Jason Smith

Don't shout at the Tele: Queer Politics

2012-01-26T14:41:00.000-08:00

I took part in a Worldbytes 'Don't Shout at the Tele, Change the Message' series. I discussed Queer politics and how ideas of equality have changed, with a group of Worldwrite volunteers. Here is the film:

Find out more about Worldbytes

See other films in the 'Don't Shout at the Tele' series

Official anti-racism: the new nationalism?

2012-01-08T02:41:00.000-08:00

Once the establishment preached the doctrine of race and nation - now the elites have redefined racism as ‘a secular sin’.

Mick Hume

Once the British state and establishment used the politics of race to boost its authority. Today, in pursuit of the same self-serving ends, they are instead engaged in a phoney moral crusade behind official anti-racism. Is that anything to celebrate?

The conviction of two men for the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 has sparked a national celebration of this apparent victory over the evils of racism. Every section of the media and political elite has jostled to line up behind Lawrence’s parents and sign up to the official anti-racist consensus. As one leading press figure put it, the guilty verdict is ‘a triumph’ not only for the Lawrences but for British justice, policing, politics and the media.

For those of us who campaigned against racism in the bad old days of the 1980s, this looks like so remarkable a turnaround in attitudes that one might almost wonder if we are living not just in another century but on a different planet. Thirty years ago when I joined a group called Workers Against Racism, there was no sympathetic media coverage or mainstream political support for the Asian families being burnt out of housing estates or the black youth being routinely brutalised by the police. The national debate was all about the scourge of ‘immigrant scroungers’ and black ‘muggers’. Those who fought against racists were branded extremists, the flipside of the fascists.

Let’s be clear. This was not the ‘unwitting’ prejudice described by the Macpherson inquiry into Lawrence’s murder as the basis of ‘institutional racism’ in the UK. It was deliberate, politicised and vitriolic racism, popularised from the top down and enforced by the state as a weapon to divide the working class and consolidate white support for the authorities.

Living in Moss Side, Manchester during the 1981 riots, I remember police vans cruising the streets while riot cops beat their batons on the side and chanted ‘Niggers, niggers, niggers – out, out, out!’. A veteran comrade of mine recalls being arrested in east London around the same time while carrying some Workers Against Racism pamphlets, and being repeatedly asked by the police ‘Do you like monkeys?’ and ‘Why do you live in a monkey cage?’ (that is, his largely black council estate in Hackney). After the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham exploded in a riot sparked by police brutality in 1985, in which an officer was killed, the Metropolitan Police arrested hundreds of youths and told the white kids to cooperate because ‘we only want the blacks’. And so it went on. The incompetent police investigation into the Lawrence murder should have come as little surprise.

And the problem went far beyond police ranks. Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher is remembered for her declaration about British culture being ‘swamped’ by immigrants. But there was little more sympathy for the victims of racism among leaders of the Labour Party and trade unions. In 1982, we marched from London to Brighton to call on the TUC to take a stand against racial discrimination and violence. Our message was not well received.

Now look at the contrast with the carnival of official anti-racism around the Lawrence murder verdicts this week. What has brought these remarkable changes about? New Labour home secretary Jack Straw summed up the widespread view that, ‘if Britain has changed for the better in the intervening 19 years… that’s above all down to two extraordinary people, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s parents’. Are we really to believe that the Lawrences have magic powers to transform a nation?

What has happened over the past two decades is that Britain has undergone a major cultural shift as the old politics of nationalism and race have lost their grip on public consciousness. This would have happened whether or not Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by racists. Indeed, the fact that his killing remains the benchmark for racist violence 19 years on shows how rare such incidents have become.

But here is the thing. The truth is that the less overtly racist British society has become in recent times, the more the authorities have started preaching about the evils of racism and launching new crusades against it. What has altered most is the perception of racism. Where once it was society’s guilty secret, now there is a concerted effort to trawl for and publicise any hint of racially incorrect language or behaviour from the school playground to the football pitch. The less racism is in evidence, the more everything appears to have been racialised. Why?

Official anti-racism has become the beleaguered elites’ political weapon of choice. The old British Establishment used the traditional politics of nationalism, race and empire to assert its authority. Those days are long gone. Instead, today’s political and cultural elites have seized upon the new orthodoxy of official anti-racism to try to give them a sense of moral purpose. Official anti-racism has also become a tool both to demonise and to discipline the white working-class people whom the elites fear and loathe.

The Lawrence case has indeed played a big part in this process, though not in the way widely assumed this week. The key was not so much the murder itself, but the publication of the 1999 Macpherson report into the case, which formally rewrote the state’s doctrine on the politics of race.

Macpherson introduced two landmark changes. First, it introduced a new official definition of a race crime. A racial incident is now ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. Such a sweeping subjective definition of a race crime has inevitably confused debate and fostered the view that racism is everywhere and that ever more laws and initiatives are required to police it.

Second, Macpherson defined the problem of ‘institutional racism’ at the heart of British society, leading to the reorganisation of the police and other public institutions around this assumption. But whereas the Sixties radicals who coined the phrase were talking about the deliberate wielding of power by a racist state apparatus, Macpherson explicitly rejected any such link between institutional racism and the exercise of power. The report stated that the Metropolitan Police was not racist; the problem was more the ‘unwitting words and actions’ of individual officers acting together.

Once racism is reduced to a problem of the individual rather than the state or society, the solution becomes re-education to alter individual attitudes. This is an open invitation to the state to intervene to police people’s words, actions and even thoughts – particularly those of the white working class now seen as the source of the problem. Macpherson even proposed that the use of racist language in your own home should be made an explicit criminal offence. The report led to an explosion of race-based codes of conduct, awareness training and surveillance measures throughout British institutions.

New laws have made it possible to charge people with ‘racially aggravated’ offences, rather than just old-fashioned assault or criminal damage, and sentence them more stiffly on conviction. The law has thus extended into punishing an individual, not just for what he had done, but for what he was assumed to be thinking when he committed an offence - his supposed ‘racial motivation’. This was reflected in the sentencing of those two men for the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Redefined on this individualised basis, racism has been taken up as the cause of the moral crusade. Declaring that you are not a racist has become the bottom line that helps mark you out as one of the ‘right-thinking people’, in the words of one police chief. In an age when many of the old moral certainties have been badly eroded, distancing yourself from racist remarks and following the new etiquette is seen as one of the few ways to draw a clear line between Good and Evil.

That is why every British leader and institution is now so keen to swear their abhorrence of racism, as a pass to the moral high ground that might once have been provided by declaring their belief in God. As the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission boasted after the Lawrence verdicts, racial prejudice is now seen ‘as a secular sin that is not to be tolerated’. And the worst sinners are now deemed to be the white working classes, who must have the new catechism/etiquette of official anti-racism drummed into them at every opportunity. That is why, for example, any hint of racism around football, patronisingly seen as a modern opiate of the masses, is made such a public example of today.

It was against this background that the killing of Stephen Lawrence was belatedly singled out by the authorities as so important. It became more than a murder inquiry; not just a criminal case, but a political cause, as the Met’s deputy commissioner Cressida Dick effectively admitted this week: ‘All murder cases are absolutely dreadful, but this case for reasons you will all understand is extremely important, not just for the Metropolitan Police, but for society at large.’ It had become a way for the state to regain some moral authority around official anti-racism.

I have little sympathy for the two men jailed for the killing of Stephen Lawrence. But for some of us who campaigned against racism on the basis of a belief in freedom, equality and democracy, the wider changes the case has become a vehicle for have not been for the better.

Indeed, some of the most worrying political and legal trends evident in recent years have been promoted in the name of official anti-racism post-Lawrence. These include the rewriting of the law along subjective, arbitrary lines through the redefinition of a race crime; the spread of conformist codes of conduct that police language and thought and suppress open debate; the institutionalisation of mistrust and mutual surveillance; and the notion that people are to be judged on their private attitudes at least as much as their public actions.

In the name of ‘zero tolerance’, the codes of official anti-racism have turned intolerance of offensive views into a ‘value’, even a virtue. Indeed, such is the intolerance of those suspected of harbouring sinful thoughts today that anything can apparently be justified to get them – up to and including, as Brendan O’Neill argues on spiked today, the abolition of such an historic principle of the justice system as the law against double jeopardy. This is the modern elite’s version of the old corrupt copper’s mantra – if they’re wrong’uns, anything goes to get them.

On spiked, and even before that in LM magazine, we have argued from the start that there is no benefit for those who believe in freedom in the phoney moral crusade of official anti-racism launched around the Lawrence case. As I wrote here 10 years ago, ‘It is the new thought police, rather than the old racist ones, who are running riot through Britain today’. The exploitation of the Lawrence verdict this week confirms that official anti-racism is now every bit as authoritarian and intolerant as the state racism of old.

Mick Hume is spiked’s editor-at-large.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11947/

Next Birmingham Salon. Wednesday 8 Feb 2012

2012-01-03T13:06:00.000-08:00

Hear podcasts of previous salons on the Podcasts page

The Sanitised City: How public is public space?

Wednesday 8 February

The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.30pm and in the pub afterwards.

Introduced by

Alastair Donald is associate director of the Future Cities Project, and co-editor of The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs (Pluto 2011). He is an urban designer, researching mobility and space at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge.

Nikki Pugh works in the grey areas between and across Art, Science and Technology. She is primarily interested in issues around interaction: how we interact with spaces and landscapes and, in supporting exploration and criticism. She is co-author of the 'Splacist Manifesto'.

For all the talk of reigning back the state, binning the red tape, and letting the Big Society emerge, the explosion of rules and regulations, bans and behavioural codes, shows no sign of abating under the Coalition. The securitised, commercialised and homogenised centres that dominate British cities have been to the fore in the urban discussion in recent years.

Privatisation, in the form of shopping malls or managed developments such as Brindley Place, are said to create ‘pseudo public spaces’, what one commentator describes as ‘pacification by cappuccino’; others point to the eviction notices pinned to tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral as showing that the interests of the Corporation prevail over the freedom of the people.

But is this picture overly simplistic? After all, six out of ten people would like to see more CCTV cameras in their local area, suggesting support for the idea that the private space of the individual should be opened up to greater public scrutiny. Where public space might once have operated on the basis of trust, today suspicion of the autonomous citizen seems to have become acceptable - and even encouraged. Behaving responsibly – no loitering, no drinking, no leafleting, no photography – is often justified on the grounds of safeguarding the public from unsolicited attention or interaction.

So what could bring our sanitised cities back to life? What represents acceptable behaviour, and who should decide and how? Is the way forward to be found in better design and new models of ownership? As from Cairo to Tunis and from Athens to Madrid, civic space has recently been thrust back into the spotlight, this session asks ‘what is public space?

All Welcome

£5 on the door (waged) or a donation of your choice if you're not.

Institute of Ideas Xmas lecture 'It's Christmas in Euroland' podcast

2011-12-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

with:
Phil Mullan: economist; business transformation director, Easynet Global Services; author The Imaginary Time Bomb

Simon Nixon: European editor, Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column; author, The Credit Crunch: how safe is your money?

Mark Seddon: writer and broadcaster; author, Standing for Something: life in the awkward squad
Podcast: Christmas in Euroland

Phil Mullan's article on his speech:
Christmas is a time we wish for things. Sometimes, as many a ‘Dear Santa’ letter will testify, these wishes can seem, at least at first, a little outlandish, maybe even utopian. So in good seasonal tradition, here is mine: my wish is for a speedy decision to dissolve the Euro, and for this to happen as part of a political, democratically infused campaign for a stronger, united Europe.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11904/

The Elizabethans worried they were running out of wood

2011-12-16T06:32:00.000-08:00

I thought this was a really inspiring article by Colin McInnes, Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Strathclyde. He writes at Perpetual Motion.

"Fossil fuels represent energy which is not of our time; they represent energy from the sun stored in compacted dead plant matter. But nuclear fuels represent energy which is not of our place. Their immense energy density, about a million times greater than fossil fuels, comes from the final moments of collapse of ancient stars which fused lighter elements into uranium and thorium. Even the prophet of ‘peak oil’, M King Hubbert, a man beloved of growth sceptics, cleverly recognised that while fossil-fuel use will no doubt ultimately peak, nuclear fuels are essentially forever, because they are so energy dense.

Let’s be clear: there is no shortage of high-grade, carbon-free energy to deliver a future of shared prosperity. But we need the will, ambition and inventiveness to exploit it. We also need to recognise that we have only scratched the surface of nuclear energy. Even modern light-water reactors are woefully inefficient at turning the energy of collapsing stars stored in nuclear fuels into useful work. But through future innovation, we can tap almost all of that clean, compact energy considerately provided by nature."

Read on.. spiked-online.com

R.I.P. Dobie Gray

2011-12-09T12:45:00.000-08:00

Niall Crowley
Who’s in the ‘In Crowd’ these days? The late US soul singer Dobie Gray provided the theme tune for uppity working-class kids in 1960s Britain.

Dobie Gray, the US soul singer who provided the theme tune for a new generation of uppity British working-class youth in the 1960s, has died. Gray’s 1965 underground dance hit, ‘The “In” Crowd’, fitted like a bespoke Italian suit for the swanky and urbane kids who had even the upper classes chasing their shirt tails. Future-oriented and cosmopolitan, with little time for the outmoded conventions and deference that had choked the country for so long, they were the ‘in’ crowd.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11877/

My Spiked article on antibiotic use in agriculture

2011-12-07T14:26:00.000-08:00

Time for an injection of common sense
Groups opposed to modern agriculture are using scare stories to try to have antibiotics banned on farms.

‘A world without effective antibiotics is a terrifying but real prospect. Now, the situation is so acute that the director-general of the World Health Organisation, Dr Margaret Chan, has warned of “a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and once again, kill unabated”... [O]ver-use of antibiotics in factory farming, especially at low doses over several days, is contributing to the huge threat of a world without effective cures for bacterial infections.’

So said Compassion in World Farming, launching a report last month with two other campaign groups, the Soil Association and Sustain. The report, Case Study of a Health Crisis is part of an ‘Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics’. But does factory farming really threaten human health?

The emergence of antibiotic resistance as a serious problem in human medicine has prompted concerns about the public health implications of antibiotic use in agriculture. Opponents of intensive agriculture argue that bacteria become resistant to antibiotics in the guts of animals that are exposed to routine antibiotic use. Then, humans ingest these bacteria through the consumption of animal products and by drinking water contaminated by ‘run-off’ from factory farms. But is there a basis for these fears?

Antibiotics have been used for over 40 years on farms for three main purposes: to treat identified illnesses; to prevent illness; and to increase growth rates. The use of antibiotics as growth promoters added to animal feed was banned in the European Union, against the advice of the EU’s own Scientific Committee for Animal Nutrition, in January 2006. In a press release from the European Parliament in October, it was argued that the EU should also phase out the pre-emptive ‘prophylactic’ use of antibiotics, too. MEPs agreed that active ingredients used in veterinary and human medicines should be kept as separate as possible to reduce risks of resistance transferring between animals and humans.

Antibiotics are sometimes used to prevent diseases that might occur in a herd or group of animals. In situations where the proportion of animals suffering a disease during a defined period reaches a threshold, all animals in the herd are treated, as the probability of most or all of the animals getting infected is high. However, in animals as in humans, a significant proportion of those treated for infectious disease would recover without antibiotics, so it could be deemed that such use is unnecessary. But does this application of antibiotics create resistance?

According to scientists from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, there is ‘no scientific study linking antibiotic use in food-animal production with antibiotic resistance’. The most thorough study on this topic, from the Journal of Risk Analysis in 2008, concluded that the risk of a human experiencing an infection from antibiotic-resistant bacteria because cattle were fed antibiotics is one in 608million, which means it is over 2,000 times less likely than being struck by lightning.

There is, however, ample evidence to suggest that bacteria - including resistant strains - enter a farm from many different sources and that transmission of resistant bacteria may occur even when livestock are not being given antibiotics. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, humans may acquire resistant infections, via livestock, even if antibiotics are not given to those animals. Epidemiological studies have identified other risk factors for infections in humans, including contact with their own pet dogs and cats. These animals may be treated with antibiotics but are rarely tested as potential sources of human infection.

There is also evidence that the removal of antibiotics from veterinary medicine would cause welfare problems. Recent analysis of antibiotic use on farms in Denmark, where a voluntary ban on the use of antibiotic growth promotants (AGPs) was instituted in 1998, reports that antibiotics are now being used sparingly. Farmers and veterinarians must now wait until animals are exhibiting clear signs of illness before treatment is applied. However, this has led to higher doses of antibiotics being used overall. The Denmark ban led to an increase in diarrhoea in pigs and an increase in deaths by more than 20 per cent according to the World Health Organisation.

It is important to understand that the antibiotics used to prevent disease in animals are not used to treat humans. However, the antibiotics used to treat disease amongst animals are also used to treat humans. The ban actually increases the use of antibiotics that are also used in human medicine. Since the Danish ban, antimicrobial use has increased by nearly 110 per cent due to higher dosages being required to treat, rather than prevent, disease.

Since the antibiotic ban was introduced pig farmers in Denmark have begun utilising zinc to help control diarrhoea in hogs. Ironically, it is highly likely that this may be encouraging the incidence of the so-called ‘hospital superbug’, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Most importantly, WHO stated in 2002 that there had been no evidence of improved public health since the ban. In fact, resistant salmonella in humans has increased and Denmark had its largest outbreak of MRSA in 2008.

The Danish ban may have also contributed to a decrease in the number of farms in Denmark from nearly 25,000 in 1995 to fewer than 10,000 in 2005. Farmers, who were already finding it difficult to make a living, faced the increased cost of cattle lost to illnesses that, in the past, would have been saved by using antibiotics. Antibiotics reduce suffering and distress and speed recovery, and since an animal cannot be allowed to suffer the only alternative is to kill it.

Given that there have been few studies into the link between antibiotic resistance and agricultural use, and that these studies have found no evidence of a link, we might ask what all the fuss is about? But when it comes to modern, highly productive and safe farming methods, evidence is not important to groups - like the disingenuously named Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics - who would apparently rather we used Victorian-era methods for food production. The same evidence phobia seems to have afflicted EU bureaucrats and faceless Euro MPs trying to find some connection with the public by implementing ‘popular’ but counterproductive policies.

Jason Smith is convenor of the Birmingham Salon.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11870/

My Review of Rob Lyons's book 'Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder'

2011-11-25T08:04:00.000-08:00

Published by Culture Wars

Rob Lyons is speaking at Birmingham Salon on Tuesday 6 December. See www.birminghamsalon.org for further details

‘Fish and chips are indigestible, expensive and unwholesome’. Eating them causes secondary poverty, which arises from the incompetent and immoral misapplication of household resources. There is a culinary ignorance, a failure to use cheap ingredients to their best advantage.

Is this the latest campaign by TV chef and moraliser Jamie Oliver? Perhaps it’s an analysis from a new government report on healthy eating? Or maybe it’s the findings of a think tank, desperately trying to understand our obsession with so called ‘junk food’. It’s actually my paraphrasing of John K Walton’s description of the debate about working-class eating habits in the late 1870s to early 1880s quoted in Rob Lyon’s new book. Something similar could easily be said today by any anti-obesity or ‘five a day’ campaigner.

The difference is that in the 1880s campaigners were upfront about their belief that the working classes were incompetent and immoral. Today such campaigners hide their disdain for ordinary people behind nutritional guidelines, obesity figures, BMI calculations and a discussion of unsustainable NHS expenditure.

In the 1880s however, or even in 1914 when Maud Pember-Reeves was investigating the diet of working class households in Lambeth, the problem was that people did not have enough food to go around. A continual rise in living standards in the post-war period has solved this problem in Britain. It hasn’t solved the tendency to problematise people’s food choices which has seen a resurgence.

