The ghastly Rod Liddle has a piece in the Spectator alleging that Tony Blair’s Labour Party has a strategy of pandering to anti-Semitic prejudice in order to win over Muslim voters. The piece contains such gems as “many psychoanalysts believe that the Left’s aversion to capitalism is simply a displaced loathing of Jews.” (Tony Blair’s Labour Party has an aversion to capitalism???!!!) Liddle’s usual sensitivity to the feelings of minorities is expressed in his recent Things I shouldn’t say about black people in the Sunday Times, ably exposed by Matthew Turner . Melanie Phillips (about whom see also Chris Brooke here ) is now promoting the Labour anti-Semitism theory in the notorious FrontPage magazine.
Which is more likely (a) that New Labour strategists have decided on a campaign strategy on the lines delineated by Phillips and Liddle or (b) that someone else (perhaps some adviser to Tory Central Office?) has decided that an effective strategy for unsettling Labour politicians and putting them on the defensive is to fling around allegations of anti-Semitism?
[Small update: John Band makes the point that we shouldn’t let our disgust at the antics of the likes of Liddle and the Tory party blind us to the real problem of anti-semitism and recommends this piece by Johann Hari , a recommendation I endorse.]
The New Statesman has an excellent leader on the Ken Livingstone row . Read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:
The demand for ritual recantation and punishment whenever someone expresses themselves “inappropriately” (itself a prissy, nannyish sort of word) has become an inhibition on free speech. A football manager loses his job when he “insults” disabled people; an editor’s career is endangered when his magazine “insults” Liverpudlians; a commentator is thrown off the airwaves when he “insults” tsunami victims with a feeble pun. The worst sin of all (and rightly so) is anti-Semitism; but to place Mr Livingstone’s remarks in that category is another example of trivialising the genuine article.
Indeed. The second part of the Statesman leader is about Michael Howard’s disgraceful pandering to the racists with his proposed “health checks” on migrants. Unfortunately this (and the recent competitive bidding by Tories and Labour alike for the xenophobic vote) doesn’t receive nearly as much attention from the “left” blogosphere — a point well made on John Band’s blog .
I’m in Ireland at the moment, where the much-needed light relief in the news is being provided by Prince Harry and his Nazi Uniform. I’m less familiar with the ecology of royal commentary than I used to be, so it’s harder to sort out the toadies from the critics from the critics who are really toadies and vice versa. Happily, Sarah Ferguson has intervened today to clarify thing, saying that “It is time for the press to back off. I know what it is like to have very bad press and be continually criticised — it is very tiring and unpleasant.” (For “very bad press” read “terrible judgment” and for “continually criticised” read “always making PR gaffes.”) Similarly, “Comedy Prankster” Aaron Barschak adopts the Aw lay orf the lad approach, saying “I can guarantee that had anyone other than Prince Harry worn a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party, no one would have blinked an eye.” If he doesn’t want the responsibility he can always renounce his position as 3rd in line to the throne, refuse a public subsidy, move to a bedsit somewhere and do whatever he likes.
Controversies like this point to the fundamental uselessness of the Royal Family, other than for entertainment value. I think the next step should be for Harry’s non-apology apology (“I am very sorry if I caused any offence or embarrassment to anyone”) to get a bit more amplification. I suggest one or all of the following:
I think it was the late Queen Mother who, after Buckingham Palace was bombed during the Blitz, said, “I’m glad it happened — at least now I can look the East End in the Eye.” The gin-soaked old horse-fancier was no less useless than Harry, of course, but even she seemed more aware of her position in life. Barschak has the cheek to invoke the grand tradition of popular dissent in Harry’s defence. “The rebellion of the individual against society is quintessential to democracy.” But as any royalist will tell you Aaron, the problem with this is that Harry isn’t the individual, he’s Society.
With the disgraceful scenes in Birmingham1, coming hot on the heels of the blow-up over incitement to religious hatred, it is wonderfuly ironic to ponder the following legal hypothetical.
Apostate Sikhs are very definitely a group defined by their religious views. As are apostate Muslims and heretics or blasphemers in general. The Home Office
FAQ doesn’t mention blasphemers specifically, but it does reassure the atheists and says that the proposed Bill “will also protect people targeted because of their lack of religious beliefs or because they do not share the religious beliefs of the perpetrator”.
It is hard for me to see how the people in Birmingham’s gurdwaras who stirred up these crowds could have done so without taking steps which would at least prima facie have given rise to a case that they had incited hatred against the play’s author. I doubt that specific acts of violence could be laid at their door, but this crowd did not assemble spontaneously, nor did its members become enraged entirely as a result of their independent theological scrutiny of the theatre listings.
Therefore, in rank defiance of almost every newspaper editorial this morning, I submit that the Bezhti affair is weak evidence in favour of the draft legislation, as it seems to me that some Sikh elders in Birmingham have behaved in a highly socially destructive and reprehensible way, that they have most likely not committed any offence under current UK law in doing so, but that their behaviour would have been illegal under the proposed legislation. This doesn’t make me a supporter of the Bill itself, but it’s worth thinking about.
Footnote:
1Actually, they’re not really that disgraceful. The theatre has a right to put on an offensive play, anyone who is offended with it has the right to stage a demonstration, and the rozzers have the right to protect the public if that demonstration turns rowdy, which they have declared themselves willing and able to do. The only real failure of the system here was that either theatregoers or theatre managements decided to go all namby about a “riot” in which nobody was hurt and only three arrests were made, all for public order offences. Gawd help us if the Premier League decides to adopt this standard of “safety”. However, the playwright has apparently now received death threats, which are genuinely disgraceful whether or not the people making them have the ability or intention to carry them out.
