Johnny has gone for a press officer

Of all the cant churned out by the British media, few subjects produce the stuff in quite such thick quantities as this country’s armed forces.  Today marks the second Armed Forces Day, apparently.  Towns and cities across Britain, I read, are holding events to honour the noble efforts of our uniformed men and women.  Forgive me if I excuse myself from this deeply creepy bit of triangulatory propaganda left over from the New Labour era.

Things have changed a bit since Orwell wrote: “Well within living memory it was common for ‘the redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the premises.”  Nowadays the cliché that “we have the best armed forces in the world” is as pervasive as “families come in all shapes and sizes”, “danger of creating a two-tier education system”, “couldn’t put a cigarette paper between them” or, my favourite, “the vast majority of whom are decent, law-abiding citizens”.  What evidence is there for it?  Like every other army in human history, it is composed mostly of young men – many of whom, as you know, adore violence, and I refer you to the chapter ‘Why Men Fought’ in Niall Ferguson’s superb The Pity of War if you’re under any illusions about that – who like the rest of us perform well sometimes, badly sometimes, and averagely most of the time.  The generals may or may not still be donkeys, but is it necessary to lionise the infantry so much that we can no longer call a retreat a retreat?  I wish the soldiers the best of luck, but somewhat to my surprise – as I don’t really have a history of sympathy for the stop-the-war mob – I find myself agreeing with some the sceptical comments on the BBC’s discussion of this.

Clearly, Gordon Brown started this cynical stunt as a countermeasure to defect flak for his policy of starting wars without giving the army the resources to fight them properly, correctly judging that most people would be too well disposed to the soldiers to see through it.  But why do even the leftish, supposedly anti-militarist sections of the press go along with this unBritish soldier-worship?  And why do conservatives suspend their sensible dislike of wasting public money when it comes to defence budgets?  It might be tempting for Telegraph-reading Blimps to imagine that the rise in support for the armed forces is a counterweight to our general decadence and declinism.  I think the opposite’s true: the increasingly uncritical support for the soldiers, sailors and airmen is really just a way of squaring our lingering jingoism with the reality of our diminished stature in the world, and of masking our general indifference to the soldiers after they’ve finished fighting.

As for the Afghan campaign itself, I can see both sides of the problem: on the one hand, the place was the graveyard of the Victorians and the Soviets, and is as corrupt and medieval as ever, so we can’t win and should quickly say goodbye to all that; on the other, nothing would prove our decadence more than withdrawing from a campaign that has killed 307 of our servicemen – a tiny number by any historical measure, and about the same number as died in the first minute of the Somme – to suit 24-hour news cycles and four-year electoral cycles.  The side of me that listens to Christopher Hitchens feels strongly that we should deploy our troops against bad foreigners to protect good foreigners.  The side of me that prefers Peter feels (perhaps more strongly these days) that like a lot of political ideas that’s all very well in theory, but usually ends up (a) not quite working out like that, apart from in countries so small we can do the job properly (Sierra Leone), (b) doing more to harm than to protect our own security back home, and (c) giving us two sets of enemies rather than one (Serbia, Kosovo).

The best solution might be the one that now seems likeliest: withdrawing slowly over the next few years, doing what we can to secure a limited area, and if necessary making deals with the Taliban and downgrading our definition of victory.  As for wider military issues, Liam Fox has been making noises about “stepping up bilateral cooperation with France”.  The idea of pooling our diminishing warfighting resources with our similarly waning neighbour is strikingly obvious, and deserves to be taken a long way.

Obama this week was right to reassert civilian control over the ‘runaway general’; maybe he’s been reading Robert Harris’ also superb Imperium, about Cicero’s struggles with Caesar.  I don’t wish us to return to the days when American troops returning from Vietnam were sworn and spat at in the street, but if we swing too far the other way it becomes harder to scrutinise the conduct of operations, and then to criticise the policies that lead to them.  If we had a less reverential view of the people involved, it might be easier to find the most honest and sensible policy.