Over the past few years the smorgasbord of panics over food have included: bacon and bladder cancer, beef and breast cancer, canned fish and premature birth, trans fats and heart disease, breakfast cereals and high blood pressure, processed foods and mental illness, mad cow disease, GM, saturated fat, and salt. Rob Lyons’ intention in this book is to investigate food scares, both on their own merits and from an historical perspective, in order to understand our essential but often shaky relationship with what we eat. Today this means confronting and assessing the worth of a lot of government advice and challenging popular perceptions of modern mass-catering practices. As he explains:

‘One consequence of the fact that more of our food is pre-prepared by others is that there is a greater space opened up for us to be fearful about food. If food is something we consume but don’t prepare, then we have to have faith that those who are cooking the takeaway or manufacturing that ready meal are doing so to a high standard. It is this gap between creator and consumer that helps to increase the possibility for food panics’.

There is another gap too. A gap between what Sunday Times food critic AA Gill describes as ‘posh, politically correct food for Notting Hill people, and filthy, rubbish chemical food for filthy, rubbish chemical people’. Gill despairs that food should once again have become a class issue, but this is not an opinion shared by many of his fellow foodie writers.

Alex Renton, writing in the Guardian, explains how he and his wife burned their copy of the previously cherished How to Cook by Delia Smith, after watching the TV series that accompanied her new book, How to Cheat at Cooking. Her crime was showing people how frozen and other convenience foods can be used to speed up the process of cooking for yourself at home. Renton argues: ‘You don’t believe, as I do, that how we buy and use food is a moral issue. Or that processed and “convenient” food sold at absurd prices by the big corporations that Delia now supports has done great damage to our society - to the rural economy, our health, and the environment - and that most of the harm has been done to the poorest people’.

Renton’s summation of the problem, that the food people choose to eat has disastrous consequences for the poorest people, the environment, farmers and society at large, expresses the anxiety many people feel about food today. Lyons argues that this anxiety, far from expressing a reality about our food, which is more abundant and safer than ever, is a consequence of the prominence of middle class concerns in social life.

The clearest example of this comes from Lyons’s chapter investigating the fallout from Jamie’s school dinners campaign. In 2005, equipped with do-gooder zeal and a Channel 4 camera crew, Jamie Oliver set about addressing the state of school dinners, which was encapsulated by his suggestion that this was the first generation expected to die before their parents. In reality, the current generation of children are almost certainly going to live significantly longer, on average, than their parents, regardless of the problem of obesity, because of a range of other factors from falling smoking rates to improvements in medicine.

The result of Oliver’s campaign was that dinner ladies considered strike action, parents ended up taking lunch orders to the local burger joint so that their children could have some food they would actually eat. People came away with the false impression that bad diet causes asthma and that grossly overweight children could end up vomiting their faeces. Worse, primary school children taking meals fell in Gloucester from 11,600 to 9,800 out of a total of 40,000 pupils. There was an even bigger decrease in Suffolk, where the total number of school meals served in the year after Jamie’s School Dinners fell from 19,000 to 13,000. In the country as a whole, 400,000 children had reportedly turned their backs on school meals - a 12.5 per cent fall - which called into question the financial viability of school meals services.

Having been told that school food was killing their kids, parents decided it would be wiser to simply give children packed lunches or money to buy takeaway food instead. Oliver’s reaction was to slam parents saying packed lunches ‘are the biggest evil. Even the best packed lunch is a shit packed lunch’, he declared diplomatically. The result was to turn teachers into ‘packed lunch police’ with nutritional guidelines set, not just for school meals, but for the food that parents decided was appropriate to put in lunchboxes, too.

When faced with criticism from parents, one saying ‘I just don’t like him and what he stands for. He’s forcing our kids to become more picky about their food,’ Oliver’s spokesperson responded: ‘If these mums want to effectively shorten the lives of their kids and others’ kids, then that’s down to them’. In the eyes of panic-mongering campaigners, everything is an ‘epidemic’, a ‘plague’ or a ‘timebomb’. Jamie Oliver is a classic example of someone who has taken a mish-mash of relatively small problems - like obesity and classroom discipline - mixed them together and heated them up in the name of promoting his ideas about how we should be fed. But it’s not just campaigners who are at fault here. Successive governments have used health issues in particular as a way of micromanaging people’s lives.

Lyons has a fascinating chapter on the history of the organic movement.

‘The social makeup of those prominent in the early organic movement suggests a group of people being squeezed out of modern society: disillusioned colonials from a declining and increasingly discredited empire, aristocrats seeking to preserve rural life as agricultural workers were replaced by machines, and churchmen trying to find a new setting for religious ideas’.

So why are organic ideas that were based on disillusionment with modernity back in fashion today? Lyons’ argument is that economically and politically, Western societies have stagnated over the past 30 years or so, especially in comparison to rapidly developing countries like China, India and the ‘Asian tiger’ economies. The idea that tomorrow will look radically different from – and better than - today seems unrealistic to many. Both the traditional left and right are exhausted, their visions of the future bankrupt. Against this background those who hanker after an imaginary idyllic past, or are fearful of future change, can often exercise disproportionate influence over politics and culture. Alongside the aristocrats like Prince Charles we now have the disillusioned stockbrokers who give up the rat race to sell organic jam, the New Age religionists, and the middle-class hypochondriacs.

Panic on a Plate adds something new to the over-stuffed shelves of food analysis books - a healthy portion of common sense backed up by in-depth research. It is a must-buy for anyone studying modern food systems, or for anyone currently worried about the consequences of their food choices, because as Lyons says: ‘Modern society has made incredible strides in changing the lives of people for the better through the application of science, industry and reason. Why on earth would we now reject those gains?’

Salon member Niall Crowley in The Independent

2011-11-18T03:55:00.000-08:00

"If a new generation of artists, designers and architects are going to create the products, the buildings and the infrastructure we need and deserve, they have to begin to think more critically about contemporary ideas, and challenge taboos and orthodoxies like environmentalism and sustainability. Only then can they throw off their self-imposed limitations, think big and finally stand on the shoulders of giants like Sir Henry Cole".

'Make do and mend' is not the way for us all to get better stuff

Next Birmingham Salon Meeting

2011-11-17T07:30:00.000-08:00

Are you what you eat? Is our obsession

with what we eat healthy?

Tuesday 6 December

The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.30pm and in the pub afterwards.

Introduced by

Rob Lyons is deputy editor of spiked, the online current affairs magazine that takes the attitude that Humanity is Underrated. He writes on a wide range of issues, but takes a particular interest in the issues of environment, food, energy and risk.

Rob's book, Panic on a Plate: how society developed an eating disorder, was published by Societas in October 2011. He blogs about food atwww.paniconaplate.com.

He is a frequent commentator on TV and radio.

Over the last few years the smorgasbord of panics over food have included: bacon and bladder cancer, beef and breast cancer, canned fish and premature birth, trans fats and heart disease, breakfast cereals and high blood pressure, processed foods and mental illness, mad cow disease, GM, saturated fat, and salt.

Rob Lyons's intention in this book is to investigate food scares, both on their own merits and from an historical perspective, in order to understand our essential but often shaky relationship with what we eat. Today this means confronting and assessing the worth of a lot of government advice and challenging popular perceptions of modern mass-catering practices. As he explains:

"One consequence of the fact that more of our food is pre-prepared by others is that there is a greater space opened up for us to be fearful about food. If food is something we consume but don't prepare, then we have to have faith that those who are cooking the takeaway or manufacturing that ready meal are doing so to a high standard. It is this gap between creator and consumer that helps to increase the possibility for food panics".

Rob argues that Jamie Oliver is a classic example of someone who has taken a mish-mash of relatively small problems - like obesity and classroom discipline - mixed them together and heated them up in the name of promoting his ideas about how we should be fed. But it’s not just campaigners who are at fault here. Successive governments have used health issues in particular as a way of micromanaging people’s lives.

All Welcome

£5 on the door (waged) or a donation of your choice if you're not.

Warning: Women at Work!

2011-08-30T13:41:00.001-07:00

A Battle of Ideas Satellite Debate

Wednesday 12 October 2011

The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.45pm and in the pub afterwards.

Research for the Institute of Leadership and Management earlier this year indicated 73% of women believe the ‘glass ceiling’ still exists, and this is borne out particularly when it comes to top-level management jobs (only 12% of FTSE 100 directors are women). Despite this, women workers have made major strides since the Ford machinists’ strike led to the Equal Pay Act 1970, as dramatised in the recent film Made in Dagenham. While there are still chauvinists in the high-powered world of business who think women are best suited for administrative roles – if not the kitchen sink - in truth women no longer suffer the gross discrimination they once did. Most workplaces are desperate to recruit more women to senior positions, and even some feminists acknowledge it is women themselves who sometimes choose less demanding careers in order to take responsibility for their children, inevitably earning less money and prestige.

The very idea of equality in the workplace is no longer just about this one issue. The 238-page Equality Act 2010 is intended to protect workers against discrimination not only on the grounds of sex, but also race, age, disability, gender reassignment, religion or belief and sexual orientation. Moreover, the act goes beyond prohibiting direct discrimination: employers will also be responsible for ‘perceived discrimination’ and ‘third-party harassment’. As one HR website explains: ‘If a heterosexual is perceived to be gay, lesbian or bisexual – perhaps because of mannerisms or rumours – and becomes the butt of banter’, or ‘if an employee is subjected to joking about their partner’s disability or a friend’s sexual orientation’, they have grounds for complaint. Should we welcome this as an extension of women’s struggle for equal treatment, or has the historic fight for equal rights at work now been reduced to policing one another’s comments and attitudes, and running off to the boss if colleagues indulge in un-PC banter?

Do the much quoted statistics on women failing to reach the top of the ladder really merit a fight for equality, or does a narrow focus on the top corporate jobs miss the point that different people make different choices? Should we, at the very least, focus more on practical obstacles like the lack of child-care options, rather than conjuring up misogynist employers and blaming supposedly sexist attitudes? Do we need to examine workplace issues through the historical prism of gender and oppression at all? Indeed, is equality something we should be worried about at the moment? In the middle of a recession, with public sector cuts and new redundancies announced daily, is arguing for workplace equality a non-starter? Or will women have a fight on their hands to ensure job cuts don’t undo the progress made over the past few decades? Which way forward for women at work?

Speakers

Linda Bellos
chair, Institute of Equality and Diversity Practitioners

Anne Fergusson
director, PricewaterhouseCoopers

Jason Smith
freelance journalist; director, Birmingham Salon

Nina Powell, chair
PhD candidate, researcher, psychology, University of Birmingham

Tickets: £7.50 (£5 concessions and Institute of Ideas members) per person.

Tickets are available on the door or in advance from the Institute of Ideas website.

All Welcome

Frank Furedi on the riots in the Australian

2011-08-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

THERE are riots and there are riots. Experience shows that mass violence can erupt in the most unexpected of circumstances.

In recent decades people have rioted because their football team has lost a match or because their livelihood was threatened by the invisible power of market forces.

Thirty years ago in the UK, black people took to the streets to protest against what they saw as police violence and racial injustice. In recent years small-scale rioting followed demonstrations against globalisation or the rise in university fees. What these episodes had in common is that they represented a response -- direct or indirect -- to some issue or cause.

Others fall into the very different trap of endowing urban violence with intrinsic social and political meaning.

The riots that have engulfed England during the past week are very different. While the first riot in Tottenham emerged from a protest march in response to the police shooting of a local man, the copycat riots across the country appear to have no purpose. This is a kind of grotesque recreational sport that provides a wider focus for the pre-existing anti-social and destructive impulse of groups of young people who inhabit geographical spaces that cannot be called communities.

It is all too easy to simply condemn rioting. Many accounts of such events are often informed by the personal prejudices of the commentator. As a sociologist I am aware that comprehensible protest is often devalued by authorities who are hostile to its objectives. Time and again rioting is wrongly blamed on outside agitators. The spreading of such violence is often described as the copycat effect.

Such commentators will describe this violence as a form of rational behaviour of the dispossessed and insist that it is the only way those without a voice can make themselves heard.

None of the conventional sociological explanations -- from the Left or the Right -- can satisfactorily account for the present riots in England.

The riots that erupted in Tottenham, north London, and then spread to other parts of this metropolis before erupting in other English cities are the consequence of a unique form of community disintegration. This process of disintegration has been made worse by unhelpful forms of government policies, which have sought to evade the issues at stake.

The eruption of the riots and its swift expansion to other parts of England has been blamed on the role of social networking applications. Digital technology did play a role in providing rioters with an organisational tool.

But a far more important factor has been the role of the police or, more specifically, the disorganisation of the institutions of law and order.

In recent years on my travels throughout Europe I have frequently come across urban decay and poverty. Every large city has its share of marginalised neighbourhoods. In such areas, petty crime and drug dealing is rife and respect for prevailing social norms is minimal. However, in comparison with England such neighbourhoods have a relatively smaller social weight. Moreover, unlike England they still manage to retain a semblance of community life. Even the banlieues of Paris have a discernible code of behaviour and sense of community. Although life is far from pleasant for the inhabitants of German, French or Dutch marginalised neighbourhoods, it is not nearly as atomised and fragmented as in England.

The problems that afflict urban ghettos and housing estates of English towns are far more extensive than their counterparts in western Europe. The most striking manifestation of this malaise is the feeble quality of community life. When the riots first broke out in Tottenham numerous critics of the police claimed that local people felt aggrieved because the forces of law and order did not "talk to them". Many observers stated that the police did not talk to the community. Now it is possible that the police were not brilliant at communicating or lacked sensitivity to local circumstances. But the question that needs to be posed is, who is the "them" that they would talk to?

Most individuals purporting to be community leaders are self-appointed careerists or employees of a state-sponsored quango. In any case they represent only themselves and are as isolated from "them" as anyone else. That there is no one to talk to or negotiate with is symptomatic of the problem of neighbourhoods without neighbours, and of locations where a geographical designation is denuded of communal content.

There are many factors that led to the implosion of numerous English urban communities. Industrial decline and loss of traditional manual working-class jobs had a significant effect on parts of urban England during the past four decades. However, the usual problems of urban poverty have been aggravated by the peculiar form of state assistance to these communities. Those without resources and means of survival deserve support from the rest of society.

However, in Britain the provision of welfare has mutated into a culture that encourages people to regard their circumstances as not a temporary phase but as a way of life. So the problem is not the provision of social benefits but the normalisation of welfare dependency as the defining feature of people's life.

One former youth worker tells me "this is about the cuts". Now and again you hear deluded individuals hinting that the riots are "payback" for the government's proposed cuts in state expenditure. From their standpoint, the violence sweeping English towns and cities is "our" equivalent of the demonstrations against austerity measures in Athens and Madrid.

Perhaps there is a link between Europe's debt crisis and rioting in England, but it isn't what critics of austerity measures suspect. Decades of wasteful and totally purposeless expenditure on bureaucracy-led welfare programs have had the perverse effect of demoralising their target population. Billions have been spent on measures that foster irresponsibility. So the riots are not so much about the cuts but about corrupting community life through promiscuous spending.

The normalisation of welfare dependency has been actively promoted by advocates working inside and outside the public sector. There are numerous institutions that assist people to claim the maximum amount. Claiming has become a term that connotes the possession of an awareness of "rights" as well as negotiating skills. The principal outcome of the advocacy of claiming is the legitimation of a way of life. From this perspective, improvements to one's quality of life depend on enhancing one's claiming skills rather than through work and effort.

Some conservative critics of the welfare state object to the dependence that those living on benefits have on public institutions.

However, such dependence is only a part of the problem. A far more important consequence of the normalisation of welfarism is that it undermines the everyday social and cultural bonds that link members of a community. Historically, those suffering from poverty would develop institutions of self-help and organisations of solidarity. Today, such organisations are conspicuous by their absence. Why? If people are encouraged to rely on state assistance in a one-dimensional manner, they have little incentive to help one another. As far as the people of Tottenham or Liverpool's Toxteth are concerned, their communities' effort has little to do with the quality of their lives. Despite their common experience of poverty and marginalisation, people have little incentive to improve their circumstances through joint effort.

The British culture of welfarism has had the perverse effect of eroding community life. Its most disturbing effect is the unusual degree of social fragmentation. Typically the breakdown of community is most striking in relation to the loss of authority that older people have towards the younger generation.

For it is young people who are most afflicted by the destructive consequences of community implosion. Denied any positive ideal of what it means to belong to a community, numerous young people are spontaneously drawn towards prevailing forms of anti-social behaviour. Those who are involved in "recreational" rioting are not abnormal feral youngsters but young people who simply have no stake in their community.

They may belong to gangs that are associated with a distinct geographical territory, but their gang identity does not have any wider community-related significance. Historical experience shows that urban gangs often take their own "manor" very seriously. In contrast the highly atomised groups of rioters today have little inhibition about burning down the corner shop that services their own family.

In an imploded community, even family life is threatened by the imperative of atomisation. Youngsters who have little respect for their own family and parents are unlikely to take wider norms of civic behaviour seriously. That is why so much of the rioting by youngsters is the consequence of years of uncontained behaviour.

The implosion of community life is not a problem of which policy-makers are unaware. From time to time officials attempt to initiate projects that aim to enhance what they call "community resilience". Previous governments have promoted what they called policies of "inclusion". But what all these initiatives had in common was to bypass the problem of a welfare culture. Money devoted to community projects and initiatives served to employ a handful of otherwise unemployed people but did nothing to strengthen communities. Why? Because communities evolve organically in response to problems that mean something to local residents. They cannot be constructed from above, especially by institutions that have been complicit in eroding the independence of community life in the first place.

The consequence of such policies has been to evade the problem they were meant to address. Instead of developing resilience, communities have been enfeebled.

But why now? In principle these riots could have erupted any time during the past decade.

The reason it has happened now is because of the high public visibility of the demoralisation of the British police. The British police force is not above criticism; it has a sad record of operational screw-ups and of making a bad situation worse. However, in recent years the morale of the police has been severely undermined and it is not an exaggeration to state that they have lost much of their coherence as an effective force.

Even the mildest form of policing of public events is regularly criticised.

Police tactics, which are far more restrained than they were 30 or 40 years ago, are frequently denounced as brutal. In recent months rioters in London and Bristol must have drawn the conclusion that their activity bears only a minimal cost.

Consequently, the public profile of public-order policing has become increasingly defensive and operationally inept. The failure of London's Metropolitan Police Service to prevent protesters from rampaging through the street of the capital in recent months -- most vividly illustrated by its inability to protect the car in which Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall were travelling -- has been noted by people throughout the land. In such circumstances many young people have drawn the conclusion that taking on the police is no big deal and that rioting is its own reward. So the rioting that broke out in Tottenham is merely an escalation, albeit a significant one, of the disturbances that have occurred during the past year.

There is no short-term solution to the implosions of community life. Decades of misguided government policies have undermined its fabric. The challenge is to ensure that young people are forced to understand that their future depends on their own effort and achievement, and that the best way forward for them is to develop a stake in their community. What's required is an acknowledgment that the previous policies have failed to recognise the malaise that afflicts English cities. What's required is a system of welfare that encourages young people to develop their own resources to make their way in the future.

London's burning.

2011-08-09T02:19:00.000-07:00

FIVE QUICK POINTS ABOUT THE RIOTS

From Kenan Malik's blog 'Pandaemonium'.

1This is not a rerun of the inner city riots that shook Britain in the late seventies and the eighties. Those riots were a direct challenge to oppressive policing and to mass unemployment. They threatened the social fabric of Britain’s inner cities and forced the government to rethink its mechanisms of social control. Today’s riots may have made the Metropolitan police look inept, revealed politicians as out of touch and brought mayhem to some parts of London, Liverpool and Birmingham. But there is little sense that they pose a challenge to social order, in the way that the 80s riots did, or that they are in any sense ‘insurrectionary’, as Darcus Howe described those revolts. Rather today’s riots amounted to the trashing of some of the poorest areas in the city. On Friday night, when the riots began in Tottenham, there was some political content to the violence, an inchoate response to the shooting of Mark Duggan (whose death looks increasingly like a police killing rather than the outcome of an exchange of fire). By Saturday the riots had descended largely into arson and looting with little sense of political motive or cause.