I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.
So what was wrong with the SBC?
(1) The SBC thinks of free speech on libertarian lines: there’s the little blogger (or journalist, or man in the pub) who wants to say something, and the nasty government which wants to stop them. Even though, the SBC sometimes concedes, what is said may provoke hatred against Muslims (for example), it would be very very dangerous to leave governments with discretion over what does or does not constitute hate speech. But I don’t accept that we should start by thinking about free speech on the model of individual rights versus nasty government. Rather, in a just state, we should assure people both of certain basic political freedoms and of the fair value of those freedoms. And that assurance of fair value means that we-the-people have to do some regulation in order to give everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum.
What does this require? Well, most obviously it requires some regulation of media ownership, access to the airwaves and so on. States and societies where broadcasting is dominated by a few conglomerates or where the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films , are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view. It isn’t the intervention of the state that’s a problem here, it is its silence. (And cue suitable extension of the argument to money-in-politics generally).
But second, and most pertinent in this discussion, securing a fair opportunity of access to all may mean we have to get some people to shut up! Most obviously this restriction of speech for the sake of speech has a place in formal debates: people speak through the chair, they can’t exceed their allotted time, mustn’t interrupt others, etc. But beyond that special formal setting, it cannot be excluded (and certainly not a priori ) that restrictions are sometimes justified. One of the purposes of hate speech — and other forms of intimidation, such as private employers threatening to sack people — is to cow its targets (and their defenders) into submission, and to create a climate where only the very bravest are willing to express themselves. In my view, securing a fair opportunity for all to express reasoned argument in the public forum ought to trump any unrestricted right to “free expression”.
Note that this cuts all ways. The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious. I’m not suggesting “offensiveness” as a test, but fair access for all. And I’d like to enter a caveat: those putting the SBC are right about the untrustworthiness of the state in the real world, so I’m pragmatically averse to state-imposed speech restrictions. I’m just saying that guaranteeing a fair opportunity to put a point of view in a way that acknowledges the right of others also to put their point of view is fundamental, rather than individual right of free expression.
(2) Many advocates of the SBC write about religion being a matter of choice, or religion consisting of a body of doctrine which ought to be open to critique etc. I basically agree, though I think people sometimes overstate the chosenness of religion. But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question, and I think it reasonable to suppose that strictly doctrinal differences play a limited role in the opinions of Glasgow Rangers supporters about Catholics, just as the “nationalist” skinheads who beat up a gay Muslim for being, among other things, a Muslim, are not that interesting in debating the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence. The lack of actual religious beliefs among many Bosnian Muslims, does not seem to have lessened the animosity of their Serb or Croat persecutors.
SBCers have asked why religion should get special protection. Well it shouldn’t. In particular circumstances the group whose members may be being denied a fair opportunity to participate in public life by hate speech may be those with a particular religious identity, gays, women, racial or ethnic groups, etc. If is is true that there is such exclusion, then there’s a prima facie justification for laws that address that, and a law that’s appropriate for postwar Bosnia, say, may not be appropriate for Illinois. And there’s the questions of whether such laws will do more harm than good, whether they will be effective, and so on.
Is it in fact true that Islamophobic hate speech is denying Muslims in the UK a fair opportunity to play their role as citizens of a democracy? No, I don’t think it is. (And, certainly, and pretty obviously, much of the speech that Muslims are offended by, such as The Satanic Verses has no such exclusionary effect.) But if Muslims were, actually, being denied fair access to the public realm by hate speech, that would, in principle, provide grounds for the limitation of such speech.
So David Blunkett has resigned . I felt pretty sympathetic to him concerning his private life, but let us all hope that his policy agenda departs with him.
With quite a lot of kerfuffle going on in the UK blogosphere over the changes to the law to create an offence of “incitement to religious hatred”, I thought it might be neighbourly to help John Band out in the rather Sisyphean task of trying to ensure that the debate is conducted in a less frighteningly fact-free atmosphere. To that end, I ask the question; have you heard of Dick Warrington? If you’re having opinions about the racial hatred laws, it would probably be a good idea if you had.
Dick Warrington is a BNP supporter who in December 2001 set quite the legal precedent. (Choice of links from a google search; some of them, you visit at your peril). He was the first person to be cautioned by police for incitement to racial hatred for displaying their new “Islam Out Of Britain” posters (part of a series including such gems as “Intolerance, Slaughter, Looting, Arson and Molestation of Women”). And he was the first person to successfully tell the police to go and stick it, because the “Islam Out Of Britain” campaign material 2001 vintage was specifically designed to skirt round the law on incitement to racial hatred, by focusing its hatred on Muslims, who are not a racial group for the purposes of UK law. Subsequent cases (Norwood vs DPP if you’re interested) have suggested that the courts have been taking a more aggressive approach to the BNP’s campaign literature, however this is not at all satisfactory, as it has been carried out by means of prosecutions under the “religious harassment” offence, and has only been made to stick by a contortion of the intent of that law by the courts’ having found that it was possible to harass person or persons unknown, or even to harass purely hypothetical persons. This is hardly a great precedent to set in civil liberties terms, and it looks to me as if it would last about five minutes in a serious appeal.