Obama this week was right to reassert civilian control over the ‘runaway general’

Read Full Post »

Philosophers and zombies

As usual, in true Iranian fashion, I begin by whipping myself for not having blogged much of late.  For once I’ve had a decent excuse – I’ve been finishing writing my debut novel, The Donkey in Winter, a black tragicomedy set in a dystopian near-future Britain.  The action follows the dying days of a despotic buffoon in a failed state in the north-east of England as he tries to ward off the radical-conservative theocracy that has swept the rest of the country, and the fate of two ordinary lads who get caught up in the violence that follows.  It’s fair to say it builds on a few of the themes I’ve explored in this blog.  Let me know if you’d like a copy.

So to the election.  Here, then, are my thoughts on the various parties on offer…

Labour – I must be fair to them (for once) and try to put their record in the context of what Britain was like in 1997.  It wasn’t all bad, at first – the minimum wage, freedom of information, a more tolerant view of gay folk, a more peaceful Northern Ireland and even the Scottish Parliament turned out to be better policies than many people thought (less so the Millennium Dome).  The good people of Sierra Leone will be eternally grateful for Blair’s intervention there – but the bombs we dropped so liberally on Serbia were a dark presage of things to come.  In the second half of Blair’s decade, hugely increased public spending (much of it still not paid for, because of hazy PFI deals) plus very little in return equalled a bloated state; and mass immigration plus multiculturalism plus the war on Iraq equalled 7/7 – the day that, for me, will always define New Labour’s term in office.  Typically, Teflon Tony escaped just in time to let Gordon handle the credit crunch.  It’s easy to say the Tories would have done the same – perhaps, but the tripartite failure that was the Bank of England / Treasury / FSA was Brown’s doing, and the whole system was set up to ignore both the level of debt in the economy and the house price bubble that drove real inflation.  We will live with the consequences of Brown’s idiocy for a long time to come, and he’s not the man to get us out of the mess he made.

As you know, Brown’s only notable appearance in this election has been during the hilarious Bigotgate (hilarious at his expense, naturally).  The instant reaction on Twitter falls into three types: the ‘how dare he’ sort, the ‘we should stick up for immigrants’ sort, and the ‘but she IS a bigot’ sort.  The last of these shows that there is still a remarkably widespread kneejerk response that equates criticism of immigration with racism – particularly when it comes in an unsophisticated form from an uneducated pensioner, which ought to be precisely the criticism we should tolerate most.  Smearing those who disagree with you is bad enough; doing it to someone who fits that description is particularly shoddy: and the mindset is not encouraging for those of us who want to see a healthier, more cohesive society, to say the least.  The same mindset insults anyone raising fears about crime by suggesting that, if only they didn’t read the Daily Mail, they would realise crime is falling.

Peter Hitchens is fond of quoting Peter Mandelson on his blog: “round about the time you’re utterly sick of saying something is when you’re beginning to get your message across”.  So I will say again: above a certain level, racism will go up as immigration goes up.  When the woman on the Rochdale omnibus thinks immigration is unsustainably high, we’re faced with two solutions: deal with the issue, or deal with the woman.  Brown has shown which he prefers, though his hotheaded behaviour’s more excusable than that of his supporters, coolly trying to justify it.  When did it become so fashionable to sneer at the poor and uneducated, and what is tolerant or liberal about belittling someone who expresses an opinion you might dislike, in words you might not yourself have chosen?  The Labour Party stopped doing this (in public) a couple of years ago, belatedly grasping that excluding dissenting voices on immigration only helped the far right – but, as we’ve seen, many of their supporters still feel this way.  Those of us who worry about racism, and the possibility of its getting worse, should be troubled by that.  But perhaps this will be the election when the Gillian Duffies realise that the more they vote Labour, the less Labour care about them.