2The riots are not about race. Many on the left have seen them as a response to racist policing. Many on the right have been pouring out racist bile against ‘immigrants’. In fact race has played little role in the violence. This is not to deny that young black men continue to be the primary target of police stop and search (an issue that has been shamefully ignored in recent years). Nor is it to deny that there is a legacy of bitterness about, and resentment of, police tactics in many inner city communities. But the riots were not in any way defined by racial divisions, antagonisms or resentments.

3The polarisation between the claim that ‘the riots are a response to unemployment and wasted lives’ and the insistence ‘the violence constitutes mere criminality’ makes little sense. There is clearly more to the riots than simple random hooliganism. But that does not mean that the riots, as many have claimed, are protests against disenfranchisement, social exclusion and wasted lives. In fact, it’s precisely because of disenfranchisement, social exclusion and wasted lives that these are not ‘protests’ in any meaningful sense, but a mixture of incoherent rage, gang thuggery and teenage mayhem. Disengaged not just from the political process (largely because politicians, especially those on the left, have disengaged from them), there is a generation (in fact more than a generation) with no focus for their anger and resentment, no sense that they can change society and no reason to feel responsible for the consequences of their actions. That is very different from suggesting that the riots were caused by, a response to, or a protest against, unemployment, austerity and the cuts.

4We should ignore anyone who talks about what ‘the community’ wants or needs. So called ‘community leaders’ are very much part of the problem.

5Mindless though the rioters may be, those who call for the army to be unleashed, curfews to be imposed, or ‘robust policing’ to be used, are more mindless still, and more dangerous.

catching up

2011-07-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

I've been very busy and haven't been updating this blog as I should.
There are so many things to comment on since I last posted.

I spent this past weekend at the most inspiring event I've been to in a very long time. The Academy, organised by the Institute of Ideas for its members, was mind-blowing stuff. It's worth becoming a member of the IOI to get invited next year http://www.instituteofideas.com/academy2011.html

I did the history strand during the day, looking at the English Civil War, empire, the origins of welfare thinking and how fascism developed in Europe. Other people did ancient Greek and Roman thought, we were all together, to discuss the rise of historical consciousness, in the afternoon.

I knew little about the English Revolution before doing the reading for this and it's fascinating. The Putney Debates by The Levellers, recently published with an introduction by Geoffrey Robinson QC, is a cracking read. Geoffrey's intro is interesting but his lifetime in the law gives him a very narrow perspective which means he misses what was truly exceptional about the many groups like the Levellers who were around, and the events that took place, in the 17th century.

Amy Winehouse died. Perhaps not that much of a surprise. Ironically the day before she died Tony Bennett, now 84 but you wouldn't know it from his voice, was on Radio 4 talking about his new album. He's done a duet with Amy and I thought it was the best I'd ever heard her sound. What's particularly annoying about her early demise it that you know she is going to be discussed as a legend forever more - it's a much overused word is legend.

I was on BBC Radio Wales talking about a proposed intensive dairy farm today - which was nice. The discussion focused on animal welfare - which is inevitable but does rather miss the point - the point being that every welfare issue you can imagine could be sorted and some people would still not be happy with mega dairies simply because of their size. An MP phoned in to have a go at supermarkets for putting traditional farms out of business - they're always quick to have a go and call for ever more regulation are MPs - I think we desperately need better MPs.
23.30 & 48.00 (I ramble a bit)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b012b11b/The_Radio_Wales_PhoneIn_28_07_2011/

I came back to find a google alert for a really good article by one of my favourite writers, and sometimes editor Brendan O'Neill, in the Spectator on confessional culture: http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/7060408/confessional-culture.thtml

Battle of Ideas Festival 2011 Satellite debate at Birmingham Salon

2011-07-16T00:38:00.000-07:00

As regular attendees to Birmingham Salon will know, we were inspired to organise meetings in Birmingham after attending The Battle of Ideas Festival - an annual event which takes place at the Royal College of Art, London on the last weekend in October.

This year we are very pleased to be hosting our second Satellite debate, entitled Warning - Women at Work! This will be a panel debate with four speakers discussing equality in the modern workplace.

The debate will be on Wednesday 12 October, 7.00pm until 9.00pm, at our usual venue The Studio, Cannon Street, Birmingham B2 5EP

The blurb for the debate is now on the Battle of Ideas website:
http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2011/session_detail/5777/

Speakers will be confirmed in due course.

The death of a free press, the hacking off of investigative journalism - the scandals nobody is talking about.

2011-07-14T14:08:00.001-07:00

by Mick Hume

What do you think about hacking into the phone messages of abducted teenager Milly Dowler or the relatives of other victims of murder, terrorism or war? Are you for or against it? Personally, having weighed it carefully, I think it’s a bad thing. And so it seems does every other human being who has commented, including everybody associated with the News of the World and the detective who is said to have carried out these acts of phone-hacking for that ex-newspaper. Nobody is trying to defend the indefensible.

When everybody is repeating the same thing, particularly in tones of moral outrage, you can be pretty sure that there are other uncomfortable questions left unasked. So let us, just for a moment, talk about something else. Such as the responses to the scandal which threaten to make everything worse. You do not need to be a champion of Rupert Murdoch’s empire or a fan of theNews of the World (and, despite having taken the ‘Murdoch shilling’ by writing for The Times, I am neither) to see that there are other scandals developing here, almost unchallenged. To name just a few:

The scandal of the closure of a popular newspaper being celebrated as a triumph of democracy. Labour leader Ed Miliband said the end of the News of the World was a victory for ‘people power’, and many others on the liberal left celebrated the death of their tabloid bête-noireas if they had won an election. In fact, the pressure that did for Britain’s best-selling newspaper, read by millions of actual people each Sunday for 160-odd years, was generated by a relative handful of modish journalists and online ‘activists’ (active with their typing fingers anyway). It was less a triumph for people’s democracy than a confirmation of the tyranny of the intolerant Twittertariat.

The British petit-bourgeois intelligentsia has always feared and despised mass newspapers and the vulgar throng who consume them (for the history of this elitist disdain, see John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses). More recently they have turned ‘tabloid’ into a swear word and blamed the Murdoch redtops for brainwashing the public – a convenient let-off for their own inability to win a political argument with normal newspaper readers. Now at last they have succeeded in depriving the public of their allegedly mind-altering Sunday fix. Oh Brave New World, that does not have the News of the World in it! The illiberal liberals would only be happier if they could have extinguished Murdoch’s Sun, too. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp (great music, shame about the politics) symbolically wiped his arse with the final edition of the News of the World on stage at a music festival on Sunday. Why didn’t the sanitisation police just go the whole hog and burn the evil tabloid at the stake?

The scandal that British politics has become an arms race to see who can whip the press hardest. Asked at the weekend what his party stands for now, the first thing Labour leader Miliband could come out with was… reform of the press. So a party of the political living dead that has abandoned any pretence of principles has finally found something to believe in. Who needs an alternative vision of the economy or the future when you can bash the tabloids? Not to be outdone, Tory prime minister David Cameron made a big speech to announce that yes, it’s all very well for the media to ‘speak truth to power’, but it’s also important that ‘those in power can tell truth to the press’. In which case, why don’t government ministries cut out the middle men and write the newspapers themselves? They could call it the Ministry of Truth (for the history of this institution, see George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). At any moment before last week, such an arrogantly censorious statement from a UK government would have sparked a furious press reaction. Yet so cowed have the media been by recent events that they uttered barely a whimper.

If this is what politics has become, little wonder that cries of ‘Hugh Grant for prime minister!’ have been heard on every celebrity chat and comedy show. It began with the Hollywood crusader for superinjunctions and censorship trying to act like the prime minister he played in the execrableLove, Actually. Now it looks as if Cameron and Miliband are actually trying to act like Hugh Grant.

The scandal of sectional interests posing as the ‘public interest’. Mention of Grant should remind us that question marks hang over many of those who have recently discovered such a heartfelt concern with journalistic standards. Is Grant the moral crusader for media regulation in any way related to the posh British actor who was splashed all over the press after being caught with his pants down with a Hollywood hooker? Has Lord John Prescott the outraged critic of the tabloids ever met the buffoonish Labour deputy prime minister who was made into an even grosser figure of ridicule by the papers’ exposure of his affair with his secretary? Does Chris Bryant, who has toured every news studio to denounce the Murdoch press, remember the young Labour MP exposed in the press for posting pictures of himself in his underpants on a gay sex website? And so it goes on.

Ours is an age in which it often seems nobody can offer any strong opinion without being accused of acting on behalf of some ‘special interest group’ or of protecting narrow economic interests. Yet in this case the usually clear-eyed cynical commentariat appears to be suffering from collective selective amnesia, unable to see any connection between the past well-publicised antics of outraged celebrities and politicians and their sudden passion for press reform. Instead they have all been allowed a free hand to attack ‘tabloid culture’ from behind the banner of ‘the public interest’ – a standard which is not, of course, to be set by the lowly public themselves, but by high-minded journalists or the judiciary.

The scandal of the hacking down of investigative journalism. In the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, the general consensus in the political class appears to be that the British press does too much prying into other people’s business and pokes its nose where it is not wanted much too far and too often. In fact there is already far too little investigative journalism in the UK media. And the response to the hacking scandal suggests that in future there will be even less of it.

What the News of the World was alleged to have done to Milly Dowler and other victims and relatives was not, of course, journalism. As spiked pointed out from the start, it was voyeurism. The problem was not so much the phone-hacking of private information – such tactics could be justified in pursuit of a story in another situation. It was that these things were done for no purpose other than to spy on personal feelings and prey on the emotions of victims and their relatives. Such a voyeuristic attitude is not, it should be noted, entirely confined to the News of the World; all mainstream media outlets have become obsessed with reporting feelings as much as facts in recent years.

The irony is that the News of the World was also almost the only British newspaper that still put serious resources into investigating stories and making the news, rather than simply reprinting what it was handed. Its exposés of corruption and hypocrisy often dominated the following week’s news. Some of us might not always have approved of the subjects it chose to investigate. But that should surely have been a cue for more probing investigative journalism of a different stripe. Instead there is now likely to be even less boldness in that direction in the face of the outcry about hacking – and whatever replaces the News of the World on Sundays could well be a pale imitation. In the furore about phone-hacking, it seems to have been forgotten not only that investigative journalism is crucial to public debate, but that it will always involve underhand methods, since it is about finding out what others don’t want you to know.

The scandal of a free press left to die slowly, unmourned. This is the worst undiscussed scandal of all. The harrying to closure of the News of the World by illiberal liberals marks a milestone on the road to ruin. Yet it has been met in media circles not with outraged protests, but with the familiar mix of cynicism and naivety: cynicism that claims it is simply a ‘business decision’ by the Murdochs (as if killing your cash cow was good business), and naivety that suggests you can ‘clean up’ and regulate the tabloid press while miraculously leaving ‘good journalism’ untouched.

In reality, the more influence that ministers, judges, policemen, commissions and crusaders are able to exercise over the media, the less freedom of expression there is going to be for all. Freedom of the press, like any freedom, is not divisible. You cannot have more controls on the ‘bad’ and let the ‘good’ (whatever that might be) run free. As a wise German wrote 170 years ago, ‘lack of freedom is the real mortal danger for mankind…. [L]eaving aside the moral consequences, bear in mind that you cannot enjoy the advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconveniences. You cannot pluck the rose without its thorns! And what do you lose with a free press?’

As that man Karl Marx also wrote, a ‘bad’ free press is always better than a ‘good’ controlled one - if you hope to get to the truth about politics, war, or scandals.

Mick Hume is editor-at-large of spiked.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10788/

My latest Free Society Column

2011-07-11T03:17:00.000-07:00

Heady stuff as hair meets the High Court

Monday July 11, 2011

An argument about a schoolboy’s haircut has gone to the High Court. Jason Smith finds that the courts are increasingly being asked to arbitrate on moral and cultural issues that should be left to common sense.

What is indirect racial discrimination? Is it being culturally insensitive while having no racist intentions? Is it being racist in an obtuse manner? Is it being oblivious to your own racist views? Recently the High Court gave an example of what it is – it is not giving due consideration to ‘a fundamental cultural practice’.

A teenager known only as G has been a victim of this kind of discrimination perpetrated by his North London school. G, along with many British teenagers, wears his hair in tight cornrow braids. The school’s uniform policy stipulates ‘short, back and sides’ for boys and he therefore contravenes this policy. Exceptions are made to this rule for Sikh and Rastafarian pupils who may wear their hair below collar length but braids, it seems, are beyond the pale. The reason – cornrow braids are popular with members of street gangs. The school argues that by banning cornrow braids it is tackling gang culture.

G’s mother argued with the school that his hairstyle was ‘of great importance to his cultural and racial identity’, adding that her son has suffered a ‘major blow to his self-esteem’ after being turned away from school. Writing in the Guardian, Hannah Pool argued that cornrow braids are a right of passage and a source of pride. Black people are still being told that their hair is not appropriate, and just like the debate over Afros in the Sixties and Seventies this shows that society still does not appreciate the black aesthetic.

Heady stuff indeed.

This raises many questions. While it is true that self-image is particularly important to teenagers, is it really possible to call a hairstyle a ‘fundamental cultural practice’? Since when has it been the job of schools to tackle gangs – isn’t that a job for the police? How is it that the High Court is now responsible for deciding the applicability of school uniform policy? Is this school really up to the job of educating children if it thinks a hairstyle is responsible for the proliferation of gangs?

What is particularly bizarre is that for black hair cornrow braids are pretty much the equivalent of short, back and sides (ie easily manageable and neat). This is why the hairstyle is popular – it needs little looking after. It used to be more popular until black hair products from the US became widely available here during the 1970s and more hairstyles became possible. Cornrow, or canerow as it was known in my neck of the woods, is a practical solution for dealing with hair that needs a fair bit of looking after. It is neither a fundamental cultural practice nor a mark of gang membership.

The regulation of the private sphere and indeed public spaces (see the Manifesto Club’s campaign against the hyper-regulation of public space) seems to have become the popular way of shutting down debate. We shy away from discussing the problem of gangs, or of why it is that society fails to inspire some young people to succeed. Instead we ban hairstyles. We do not have a national debate over religious tolerance, instead we talk about banning the Burka. Hoodies are banned from shopping centres, and there is no discussion about our frankly unhealthy attitude toward the younger generation.

Moral argument is not seen as something for all of society to get involved in. Instead it is for experts, courts and the authorities to decide for us. More and more it is the courts who are deciding what is acceptable in society. This seems to me to be a very bad thing. I have never voted for a judge, and nor do I want the opportunity to, but why do we need a higher authority to sort these things out at all? We are perfectly capable of coming to a conclusion on moral issues without the intervention of any authority.

An upper-middle class, middle-aged judge in the High Court deciding on the rights and wrongs of teenage fashion should seem absurd in any society. In ours it symbolises not only the desire, on behalf of the current political class, to interfere in areas of life previously considered private, but also our own reluctance to take collective responsibility for the society in which we live. A career in the legal profession does not make a person more qualified to decide on moral issues, any more than working on a checkout in a supermarket makes you an expert on commodity prices.

In a more forward-looking, tolerant, sensible society this case would have been thrown out of court and the people involved told to stop wasting the court’s time. That the case was even heard shows the willingness of the authorities to poke their noses into places that in the past they would not have been welcome.

Published by http://www.thefreesociety.org/

It's better to have a bad free press than a “good” controlled one.

2011-07-10T02:35:00.000-07:00

Brendan O'Neill in The Telegraph http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100096123

Cameron holds a press conference at Downing Street this morning (Photo: Getty)

This is a line that should send a shudder down the spine of every man and woman who cares about freedom of the press: “It is vital that a free press can tell truth to power; it is equally vital that those in power can tell truth to the press.” That threat, that ominous, Orwellian rewriting of the phrase “telling truth to power” as “using power to enforce the truth”, was uttered by David Cameron this morning.

Cameron is doing nothing less than hinting at a rearrangement of the relationship between the state and the media. For too long, he implies, journalists have been at liberty to hack and investigate and say what they see fit; now, post-hacking scandal, those in authority must step up and cast a more watchful eye over these antics.

When I once argued that the Guardian’s “almost pathological pursuit of the News of the World hacking story is posing a serious threat to press freedom”, I was roundly mocked by the newspaper’s media correspondent, Roy Greenslade. He said I was naive about the “worthless nature of [the News of the World’s] journalistic aims and results”. Its reporting is “not in the public interest”, he sniffed, before expressing doubt that the state would show much interest in curtailing its behaviour. Yet now, lo and behold, it appears that one concrete consequence of the hacking scandal, alongside the closure of a newspaper read by millions of people, will be the corrosion of press freedom, the creeping of the state into an arena which the Guardian and others have somewhat gleefully depicted as corrupt and depraved and in urgent need of a clean-up.

Cameron this morning promised to set up two inquiries – one specifically on what happened at the News of the World, the other, more worryingly, on “press behaviour” in general. And he expressed his keenness to establish a new regulatory body, one with more teeth, and therefore presumably with more bite, than the current Press Complaints Commission. He paid lip service to the idea of press freedom, of course, though his attitude can best be summed up as “I support press freedom, but…”

So he said he wants a press that is “free and rigorous, which investigates and entertains”, BUT it must also be “clean and trustworthy”, as no doubt defined by him, his inquiries and the regulatory body which he hopes will speak power to truth. The end result of the intense media focus on the scandal at the News of the World, of the depiction of Wapping as something akin to the seventh circle of hell, of the pressure heaped upon politicians to Do Something About It, is likely to be ill-thought-through and illiberal new measures.

The press in Britain has been pretty much free since the 17th century. It will be a very sad day for open and honest and unfettered media investigation and debate if that now changes in the wake of the hacking scandal, and if politicians tiptoe into what was previously a no-go zone for them: the hearts and brains of hacks. Yes, the tabloids can be ugly beasts at times and they frequently publish drivel; the News of the World went beyond even that, and someone at that paper should have tackled the moral rot head-on. But still, better to have a bad free press than a “good” controlled one. A “free press” designed to conform to Cameroonian tastes and morals is not a free press at all.

My article on Foston pig farm has been re-published by Voltaire (Sweden)

2011-07-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

VAD GRISARNAS VÄNNER BÖR VETA OM STORA FLÄSKFARMER

Det senaste grälet mellan brittiska jordbrukare och djurrättsaktivister handlar om en cirka 30 tunnland stor grisproduktionsanläggning i Foston, Derbyshire, som föreslagits av Midland Pig Producers (MPP). Anläggningen skulle hysa 2 500 suggor och producera över tusen grisar i veckan.

http://www.voltaire.se/sv/blogs/58.1718/spiked/vad-grisarnas-vanner-bor-veta-om-stora-flaskfarmer

Next Birmingham Salon: Tues 9 August

2011-07-06T03:07:00.000-07:00

Book discussion of "In Search of Civilisation, remaking a tarnished idea" by John Armstrong

Tuesday 9 August 2011

The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.30pm and in the pub afterwards.

The idea of civilisation is a complicated one, tangled up for years in ideas of colonialism and politics. John Armstrong explores the nature and aims of civilisation, examining how civilising forces from the Greeks to the Renaissance have shaped and coloured the ideas of what a Good existence means. Only by bringing conversations about civilisation back into our everyday lives, argues Armstrong, can we rediscover our chance for wisdom and happiness.