So, Mr Warrington’s famous victory was a pretty isolated case, and there is some case law developing which looks like it might close this loophole, albeit in a way in which no civil liberties fans should be very keen on. However, there is a genuine issue here which it would do well to keep in consideration before launching into one’s autopilot tirade about religion. That is that there are genuine bigots in the country, and they are currently having one heck of a lot of fun with the law on racial and religious hatred.
Here’s a summary of the fun and games that these charming people get up to. Basically, an important political aim of the BNP appears to be the stirring up of racial trouble in Northern English towns with a sizeable Muslim population. Let’s be straight here; there is nothing in the material these people distribute which suggests that they have any sincerely held beliefs about the Koranic attitude to women, international salafism or the movement toward democracy in the Middle East. They just believe (probably correctly) that if they can stir up enough local dislike of the brown people in one of these towns, then sooner or later there will be a riot, and the ill will and local grievances arising as a result of this riot will probably result in more white people voting for them. Thus, the BNP in Oldham was happy to jointly author some of their propaganda with local Sikh and Hindu bigots, and to say in their leaflets that “whites should not boycott businesses owned by Chinese or Hindus, only Muslims as it’s their community we need to pressure”. This is pretty standard divide and conquer stuff and there is not an atom of reason that anyone should believe that the BNP’s desire that the British Muslim community should “mend your ways, cut your birth rate and keep yourselves to yourselves - or get out!” is motivated by anything other than their historical desire for a white United Kingdom.
So, there is an issue here. The same individuals who have been stirring up race riots in the UK for the last twenty years have found a way of wording their material so as to have the effect of inciting racial hatred while only formally inciting religious hatred, which is not a crime. It is usually possible to catch them, because the British National Party has neither a whole stable of legal masterminds to call on, nor any claim on the benefit of the doubt from the courts, but it is not very satisfactory to be relying on this contingency, any more than it was really working to regulate mobile-phone using drivers with the careless driving laws. Nor is there any real way in which to use the more serious incitement to violence laws to control this problem; under English law and for good free speech reasons, there is a blanket prohibition against “lighting a fuse” (inciting people to immediate action), but not against “piling up tinder” unless it is specifically racially motivated.
It’s this problem that the current Bill is meant to solve, and I have to say it goes badly for the credibility of arguments against the Bill when they ignore it or pretend it isn’t there; the BNP have already managed to trick up at least one race riot (in Oldham) by this means, and another hot summer in the North will give them another chance. One also damages one’s own case by pretending that comedians, leader writers etc are going to be at risk of frivolous prosecutions under this law when they aren’t – as John points out, private prosecutions would not be allowed under the new law, and all the case law on the incitement to racial harassment legislation suggests that the courts take a very high standard of what constitutes “hatred” for these purposes; this is not always the case in places like Canada or the Netherlands, but in the UK you really have to work quite hard at your bigotry before you get your collar felt. There are plenty of people making the most toxic racist statements every day in the UK, all of whom get away with it apart from three or four every year who cross the line into stirring up race hate. The addition of “or religious” into the racial hatred laws would not alter that case law, and would, on the basis of all we know about the working of the UK system, add only another three or four bodies to the jail population, none of whom would be people of innocent good intentions and all of whom would be material contributors to social instability in the UK. As someone with a long-held and passionate dislike of petrol bombs, I am really quite confident that all the people who end up going to jail under this law, belong there.
So I would argue that there is a need for something to be done here, and that anyone campaigning against the Bill has a duty to be very clear about the facts of the matter (otherwise, they risk unwittingly providing support to some very nasty people). However, with these massive caveats in mind, it’s still not a good piece of legislation and one that ought to be opposed. Why?
First, it’s not proportionate to the end. The loophole that is meant to be closed is one whereby insincere criticism of a religion is being used as a form of code to incite race hatred. The writers and readers of the BNP “Islam out of Britain” literature both know that the real target is not the Koran. All that is needed is to clear up this matter with a bit of statute law directing the courts that they are on firm ground in finding racially inflammatory material to be such, even if it only uses religious language.
Second, it protects some groups and not others in an arbitrary fashion. The atheists get protected from diatribes against “infidels”, but the gays don’t get a look-in (in particular, as far as I can tell it would be legal for Rastafarians to say that male homosexuals should be executed, but not for Peter Tatchell to respond in kind). This sort of legislation almost always has an inflationary bias, as there is always one borderline case which looks like it has been unfairly excluded, and that is the way in which freedom of speech gets eaten away.
And finally, the Bill appears to be smuggling a quite material change in the test for what statements constitute incitement to hatred. Compared to the old Public Order Act test of “intended to incite”, the current Bill has a weaker test of “intended or likely to incite”. I don’t know what “or likely” is doing in there and nobody seems to at any point have explained why it’s needed. As far as I can see, it’s just there to make it easier to get convictions under this law, and I’m not at all sure that it should be accepted without proof that this is a desirable thing.
So that’s pretty much it. This is a bad and illiberal Bill, but most of the opposition to it is pretty ill-informed and quite ill-conceived. It’s got nothing to do with giving Abu Hamza the right to censor your every weblog post and everything to do with preserving public order in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, “Islamophobia” is not a fictitious problem in as much as there are quite clearly “critiques” of Islam which are being used as a fig leaf for outright racism and the self-styled defenders of “Enlightenment values” don’t seem to regard this as any problem at all of theirs. In fact, an awful lot of people commenting on this issue don’t appear to be able to keep a decent degree of separation in their own minds between genuine civil liberties issues and just randomly having a go at Muslims for being backward and uncivilised. And if I was a Muslim, I daresay I’d be pretty hacked off at that.