One misguided explanation for the rise of the BNP is that Labour haven’t done enough to explain the benefits of immigration to their traditional supporters (as is the conclusion of this otherwise very reasonable article).  But this presupposes that immigration has benefited them – it clearly hasn’t.  Not only has it undercut the wages of those at the bottom (and it’s easy to say ‘you can’t undercut the minimum wage’, but how many of the 1m+ illegal immigrants in Britain are on the minimum wage?), but, by giving them a permanent source of very cheap labour, it’s allowed the upper middle classes to sweep our 5m+ indigenous, permanently unemployed underclass under the carpet and keep them there.

So if, like me, you come from a middle class, liberal family, work in the public sector and have benefited from mass immigration, globalisation and neoliberalism, by all means vote for them – they’ll protect as many of our vested interests as they can get away with.  If you’re actually working class – forget it.  They clearly despise you.

Conservatives – for all that, I don’t blame anyone for being troubled by the idea of another Tory government: their past conduct always acts as a heavy warning against getting overexcited by Cameron’s One Nation talk.  Having said that, I still think he has the potential (backed by some first-rate One Nation thinkers like Michael Gove and David Willetts) to be a decent PM, in spite of colossal stupidity over Ashcroftgate – but this is not the best election to win.  None of the parties are being honest about the scale of the cuts to come – and I don’t blame them, because if any of them break the silence their popularity will plummet (as Clegg discovered when he spoke, in a flash of honesty, of “savage cuts”, and as Osborne did when he mentioned the “austerity” to come).  Voters this year claim to want to be told the truth – but, in truth, we can’t handle the truth.  For this reason, the figleaf of a deal with the Lib Dems would probably be the best result – for them and us.

Lib Dems – the surprise package of the election.  Nick Clegg – memorably dismissed by a fellow commentator before the debates as “making Wendy Alexander look like Cicero” – has managed to speak the fiery old Labour language of fairness, before it all got perverted by bureaucracy and statism.  Using ideas like localism for progressive ends – Brown’s aims through Cameron’s methods, if we’re being charitable – is an appealing thesis.  We need a decent, honest, social democratic centre left in Britain, but for 13 years have had a vicious, corrupt gang who, among many other things, lied us into an illegal war that debased our democracy and cost a million lives, bought every one of the City’s self-serving lies, and whose last act has reduced us to within an inch of national bankruptcy.  If you believe in liberal or social democratic politics you should want the party that has in times gone by been its main vehicle either to fail completely, or to devise a wiser philosophy in opposition.  Either way, you should vote Lib Dem instead of Labour.

There are still plenty of contradictions in the Lib Dem platform, and plenty to belie their line that they are not of “the old politics”.  For all their inspiring talk of local democracy, and giving power away from Whitehall, they’ve shown their own fear of democracy.  Their last manifesto promised a referendum on the European Constitution, which became a shameful abstention on a referendum on the almost identical Lisbon Treaty.  They reneged on this on the grounds that they would support a in/out referendum on our membership of the whole thing – then, when this was proposed in the House of Lords by a UKIP peer, quietly voted against it.  So, beware of their claims to be so different from the other two.

I mentioned immigration and its effect on our underclass, which I think are both the symptom and the cause of many of modern Britain’s problems.  The Lib Dem policy of taking everyone on up to £10k out of tax altogether is the best policy in the whole election, and by far the best way of incentivising work for those currently at the bottom of the heap.  Whether or not the effect would be cancelled out by an amnesty for illegal immigrants, as they also seem to want, is hard to say.

SNP – I actually think they’re doing a reasonable job of running Scotland (which, largely thanks to Annabel Goldie, who rather undermines her boss’s scaremongering, has become a good advert for hung parliaments), particularly on education, but find it hard not to be put off by Salmond’s Caesarian egomania.  His target of 20 seats seems as hyperbolic as ever.  If the Tories win, expect our canny FM to drive multiple wedges between us and them.  Whether or not you approve of this ultimately comes down to whether or not you want to break up the UK, but any argument in favour of unionism is massively outweighed by all the arguments against Labour.