Review links

Henrik Bering in The Wall Street Journal

Alain de Botton in The Observer

Dr Rob Clowes on Culture Wars

Available from Amazon »

All welcome

There will be no speaker to give an introduction at this salon - it'll be more like a bookclub. The book is available quite cheaply on Amazon so I hope everyone will manage to get hold of a copy.

2011 Debating Matters Competition winners

2011-07-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

From left to right in picture above: Daniel Keeley, Matthew Oldham, Jonathan Mitchell, teacher Clare Boughey and Matthew Handley

St. Francis Xavier’s (SFX), a comprehensive school and sixth form college from Liverpool, have won the National Final of the Institute of Ideas Debating Matters Competition 2010/11, which took place over three days at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, from 1-3 July. The team won all three of their debates over the weekend, and the team impressed judges with their in-depth research and strong, committed lines of argument. Speaking after judging the winners in the final debate, renowned writer Anthony Horowitz said of the team:

“Judging was an intense and thoroughly fascinating experience. I came to the event expecting to be out-smarted by the other judges, but to find that the students were cleverer than us was a shock! The teams were wonderful and I was blown away by their arguments.”

Other top-name judges at the final included: businessman and chair of the Royal Society of Arts Luke Johnson; film and documentary director Beeban Kidron; Gill Penlington from CNN; and Professor Raymond Tallis amongst many others.

During the course of the weekend the eight competing teams grappled with a wide range of contemporary debates, including the provision of IVF for older women and whether prisoners should have the vote. In the first semi-final debate on the Wikileaks controversy, former National Final champions Durham Johnston Comprehensive School put up a hard fight against the St. Francis team, with judges declaring that that had only narrowly lost-out to the eventual champions; in the second semi-final debate on smart drugs newcomers Dalriada School from Northern Ireland beat Uppingham School.

Tension then mounted for the final debate on the French burqa ban, which was lively and heated, and not just from the debate teams! The audience who engaged passionately and fiercely with the two teams. St. Francis, arguing in support of the ban, were under enormous pressure from the audience questions, but held their nerve and commitment to their position throughout.

In the spirit of the competition, and reflecting the way that all schools engaged across the weekend, teacher Rob Johnson of Durham Johnston Comprehensive School said of the competition:

“Debating Matters is intellectually stimulating and the students are looking at issues they had not thought about or considered before. This competition literally opens up new worlds to the students. We have had a fantastic time”

Speaking after judging the a semi-final debate, judge and children’s writer K A S Quinn said:

“One of the great failures in life is not finding your own voice. It is one of the most important things in the world to be have a well thought-through opinion and then to be able to articulate it forcefully. This is the essence of what Debating Matters is all about – recognising and developing young people’s capacity to find and nurture their voice.”

Across the three day final teams not only spoke in their hard-fought debates, but also made some excellent contributions during the numerous extra-curricular activities that were organised across the National Final weekend, including a Bookshop Barnie with Ed Howker, Spectator magazine journalist and author of ‘Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth’ and at the Institute of Ideas ‘Question Time’ debate where students interrogated a distinguished panel on bis issues of the day, which included leading British economist Ruth Lea; BBC Foreign Correspondent Humphrey Hawksley; Dr Evan Harris, Vice President of the British Humanist Association and former Liberal Democract MP; and novelist, cultural critic and broadcaster, Diran Adebayo.

Teams and individuals also received some fantastic prizes from our sponsors, including £4000 worth of books and educational resources from Hodder Education for the winners, runners-up and semi-finalists, tickets to the ENO autumn season, Encyclopaedia Britannica atlases, boxed sets of the OUP’s acclaimed ‘A Very Short Instroduction’ series and Foyles bookshop gift cards amongst other things. The winning team were also presented with limited edition ‘Champions Hoddies’ and a glass trophy to take back to their school, most importantly they won an all-expenses paid trip to London to take part in this years’ Battle of Ideas festival, where they will take on the champions of the all-India Debating Matters Competition.

The Debating Matters team would like to thank all the judges and speakers who helped to make the weekend so challenging and stimulating for the students who attended, but most importantly we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our sponsors and supporters for their commitment and belief in the Debating Matters Competition. Thanks to: Pfizer, Wellcome Trust, Hodder Education, Canterbury Christ Church Univeristy,Carillion Energy Services, Economic and Social Research Council, and the Medical Research Council.

Winners: St. Francis Xavier’s College, Liverpool

Runners up: Dalraida School, Ballymoney

Semi finalist 1: Durham Johnston Comprehensive School, Durham

Semi finalist 2: Uppingham School, Oakham

Individual Prizes:

Best Individual: Matthew Handley, St Francis Xavier College
Highly Commended: Fiona Miller, Godalming College
Commended: Louis Cowling, Durham Johnston Comprehensive School

Gina Owens Memorial Prize: Shaan Tehal, Godalming College, Surrey

Honourable Mentions: George Butcher, Durham Johnston Comprehensive School; Leo Evans, Dalriada School; Matt Gowshall, The Ridgeway School; Christy Gregg, Dalriada School; Katie Heard, Uppingham School; Daniel Keeley, St Francis Xavier’s College; Tim McConnell, Chilwell School; Chloe Peirce, The Ridgeway School; Scott Pepe, Godalming College.

Vajazzled in Essex By BRENDAN O'NEILL

2011-06-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/oneill06242011.html

Is there a right way and a wrong way for a woman to worship her vagina? Judging from this week's weird media debate about "vajazzling", there clearly is.

On Monday evening, Newsnight caused its normally catatonic viewers to wake up and spill their Ovaltine by featuring a discussion about vajazzling.

Beloved of Essex girls in particular, this practice involves the jazzing up of the vagina, where the pubic hair is waxed off and replaced by stick-on jewels.

The Newsnight reporter, Liz MacKean, wore her best Horrified-of-Hampstead face as she bravely entered into alien territory - a beauty salon for permatanned working-class women - and gawped in alarm at a vajazzle catalogue.

In the studio, Jeremy Paxman oversaw a debate in which brainy middle-class feminists informed us that these Essex birds feel "compelled by society" to make themselves look more "pornographic".

Of course they couldn't possibly have decided for themselves to be vajazzled - no, they were propelled into the beauty therapist's chair by forces beyond their control and understanding.

One of the feminists described vajazzling as a "symbolic castration", with these poor unfortunate women effectively being "prepped for surgery by Dr Bling".

She said it with all the sneering condescension of those Victorian anthropologists who once looked with disgust upon the plaited pubes and exposed boobs of strange African tribes. Only today it is Essex that is viewed as an exotic land full of weird women, by well-educated feminists who live in the more civilized bits of south-east England.

The great irony is that the very same feministas who sneer at vajazzling are just as likely to sing the praises of something like The Vagina Monologues.

That interminable pussy-fest featured well-known middle-aged women taking to the stage on Broadway, in the West End and across Europe to bore on at great length about their clitorises and the power of the c**t.

It won plaudits from the broadsheet press, and female celebs queued up for the opportunity to praise their private parts in public.

So it is apparently wrong to vajazzle your vagina, but perfectly okay to valorise it; it is bad to "worship" it with jewels but good to "worship" it with words in front of like-minded liberal feminists.

Such are the double standards of modern-day feminism. This week's bemused and aloof discussion of vajazzling exposes the snobbery of the sisterhood, the disdain that many feminists feel for the plucked and preened women of Essex and other jazzy towns, who apparently "do sex" in the wrong way.

Feminism today seems to be more about expressing disdain for the sexual antics of women from the lower orders than it is about demanding equal treatment.

Consider the recent rehabilitation of burlesque, that old tassle-spinning artform in which women in corsets tease and tantalize their audiences. Influential feminists always sing the praises of burlesque dancing in one breath while denouncing lapdancing in the next. Burlesque is "empowering"; lapdancing is "degrading".

In her new book How to be a Woman, Caitlin Moran becomes the latest in a very long line of non-vajazzled feminists to insist that lap-dancing is "not fine" but burlesque is.

Here, once again, a clear moral distinction is made between sexy stuff done by middle-class women and sexy stuff done by working-class women. It's not okay for working-class women to strut their stuff for cash, but it's fine for middle-class history students from Oxford to be part-time tassle-swingers for "art".

The message is clear: "Our preferred method of stripping is fun - yours is disgusting."

Likewise, the recent Slutwalks phenomenon confirmed that the only acceptable "slut" in the eyes of respectable feminists is the knowing and ironic one, who dress provocatively only to make a political point. Those other "sluts" - the real ones, in their alcopop-stained micro-dresses - are a different matter entirely.

So where the Slutwalk sluts won garlands of praise from female commentators, so-called "ladettes" are more likely to give those same commentators nightmares. Young women who dress saucily and drink heartily because they actually want to get screwed at the end of the night are pitied as at-risk and deluded creatures.

Both Germaine Greer and Fay Weldon, grande dames of modern feminism, have attacked these "ladettes" as out-of-control creatures, who only aspire to "join the masculinist elite.”

There's a brilliant irony at the heart of modern feminism: it presents itself as edgy, yet it implicitly promotes new morals and manners that all good women must apparently adopt. Its distinction between right-minded women and fallen women, between a vagina-worshipping elite of feminists and the vajazzled hordes, breathes new life into the old Victorian divide between the Good and Bad amongst the fairer sex.

Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked and among other publications, contributes to The First Post, where this first appeared.

Kevin Rooney's argument for signing the Take a Liberty (Scotland) petition

2011-06-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

"These laws have brought the policing of people’s words and thoughts to an unprecedented new level. Nobody who cares about free speech and civil liberties should allow this legislation to pass without protest. Celtic and Rangers fans should overcome our rivalry in a robust defence of our right to offend each other at games. These laws demonise and criminalise us all, and we should unite to tell the politicians to stay out of football and stop treating football fans like scum".

No free speech for football fans
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10627/

Alex Salmond’s proposed new ‘anti-sectarian’ laws

2011-06-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

Take a Liberty ( Scotland ) has launched a campaign against Alex Salmond’s proposed new ‘anti-sectarian’ laws. A statement and petition (see below) is being circulated around the UK to challenge what Stuart Waiton, from Take a Liberty (Scotland), believes is, ‘an almost unbelievably reactionary and authoritarian proposal’, being put forward by the Scottish government.

We believe that introducing a law to imprison people for up to five years because of offensive sectarian chanting or online comments is extreme and illiberal.

SIGN THE PETITION AT http://www.petitiononline.com/1967a/petition.html

Signatories so far include.
Stuart Baird, Scottish Secondary School Teacher, Rangers fan and Take a Liberty ( Scotland ) supporter.

Dr Carlton Brick, Sociology of Sport, West of Scotland University, co-author Key Concepts in Sports Studies.

Eamonn Butler MA PhD, Director Adam Smith Institute, author of Milton Friedman: A Concise Guide to the ideas and influence of the Free-Market Economist.

Dolan Cummings, cultural commentator and contributing author of It's Rangers for Me?

Stephen Field, author of Prison Law Index: The Definitive A-Z Index of Prison Law.

Dr Chris Gilligan, Senior Lecturer Sociology, University of the West of Scotland, editor, Northern Ireland Ten Years After the Agreement.

Dr Donncha Marron, Sociology Lecturer, Robert Gordon University and Take a Liberty ( Scotland ) supporter.

Tom Miers, Editor Free Society

Steven Purdie, Principle Teacher Humanities, Calderhead High School, Celtic fan and Take a Liberty ( Scotland ) supporter.

Kevin Rooney, teacher, writer and Celtic season ticket holder.

Jonathan Simon, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, visiting professor of law, University of Edinburgh, and author of Governing through Crime.

Dr Craig Smith, Scottish based moral philosopher.

Dr Stuart Waiton, FRSA, Sociology and Criminology Lecturer, University of Abertay Dundee , Co-founder of Take a Liberty ( Scotland ).

Graham Walker, Professor of Political History, Queen’s University of Belfast

‘No one should be subjected to intolerance, prejudice or violence in 21st Century Scotland’. So reads the Scottish Executive website discussing Banning Orders, introduced in 2006, orders that can ban abusive or bigoted fans from attending any football game anywhere in the world for up to ten years. Ironically, as the authoritarian discussion about how to rid Scotland of sectarianism rumbles on it appears that the Scottish Government are illustrating their own far more worrying form of intolerance, prejudice and violence.

Tolerance, it appears, today means not tolerating views that we don’t like. Not too long ago this was called authoritarianism. Now there is talk of making sectarian conduct at football matches a specific criminal offence punishable by five years in jail, with similar powers to target bigotry on the internet.

Not too long ago challenging bigotry and sectarianism was seen as a political challenge, today, like many other things, it has become something to be policed out of existence. But then even this is to take the reactionary approach of the SNP and today’s pundits too seriously. Any serious analysis of sectarianism in Scotland would have to conclude that it is largely a fiction. In fact if we take Rangers and Celtic out of the equation - where is this sectarianism? We can no doubt find some stupid kids fighting and call it sectarianism, but previously sectarianism was a powerful force in society, something that meant people would be denied jobs, houses, would never inter-marry, or associate with the ‘other’ side. Today none of this holds true. Celtic and Rangers fans may shout IRA or Fenian this and that, but they then troop off home to their Protestant wife or Catholic mates. Today ‘sectarianism’ is a 90 minute game and the main reason we are aware of it at all is because politicians and pundits are grandstanding, attempting to look tough and purposeful by doing their ‘thing’, which today means being ‘outraged’, standing up for the ‘offended’ and introducing all sorts of draconian law and forms of policing.

Strangely, this whole furore has erupted largely because of a few extreme acts – the sending of a bomb to Neil Lennon (for which there are already laws to send these idiots down), the scuffle between him and Ally McCoist (which actually wasn’t extreme at all but was portrayed as such), and the ridiculous assault (another criminal act) on Lennon at Hearts.

These events have magically been tied into the hundreds of thousands of everyday Old Firm fans who shout and sing at football matches. Here we find the prejudice of the Scottish elite about football fans, with their own comments filled with bile and hatred about this imaginary sectarian force in society, backed up with serious violence in the form of imprisonment for up to 5 years for singing a song that someone somewhere finds offensive.

No one should be subjected to intolerance, prejudice or violence in 21st Century Scotland, except that is for Celtic and Rangers fans. This is the real shame on Scotland.

Telling porkies about big pig farms

2011-06-21T03:49:00.000-07:00

The latest spat between British farmers and animal welfare groups is over a 30-acre pig-production facility in Foston, Derbyshire, proposed by Midland Pig Producers (MPP). The farm will house 2,500 sows and produce more than a thousand pigs for sale each week.

MPP is one of the largest pig companies in the UK, producing over 100,000 pigs each year from 30 farms in eight counties. Size, it seems, is one of the main objections to the company’s proposed farm. Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) argues: ‘We are concerned at the sheer scale and the indoor nature of the proposed pig farm… we urge those planning the farm at Foston to retain their intended welfare standards but to break the proposal up into a number of much smaller farms.

The Environment Agency has objected to the Foston plans on the basis that its concrete slurry tank could, over time, leak and pollute the local water supply. This objection is similar to the one made by the agency in relation to the proposed dairy farm in Nocton, Lincolnshire, an objection that led developers to withdraw their planning application. If this situation is repeated, it will be a blow to struggling farmers but, more importantly, it could help to halt progress in farming altogether.

Many arguments are now made against intensive-farming units, some practical, some environmental, and some of which boil down to a demand that society should go backward and do things in an inefficient way, like in the old days. Let’s challenge these arguments.

Indoor Production
Out of all the controversies over animals being kept indoors, the hoo-hah over the indoor farming of pigs is perhaps the strangest. Pigs are ideally suited to being kept indoors because they are hopeless at regulating their body temperature. The UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is very strict in its guidance to British farmers on how to treat pigs because wide or abrupt fluctuations in temperature can create stress that may trigger outbreaks of abnormal behaviour – ‘vice’ - such as tail biting, or disease such as pneumonia.

Many pig varieties are susceptible to sunburn and heat stress, and all pigs lack sweat glands and cannot cool themselves. Pigs have a limited tolerance to high temperatures and heat stress can lead to death. Temperature regulation is therefore particularly important. This is one reason keeping pigs indoors has become the main method of farming them: it is better for their welfare. Intensive, specialist farms allow the kind of investment in temperature-control systems, such as ventilation and drip-water systems, that are out of the reach of the traditional farmer. A traditional farmer would simply hose the pigs down with a pipe.

Waste
The major environmental issue facing livestock farmers is what to do with animal waste. As farms have got larger, muck-spreading - the traditional way of disposing of waste - has become problematic. The smell it produces spreads over a wide area, contaminating the air. This is one of main reasons for local objections to proposed intensive units from rural residents. As the documentary film Pig Business, made by eco-campaigner the Marchioness of Worcester, points out, it could also be making people ill.

Smithfield Foods, the American food giant has, like most US pig producers, stored waste in lagoons and then spread it over surrounding fields. Residents in North Carolina and Psie Głowy, Poland - where Smithfield has recently expanded its operations - have complained not only about the smell but also about water pollution. One woman was told by local authorities not to drink from or wash in the water coming from her taps after they analysed a sample. A better solution for waste disposal is needed.

A potentially revolutionary solution is being proposed for Foston: ‘odourless livestock production’. Pig waste would be regularly flushed into a sealed biogas reactor (an underground concrete tank) which would render it odourless and produce natural gas (methane) to be burned to produce electricity. The manure substrate produced in the biogas generator would be processed much like in a sewage works and the processed water recycled and fed back to the pigs (much like modern human water consumption). The solids left over would be dried and bagged to be spread as fertiliser on crops that are harvested and milled on site, utilising some of the energy created to produce feed for the animals.

Since the UK does not manufacture fertiliser on any large scale, this scheme would reduce the need for imports. The farm is also in talks with the adjacent Foston Prison to supply it with electricity produced from pig waste.

Welfare
The ultimate goal of breeding pigs has always been to produce the greatest number of pigs per sow per year with the least amount of labour and costs. The goal of any successful business is to produce a desirable product efficiently at maximum profit. Animal-welfare groups argue that these goals are at odds with the need to treat animals humanely. While the potential for cruelty is always there on any type of farm, these fears are largely unwarranted.

The profit margins for a pig farmer are small. His most valuable asset, apart from the farm (if he owns it), is his stock. His livelihood depends on producing a good-quality product and that means looking after the herd as well as he can. Many of the procedures criticised by animal-welfare groups were developed in order to improve welfare and therefore the end product.

Farrowing crates, attacked for not allowing a sow to turn around, were designed specifically to stop movement of a pregnant sow for welfare reasons. A sow is likely to kill the piglets to which she is giving birth simply by moving and accidentally crushing them. While there is evidence that some farmers leave sows in crates for too long, the EU has discussed legislation that would set a maximum length of time that such crates can be used.

The ‘mutilation of piglets’ to which CIWF refers is a similar story. The eight needle-teeth of piglets are clipped (notched) shortly after birth in order to prevent damage to littermates and to the sow’s udder. If they remain uncut, the sow can get an infection if cut by them and these needle-teeth are of no known benefit to the baby pig. This is a traditional farming practice which is not confined to intensive farms.

Scale
The size of a farm is everything to critics of intensive units. The specific issues addressed above may be of concern to them, but what really matters to campaigners are the numbers of animals involved and the scale of the operation. If it were possible to overcome every other objection to factory farming, many critics would still not be convinced because there is just something inhumane and wrong with keeping ‘too many’ animals in one place.

This says more about the critics of intensive farming than it does about intensive farms themselves. Take the Marchioness of Worcester’s Pig Business film as an example. The people she interviews complain about the smell and water problems caused by farms; the interviewees in Poland also complain about a lack of jobs. She interprets this not as a practical problem - the need to find a solution to the unforeseen consequences of feeding people cheaply, and Poland’s need to create rural jobs - but as these people having their lives ruined. Factory farms are said to be destroying the culture and soul of Poland. While filming at a Smithfield Farm processing centre in North Carolina, she tells us with disdain that the company employs 52,000 people, as if that should be a crime in itself.