I have no real post to go with this headline, but as a service to the British journalists with the thankless job of covering our Home Secretary’s love life (sample coverage “Mark, the Home Secretary is currently suing his pregnant ex-lover to force her to take a DNA test so that he can prove that her older child, as well as her current unborn child, is in fact illegitimate and fathered by him. Do you think he’s done anything unwise?”), may I pass on a fantastic old quote from JK Galbraith:
“Anyone who says four times that he won’t resign, will”
By my count, Blunkett currently has a Galbraith score of 1. I think he ends up staying, but that quote ought to be good for a couple of paras if you’re hard up against it. You can return the favour some time in the future.
Kieran mentioned Jonathan Coe’s vicious and funny take-down of Thatcherism, “What a Carve-Up” in passing a couple of days ago. It reminded me of a bit in Coe’s more recent novel, The Rotter’s Club, where he identifies the ‘death of the Socialist dream’ with the extinction of prog-rock.
He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I’d seen in Stubb’s eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Philip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of countless millennia into half an hour’s worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip’s musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.
I don’t agree with the sentiment or the identification, but it’s an interesting and clever metaphor. I’m also curious to know from UK/Irish readers whether the sequel to the Rotter’s Club is as good as the first volume - hasn’t been released on this side of the Atlantic yet, I don’t think.
I don’t want to turn Crooked Timber into a series of announcements for British radio shows, but I would like to give advance notice that Alan Carling , sociologist, electoral candidate, and one of my collaborators on Imprints, is now on the radio with Bradford Community Broadcasting . His show — The Bradford Experience — goes out this Thursday, and he’ll be interviewing Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart . The show goes out from 1600-1700 (UK time) and I rather suspect they’ll be discussing race, religion, secularism and such matters. There’s sure to be plenty on the live stream that might interest — or infuriate — Harry, Ophelia Benson, Russell Arben Fox and others around these parts. So perhaps Crooked Timber can get Alan an audience beyond the limits of the Bradford—Leeds conurbation.
UPDATE: Alan tells me that the programme will be repeated on Saturday (9.00-10.00 am) and Sunday (4.00 - 5.00). He’ll also be interviewing the Bishop of Bradford.
I don’t want to turn Crooked Timber into a series of announcements for British radio shows, but I would like to give advance notice that Alan Carling , sociologist, electoral candidate, and one of my collaborators on Imprints, is now on the radio with Bradford Community Broadcasting . His show — The Bradford Experience — goes out this Thursday, and he’ll be interviewing Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart . The show goes out from 1600-1700 (UK time) and I rather suspect they’ll be discussing race, religion, secularism and such matters. There’s sure to be plenty on the live stream that might interest — or infuriate — Harry, Ophelia Benson, Russell Arben Fox and others around these parts. So perhaps Crooked Timber can get Alan an audience beyond the limits of the Bradford—Leeds conurbation.
UPDATE: Alan tells me that the programme will be repeated on Saturday (9.00-10.00 am) and Sunday (4.00 - 5.00). He’ll also be interviewing the Bishop of Bradford.
I have a number of fantastic pieces of unsolicited advice for the Democrats, which I will no doubt be trotting out over the course of the week. Idea the first, however, is something that’s been on my mind for the last few years.
It’s time for the UK to face facts, agree that we have very little in common with Europe and a lot in common with the USA, and join the United States. Not only would this be good for Britain, the addition of 60 million voters, substantially all of whom are politically to the left of John Kerry, would presumably solve a few problems for you lot too.
Specifically, I would make the following proposals:
As a single entity, the United Kingdom is just far too big to be a single state. We are roughly twice the population of California; while I have no problem with giving us one big lump of 110 electoral votes, I understand that the more pedantic element among Constitutional scholars would probably have a cow. In any case, it seems inequitable that we should only have two senators. Therefore, I would suggest that we should join as the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states, these states to be provisionally entitled North England, South England (like the Dakotas or Carolinas) and Scotland.
Scotland would cover its historic boundaries plus the North Sea oilfields and would have 20 electoral votes (state capitol: Edinburgh). North England and South England would be separated by a line drawn between the Humber and the Wash, with North England getting 35 electoral votes (state capitol: probably Manchester) and South England 50 (state capital: Birmingham, as we would probably want to preserve London as a financial centre, rather as they do things in New York State).
I suspect that Northern Ireland is a little bit too small to be a viable state, but I don’t like the idea of adding it to either North England or Scotland. I therefore suggest that it be reunited with the Republic of Ireland, with the reunited entity becoming part of the Commonwealth of Massachussetts. I guesstimate that Mass. would need to be given roughly 8 more electoral votes because of this (note that a positive side-effect would be that Ireland would have to legalise abortion, as it would be transformed from one of the most socially conservative countries in Europe to part of one of the most liberal states of the USA).
Wales, obviously, would become an independent country but would adopt the dollar as our currency and leave the EU. With me as the first Governor of the Central Bank, I suspect that our first day’s order of business would be to lower the rate of tax to 4%, pass some fairly tough banking secrecy laws and sign a few advantageous tax treaties.