UKIP – some appealing populist policies, and not just on the EU, but unfortunately they’ve thrown their lot in with the climate change denial lobby – and by that I don’t just mean a few dissenting engineers and geologists, but genuine headcases like Christopher Monckton.  Their yeomen base might not be too happy to discover the libertarian small print about drugs, the BBC and the NHS either.  Nigel Farage – who, ironically, is precisely how I picture a low-grade bank clerk if and when I think of one – could provide some of the best drama of the night if he beats the Brownnosing Speaker, but I wouldn’t want more than one MP dragging a Cameron government off to the unworkable right.

Greens – likeable people, uncorrupt and more intellectually coherent (though still socialist) than they used to be, and very good locally.  I still think they’re wrong about nuclear power, but I must apologise for smearing them in the past when I suggested they were on the EU gravy train – it seems that, like some of the more noble Lib Dems and unlike Labour, they have an idealistic view of Europe which doesn’t allow them to accept the institution as it currently stands.  It wouldn’t be a bad thing if one or two of them get in – especially as it might make more Labour support go in their direction in future.

BNP – see above.  If they do well, it won’t be Gillian Duffy’s fault – it’ll be Gordon Brown’s.

Assorted Communists, Trotskyites, Gallowayists, etc – a bit like the BNP, but with anti-Semitism instead of white racism.

In conclusion, my advice would be: anyone but Labour, except their offshoot party the BNP.  My constituency (Glasgow North) is Labour held, but 33rd on the Lib Dems’ target list, requiring a swing of 6%.  Albeit with the reservations listed above, they’ll be getting my tactical vote on Thursday.

Read Full Post »

It little profits that an idle king

I haven’t read this yet (it’s next on my list) but The Classical World, or at least its latter stages, doesn’t seem so different from our own: they wrestled with deforestation and climate change, globalisation, celebrity, mass migration, huge extremes of wealth and poverty, clashes of civilisations and religious backlashes, and imperial expansion, hubris, overstretch and retreat, as we do.  Rome had its own war on terror.  We too can see democratic participation and group identity weaken as the polis expands: “the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws,” as Tacitus wrote, perfectly describes both New Labour and the European Union.  And in some cases, their shadily appointed leaders sound horribly familiar…

The first heir was the elderly Tiberius, a tall, austere figure of man, already in his mid-fifties… he was already a proven general who was known as a severe disciplinarian.  Yet he was very much a last resort, the man Augustus had had to choose.  Public generosity, the popular touch and a wholehearted sense of style were not parts of his haughty nature; revealingly, he gave few public shows and showed little interest in those he attended…  The recurrent lesson from Tiberius and subsequent emperors is not only that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’: it is that emperors were only as good or bad as they had been before becoming emperor.  They ran true to form and never improved with the job.  Each of them began his reign with a modest, judicious statement of intent, but matters soon deteriorated, partly through their own characters and weak spots, and then through complex manoeuvring for a potential successor… In Tiberius, the Romans had someone who was cunning and inscrutable but temperamentally unsuited to populist gestures or to giving senators a clear lead.  After nine years he was talking vainly of ‘restoring the Republic’ and giving up his job: the death of his own son disenchanted him and was followed by other bereavements…  In his late sixties he looked repulsive, too, bald and gaunt with blotches on his face, only partly concealed by plasters… In March 37 his death was joyfully received by the common people.  The senators conspicuously refused to honour him posthumously as a god.

Remind us of anyone yet?  Yes, for all the very amusing comparisons with Richard Nixon, Gordon Brown is in fact the new Tiberius.  The comparison extends to their predecessors, Tony Blair and Augustus – both came from new money, both overturned the existing diffusions of power and concentrated it around themselves and their unelected advisers, both saw themselves as divinely ordained – but will it extend to their successors, David Cameron and the similarly feted Caligula?  I don’t know if he yet has plans to appoint his horse as Home Secretary (I presume he owns several) but it would certainly raise the profile of his lacklustre shadow cabinet.