What she is expressing here is not her anger at the perceived problems of farming but her own sense of a lack of control, of what Frank Furedi describes elsewhere on spiked as an ‘impotent rage’ that pathologises all change as something terrible. What we really witness in this documentary is the Marchioness’s personal therapy session. She is able to express all the anxiety she feels about the modern world through the prism of farming. Tellingly, at one point she says ‘economic development is not being determined by the needs of people but for the needs of large companies to grow’, as if the existence of private profit had come as a shock to her.

Large farms and small ambitions
Penny Thorpe of the Environment Agency says that they are not against the idea of megafarms. Yet out of the two most ambitious, efficient, modern units that have been proposed to date, one – Nocton - withdrew its application, citing a lack of support from the Environment Agency. The other, Foston, is facing difficulties in bringing about a potential revolution in farming because a concrete tank may, at some point in the future, sprout a leak.

Some intensive producers clearly need to clean up their act; polluting the water supply is bad for surrounding communities and for the farms themselves in the longer term. But so many arguments against intensive production are over-emotional and express a more general sense of loss that goes way beyond a particular dairy or pig farm. The opposition to large-scale farming ends up arguing against modernity, against progress and against cheap food. Unfortunately, it seems, the Environment Agency shares much of this uneasiness with new production methods.

The desire to feed the world as cheaply as possible is a positive human aspiration. The intensification of agriculture holds the possibility, if done on an international scale, of fulfilling this goal. We shouldn’t let erroneous arguments or a misplaced sense of unease get in the way of feeding the world.

The case for corporate universities

2011-06-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

Professor Dennis Hayes of University of Derby addresses the problems of HE in 2003.

There are many useful points which help clear up some of the bizarre reactions to AC Grayling and Richard Dawkins new private university, 'The New College of Humanities'.

The McDonaldisation of UK higher education seemed to come one step nearer in 2002, when a senior source at the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) hinted that in a forthcoming government shake-up, ‘private businesses would be encouraged to award their own degrees in direct competition with traditional universities’.

At the time, this appeared to be nothing more than an accommodation to what was happening in the business world. There are already over 2000 corporate universities in the USA, including one run by McDonald’s and popularly known as the ‘Hamburger University’. In Britain, Anglia Water has a University of Water and Unipart, the car-parts company, has a training centre that they call the ‘u’. Other businesses are likely to follow their lead.

However, it would be absurd to accept that these training, marketing, or in-house product development operations are ‘universities’ in any real sense. The promotion of their growth and development is important only because it tells us something of what the UK government thinks may be the future for state-subsidised universities, and raises some serious questions about the role that ‘corporate’ or ‘private’ funding should play in real universities.

Now that the government has launched its long-awaited white paper on The Future of Higher Education (2), the promised ‘shake-up’ is beginning to look as if it were kite-flying. Despite the furore about top-up fees and the consequences of increased student debt, this bland document merely consolidates trends already in evidence and much discussed. These primarily concern teaching in higher education and, as ‘an important signal about the importance of teaching’, the white paper suggests the title of ‘university’ should be awarded to universities that are not research active. Teaching-only institutions, or those that undertake little research, get the opportunity to work with business and further education colleges in a network of twenty ‘Knowledge Exchange’ centres, with the aim of boosting local economies.

Such bureaucratic structures will have the aim of spreading ‘good practice to other universities and colleges’. Yet ‘good’ practice is not something to be discovered - it is pre-determined, in that it must focus on developing two-year foundation degrees. As much of the teaching on these programmes will be undertaken in actual further education colleges, we are on the brink of seeing something like the American ‘Community College’ system being created.

This is no step forward. Whatever the faults with the education on offer in some new universities, the government’s proposals will ultimately turn all but some 40 universities into further education institutions engaged not in knowledge creation but what is better described as ‘knowledge transfer’.

In the recent discussions about the white paper, the university is assumed to have a major role to play in promoting social justice, and in developing teaching skills to help students digest pre-packaged and unchallenging bits of knowledge. These two assumptions miss the point of what a university is for. A university is not a site for social engineering. Equally importantly, a university is not in any sense a teaching institution (3). Its role is exclusively what Professor Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, described back in 1999 as the ‘pursuit of knowledge without fear or favour’(4).

The phrase ‘fear or favour’ is crucial. It might seem that the white paper’s proposal to target research money to the 19 members of the Russell Group, a self-selected group of research-led universities, and to some 20 other universities, is the creation of an elite or two-tier system of education. Yet if these universities continue to have their research output determined not by the demands of the community of scholars but the bureaucratic and unwieldy Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), or whatever might replace it, they will not have the academic autonomy they require to be anything better than the teaching-only universities.

A requirement to publish four works for each assessment in obscure, dull and unread journals is hardly academic freedom. Furthermore, it is not only the form of research that is regulated. Bids for research funding are increasingly required to have political ends, whether increasing social justice and inclusion, or developing teaching skills. Such political and politically-correct requirements also operate informally, so that thinking the unthinkable and saying the unsayable becomes impossible.

The suggestion that an ‘access regulator’ be appointed to ensure that more working class students attend university caused some consternation among vice-chancellors, who saw it as a threat to academic autonomy. Yet other forms of regulation that will destroy the autonomy of universities receive their support. These include scrutiny of management, the determination of the sort of degree awarded and how it is assessed, and the nature of teaching. In a reversal of historical roles, lecturers will even face monitoring by their students.

As the white paper puts it, these spurious ‘new freedoms’ such as the ability to charge top-up fees, must be balanced by new responsibilities. Under the guise of an attack on ‘bureaucracy’, the white paper argues for ‘better regulation’, when what it means is self-regulation. And indeed, today’s university managers will be all too eager to regulate themselves to ensure the security of their funding. Even the Cabinet Office’s ‘Better Regulation Task Force’ recognised that individual universities were more bureaucratic than government quangos when it came to collecting data and preparing for inspections.

Self-regulating ‘research’ institutions doing the government’s bidding, and a network of further education colleges, appear to be all that is on offer in this new vision of the future for higher education. If there remain any pockets of independence, by which I mean true communities of scholars pursuing knowledge for its own sake, it will be due almost entirely to the ability of institutions to attract private funding, whether directly from companies, individuals or endowments.

These may seem an odd claim to anyone whose idea of state funding is based on the so-called ‘golden age’ of relatively well funded university expansion in the middle of the last century. Something like a ‘community of scholars’ existed at that time. No matter how many individual academics squandered this opportunity, they were free to pursue knowledge wherever it led them. The difference today is not that funding for academic work is inadequate, which it is, but that research funding is tied to specific outcomes. This often takes the form of direct tenders to undertake research to show how government targets can be achieved or to evaluate government projects and programmes. These ‘research’ contracts turn universities into arms of government.

The main sources of state funding for research also use their grants not in pursuit of knowledge, but towards solving social problems. To illustrate this, look at how one of the most prestigious research funding bodies, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), distributes its funds. The ESRC has adopted ‘thematic priorities’ in response to government criticism. These priorities are set to ensure that research is ‘relevant to today’s problems, and that there is increasing “knowledge transfer” between social scientists and the users of their research’.

Furthermore, ‘all the research councils were required to address this problem by working more closely with users of research and introducing the criterion of “relevance” more clearly and strongly into their funding decisions’ (5). Not surprisingly, one of the ‘thematic priorities’ is ‘Social Stability and Exclusion’. It is increasingly impossible to get social science or other funding that does not require, as outcomes, practical measures of the sort that promote social inclusion.

The idea that this research is somehow ‘objective’ and ‘unbiased’ is only true in the sense that researchers are expected to use a rigorous ‘methodology’. It is strange, then, that the myth persists that this funding is better than corporate funding. Companies may try to determine how their funding is used, but this is not necessarily the case and often it is given simply to advance knowledge in a particular area. Many universities are learning the lesson about reducing their dependence on government money, which never comes without strings.

The University of Surrey is perhaps the most controversial and well-known example of an higher education institution seeking to protect itself in this way. It has worked with business and set up its own companies. Although it denies the intention of becoming a private university, it receives only 25 per cent of its income from government. Many other universities thrive on income from research contracts with industry or from corporate donations.

University researchers know that funding from business is not necessarily submission to the dictates of the market, but perhaps the only guarantee of being able to conduct research without fear or favour. As long as such funding is given without conditions it is the best way of ensuring the continuation of academic freedom and the existence of the university in any meaningful sense.

Despite the prejudice in many commentators’ minds, there is no necessary link between private funded research and its conclusions. It is government and its quangos that prescribe research outcomes before they provide funding.

The concern with the possible introduction of the ‘market’ or the privatisation of institutions, rather than with what is on offer in universities, is a distraction produced by old ideological conflicts. What’s left of the political left, the professional bodies and trade unions in the university sector are currently campaigning against the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) which seeks to ‘liberalise’ service provision and open it up to market forces. Inverting reality, they see the state as a bulwark against the threats to academic freedom.

Professor James Tooley, who is the director of the EG West Centre for Market Solutions in Education, and right-wing bodies such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, argue for private universities because they are committed to a market ideology, and not from the premise of the need to defend the university as a community of scholars. Both ‘sides’ in this ideological conflict miss the central point. The issue is not the of funding but that it is given with no strings attached.

Universities, as communities of scholars, should be able to pursue knowledge without being accountable to anyone but themselves. The ‘public’ are often said by ideologues of the left and right to have the democratic right to require that publicly funded bodies are accountable. If people were ever consulted, it is my view that they would be found not to be so philistine, and more concerned with ensuring that universities remain places where academics and students think for themselves.

The argument put forward here in favour of ‘private’ universities is not one in support of the sort of training and research institutions interested in improving efficiency, marketing and product development that I mentioned in my opening paragraph. They have as much resemblance to the traditional university as the summer school I saw advertised last year as a ‘Children’s University’.

But the government’s triumph, if the white paper is implemented, will be to transform the whole university system in to a network of just such ‘McUniversities’. The only alternative is to support the creation of corporate or private universities, founded on the principle that they pursue knowledge without fear or favour.

From: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/6774/

B'ham city council outsourcing IT jobs to India

2011-06-09T09:16:00.001-07:00

http://www.birminghampost.net/news/west-midlands-news/2011/06/09/birmingham-city-council-s-it-jobs-lost-to-india-to-cut-costs-65233-28849775/

Private universities. The way forward?

2011-06-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

There has been much hoo-har over the setting up of this new private university especially from academics at state-funded institutions. Given that state funding has eroded academic freedom, instrumentalised the purpose of higher education, and made a degree about obtaining 'skills for the labour market', rather than about obtaining knowledge in your specialist subject for its own sake - surely this new institution shows an imagination sadly lacking amongst many academics?

"A new private university in London staffed by some of the world's most famous academics is to offer degrees in the humanities, economics and law from 2012 at a cost of £18,000 a year, double the normal rate.

The Oxbridge-style university college aims to educate a new British elite with compulsory teaching in science literacy, critical thinking, ethics and professional skills on top of degree subjects taught in one-to-one tutorials."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/05/new-university-college-humanities-degrees

California Bill Could Protect Cross-Dressing in the Work Force

2011-06-05T10:31:00.000-07:00

I can't help but think any legislation to do with what people wear is a bad thing, but is this another gay/christian B&B moment? Private institutions/companies should surely be able to set their own rules. People should wear what they want but isn't what you wear to work a bit different?

"A California bill working its way through the state legislature providing more protection for transgender individuals in the workplace could allow for cross-dressing employees to wear whatever they want to work, despite workplace dress codes.

AB 887, which passed through the state's Assembly on May 16, is causing a stir among critics who feel it's raising the identity of a transgender individual to the same level as one's ethnicity or gender."

Dodging the burger won't save the planet by Rob Lyons

2011-05-31T04:05:00.000-07:00

Meat is murder, sang The Smiths. But according to a new documentary, the real problem is that meat is killing the planet – and maybe us, too.

Planeat is, pretty much, a 75-minute advert for veganism made ‘independently with absolutely no funding’ in their spare time by Shelley Lee Davies and Or Shlomi. But it’s not all hard polemic. Instead, it weaves in mouthwatering pictures of plant-based food from a variety of plush restaurants in an attempt to persuade you that not only is cutting out the animal-derived foods the ethical thing to do, but it won’t involve wearing a hairshirt, either. Not only will you be saving your health and the planet, but you’ll be discovering a whole new world of eating.

The three pillars of Planeat are T Colin Campbell, Caldwell Esselstyn and Gidon Eshel. Campbell is an American biochemist who worked on a 20-year study of Chinese diets and health and later produced a bestselling book, The China Study, which can apparently count former US president Bill Clinton among its advocates. Esselstyn is an American doctor who advocates a plant-based diet to treat heart disease. Eshel is an Israeli physics professor now working in New York with a particular interest in food and climate change.

Campbell argues that animal protein is key to the development of disease, particularly cancer. So he explains research he conducted in rats, which showed that when fed a diet of a milk protein, casein, rats will develop liver tumours. However, when fed plant proteins, the rats did not develop cancer. Campbell also points to the results of the research in China – an apparently perfect place to conduct such research given the relative homogeneity of the population, which he says supports the conclusion that ‘people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease’.

Esselstyn believes that a plant-based diet can not only prevent heart disease but also reverse it. He claims in the film that in his first batch of patients, all but one avoided a repetition of heart problems as a result of a plant-based diet – and the odd one out had simply strayed from the path of enlightenment. Esselstyn shows off some remarkable-looking scans of patients’ arteries that he says indicate the transformation of their health after cutting out meat and dairy products.

As for saving the planet, the film shows Australian philosopher Peter Singer declaring that ‘Nothing changes the face of our planet as much as the way we produce our food. You have to think about the choices you make in terms of what you eat as choices with ethical consequences.’ It’s a view fully endorsed by Eshel: ‘Most people have no greater spatial effect than their dietary choices’, he says. Eshel argues that by switching from meat and dairy to a plant-only diet, our ecological footprints would fall dramatically.

Unsurprisingly, these claims are disputable. Campbell has been criticised for a rather selective approach to the data, making claims about links between animal protein intake and liver cancer, for example, that just aren’t supportable. As Denise Minger points out in a critique of The China Study, there are better explanations for some of the disease links Campbell makes and it’s even the case that many of the plant foods that he praises have stronger correlations with disease than animal food.

Which all makes Esselstyn’s claims a bit harder to swallow. Unless we could conduct long-term trials on his methods, it is difficult to tell whether Esselstyn is really achieving the miraculous results he claims and whether those results are due to cutting out meat and dairy products. We have to fall back on the kind of epidemiological evidence that Campbell cites – and that doesn’t really support Esselstyn’s case. A point slipped in at the end of the film, however, is that we’re not just talking about a plant-based diet – we’re talking about a whole foods diet, too. That means excluding all the sugary and easily digestible stodge, too, not just animal foods. Could it be that it that it is the rapid increase in carbohydrate consumption in recent decades that has caused increasing obesity, heart disease and type-2 diabetes, as other authors like Gary Taubes claim? To the extent that Esselstyn has identified something of therapeutic benefit, it may well have nothing to do with cutting out the meat.

As it happens, while Campbell and Esselstyn’s dietary suggestions won’t kill anybody, they might just bore them to death. In the film, Esselstyn’s wife Anne gives a little cookery class in how to make a kale and lemon sandwich. Yes, a cabbage butty, with no-oil, no-tahini houmous and lemon juice. She thought it the greatest thing ever. My impression was that it’s just the kind of thing that gives veganism a reputation for crankiness. Still, it’s better than self-flagellation, I guess.

Eshel’s claims that avoiding animal foods will save the planet seemed dubious, too. It’s an idea that has already been roundly and convincingly criticised by former Ecologist editor Simon Fairlie in his book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. For instance, using animals allows food to be produced in all sorts of places – like hilly pasture and semi-arid desert – where growing crops would just not work. The film also suggests that small-scale organic production is better – an idea that would involve ploughing up billions of acres of land to make up for the productive shortfall that organic agriculture inevitably entails. At the London Green Festival screening that I attended, the Friends of the Earth representative accepted that some animal food production was probably beneficial.

What was pretty much absent from the film was any discussion of animal rights. Having failed to win over anything like a majority of people to the idea of eating plants as a way of avoiding ‘cruelty’, it seems that vegans have adopted the tactic of trying to convince us that we should eat tofu to save our own lives. But if the issue of animal rights is sidelined - it was always a dubious idea anyway - there is no basis for being vegan. The evidence that it is healthier is unconvincing. If our current method of meat production is really screwing up the planet – and that claim seemed rather overcooked – then we can always change our production methods.

The one thing we don’t have to do is give up on all that lovely steak, chicken, bacon and cheese. As ever with green campaigning films, in Planeat problems are exaggerated and the ecological message – eat less, travel less, apologise for your existence generally – trumps all potential alternative solutions. While it may be considerably less hectoring than many other such eco-films, Planeat is still an unappealing dish.

Rob Lyons is deputy editor of spiked. His book, Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder, will be published in October. Read his blog here.

So they've arrested Ratko Mladic

2011-05-27T03:45:00.000-07:00

This article, 'What's in a 'mass grave?' by Linda Ryan was published in Living Marxism, Issue 88, March 1996. Radio 4's Today programme this morning, reporting Mladic's capture, repeated uncritically so much of the propaganda that was around at the time that I thought this might add some balance.

What's in a 'mass grave?

Ever since the small town of Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serbs last
summer, the international media has reported that 8000 missing Bosnian
Muslims were massacred there. US human rights envoy John Shattuck stated
categorically that 7000 were massacred after he visited the alleged mass
graves discovered by journalists around Srebrenica. The genocide indictment
issued by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague against the
Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, claims they
were involved in killing 6000 at Srebrenica.

The Srebrenica story is symptomatic of what has happened since the start of
the war in Bosnia. There has been a degradation of investigative journalism,
with a ghoulish search for bodies substituting for professional rigour.
There has been duplicity by journalists and officials about what has
happened to people on all sides. There has been a manipulation of death
tolls without any evidence to substantiate the numbers. The claims of 8000
slaughtered in Srebrenica have no more credibility than the claims of 250
000 dead in the whole of Bosnia. And there has been an abandonment of the
concept of 'innocent until proven guilty'.

Number-crunching

Many people have died on all sides in Bosnia. But there is no way of knowing
how many have been killed. Yet instead of circumspection we have had
prejudgement of one side--the Serbs. The 'fact-finding missions' and
investigative reports look more like the work of the US intelligence
services, which have sought to orchestrate hysteria about genocide and
Holocausts as part of their propaganda war against the Bosnian Serbs.

Where do the figures for the dead in Srebrenica come from? They are based on
misrepresentations of information from the International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC). On 13 September 1995, the ICRC released the following
statement: 'After the fall of the enclave, the ICRC received over 10 000
requests for family news from civilians who were transferred to Tuzla in
central Bosnia. About 2000 of these requests were from different family
members seeking the same individuals. An in-depth analysis has shown that
the remaining 8000 requests fall into two categories: about 5000 concern
individuals who apparently fled the enclave before it fell, while the
remaining 3000 relate to persons reportedly arrested by the Bosnian Serb
forces.' (ICRC News, No37) In other words, the maximum number of people who
could have fallen foul of the Bosnian Serbs according to the ICRC's research
was 3000. But an illiterate or innumerate media seized on the figure of 8000
as the putative death toll.

The ICRC believes that at least 5000 of the 8000 escaped to Bosnian
government territory without their families being informed. After intensive
pressure from the ICRC, the Bosnian Muslim authorities in Sarajevo finally
admitted months later that thousands of fighters from Srebrenica had been
redeployed in central Bosnia. The government justified its decision not to
inform the soldiers' families or the ICRC on the grounds of operational
security. This fact was hardly reported.