There would, obviously, be a few financial consequences. I’m afraid that we’d make the Social Security problem a bit worse, as we have a slightly older population and a lower birth rate. However, since our pension fund has always been pure pay-as-you-go, and we have no “lockbox” at all, we would massively increase the size of the “transition problem” and make it utterly impossible to privatise SS.
Furthermore, it would obviously be completely untenable to have free state-provided healthcare in only three States of the Union plus part of Massachussetts. We would have some transitional arrangements to stop health tourists from the other 50 States from taking too much short-term advantage, but in the long term it would obviously be the case that the National Health Service would either have to be dismantled, or something like it would need to be provided at a Federal level across the USA. Since the electoral arithmetic of our huge numbers of electoral votes would make it more or less mathematically impossible for anyone to be elected President who proposed to tamper with this genuine “third rail” issue of British politics, America would have socialised healthcare within a generation.
All in all, it’s a fantastic idea; gets us in the UK out of an increasingly onerous and antidemocratic burden of European legislation as well. All I lack is a catchy name for this idea, since my first choice has apparently already been taken.
The pro-war British blogs seem to be linking to and discussing an article in David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine which alleges that the UK is in the grip of a frightening epidemic of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. In the words of one of their number, Melanie Phillips :
This article describes vividly what it’s like to be an American and a Jew facing the tsunami of anti-American and anti-Jewish hatred that has swept over Britain
I’m neither American nor a Jew, so I hesitate somewhat to downplay these reports. Certainly unthinking anti-Americanism — of the kind depicted in Whit Stillman’s film Barcelona — is a feature of European political and social life. (Only the other day, a supermarket checkout assistant told me that “after all, Michael Moore is just another fat American”.) And anti-semitism also exists in a number of forms: there’s a residual British conservative strain of it and it has come to infect some of the discourse of anti-Israeli polemic on the Left. But American and Jewish friends and colleagues do not tell me of hostility of the kind recounted in the article, and the judicious Jonathan Edelstein reports in comments to one of the blogs discussing the alleged phenomenon :
I’m a fairly frequent visitor to London and just returned from four days there, where I hung out with quite a few Guardian and Independent-readers, some of them avowedly Marxist. None of them had any problem with me as an American, a Jew or a Zionist - we had some lively arguments, certainly, but none of them degenerated to personal abuse, anti-semitism or “Israel is a pirate state” rhetoric. I’ve never encountered that kind of crap in the UK, although I’m sure it exists; there are idiots everywhere. The reception of Americans in London probably has a great deal to do with the particular people they meet.
I’d be interested to hear of other experiences.
Jon Snow’s autobiography is being excerpted in the Guardian . The would-be future leader of Ewekip puts in an appearance:
Meanwhile, we found our cause: anti-apartheid. Liverpool was effectively Tate & Lyle’s British capital. The university had sizeable investments, and a goodly portion found its way to investments in South Africa, where Tate was still big. “Disinvest from South Africa” became our clarion cry. One of the most active staff members was Robert Kilroy-Silk, a junior lecturer in the politics department. In those days, Kilroy was a rabid revolutionary.
A little later on ….
Three days later, 10 of us, mostly elected officers of the students’ union, were charged by the authorities with bringing the university into disrepute. Of Kilroy-Silk, so voluble at the start, there was no sign.
With apologies to The Poor Man, an application of this strategy to an issue which appears to be confusing surprisingly many surprisingly intelligent minds in the British Isles:
Why are people so keen to ban fox-hunting when (fishing, battery farming, meat eating in general, mousetraps etc) are responsible for much more animal death and suffering?
Because hunting foxes with dogs is a sadistic pleasure.
Next week, I may tackle the question of why the Beslan siege appalled us more than the ongoing deaths of children through malnutrition and disease in Africa. Or I may not.
Andrew Smith has just resigned as the pensions minister. I’m not particularly interested in the political backstory to this; I’m much more interested in the opportunity it offers to undo one of the Original Sins of New Labour.
It was an appalling mistake to sack Frank Field and it is time to undo it.
Straight up at the start, I must confess that I don’t like Frank Field. He is a God-botherer and he is entirely too keen on what I regard as alarmingly authoritarian schemes to try and reform the feckless poor through government action1. I would say that he has a nasty case of the pathologised form of the Work Ethic, and that the poor and unfortunate can generally do without the kind of help that well-meaning social reformers tend to inflict on them.
However, I am not recommending that he be drafted to a position in the Home Office. The job that has come open is in pensions, and Frank Field understands pensions (I’ve selected an article more or less at random there; his site is chock full of sensible articles about them). Nobody else in government does (or at least, nobody acts as if they do), and this matters. The UK has a problem with insufficient saving for the long term, and nobody appears to see that the obvious reason why UK punters don’t save enough for the long term is that the only way for them to do so would be to hand over their cash to an industry which has suffered PR disaster after disaster. At the same time, the great and the good of our country have found it very difficult to communicate to the public that the amount of saving that their employer has been carrying out on their behalf has been drastically reduced, mainly because to do so would most likely involve owning up to the fact that the movement from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans has been carried out on terms which seem more or less equivalent to a 5% wage cut over the last ten years.
Pensions are important, and boring. We’ve covered the issue a few times in the past. In a nutshell, people don’t understand pensions because they’re difficult and dull, people have been rather systematically taken advantage because of this asymmetry of knowledge, and because people dimly realise this, they don’t trust the pensions system. Which means that they don’t save, which is bad news.