Read Full Post »

Every Labour government runs out of power in the end

It’s one thing MPs getting caught with their pants down.  It’s quite another when they’re all getting caught with their willies in the till too.

Headlines as hilarious as this, coupled with the impending failure of Brown’s last gamble at the G20, all make a Tory victory more certain by the day.  No-one wants Labour to lose more than I do.  But there is one set of circumstances under which I would consider voting for them: to prevent a Tory landslide.

Look at the state of them now: led by a sociopath who (I can’t work out which) is either a reckless gambler betting everything on somehow bucking the recession, the markets and the rest of the world’s governments, or a saboteur deliberately wrecking the public finances to force the Tories into huge spending cuts.  He is surrounded by a cast of knaves who have, quite rationally, realised that they will be out of a job, and in many cases out of a seat, in a year and are focused on milking the public purse for all its worth while they can.  New Labour is morally, intellectually and electorally finished.  They are the economic inheritors of Thatcher, but twice as authoritarian.  Anyone who wants to see a strong centre-left in Britain should hope, if anything, for an immediate election to put them out of their misery.  Old Labour collapsed after being captured by one set of special interests (the doomed miners), and New Labour after various others (the City, the neocons, and the more bloated parts of the public sector).  It is best for everyone concerned if Labour has a short civil war and a long spell in opposition, and it will probably take eight or ten years for them to come up with a coherent set of ideas appealing enough to undo what they have squandered up to now.  For years the Tories wished they’d lost in 1992.

I am prepared to give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt: although it’s still not easy to divine specific policies, his apparent views on fiscal responsibility, the environment, education and civil liberties make him more appealing to me than any of Brown’s possible successors within Labour.  But I wonder, beneath the smooth brand management, whether his is still a (not the) nasty party.

The blogosphere, as a barometer of grassroots opinion, suggests they might be.  As new social media developed under a Labour government, it was natural that conservatives, in opposition, would make better use of its opportunities (taking their cue from the US, where the right dominated the internet, at least until Obama’s campaign, as a response to a supposedly liberal traditional media).  Most political blogs, with the exception of Political Betting, are depressingly partisan.  And although some right-wing bloggers, like Guido Fawkes, are an entertaining and sometimes informative alternative to newspapers bound by the developed world’s most restrictive libel laws, most of his commentors turn out to have predictable views on climate change, capital punishment, gays, etc.  It may be that it’s simply easier to be abusive and inflammatory when hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, and perhaps the Young Turks are still outnumbered by retrograde but fairly harmless Blue Rinsers, but we should judge a party by its base as much as its leadership.  A small Tory majority, or better still a Tory-Liberal deal in a hung parliament, held to account by a Labour opposition rediscovering some long-dormant decency, seems the least bad outcome.  One of these seems likeliest at the moment, and (given the systemic bias against the Tories) things will still have to get quite a lot worse (if that’s possible) for a landslide to be on the cards, and therefore for me to hold my nose and perversely vote Labour.

I suppose, though, that at least a rampant Tory right wouldn’t come up with anything like this.  What a perfect summary of this government’s philistinism and neophilia in one policy.  As if school leavers aren’t historically illiterate enough.  As if their attention spans aren’t short enough.  As if we don’t already have a surfeit of unemployable communications graduates.  What, having learned nothing at school, will these twits of tomorrow tweet about?  Jade Goody?

As if to prove the point, your faithful but bog standard comprehensive-educated correspondent has again ended up blogging about… blogs.

Read Full Post »

Labour isn’t working

May I begin by wishing Bush a short and miserable retirement.  Now then, I see Obama has begun his presidency with a huge public works programme.  A hundred billion or two for repairing roads and buildings here, a similar sum for electricity lines there.  I suppose if I was an American taxpayer I would be concerned about who was going to pay for it all (the answer is Chinese savers, though I wonder how much longer they will keep buying western bonds) but it makes much more sense than what our government’s doing.