So what happened to the 3000 reportedly 'arrested' by the Bosnian Serb Army?
This is where the story begins to get murky. Only about 200 men from
Srebrenica have been found by the ICRC in Bosnian Serb prisons. There is
evidence to suggest that some Bosnian Muslim soldiers and civilians were
killed in fratricidal fighting between those who wanted to battle on and
those who wanted to surrender or leave. In New Republic in August 1995,
Charles Lane, a committed supporter of the Bosnian Muslim cause, reported
that there were at least two firefights between Muslims Journalists reported
that bodies of dead soldiers and civilians were strewn in the streets when
they entered the town.

However, a few fratricidal firefights cannot account for the 3000 presumed
missing by the ICRC. In February, Bosnian Serb officials in Srebrenica told
the new UN human rights envoy, Elizabeth Rehn, that the missing men had been
killed in battle. There was intensive shelling and fighting on the front
lines and in surrounding villages for days before the town fell. There may
also have been more fighting after the fall of the town, as Bosnian Muslim
soldiers moved to government territory, and it is likely that some were
ambushed and killed. This scenario has been disputed by journalists and
international investigators who insist that the missing thousands were
slaughtered en masse by the Bosnian Serbs. Let us look at the evidence they
have assembled to substantiate these claims of mass murder.

The first evidence of large-scale killings cited by journalists and human
rights investigators came from the refugees who arrived in Tuzla. In the
many media and official reports about the alleged massacres in Srebrenica,
however, testimonies based on hearsay and double hearsay outnumber the scant
eyewitness accounts many times over. This has not prevented rumours being
accepted as hard evidence by international journalists and investigators.

Contradictory stories

The international war crimes tribunal in the Hague is also counting on small
numbers of witness testimonies to carry the indictments against Bosnian Serb
leaders accused of genocide in Srebrenica. One survivor, Hakija Husejnovic,
told investigators that on 13 July 1995, 2000 men trying to escape from
Srebrenica were caught by the Bosnian Serbs, crammed into a warehouse in the
village of Kravica and killed with grenades and machine guns fired through
doors and windows. Husejnovic said he survived by playing dead and covering
himself with bodies. His story contradicts that of another witness who
claimed that 2000 men surrendered in the village of Kravica and were taken
by truck at night to an outdoor location, thought to be near Zvornik (quite
a distance from Kravica), lined up and shot by Bosnian Serb soldiers. The
witness said he pretended to be dead and then escaped. It is impossible for
both of these stories to be true.

The second source of evidence cited in support of the claims of mass
killings is the US intelligence services, which provided satellite
photographs, purporting to identify a mass grave near Srebrenica, which were
printed around the world (see below). They are supposed to show a football
field at Nova Kasaba which was used as a collection point for Bosnian Muslim
prisoners of war. But they could have been taken over any field, anywhere,
any time. There is not a single satellite photograph showing hard evidence
of a massacre near Srebrenica. Claims by the US intelligence services to be
in possession of damning tapes of intercepted telephone calls about
Srebrenica between Serbian officials are unfounded. John Shattuck admitted
in an interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel that there is no evidence
that tapes exist.

These spy stories are the stuff of Cold War propaganda once scorned by
journalists. But today they seem to be accepted on the nod. Few journalists
even thought to question the timing of the release of the pictures--in
August, a month after the fall of Srebrenica, but within days of the
expulsion by the Croats of 200 000 Serbs from Krajina. It looked like a
classic diversionary tactic by the US authorities, which had given full
backing to a mass 'ethnic cleansing' operation by the Croats. In all the
excitement about the alleged mass graves in Srebrenica everybody forgot
about what had just happened in Krajina.

The eager media consumption of the CIA photographs turned the search for
'mass graves' into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Journalists scurried to
eastern Bosnia in search of bodies. In August 1995, teams from CNN, CBS,
BBC, France 2, TG 1 (Italy), TV Netherland and others streamed in. They
found little. Many crews did not even bother to search out the site shown on
the CIA satellite photograph, because it had generally been agreed in media
circles that it was not a mass grave. This revelation did not grab the
headlines like the original story. Indeed, it was not deemed worthy of
mention. A bandwagon effect had been created. More journalists set off in
search of 'the evidence'.
Find the corpse

By mid-February this year, journalists led by David Rohde of the American
Christian Science Monitor and Julian Borger of the Guardian claimed to have
discovered five mass graves linked to the Srebrenica killings. The only
physical evidence they had come up with was some bones and clothing. For
Borger, that was enough; reporting that he had found some rotting body
parts, he endorsed claims by US war crimes investigators that Kravica 'is
the site of one of the worst atrocities in Europe since the Holocaust'
(Guardian, 22 January 1996). It seems that any patch of ground in Bosnia
where earth has been moved can qualify as a mass grave, and any evidence of
death in the war-zone can be put alongside the Holocaust.

Some might think that bodies would come in handy as evidence when charges of
genocide are being levelled. There must be tens of thousands buried all over
Bosnia. Yet not one had been uncovered at the alleged 'mass graves' near
Srebrenica at the time of writing. All sorts of excuses were given for the
lack of bodies--they had been covered by snow, dismembered by machines,
destroyed by chemicals and moved elsewhere by the Bosnian Serbs. It almost
seems like nobody wants to dig around in case they discover the 'mass
graves' are empty. This is what happened when British divers went into the
flooded mine at Ljubija, in north-west Bosnia, alleged to hold the bodies of
8000 Bosnian Muslims and Croats. They found nothing.

There is no hard evidence that 3000, let alone 8000, Bosnian Muslims were
massacred in Srebrenica. The Dutch troops who were based in the area at the
time testified to the war crimes tribunal that they saw no evidence of mass
killings. The first official report into the Srebrenica events, the last
written by the UN human rights envoy, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, before he
resigned, provided no conclusive evidence. The latest investigation by his
successor, Elizabeth Rehn, turned up no new evidence. The troupe of foreign
journalists have discovered nothing more. Officials examining the 'mass
graves' have yet to find one body. Not a single photograph of a 'mass grave'
taken with a terrestrial camera has been forthcoming.

Reasonable doubt

The war in eastern Bosnia was brutal. In 1992-93, more than 1000 Serbs from
the villages around Srebrenica were killed by Bosnian Muslim fighters. These
events were the subject of an award-winning film, The Unforgiving, by Clive
Gordon. They have been well-documented and the graves are there for all to
see in Bratunac. So there is good reason to think that local Serbs may have
sought vengeance after the fall of Srebrenica. But this is still surmise and
conjecture. As long as there is no hard evidence, there must be doubt about
whether or not Bosnian Muslim soldiers were massacred.

Yet on 7 February 1996, a senior ICRC official, Jean de Courten, stated
that, after five months of silence from the Bosnian Serb authorities in face
of repeated requests for information, he believed the 3000 had been killed.
Coming from the one international organisation which has remained neutral
throughout the war in Bosnia, this statement carries more weight than the
media's loose talk. What made the ICRC take the unprecedented step of
accusing one side of conducting a massacre?
Was it because the ICRC had obtained conclusive evidence of a massacre? Or
was it because the ICRC had its arm twisted at a time when the USA is
turning the hunt for war criminals into a crusade? A climate of hysteria has
been created around the mass grave stories that recently resulted in the
ICRC offices in Tuzla being wrecked by refugees from Srebrenica. This
climate has been created by the USA with the help of the media. Allegations
of mass killings in Srebrenica are big news because the USA has an axe to
grind on the subject of war crimes.

American interests

Since the start of the year Washington has been making all the running on
the war crimes issue--sending troops to escort war crimes investigators,
pushing Nato forces to play a role hunting down alleged war criminals. And
it has piled pressure on Serbia to cooperate with the war crimes tribunal or
face perpetual ostracism. The US secretary of state, Warren Christopher,
told Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in February that Belgrade would
get no ambassador, no financial aid, no recognition and no permanent lifting
of sanctions unless it handed over suspected war criminals. This is not a
noble crusade by Washington, but a self-serving attempt to occupy the moral
high ground in international affairs. Before they take it at face value,
journalists would do well to consider the implications.

They might learn the lessons of Pakracka Poljana, an alleged mass grave in
Western Slavonia which was said to contain the bodies of 1700 Serbs. The
figure of 1700 came from a UN officer who guessed that there were 17 graves
in the area, each with approximately 100 people. He did not see the graves,
but observed evidence of digging. The official investigation found 19 bodies
in nine small graves. The 'mass graves' were just military trenches. The
report by the UN war crimes tribunal Commission of Experts concluded that
on-site investigations are absolutely necessary to confirm the validity of
allegations. 'Some groups have expressed their displeasure at the
investigation establishing that people in those numbers are not buried
there. Presumably for propaganda purposes 1700 is a more useful number than
19.'

Why have war crimes investigators not shown the same circumspection before
jumping to conclusions about 'mass graves' in eastern Bosnia? Surely not
because the bodies in question are said to be those of Muslims rather than
Serbs; or because the USA finds 8000 a more useful number for propaganda
purposes than 800.

Additional information from Bill Hawk

These chickens need a shrink.

2011-05-25T02:14:00.000-07:00

"Pretty much all commercially raised chickens and eggs have been exposed to modern “factory farming” strategies which in turn endanger their nutritious value by using health supplements which artificially boost development, vaccinations to avoid disease and also antibiotics in order to suppress bacterial infections. In addition, chickens are held inside overloaded conditions that promote anxiety within the flock and lead to severe air and water contamination".
http://www.alad2007.com/tag/factory-farming

This blog seems to be saying that looking after livestock well, by feeding chickens supplements which have been specifically designed to be as nutritious as possible for chickens, and preventing disease by giving vaccinations, is agribusiness being left unfettered to inflict cruelty on chickens. It is not an uncommon opinion. Reality is the other way around. Intensive farmers are able to prioritise welfare far more than conventional farmers. I've written about this (articles on the right).

The 'anxiety' caused to chickens by being reared intensively argument is an interest one. It's not new of course, veal calves spring to mind, but today its use of therapeutic language to imagine the 'suffering' of non-humans creates a truly juvenile anthropomorphism which is evident in many discussions of the future of farming. I'm being side-tracked right now from writing an article about the protest over what VIVA (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals) are calling the Foston Pig Prison.

Out of all the controversies over animals being kept indoors, the indoor farming of pigs is perhaps the strangest. Pigs are ideally suited to being kept indoors. They are hopeless at regulating their body temperature.

Many pig varieties are susceptible to sunburn, heat stress, and all pigs lack sweat glands and cannot cool themselves. Pigs have a limited tolerance to high temperatures and heat stress can lead to death. Temperature regulation is therefore particularly important. Intensive, specialist farms allow the kind of investment in temperature control systems that are out of the reach of the traditional farmer - ventilation or drip water systems. A traditional farmer would hose the pigs with a pipe. Excuse me for seeing progress.

Rapture.

2011-05-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

Brendan O'Neill in the Telegraph arguing that at least the Christians end-of-the-world predictions offer us an eternal life of living in the clouds if we are Good – the greens implore us to be meek and to recycle and to never go on holiday in return for absolutely nothing.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100088694/

My Free Society Column - May

2011-05-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Social mobility and the isolated political class

Wednesday May 18, 2011

Jason Smith reads the government’s latest report on social mobility and concludes that it tells us more about modern politicians than the people they try to govern.

Nick Clegg’s Cabinet Office report Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility published in April is an achievement in itself. The ability to write an eighty-seven page document and not actually say anything of substance must be considered an accomplishment of sorts.

It has – as all government output must have given today’s managerial-style politics – a liberal scattering of buzzwords: ‘robust mechanisms’, ‘external scrutiny’, ‘leading indicators’. But when it comes to setting out a proposal for making society better, in other words a policy, it falls so short of the mark it’s doubtful it ever crossed the starting line.

This is unfortunate because the report is trying to address a real issue. Social mobility in Britain was worse for children born in 1970 than it was for those born in 1958. Children born to poorer households post 1970 are less likely to have entered higher education and gone on to get professional jobs. In other words movement between social classes stagnated in this period. Higher levels of public investment over the last decade are not expected to result in any significant improvement. What could the problem be?

The report does show the direction of the Coalition’s thinking, and it would not sound more New Labour-ish if it included a scandal involving Peter Mandelson. It makes explicit the current political elite’s view of the masses. People are unable to play a productive role in society because they are “often trapped by addiction, debt, educational failure, family breakdown and welfare dependency”. It is clear, then, why Britain is failing in the social mobility stakes – British people are the problem.

In order to put us right the government is recruiting an additional 4,200 health visitors. This will more than double the number of families who can be ‘helped’ as part of the Health Visitor Implementation Plan 2011-2015. The initiative will therefore counteract the negative influence that exists on such an important national asset as British children – their parents.

The report quite rightly points out that people do not want government to tell them how to raise and love their children. But it then goes on to say that the government would like the provision of parenting advice to be considered the norm. In short this document represents not so much a strategy for doing anything in particular, but more of a thought exercise which concludes that government needs to save children from their parents.

It doesn’t stop there though. The ‘Adulthood’ section makes it clear that intervention is necessary in every stage of life. Some people manage to make it to adulthood without becoming educated professionals, therefore what these people need is a kind of ‘Every Child Matters’, but for 30+ year-olds. The logic is if you’re not an educated professional then you must be a drug addicted, unemployed, feral failure.

The most striking thing about this report is the lack of imagination it shows amongst our rulers. They are so insular as a group, the social strata in which they mingle is so narrow and they have so little connection to the electorate, that they imagine everyone who has not chosen a route familiar to them to be a problem. The political class is becoming more like an isolated clique of the kind more usually found in totalitarian dictatorships than in a democracy. They lack a connection to us and therefore blame us for their own failings. Social mobility has failed in that it hasn’t created more people like them.

So this report shows an altogether different failure. As Brendan O’Neill has argued on Spiked, in the past our leaders cut their political teeth working amongst people or a community for years and represented their interests in the centre of political life; today they are handed a safe seat in order to provide them with a democratic gloss. The public are not interacted with, understood, talked to, taken seriously – they are merely looked upon as the mound upon which a member of the oligarchy might build his palace. Having occupied the aloof, closed-door world of think tanks, finance or EU institutions, insulated from popular pressure, today’s politicians fear and distrust the electorate.

This, in part, explains why the AV referendum and discussion seemed so remote from people’s everyday concerns. We were arguing over the system by which votes should be cast and counted when the real problem is the lack of any coherent political ideas by which to govern society. In place of having ideas and policies for improving society, today’s political class blame the electorate for their own failings as leaders.

Jason Smith is convenor of Birmingham Salon and a member of the Battle of Ideas organising committee

A warning to parliament from the Levellers published in July 1646

2011-05-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

"We are well assured, yet cannot forget, that the cause of our choosing you to be Parliament-men was to deliver us from all kinds of bondage and to preserve the commonwealth in peace and happiness. For effecting whereof we possessed you with the same power that was in ourselves to have done the same; for we might justly have done it ourselves without you if we had thought it convenient, choosing you (as persons whom we thought fitly qualified, and faithful) for avoiding some inconveniences. But you are to remember this was only of us but a power of trust (which is ever revocable, and cannot be otherwise) and to be employed to no other end than our own well-being".

A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (anonymous)

An inspiring read I thought given todays MPs just seem to want to control us. A decent reminder that it is supposed to be the other way around.

Next Birmingham Salon discussion: Wednesday 29 June

2011-05-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

Film premiere. Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible

Wednesday 29 June 2011

The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.45pm and in the pub afterwards.

Saleha Ali, reporter and documentary filmaker at the development charity Worldwrite, will introduce the film for its Birmingham premiere and answer questions afterwards

In feature length essay form, Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible, traces Sylvia's ideas, campaigns and political life. Researched and filmed by over 100 volunteers, it is packed with facts from primary sources, rare images from museums and archives, interviews with historians and compelling testimony from Sylvia's son Richard Pankhurst and his wife Rita.

Sylvia was imprisoned more than any other suffragette for her tireless campaigning and unlike her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel, who dropped the fight for votes for women to support the war effort, Sylvia refused to sacrifice the fight for universal suffrage until it was won. Her opposition to the war and her internationalism were and remain exemplary and her bravery in fighting for equality and opposing all misanthropic trends puts her, as one interviewee put it, 'up there with the angels.'

Visit Worldwrite

All welcome

Birmingham Salon readings Wednesday 11 May

2011-05-08T02:40:00.000-07:00

Some links to articles people may find useful for the salon meeting on Wednesday. Hope to see you all there.

Karl Sharro: The Egyptian Uprising: on the universal aspiration for freedom
http://karlremarks.blogspot.com/2011/02/egyptian-uprising-on-universal.html

Karl Sharro: The No-Fly Zone in Libya: Hijacking the Arab Uprisings
http://karlremarks.blogspot.com/2011/03/no-fly-zone-in-libya-hijacking-arab.html

Mike Hume on the death of NATO
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10443/

Brendan O'Neill on Humanitarian War
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10351/

Tim Black on the hypocrisy of intervention
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10297/

The struggle for democracy in the Middle East and Africa: Can the Arab movements survive western intervention?
Wednesday 11 May 2011
The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.30pm and in the pub afterwards.

Brendan O'Neill on why you should vote no to AV

2011-05-05T03:23:00.000-07:00

If you think politics should be about passion and principle - about having something to say and more importantly having the guts to say it - then go out and vote NO to AV.

Of course, none of us asked for this referendum on the alternative vote.

There were no mass gatherings in Hyde Park. No one chained themselves to railings or threw themselves in front of the Queen’s horse for the Right To Divide My Vote Between Four Or Five Candidates.

Instead, the referendum is a product of elite deal-making between David Cameron and Nick Clegg as they forged their coalition government last year.

But now that we’ve been landed with a referendum for an electoral system that a majority of the public are savagely uninterested in, it’s paramount that we vote NO to AV.

Because AV would accentuate some of the most degenerate trends in politics today.

Through its invitation to voters to express their views about all candidates, it would turn voting from an impassioned statement of political desire or attachment to an ideal into a relativistic process of erming and ahhing.

And by making aspiring politicians potentially reliant on second- and third-preference votes, it would nurture even more public figures who refuse to say anything surprising or provocative for fear of alienating their kind-of constituencies.

In short, AV would water down the act of voting and reduce risk-taking and ideas-making in mainstream British politics - a trend that is already underway but which would effectively be institutionalised under AV.

So go out and say NO.

For more, read Frank Furedi on the principled case against AV:
The democratic case against alternative voting

And check out my editorial on how AV would degrade political debate:
The real reason you should say no to AV

The worst form of bigotry today is the liberal elite's view of the working classes as a mongrel race of slothful drones

2011-04-22T02:00:00.000-07:00

From: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100084500

Brendan O'Neill is editor of http://www.spiked-online.com

The metropolitan elite regard the working class as slothful (Photo: Getty)

We often hear of self-loathing Jews, but what about self-loathing proles – working-class people who look back with contempt at the communities they had the misfortune to grow up in? There’s a very good example of it in today’s Guardian, in this column by Lynsey Hanley, a woman who has made a writing career on the back of the fact that she grew up on a council estate. (It is testament to the middle classes’ continuing colonisation of the media that Ms Hanley can be treated as a curious novelty by Granta and the Guardian, almost as a messenger from some distant, dark planet, simply because she once lived in social housing.) Ms Hanley writes of the “terrible ignorance” of the community she used to live in, prior to her moral and mental rescue by “metropolitan elite liberal values”.