Now I am told from Newsnight that a likely candidate for the pensions minister job is Geoff Hoon. There is something about Hoon’s record that rather suggests to me that he is probably the wrong choice if you want to project an image of trustworthiness.
The fact that appointing Frank Field would be a massive up-yours to Gordon Brown should not really carry that much weight in Tony Blair’s decision process, but if it’s the featherweight that tips the scales, I promise not to grumble.
Footnote:
1I have a post in the works on the general issue of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) in the UK. In summary, I’ve seen them work in my part of London. I agree with the general concept that even though the danger of abuse is obvious, there is a role for a police power to exclude known bad elements from their place of business without the requirement to catch them in an illegal act. ASBOs have worked very well against localised crack problems, for example. However, this success in small local pilot schemes should not be taken as warranting throwing the bloody things around like confetti; there are quite obvious reasons why this pilot is unlikely to scale. But this is for another post.
OK gang, you know how much you love your mates at CT, now it’s time for you lot to do something for us. We need to get the Wisdom of Crowds to work to come up with an idea that will make us1 all rich. There’s quite likely to be an election in the UK within the next twelve months, which means that anyone who wants big and lucrative government contracts needs to start donating to the Labour Party now.
Footnote:
1In case it’s unclear, I am not using “us” here in any sense that might include you lot.
I’m not joking. There are two great things about UK politics for a young chap who wants to get rich, as opposed to the USA. In the first place, we’re going through an ongoing process of privatising the public sphere, with very poor control over the terms on which the government assumes massive liabilities for the future. In the USA, you really have to be in the defence industry (or at a pinch running a prison) if you want to look forward to a lifetime of risk-free suckling at the government teat. In the UK, you can run schools, go into waste management, clean hospitals not very well, basically anything you like, all at surprisingly attractive prices. It’s the happy hunting grounds.
Second, thanks to our bans on political advertising, UK politics is not such a big-money game as US; you get a much bigger bang for your buck. Consider that $50,000 would barely get you a place on the ladder of fundraisers for the Republican party (specifically, you’d be a “maverick” rather than a “ranger” or “pioneer”, and be honest, “maverick” sounds pretty crappy). In the UK, however, at the going rate of £2,000 a pop, the same money that would make you a “Maverick” would allow you have eleven separate questions asked in the House of Commons.
Furthermore it appears to the cynical mind that the price list for more tangible government benefits is equally reasonable:These returns on investment are absolutely fantastic! And the great thing is that while this sort of thing is obviously not exactly a poor man’s game, neither are the amounts entirely out of the ballpark for a small syndicate. Most of the CT staff are starving scholars or impoverished academics, but I’ve got a small bonus coming, John Q’s got his Federation Fellowship and a few of the others have probably got a bob or two they can scrape up. I reckon that we could easily come up with a £500,000 donation to the Labour Party once we’d convinced ourself that this was a better use for the money than bringing democracy to Gabon.
My guess is that we ought to get CT some sort of official status as “People’s Blog Laureate” with a budget of around £10m a year. Or possibly we could take on a couple of underprivileged kids under the terms of their anti-social behaviour orders and get City Technology Status. Maybe the four or five posts we wrote on Najaf would give us sufficient expertise to bid for a PFI contract to manage urban warfare for the Army. I’m not that fussed what we do as long as it’s under a long-dated contract with easy performance criteria and plenty of scope for us to renegotiate the contract once all the other bidders have dropped out and we suddenly discover it’s going to cost five times as much as we tendered.
Ideas, please?
Richard Ingrams is an old fart, a homophobe1 and an anti-Semite2 and I have suggested on a number of occasions to the Observer’s letters editor that amost anyone else would make better use of the space that newspaper provides him every week. But this week, he has a quite interesting point that I think bears discussion.
His subject is Mark Thatcher, who has managed to get himself arrested on suspicion of financing a coup in Equatorial Guinea. Ingrams notes that it would be rather unfair in the current political climate if Thatcher does get found guilty and thrown into jail, because after all, everyone would agree that Equatorial Guinea’s current President is a thoroughly bad man and the Guineans would be better off without him in power. True, Thatcher and his alleged co-conspirators had no real plan to deal with the aftermath of their coup (other than securing the oil wells) and actually make the Guineans better off, and true, many people suspect that their motives were not entirely purely humanitarian, but the Butler and Hutton reports have established that this isn’t even a reason for anyone at all to lose their government job.
The serious issue raised by this joke is, if we accept the logic of the “strong version”3 of humanitarian intervention, then why should we also say that it is only the job of states to carry out such interventions? Since, ex hypothesi, any special position for states is ruled out by the strong pro-war internationalist liberal stance, why shouldn’t groups of private individuals take action? For example, Harry’s Place has five main contributors, each of whom could probably raise about $200,000 if they took out a second mortgage; maybe they should be ringing up Executive Outcomes and getting a few estimates in on smallish African states. Why leave this to the government?
Footnotes:
1In my opinion, although given his history at Private Eye I think it would be pretty hypocritical of him to sue me
2Specifically, he has in the past suggested that Jewish journalists should identify themselves as Jews when writing about Israel; some people might consider this to be anti-Zionist rather than anti-Semitic but to be honest I’m not interested in arguing such a ludicrous point.
3By this I mean the version pushed in the pro-war blogosphere, under which any intervention that removes a bad regime is by that token good. Not the rather stronger criterion used by Human Rights Watch.