I have discussed my road trip across America last summer in earlier posts, but it’s worth mentioning a couple of other things I noticed en Route 66.  First, some of the roads – particularly around Obama’s home town of Chicago – were the worst I’ve seen outside of India.  The condition of some of the country’s major highways and bridges is awful.  More importantly, the place is full of wind farms but lacks a National Grid.  The Midwest – famously described by spasmodically dysphonic heroin addict Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as “the Saudi Arabia of wind” – contains relatively few people and a huge potential for renewable energy, but no mechanism for getting surplus electricity towards the dystopian coasts.  To save money in the future, wean themselves off foreign oil and start tackling climate change, building a proper power grid is an ideal start.

Obama is spending money now in a way that will create jobs in the short term and leave a legacy of better and greener infrastructure.  Brown is doing neither, instead throwing money at whichever set of special interests is powerful enough to lobby for it.  But what would a British public works programme look like?  Brown would presumably argue that a new runway and terminal at Deathrow is just that.  I would disrespectfully disagree.  Most of the extra flights will be transit passengers going from, say, Dubai to New York.  Most of these passengers will contribute nothing more to the British economy than £4.85 for a sandwich.  Once aviation joins the EU’s emissions trading scheme in 2011, i.e. once we have to pay the carbon cost of flying, transit flights will become a net drag on our economy.  The best thing we can say about the third runway is that it will never be built – assuming, perhaps rashly, that the Tories keep their promise once they take office.  Their high-speed rail line seems a better idea, but Britain’s unhelpful quadrumvirate of gravy train consultants, finger-in-the-till quangos, health and safety jobsworths and trade union bullies makes any swift start in response to mass unemployment impossible.

How about a big housebuilding programme to provide much-needed new stock for local authorities and housing associations?  I can’t see this government, so in league with reckless lenders and borrowers (Brown is both), doing anything that might further reduce house prices.  These ‘eco towns’ are pure greenwash, though as with the third runway I doubt a stone will ever be laid.  The Olympics are another false economy, employing a few (mostly non-British) people now but leaving a legacy of elite white elephants surrounded by local authority facilities that have gone to seed.

My own eco-Keynesian plan is to copy the mayor of Seoul – who was elected president on the back of his brilliant Taoist scheme – and turn an urban motorway (the M8 springs to mind) into a canal with walkways and greenery.  No-one buys cars any more and there’s going to be a bastard of a recession anyway, so we might as well have some nice, stress-reducing scenery to look at.  Or, if we really wanted to go out with a bang, why not bulldoze the whole east end of Glasgow and rebuild Florence in its place?

Read Full Post »

Brown or red?

I don’t know about you (obviously) but I didn’t think much of Gordon Brown’s speech: preaching “fairness” while making tax even more regressive makes as much sense as chanting “British jobs for British workers”.  Although market turmoil seems perversely to have bought him some time, Labour under Brown are making a Tory landslide more certain by the day and every backbencher knows it, but there’s no certainty that David Miliband (Blair’s policies without his charm) would do any better.  So long as Labour remains ‘New’, the public will choose the Conservatives, who under David Cameron look like a more organised and disciplined Blue Labour.  Were I advising the Labour Party I would urge them to throw caution to the wind: get behind a popular left-winger (Jon Cruddas perhaps), install him as prime minister, wait till the spring and lose a general election respectably, making the next one competitive at least.  At a moment of sudden public disenchantment with Tory-style deregulated capitalism, there is an opportunity for the Labour left to reassert itself: Brown tinkering with short-selling won’t make any difference, but if a new leader were to attack managerial salaries, crack down on City bonuses, introduce a windfall energy tax, close loopholes for tax exiles and non-doms, and reinstate the 10p tax band, they could take on the Tories with economic populism and put the opposition, at least for a while, on the back foot.

Read Full Post »