Perhaps keen to assure her current employers that she is now one of them and has been scrubbed clean of any trace of working-class brutishness, Ms Hanley sneers at the “view of life” that held strong in the community she was born into. These people were “paranoid, suspicious, mistrustful, misogynist and racist”, she says. She heaps disdain on the “social conservatism” of white working-class communities, which are given to “silently or violently rejecting anyone who is different or who expresses a different opinion to that of the crowd”. Thankfully for her (and let’s face it, probably for the community she was born into), Ms Hanley escaped from this “crowd” (in pre-PC times they called it “the mob”) by embracing what she refers to as metropolitan, liberal values. She pleads with New Labour not to ditch these values, since there might be other “provincial working-class teenagers” who, like Ms Hanley, also want to be rescued.

It’s an embarrassing column, but also a revealing one. In treating Labour as a kind of modern-day version of those Victorian outfits that once rescued “fallen women”, only Labour apparently has a responsibility to rescue enlightened, Guardian-reading teenagers from a life of witless racism and violence, Ms Hanley captures the extent to which Labour is now separate from and aloof to the communities it once claimed to represent. Where Labour once promised to embody the values of working-class communities, it now looks upon those values as deeply problematic and in need of a serious spring clean. From their imposition of parenting classes to their jihad against junk food to their treatment ofanyone who holds a non-metropolitan, non-liberal value as a “bigot”, Labour and its media cheerleaders increasingly look upon the white working classes as a weird, morally warped mass which must be beaten and reshaped into something more respectable: a bit more Islington and a bit less Bermondsey.

What’s more, Ms Hanley’s dutiful provision of moral porn for the chattering classes, who so enjoy reading about the weird goings-on in mysterious council estates over breakfast, speaks to the prejudices that are rife amongst the community she has now embraced: the “metropolitan liberal elite”. The great irony of this elite’s war on the wantonness, gluttony, slothfulness and bigotry of the little people is that it is fuelled by a bigotry of its own, a respectable, PC form of bigotry – one which treats the white working classes as unenlightened Daily Mail drones in need of moral deliverance by sussed outsiders. It is not the working classes who “silently or violently reject anyone who is different”; rather it’s this increasingly intolerant metropolitan elite, which can’t even abide the fact that some communities eat and drink differently, never mind think differently, to itself. In presenting Britain as being neatly split between a morally superior race of liberals and mongrel race of paranoid racists, Ms Hanley and others are unwittingly rehabilitating the very prejudices that originally fuelled the politics of racism in the 19th century: a mean-spirited, Malthusian view of Britain’s own native lower classes as morally defunct.

Perhaps Ms Hanley had the misfortune to be born into a peculiarly conservative bit of Britain, but in the working-class community in north London that I was born into there was a great deal of social solidarity between whites, blacks and Asians. Yes, there was social conservatism, especially amongst the older generations, but not amongst the young, who were forever experimenting with drugs, weird music and sex. Back then the media denounced us working-class youth for being overly reckless and not conservative enough; you can’t bloody win. When I popped back for a visit at the weekend I found my brother (a builder) helping his Romanian workmates to pack a white van with gifts, goodies and food, all of which will be driven across Europe to families living in the furthest reaches of Eastern Romania. I felt a million miles away from the stifling sameness and unhinged suspicions of the metropolitan elite.

My column on thefreesociety.org

2011-04-18T02:07:00.000-07:00

Is happiness immoral?

Monday April 18, 2011

Suddenly, happiness is on the political agenda. But how do we define happiness, asks Jason Smith, and shouldn’t we be concentrating less on our inner emotional well-being than on the fight for a better society.

Are you happy? A new campaign, Action for Happiness (AFH), would like you to be. Their project is about an idea; to improve our quality of life by having as much happiness as is possible and, above all, as little misery. We all want that, surely?

Following on from the publication of his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science in 2005, Lord Richard Layard (founder of AFH) says “The causes of happiness differ hugely between people. Some like quiet, some like noise; some like to study, others don’t. We get happiness from different things. But we all know what it is to be happy – and to be miserable. It is a matter of our feelings. What matters is how we feel in general, rather than the short-term ups and downs”.

Our problem is that we have tended to equate happiness with self-centred individualism – with having stuff. What we should be thinking about is our personal, inner joy. Developments in neuroscience have persuaded Layard that the most important factors in achieving happiness are positive mental health and personal relationships.

Our genes are said to influence about 50 per cent of the variation in our personal happiness, our circumstances (like income and environment) affect only about 10 per cent. The remaining 40 per cent is down to our inner emotional state.

The government also wants to improve our GWB (general well-being), and has its Behavioural Insight Team in Downing Street to ‘nudge’ us into making the right choices for our own good. Everyone it seems wants to increase our happiness.

Here’s my problem. When faced with a society that is far from perfect, and where government appears to have no vision of what a better society might look like, never mind how to get there, my emotion is not happiness but anger. When the government is in the process of undermining our civil liberties, is intervening abroad in the affairs of sovereign nations, and seems incapable of coming up with a policy for economic growth, happiness would be entirely the wrong emotion to feel.

The happiness and well-being agenda asks us to put aside our concerns that society is not all it could be, and instead focus on our internal emotions. Action for Happiness tries to come up with personal, inward-looking, therapeutic solutions to social problems. The emphasis on the psychological aspect of happiness encourages us all to focus on inwards rather than being fulfilled through the pursuit of higher, externally-given goals.

While the US Constitution commits the people’s representatives to upholding ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, it does not get into instructing the electorate as to what definition of happiness they should pursue. The pursuit of happiness also alludes to a society that wants to strive to be better. Layard’s version is stripped of any progressive, forward-looking aspiration.

The promotion of an abstract notion of happiness is immoral. It naturalises that which is social and belittles human beings by suggesting that we can only make a change in our own heads, rather than in wider society. It is an attempt to make us focus on what the therapy industry calls our ‘self-esteem’ – a kind of Buddhism for a secular age.

Society has typically progressed when people feel restless and discontent. Social changes have come about when people felt unhappy with their present lot. Anger, militancy, even violence have brought social progress. Reorienting social policy towards governing our emotional well-being is a symptom of a society with no positive vision of a future which is better than the present. It will lead to more stagnation and paralysis.

Throughout history great men and women have put aside their desire for personal fulfillment in order to fight for causes which they believed were right. It is difficult to imagine, for instance, that the Suffragettes derived much happiness from the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, introduced by Asquith’s government, whereby they were released from prison only for long enough for them to regain their strength following a hunger strike, and were then promptly re-arrested.

On the contrary these women were not focusing on their inner emotional well-being but on something far more important, the fight for a better society. We would all be better off following this example than Layard’s immoral version of happiness.

Jason Smith is convenor of Birmingham Salon and a member of the Battle of Ideas organising committee

Next Birmingham salon: Wednesday 11 May

2011-04-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

The struggle for democracy in the Middle East and Africa: Can the Arab movements survive western intervention?

Wednesday 11 May 2011
The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.30pm and in the pub afterwards.

Karl Sharro is an architect, writer and commentator on the Middle East. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut. Karl has written for a number of international publications, such as Springerin (Austria), Mark Magazine (Holland), Novo (Germany), Glass (UK) and Blueprint (UK), and he contributes regularly to the online publications Culture Wars and Muftah.org.

The uprisings in Arab countries came as a surprise to most; even President Obama questioned US intelligence agencies’ failure to predict events. Those uprisings are driven by genuinely popular democratic movements, but their outcomes are still unclear. Given the lack of traditional forms of political organisation spearheading those uprisings, how will events unfold and who are the main players determining the outcomes? As the UN prepares to intervene on behalf of Libyan rebels while ignoring the foreign repression of Bahrain's protesters, can the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East keep control of their movements? Might their revolutions be taken away from them?

The uprisings put paid to the idea that democracy is exclusively Western, and show it is a universal aspiration. Yet the reaction from Western elites has been ambivalent at best: Can Arabs bring about a ‘stable democracy’? What do we make of calls from foreign ministries for an ‘orderly transition’, especially in light of Western powers’ history in the region? What do those revolts mean for the balance of power in the region, and for American hegemony?

He blogs at Karl reMarks

All welcome

Further speakers TBC

Putting the 'Library of Birmingham' into some perspective. Will it rewrite or ditch the book?

2011-04-10T00:36:00.000-07:00

From: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10369/

Britain’s public libraries, like many other state services, from the National Health Service to schools, are not what they used to be. It’s not even clear that providing people with books is their main function anymore. ‘Digital inclusion’ and ‘community cohesion’ seem to rank equally highly nowadays.

Still, for many self-styled liberals and self-appointed anti-cuts activists, reality comes a poor second to political fantasy. In their 1980s dream world, not only are libraries as vital as they once were, bastions of learning and self-improvement, they are also threatened by the spectre of Thatchers in Cameroon clothing, a Tory scum government of the posh and the parvenu, who, with Hayek in one hand and the blood of public-sector cuts on the other, are waging ideologically motivated war on the poor and dispossessed.

The latest addition to this Red Wedge historical re-enactment society is doleful author Zadie Smith. Speaking last week at one of those north London pubs decked out like a threadbare stately home, she was in no doubt that local-authority plans to shut a number of library services across the county were a declaration of class war. ‘I can see that if you went to Eton or Harrow, like so many of the present government, it is hard to see how important it is to have a local library’, she said while adjusting her Che beret and muttering something about power to the people.

‘But then’, she continued, ‘it’s always difficult to explain to people with money what it’s like to have very little’. Clearly impressed by talk of Thatcherite ‘low motives’, the BBC Radio 4 Todayprogramme picked up and ran with Smith’s speech on Friday morning, much to the annoyance of actual, living Tories.

Smith – ‘Wolfie’ to her friends – is far from alone in seeing prospective library closures in terms of a Tory’n'toff war on the impoverished. At the beginning of February, over 400 libraries were occupied by anti-cuts militants determined to shake the evil Tory edifice to its foundations using the dread power of Jackanory marathons and shhh-ins. Promoting what was called Save Our Libraries Day, one activist website explained the situation: ‘Popular, empowering and free – that’s why the Tories hate libraries.’

All of which raises one question: Have any of those willing to invoke library closures as an indictment of Tory scumminess actually been to a public library recently? ‘Popular, empowering and free’; ‘Gateways to better, improved lives’... I’m not sure a few computer terminals, an ever-depleted book stock and, if you like your libraries noisy, a cafe and crèche, quite lives up to the State‘R’Us brochure.

Not that Smith and the countless other library champions could be blamed for not visiting a library since the 1980s. After all, they wouldn’t be the only ones. Twenty years ago – yes, that’s right, under a ‘library-hating’ Tory government – people were making around 340million trips to the local library a year. This figure has now fallen by 60million. Or take the recent Taking Part survey overseen by the government.

In 2005/6, 48 per cent of respondents had visited a library in the last year, which was a low figure by early 1990s-standards. Since then, however, the decline has continued, with the figures for 2010 showing that just 39 per cent of respondents were bothering to cross the threshold of their local ‘community cohesion’ centre. It doesn’t matter which survey or set of stats you turn to, the same picture emerges: libraries are no longer popular or empowering; they’re shunned and patronising. It’s no surprise, then, that library-book issues have fallen by a third since the 1990s.

‘Yeah, yeah’, the militant division of the libraries guild will say, ‘but the growing disuse of libraries stems from years of state neglect’. And it would be right if by that it means that, in real terms, investment in actual books has fallen over the past 30 years. Yet what is striking is that other areas of expenditure, from staffing to buildings and so on, have actually risen. More importantly, far from being neglected over the past 20 years, public libraries have never received so much political attention. This is in stark contrast to the preceding 150 years. From the original Liberal-sponsored, Chartist-driven 1850 Public Libraries Act up to New Labour’s coming to power in 1997, library legislation (and the attendant reviews) seemed to consist of little more than a couple of acts of legislation, one in 1919, and another in 1964. Since 1997, however, government seems to have been suffering from some sort of library-provision OCD. No sooner has one review been completed then another one starts, each in their turn attempting to redefine the role of public libraries.

Take for instance the 2003 Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) review document, Framework for the Future. Now, you’d think working out what a library’s key activity should be would be pretty easy. You know, providing books for people and, should they so wish, somewhere to have a good, attentive read without a lot of noisy distractions. But no, according to the then New Labour government, the public library had not one but threecore activities: 1) promotion of reading and informal learning; 2) access to digital skills and services, including e-government; 3) measures to tackle social exclusion, build community identity and develop citizenship. Given the weight of the ‘policy imperatives of the day’, little wonder less attention, not to mention cash, was given to the public library’s role as a book provider.

This is a familiar New Labour story. Hoping the state would provide the social bonds that an atomised civil society no longer seemed capable of providing, it set about transforming and using various public institutions to try to do precisely that. I say ‘transformed’ but that’s probably being kind. In the course of ‘including’, ‘engaging’ and ‘cohering’ people, it helped eviscerateevery public institution its fiddling hands touched. The effect has been disastrous for public libraries. By messing about with the reading-and-learning function of the local library, it removed the main reason for people to bother going.

The truth is that public libraries are in crisis. But it’s not just because of the Lib-Con coalition cutting funds to local authorities. It’s also because of the earlier, state-backed attempt to turn public libraries into a means for socialising civil society. It is unsurprising that the current rash of public-library champions were so quiet as New Labour were ruining public libraries. After all, so wedded are they to the patronising and disempowering idea that the state should be doing everything for its poor and useless citizens that they virtually cheered New Labour on as it turned libraries into community-cohesion centres.

So while the Conservative-led coalition might well be killing off the public libraries, given these once vital institutions’ philistine torture under New Labour it could be argued that the Tories, scum or not, are merely putting some of these institutions out of their misery. To defend libraries properly, to make a case for their social value, you need to make a case for the importance of their intrinsic function - that is, to provide people with access to knowledge and learning and literature. And that means recognising that public libraries in their current degraded form are not so much providing an essential frontline service as doing a grave disservice to the desire of ordinary men and women to better themselves.

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

Can opera involving ordinary people be more than a social inclusion project?

2011-04-01T04:41:00.000-07:00

Not what you expect from opera?

Birmingham Opera Company and the politics of outreach

Niall Crowley

A couple of years ago I was invited to a dress-rehearsal of an opera made up largely of untrained performers recruited from ‘deprived’ inner-city Birmingham, and staged in a disused factory. The cynic in me feared I was in store for a worthy ‘social inclusion’ project rather than an evening of ‘real’ opera. But then I had never heard of Birmingham Opera Company or its renowned director Graham Vick.

At first sight the company’s approach to opera resembles many of the initiatives around today which claim that opera is too elitist and needs to get out of its stuffy theatres and become more ‘relevant’ to the lives of ordinary people. Birmingham Opera Company certainly likes to ‘get out’. It has never staged a production in a traditional theatre, opting instead for large disused, or unlikely urban spaces; a shopping mall, empty factories, an abandoned ice rink and even a former city centre bank. The Bullring Shopping Centre is a long way from La Scala.

A scene from Birmingham Opera Company’s production of Mozart’s King Idomeneo, staged in 2008 in a disused canal-side factory in Birmingham.

At prestigious institutions like the Royal Opera or New York’s Met, Graham Vick works with some of the world’s best musicians and singers, but in Birmingham he recruits from performance courses, choirs, and schools and colleges in inner-city neighbourhoods such as Highgate, Ladywood and Newtown. In the hands of lesser people, this might be an entirely patronising endeavour, but Birmingham Opera Company places demands, and has ambition and expectation of its performers that is rare in contemporary Britain. Its bottom line, it says, is ‘making opera speak to a broad audience’. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

The opera world is increasingly concerned with its ‘elitism’ tag and some leading figures are going out of their way to ‘reach the people’. High profile opera director Jonathan Miller is one of a number of well known faces behind a new London opera house – at the King’s Head pub in Islington. According to Miller, ‘There is a strange sort of intimacy if you can get away from the luxurious establishments we have, where people just relish being there because they are rich. There is something about the gigantic, gilded theatres that we associate with opera that is wrong’.

Over the last decade, arts institutions have become ever more embroiled in, and led by social policy issues. Galleries, theatres and museums across the country now talk the language of community, diversity and inclusion. London’s ‘Streetwise Opera’ works with homeless people, using music and performance in a therapeutic way, to help build the ‘self-esteem’ of participants. And many more established arts institutions around the country operate similar, outreach-style initiatives. For those of us who uphold the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’, it’s easy to be cynical about any arts initiative that smacks of this kind of ‘instrumentalism’, but it’s worth taking each initiative on its merits.

Since its launch in the late 1980s, Birmingham Opera Company (originally the City of Birmingham Touring Opera) has steered clear of ‘gilded theatres’ and conventional opera audiences . The company doesn’t have its own theatre, or any other building, aside from a small office in the Jewellery Quarter. Finding large empty spaces for productions is both necessary and practical, given that Birmingham is full of them. More importantly, from a creative point of view, the challenge of bringing to life a dead space with no connection to the arts or performance is something that Vick relishes.

Although they target ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods for talent, this is no patronising ‘social inclusion project’.

The company’s productions are not designed to build the self-esteem of the young and underprivileged with involvement in work that is ‘relevant’ to their experience. As the Guardian noted; ‘none of the works it has staged… has seemed an obvious choice for a company that involves as many local people as possible in every production’. More often than not they stage difficult, lesser-known operas and make no excuses for the inexperience of their cast. They demand professional standards and invariably deliver highly-acclaimed productions.

There’s a self-consciously informal element to the company’s productions – no stage, no separation between audience and performers; punters are encouraged move around freely as the drama happens around them. This kind of approach has become known as ‘immersive theatre’ and is being used increasingly by theatre companies who feel they need to ‘break down’ the perceived formality of conventional productions and find ways of engaging with a wider audience. But Birmingham Opera Company don’t do this because they are worried that ordinary people are incapable of sitting quietly and attentively for three hours; but because the reaction and behaviour of the audience during the performance is an integral part of the company’s productions.

The reason an opera company consisting of so many amateurs and novices can perform to such a high level is due, in large part, to the support of professionals. Actors, choreographers and singers train and work alongside the amateur cast. Each section of the opera chorus, for example, has at least one ‘mentor’, a young professional singer looking to gain more experience themselves, who acts as a guide to the amateur chorus. And of course, the real stars of the show - the lead soloists, are respected professionals, as are most of the musicians (though some are local music students).

Exposing the inexperienced cast to the rigours and exacting standards required to stage professional opera has a transformative effect. Young school students are never indulged or patronised – they have to put their heads down and work hard and stay disciplined. Vick and his team of professional actors, singers, choreographers and stage crew push their recruits hard, and and it’s quite inspiring to see how well they respond.

For Graham Vick, it’s always a dynamic, collaborative project – he likes the challenge of working with who or what is at hand, whether that’s people of the area or an empty warehouse in Digbeth. These unpredictable factors form an integral part of the finished production. In doing this Vick will seek out and weave into his productions the best ideas from the amateurs he works with.

Ultimately, Birmingham Opera Company is granting an enormous privilege to its amateur cast. And to the audience. Despite the cast’s lack of experience, they are gifted the opportunity that so many young music students and professionals rarely get – to work with some of the best people in their field and the chance to perform in a top opera production directed by a world-famous director.

The audience, many of whom may be relatively new to opera - get to sit (or stand) centre stage and experience the full musical force of opera, engulfed by the sound of the orchestra, a full chorus, and of course, the lead soloists. It’s better than a royal box. But what have any of them done to deserve these privileges, and should such prizes not be given out on merit? Birmingham Opera Company may, like so many other arts organisations, have to jump through all kinds of ‘social inclusion’ hoops in order to obtain funding; it may even share some of those instrumentalist ideas about the arts, but at the heart of its work is the conviction that anyone develop an appreciation of great art, regardless of background or experience.

Equally, their annual productions demonstrate that the ‘just do the best you can’, low-horizons culture is holding ordinary people back, especially the young. Their message - take yourself seriously, work like a dog, raise your game, and (with a lot of professional support) you can do some genuinely impressive and rewarding work, artistic or otherwise – is one that many of our education and arts institutions have forgotten, or long-since stopped believing in.