On Parliamentary Questions the other day they played a clip of David Owen, recorded in 2003, admitting without embarrassment that when he was Foreign Secretary he seriously considered ordering the assassination of Idi Amin. There was no explanation of why the idea was rejected (it was a clip in a game show), but my immediate, and non-reflective, reaction was that it was the first good thing I had heard about Owen (whom I couldn’t stand when he was a real politician, even before reading Crewe and King’s fantastic biography of the SDP in which he emerges as a deeply unlikeable and destructive character). Without giving it a lot more thought, which I can’t do right now, I can make a very rough judgement that certain objectionable leaders are legitimate candidates for assassination (Hitler, Amin, both Duvaliers, Stalin) whereas others are not (Khomeni, Castro, Rawlings, Botha). I could tell a story about each, and probably be dissuaded on each of them (except Hitler). But I couldn’t give anything approaching necessary and sufficient conditions for candidacy. What makes a leader a legitimate target of an assassination attempt?
Clarification: as jdw says below we are talking about a government authorising the assassination of a foreign leader, rather than a citizen assassinating his/her own country’s leader, the assumption being that governments require more justification.
Arguments, fights and feuds have their own inner logic, and they lead to people taking up positions and attitudes that make little sense on a rationalistic model of what beliefs we ought to have. But sometimes, even in the middle of such a quarrel, we get a sense of where it’s going, how it is defining and entrenching us and the other person. David Aaronovich captures something of this in today’s Guardian:
I wrote a year ago that other peoples’ assumptions were turning me into a Jew. And now I began to wonder whether being attacked as being anti-Muslim because of my views on Iraq and secularism, and despite my views on Palestine and racism, wasn’t beginning to make me the thing that I was being accused of. Bugger it then, you half-think, if that’s what you want.
But if that’s how I feel, wonderfully rational bloke that I am, what in heaven’s name is the effect on people from the Muslim community who are being wrongly stopped in the name of counter-terrorism? Doesn’t that mean the warnings about alienation are essentially correct? Last Friday’s announcement of the police stop and search statistics were like a bucket of iced water in the face. A 300% increase in the number of Asians stopped, and you just know that most of these will be young men. And we also know from the sus laws and the experiences of black BMW drivers, what the reaction is. Fuck you.
UPDATE: Chris Brooke links to a Mirror hatchet job on of Ewekip’s celebrity MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk.
UPDATE UPDATE: this is a restored post from Google’s cache.
My friend Alan Carling, whose campaign I blogged about a few days ago, managed to secure 342 votes in Bradford’s Heaton ward . I hope his campaign has more impact on local debate than it had on votes, since elsewhere in Bradford the extreme right-wing BNP had four councillors elected. Generally, the local elections look like a disaster for Tony Blair (I ended up voting LD in the Euros) and I imagine that nervous backbenchers are sharpening their knives already.
My friend and occasional collaborator, the sociologist Alan Carling , is running as an independent candidate in local elections in Bradford, West Yorkshire (in the UK). Bradford has in recent years acquired something of a reputation for urban deprivation, ethnic violence and increasing patterns of residential segregation, something which the main political parties have done little to address. Alan has thought more than most people about the problems of combining social justice and ethnic diversity. I’m sure that if I lived in Bradford I would give him my support. Alan’s campaign aims to tackle some of these issues head-on. He has a campaign website BetterBradford.org.uk . From Alan’s campaign statement :
Multicultural policies have rightly recognised the differences in ways of life. The question in Bradford is whether the well-intentioned practice of multiculturalism in the past has contributed inadvertently to undesirable forms of segregation in the present. Multiculturalism makes us think in terms of single identities and multiple ‘communities’: the White community, the African-Caribbean community, the gay and lesbian communities and so on. But ‘community’ can mean an inward-looking attitude, so that each separate group regulates its own affairs without reference to anyone else outside. This is undesirable in an open democratic society.
Identity is about how we describe ourselves, as ‘White’ or ‘Sikh’ or ‘Muslim’ or ‘English’ or ‘Ukrainian’. But whatever we choose as our main label, the truth is always more complicated. There are different meanings to each label, and there are many different ways of observing any religion. No-one is only White or only Muslim, because we are also women and men, young and old, and these different identities mean different things in different circumstances. A new perspective on multiculturalism would emphasise a single community and multiple identities.
(I don’t know what others at CT would make of Alan’s campaign: this just represents my own endorsement of Alan.)
Good news - MySociety, the people who brought us the excellent Downing Street Says, have just been awarded £250,000 by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister following a bid they made with the West Sussex County Council.
Details of exactly how the money will be spent aren’t yet available, but Tom Steinberg hopes it will allow MySociety to start building the projects they selected before Christmas from hundreds of proposals. The lucky winners are intended to strengthen the voluntary sector and the democratic process;
GiveItAway - Lowering the barriers to giving stuff away, instead of throwing it away.
PledgeBank - Want to help a cause, but worried that your effort will make no difference?
FaxYourRepresentative - FaxYourMP.com goes 21st century
NotApathetic - Don’t want to vote, but also not apathetic? Let them know why.
YourConstituencyMailingList - Want to hear from your MP & discuss what they say?
Congratulations to everyone at MySociety - it couldn’t happen to nicer people.
Remember the begging letter from Paul Foot appealing for funds to pay for the legal costs and damages incurred by his Socialist Worker Party chums Alex Callinicos and Lindsey German after they libelled Quintin Hoare and Branka Magas? I blogged about it all here . The very same Lindsey German is now threatening legal action on behalf of George Galloway MP. Full details at Harry’s place .