Opera, regardless of when, where and by whom is was made, can speak to us all and enrich our lives. When parochialism, ‘relevance’ and the politics of identity encourage us look inwards and backwards, the passion of Vick and his team to involve and teach the general public about opera, and his faith in their ability to understand and appreciate it, should be applauded and encouraged.

From: http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/not_what_you_expect_from_opera/

A year of debate in Birmingham - press release

2011-03-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

250 years ago Birmingham could quite correctly be described as the centre for debate in Britain. The Lunar Society was in full swing, clubs and meetings debating science, religious freedom and radical politics were going on all over the city, in taverns, coffee houses and inns. The radical fervour of the period saw riots and battles in the street between conservatives and supporters of the French revolution which James Watt described as “dividing Birmingham into two parties who hated one another mortally”.

The city, during this period, has been described as having ‘freedom built into it’s self-image’, making Birmingham the place to settle for radical dissenters from all over the country. It all came to an end rather abruptly when Joseph Priestley (of the Lunar Society) was forced to flee the city following a full scale riot at his house in protest at a dinner he was giving to celebrate the second anniversary of the storming the Bastille (It is thought these rioters were in the pay of conservative city officials).

The Birmingham of today is a little quieter but recently the city’s history of debate has had something of a revival.

Cafe scientifique meet once a month to discuss issues in science and research, providing a valuable insight into the workings of science practice and debunking some common misunderstandings. For someone like me who doesn’t know his Periodic Table from his Bunsen burner, a night in the pub with these popularisers of science is an education.

Skeptics in the pub meet twice a month at the Queen Victoria to contemplate the meaning of life through a variety of issues. Birmingham Humanists have had some very interesting debates this year, and after an absence of over 200 years the Lunar Society set up again a few years ago to continue the tradition of the original dissenters.

Last month also saw the first birthday of the Birmingham Salon. Inspired by the Institute of Ideas' annual debating festival The Battle of Ideas which takes place in London in October each year. It was formed in the belief that Birmingham needs the same channels for intellectual debate. Each salon meeting is led by expert speakers and involves anyone who is interested.

“Our aim to get away from the stale affairs so often witnessed on Question Time or Any Questions, where adversarial politicians engage in point scoring and one-upmanship. The salon aims to get to the bottom of controversial ideas. We try to attract an audience who are prepared to challenge speakers, and be challenged themselves by new ideas, so we have a genuine public conversation. If this approach upsets some apple carts and challenges some orthodoxies all the better”, said Jason Smith, the salon’s organiser.

Over the last 12 months Birmingham has had open public debates on ‘What is the new Birmingham library for?’, ‘Is Childhood in Crisis?’, ‘Therapeutic culture: are we all on the depression spectrum?’, ‘Can Aids medicine work forever?’ and a ‘History of tattooing’, as well as many others.

The Lunar men and others of that period saw debate as integral to democracy. Voting every 4 or 5 years was the technical bit, debating and having a personal commitment to seek the truth was the actual practice of democracy. Active citizens were the key to the future. Perhaps Birmingham is again starting to find it’s radical voice.

A campaign with no aims, no ends and no opposition by Mick Hume

2011-03-27T05:15:00.000-07:00

From: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10314/

If Colonel Gaddafi’s regime looks relatively easy meat for Western intervention, so should the half-cocked, half-arsed wholly lamentable war that the West has launched against him present a sitting target for anybody with an anti-militarist bone in their body.

Yet despite many quibbles, what is striking so far is the lack of serious opposition in the West to this bombing campaign - and the politically dud content of what resistance there is to the war. The UK parliament has just voted to support David Cameron’s war by a bombtastic majority of 557 votes to 13 – far more than might have voted with the British government in the early stages of the war against Hitler. So much for this being ‘Britain’s most rebellious parliament since the Second World War’. If Western liberal elites are wrestling with their consciences, it looks like they are winning.

There should be no shortage of ammunition for an anti-war movement here. As Brendan O’Neill explains on spiked today, this Libyan adventure looks like a war without clear ends or strategy, sketched out on the back of a United Nations envelope by Western leaders desperate to get some good PR for imperialism, to save their own worthless political hides at minimum personal risk.

What is the aim of the campaign? Apparently it depends who you ask. Who are the Good Guys that the West is championing? Good question. Where will it end? Who knows – let’s blindly lob missiles into Libya from the middle of the Mediterranean, drop bombs from a great height, and hope for the best. And who is in charge of the clattering train of intervention, with the US not wanting to play leader of the free world this time and the French and British reduced to job-sharing aircraft carriers? The West is desperate for the Arabs to assume a leading role to avoid accusations of colonialism. But as the assorted tyrants of the Arab League get cold feet over bombing their neighbour, only Qatar has so far confirmed it will send, er, four planes. The Qataris might have got the World Cup, but assuming the role of World Policeman is a slightly taller order.

And it is not exactly hard to see through the high-blown rhetoric of leaders such as President Sarkozy who ludicrously expect us to believe that they have transmogrified from friends of the north African dictators to peoples’ champions overnight. Nor does it take much nous to question the double standards of Western governments that will bomb Gaddafi ostensibly to protect the Libyan people, while backing the Bahraini monarchy against its revolting subjects.

Little wonder then that, even as the bombing campaign began amid a chorus of self-congratulation, questions were already being raised in the normally patriotic parts of the UK media. Yet the most striking thing has been how many politicians and observers are supporting this pathetic excuse for a war, with varying degrees of enthusiasm – a ‘coalition of the reluctantly willing’ as one headline has it. Perhaps even more important is the politically feeble state of what opposition there has been. From America through Britain to Germany those questioning the war in the West have mobilised the combined forces of pragmatism, cynicism and a fear of commitment with a notable absence of anti-war principles – worrying about ‘mission creep’, or the cost of bombing Libya when you’re closing libraries, or terrorist ‘blowback’ etc. That sort of rag-tag opposition can quite easily be turned around.

The truth is that most mainstream Western questioners of the Libyan campaign are really pro-interventionists at heart who have been scared off by the experience of the Iraqi debacle. Thus they talk less about what is happening in Libya – about which we know little – than about what happened in Iraq after the 2003 coalition invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Many of these prominent people were enthusiastic about the first Gulf War in 1990-1, the Bosnian interventions of the mid-1990s and the 1999 war over Kosovo. Some even initially backed the 2003 Iraq War. But the bitter results of that ‘liberation’ of the Iraqi people made them temporarily less gung-ho.

Now, however, some of the leading Western critics of the Iraq War are embracing the cause of bombing Libya, seizing upon the anti-Gaddafi moment as an opportunity to regain some credibility and moral authority by intervening on the side of the angels. Thus the UK Liberal Democrats, who pride themselves (with no discernible justification) on being the only party to oppose the Iraq War, are now part of the government making war in Libya. Not a single Lib Dem MP voted against the bombing of Libya; even the Tories managed one dissident. And Dominique de Villepin, a fierce critic of Sarkozy who as French foreign minister denounced the Iraq War at the UN, has now declared that ‘In this instance, France has lived up to its ideals’. Others with concerns about a ‘slippery slope’ towards ‘another Iraq’ are showing signs of being won over by talk of a ‘good war’ in Libya – ‘you know, like Bosnia’ – with ‘clean’ air strikes and local support and little risk (it says here) of getting bogged down in a ground campaign.

With the debate over Libya apparently restricted to different degrees of pro-interventionism, it is time to make the case for opposing all of these interventions on principle, before it is too late. Not pacifist principles, either; history shows that war can be good for something, whatever Edwin Starr claimed. No, the principle at stake here is that Western intervention, however it is painted in ‘humanitarian’ colours, is inherently anti-democratic and an infringement on the right to self-determination. And if you prefer practical politics, the fact is that it does not work either. There is no space to discuss the experiences of intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in detail here. But anybody who seriously thinks they were ‘good’ wars that turned out well is suffering either from historical amnesia or wilful self-delusion.

With the Libyan bombing campaign having started on such an uncertain and arbitrary basis, the possibility of a major cock-up or a drawn-out stalemate cannot be discounted. But here is the thing: even if it were to succeed quickly and cleanly in its own terms, with Gaddafi either deposed or dead, the intervention would still be a bad thing in the end for Libyans, the region, and the wider world.

The half-cocked intervention is already shifting the focus away from the Libyan people and on to the West, turning a civil conflict into an international war. The rebels who began with banners insisting that Libyans can fight for their democracy without foreign intervention are now apparently wishing for and cheering coalition bombers, reduced to supplicants and spectators in the midst of their own struggle, playing the victim card for the international audience. If Gaddafi is using Libyans as ‘human shields’ he is not alone – the coalition is also keen to hide behind the rebels, exploiting their conflict in a desperate and misguided bid to rebuild its own moral authority in the world.

This process of intervention also calls the future of the wider Arab revolt into question, threatening to interfere with its regional dynamic. While the world watches Western bombs and missiles falling on Libya, there is far less focus on the protests and repression from Bahrain (where the West’s ‘freedom-loving’ Saudi allies are backing the monarchy) to Yemen. Everything becomes about what the West will do next, and the danger is that the peoples’ destiny is taken out of their hands. Democracy is not a gift to be handed down, but a freedom to be fought for from below; it can come out of the barrel of a rebel’s gun, but not a NATO warplane or submarine.

In the run-up to the British parliamentary vote on the Libyan intervention Douglas Alexander, the opposition foreign affairs spokesman, called on Labour MPs to put aside the disaster that their own government presided over in Iraq, and back the Lib-Con coalition’s intervention in Libya. He declared that the Arab revolts ‘present a historic opportunity for Britain and the West to realign our interests and our values.’ That is true, but not in the way Alexander the conqueror means. It is a chance for us in the West to align ourselves with the people by showing political solidarity with their struggles – and refusing to interfere in their affairs or infringe their democratic right to self-determination, either with bombs or ‘soft power’.

Instead the prevailing mood among UK liberals, whatever their fears, appears to be one of hoping that the bombers of the Western powers can prevail and help ‘liberate’ Libya. There was a telling moment at the end of the Channel 4 topical satire, 10 O’Clock Live, last Thursday night when news broke that the United Nations Security Council had voted to enforce a no-fly zone over Gaddafi’s Libya. The audience and supposedly hard-bitten panellists broke into spontaneous applause and cheers, before trying to crack the obligatory cynical joke. The instinctive response of these radical critics was thus to make themselves feel good by turning into self-righteous cheerleaders for a bit of ‘humanitarian’ imperialism. As I say, wrestling with their consciences, and winning.

Hard as it may be for some over here to accept it, the Libyan conflict and the Arab uprisings are about their future and they are the ones who must shape it. The best contribution we can make in the West is to oppose every bombing mission and every other form of intervention from those who are so vain they think somebody else’s life-and-death struggle is all about us

The No-Fly Zone in Libya: Hijacking the Arab Uprisings

2011-03-19T02:07:00.000-07:00

Republished from Karl reMarks blog

http://karlremarks.blogspot.com

Last night’s UN Security Council’s decision to authorise military action in Libya was greeted with almost universal jubilation revealing how confused the anti-imperialist camp has become. The very same people who had been opposed to the US invasion and continuing presence in Iraq and Afghanistan cheered the decision that will supposedly prevent Qaddafi from massacring his people. This also revealed the left’s lack of faith in revolutionary politics: overnight the Libyans were turned from subjects attempting to take control of their destiny into victims in need of protection. The most troubling aspect of this is the willingness to recognise the West’s moral superiority, failing to acknowledge that Western intervention has been actively propping up authoritarian Arab regimes for decades. The no-fly zone is nothing to celebrate, on the contrary it signals a major turning point that will hand the West the initiative allowing it to ensure its interests are maintained in the region. It will also undermine the legitimacy of the autonomous Arab uprisings as they begin to be associated with Western sponsorship. We have entered a new phase with direct Western intervention that will pose serious threats to the pursuit of freedom in Arab countries.

There is no doubt that many people who support the no-fly zone are driven by good intentions, and it’s tough to watch Gaddafi’s forces regain ground and advance towards Benghazi without feeling the need to ‘do something’. This is particularly understandable given the early success of the Libyan uprising and the sense of expectation it created, contrasted with the current frustration of seeing Gaddafi about to crush the democracy movement. Yet, it is very important to resist the temptation to intervene at any cost. Let’s not forget what the uprisings are about: people attempting to shape their destiny. In other words, they are about autonomy, self-determination and the manifestation of popular will. No matter how well-intentioned outside intervention is, and Western intervention in the region has proved to be far from well-intentioned, it contradicts those principles.

The celebrations that erupted on the streets of Benghazi following the announcement of UNSC resolution 1973 were seen by many as legitimising this intervention, since the people of Libya are asking for intervention then the UN decision becomes credible, so the argument goes. Again it’s understandable that the rebels when facing the prospect of defeat would reach out for any form of help, but this does not justify military intervention, whether sanctioned by the UN or not. The UN and Western governments are deciding for themselves which voices to listen to in Libya in a clear contradiction of the principles of sovereignty and self-determination. The dubious nature of the decision to override Libya’s sovereignty is only amplified by the near-silence over the crackdown on the protests in Bahrain, which has hardly moved Western governments to act. Of course intervention in Bahrain would be equally illegitimate and ill-advised, but it reveals the West’s hypocrisy and opportunism in taking the moral high ground over Libya while ignoring the situation in Bahrain, where the West’s regional allies are actively participating in putting down the uprising.

The astounding aspect of the West’s rush to intervene in Libya, led in particular by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, is how quickly the lessons of the Iraq invasion and its catastrophic aftermath have been forgotten. The UN and Western governments have sought to make distinctions between the two Libya and Iraq by sanctioning all military action but ruling out an invasion, in an attempt to portray this as a humanitarian intervention rather than regime change. But the utter folly of this distinction is remarkable. The most that a no-fly zone would achieve is a stalemate. Gaddafi’s forces would be prevented from making any advance and attacks on civilians would be stopped, but given the meagre military capabilities of the opposition, they will not be able to achieve victory either. How long would be after that when the calls for further intervention would be intensified, in a situation that we have witnessed several times before from Bosnia to Iraq? The West having already committed itself would be unable to withdraw from the situation, eventually making an invasion a very likely prospect. Not that there is a distinction anyway, the UN resolution is a declaration of war on Libya that can only escalate in magnitude.

Already there are voices making the case for such an increased intervention. Today David Aaronovitch, one of the main cheerleaders of the Iraq war, wrote an article in The Times arguing that ‘the price of inaction in Libya is far too high’. Aaronovitch’s article clearly reveals the prism of risk through which the West now primarily regards events in the world, as he put it: ‘if we don’t bomb Gaddafi’s tanks, Europe is likely to face a wave of refugees and a new generation of jihadis’. Like the argument for the Iraq war, this reveals the precautionary approach that drives Western pre-emptive interventions. In the case of unpopular leaders like Cameron and Sarkozy, it’s also about trying to find a moral sense of purpose abroad to compensate for their lack of credibility at home. Obama was convinced to tag along after his earlier hesitation, with the attractive prospect of compensating for his incompetent handling of the Egyptian uprising and his failure to reign in his allies in the Gulf. But, in effect, this is a recipe for disaster as the intervention has neither a clear purpose nor a desirable outcome that could be achieved without further military intervention.

The West was undoubtedly caught off-guard with the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, and the actions of Western governments over the past few weeks have revealed astonishing levels of incompetence. They also revealed the extent to which their influence in the region has deteriorated, robbing them of the ability to dictate the course of events. Enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya will allow the West to portray itself in a better light and take back the initiative, but in effect it is only likely to complicate the situation on the ground further. The legitimacy of the Libyan uprising can only be undermined through its association with Western powers, while Gaddafi will be able to deploy the anti-Western card that he is so adept at. It will also weaken the autonomous impulse of the Arab uprisings, replacing popular action as a means for political change with Western sponsorship and protection. This can only mean the return of imperial influence under a different guise. The no-fly zone represents an attempt at hijacking the Arab uprisings and opposing it should become a political priority.

Jason Smith

Don't shout at the Tele: Queer Politics

Official anti-racism: the new nationalism?

Next Birmingham Salon. Wednesday 8 Feb 2012

Hear podcasts of previous salons on the Podcasts page

The Sanitised City: How public is public space?

Introduced by

Institute of Ideas Xmas lecture 'It's Christmas in Euroland' podcast

The Elizabethans worried they were running out of wood

R.I.P. Dobie Gray

Who’s in the ‘In Crowd’ these days?

My Spiked article on antibiotic use in agriculture

My Review of Rob Lyons's book 'Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder'

Salon member Niall Crowley in The Independent

'Make do and mend' is not the way for us all to get better stuff

Next Birmingham Salon Meeting

Are you what you eat? Is our obsession

with what we eat healthy?

Introduced by

Warning: Women at Work!

Frank Furedi on the riots in the Australian

London's burning.

FIVE QUICK POINTS ABOUT THE RIOTS

catching up

Battle of Ideas Festival 2011 Satellite debate at Birmingham Salon

The death of a free press, the hacking off of investigative journalism - the scandals nobody is talking about.

My latest Free Society Column

Heady stuff as hair meets the High Court

Monday July 11, 2011

An argument about a schoolboy’s haircut has gone to the High Court. Jason Smith finds that the courts are increasingly being asked to arbitrate on moral and cultural issues that should be left to common sense.

It's better to have a bad free press than a “good” controlled one.

My article on Foston pig farm has been re-published by Voltaire (Sweden)

VAD GRISARNAS VÄNNER BÖR VETA OM STORA FLÄSKFARMER

Next Birmingham Salon: Tues 9 August

2011 Debating Matters Competition winners

Vajazzled in Essex By BRENDAN O'NEILL

Kevin Rooney's argument for signing the Take a Liberty (Scotland) petition

Alex Salmond’s proposed new ‘anti-sectarian’ laws

Telling porkies about big pig farms

The case for corporate universities

B'ham city council outsourcing IT jobs to India

Private universities. The way forward?

California Bill Could Protect Cross-Dressing in the Work Force

Dodging the burger won't save the planet by Rob Lyons

So they've arrested Ratko Mladic

These chickens need a shrink.

Rapture.

My Free Society Column - May

Social mobility and the isolated political class

Wednesday May 18, 2011

Jason Smith reads the government’s latest report on social mobility and concludes that it tells us more about modern politicians than the people they try to govern.

A warning to parliament from the Levellers published in July 1646

Next Birmingham Salon discussion: Wednesday 29 June

Film premiere. Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible

Birmingham Salon readings Wednesday 11 May

The struggle for democracy in the Middle East and Africa: Can the Arab movements survive western intervention?Wednesday 11 May 2011The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.30pm and in the pub afterwards.

Brendan O'Neill on why you should vote no to AV

The worst form of bigotry today is the liberal elite's view of the working classes as a mongrel race of slothful drones

My column on thefreesociety.org

Is happiness immoral?

Monday April 18, 2011

Suddenly, happiness is on the political agenda. But how do we define happiness, asks Jason Smith, and shouldn’t we be concentrating less on our inner emotional well-being than on the fight for a better society.

Next Birmingham salon: Wednesday 11 May

The struggle for democracy in the Middle East and Africa: Can the Arab movements survive western intervention?

Putting the 'Library of Birmingham' into some perspective. Will it rewrite or ditch the book?

Can opera involving ordinary people be more than a social inclusion project?

Not what you expect from opera?

Niall Crowley

A year of debate in Birmingham - press release

A campaign with no aims, no ends and no opposition by Mick Hume

The No-Fly Zone in Libya: Hijacking the Arab Uprisings

Republished from Karl reMarks blog

The struggle for democracy in the Middle East and Africa: Can the Arab movements survive western intervention?
Wednesday 11 May 2011
The Studio, Cannon St, Birmingham B2 5EP. 7.00pm until 8.30pm and in the pub afterwards.