In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. The Guardian has the story . And staff at Birmingham have a campaign to defend their right to host personal material.
Seumas Milne has an article in today’s Guardian plugging a book of his and remembering the British miners’ strike of 1984—5. Like Milne I was an active supporter of that strike, collecting for striking miners and offering as much propaganda and political support as I could. I worked for Verso, the publisher of Milne’s book, at the time and we produced a special on the strike called Digging Deeper in record time: going from copy to bound volume in about two weeks.
So my memories are still pretty vivid and I think I’m in a position to assess the claims Milne makes. With his general characterization of the strike as being self-defence against a class war fought by a vengeful Tory government, I have no quarrel. Likewise with what he says of the police at the time. Since the strike we’ve had to listen to no end of sermons about “insurrection” and the assertion of the “rule of law”. There was no rule of law. The police and the government and the courts acted violently and cynically against the miners and their communities: men were attacked and beaten, their freedom of movement was restricted, they were not given fair hearings by magistrates and courts. I could go on, but those who know know and those who don’t want to will not be persuaded by further extending the list of arbitrary and violent state actions. The government had decided to break the NUM, was going to apply all necessary resources to doing so and could do so untrammeled by worries about legality.
It is interesting to wonder how things would have developed if they’d taken place today. My guess is that the legal situation would have been basically the same, Human Rights Act notwithstanding, for all practical purposes. Maybe the miners would have received some redress from the ECHR, but only months or years after they’d lost anyway. Technology might have helped the miners, though. Cellular phones and the internet would have made it easier to organise pickets and to thwart police roadblocks and would have given early warnings of other police operations.
I do disagree with Milne profoundly, though, on what became the central political issue of the strike within the left and the labour movement: the NUM leadership’s refusal to call a national ballot. He puts the point thus (I find his 1969-70 date confusing btw, surely he means 1973-4?)
The NUM’s decision to rely on the domino tactics that had been so successful in 1969-70 and 1981 - often claimed as Scargill’s key error - reflected the division between coalfields with apparently different long-term prospects as well as a determination to give those who realised what they faced a chance to defend their jobs. The dominant view among NUM leaders and activists was that to call a national ballot after the strike had already drawn in the overwhelming majority would have been seen as a get-out, and invited a no vote.
The key tactical issue for the strikers was not — despite what some clearly believed — whether they could defeat the government through their own physical force, they couldn’t. It was whether they could succeed in mobilising enough of the labour movement in their support, whether they could win over public opinion and neutralise the hostile. The failure to hold a ballot, an elementary requirement of democracy, meant that they could do none of these things. It was wrong in principle to commit thousands of men to a battle like that without a vote, and it was wrong as a matter of tactics. Not holding a ballot lent legitimacy to the strikebreakers in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere and provided ammunition to the Labour leaders who were hostile to the miners. Arthur Scargill and, following him, Milne, clearly regarded democracy in purely instrumental terms: if it delivers, fine; if not, not. The presumption of a vanguard to speak for the workers and to articulate their “real” wishes whether they recognize them or not has done fantastic damage to the left over the past century. What a pity that such a presumption still survives at the Guardian in the form of the Stalinoid patrician Milne.
The news that British spies bugged the office of Kofi Annan during the Iraq debate has a number of implications. First, for me, this is the point at which Tony Blair should go. The whole idea of going to the UN for authority to invade Iraq was his, not Bush’s, and now it’s clear that it was corrupt from the beginning. I won’t argue this in detail - no doubt a lot of people already thought he should go, and others still won’t be convinced.
The main point I want to make is that it’s time for Britain to get out of the spy game. More than any other democratic country, Britain is addicted to spies and their natural counterpart, Official Secrets.1 From Burgess and McLean to the present day, the spies have been a constant cause of embarrassment and worse. On the other hand, there’s no evidence that they’ve ever found out anything that was both useful and sufficiently reliable to act on2.
This isn’t a matter of bad luck, or even incompetence. Standard game-theoretic reasoning shows that, outside the zero-sum case of war, there’s unlikely to be a net benefit from actions like bugging offices. The problem is simple. If I bug your office and you don’t suspect me, I can gain potentially valuable information that you don’t want me to have. But if you suspect me, and I don’t suspect that you suspect, you can use my bugs to mislead me. As with all game theoretic reasoning, you can iterate this as many times as you like, but the end result is that the net value of information derived from bugging is zero. On the other hand, the costs of the activity are substantial. In an environment where bugging is routine, everyone learns to communicate in various forms of code, and decoding is costly and prone to error.
He’s often been dismissed as hopelessly naive, but US Secretary of State Henry Stimson was right when he shut down the State Department’s cryptanalytic office saying “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.”
1 This is a case where life imitates art. The spy novels of Erskine Childers and John Buchan were written before the rise of espionage as a significant government activity and before the passage of the first effective Official Secrets Act (1911)
2 In this context, I’m excluding wartime codebreaking, which is always useful since, at a minimum, it disrupts enemy communications.
I’ve treated Clare Short’s allegation as fact, since Blair hasn’t denied it. His claim that he can neither confirm nor deny it for security reasons doesn’t hold up. Short made the specific claim that she had seen transcripts of Annan’s conversations. Blair could refute this claim without reference to whether or not such transcripts existed.
The argument about the uselessness of spies is developed at much greater length in this piece I wrote for the Australian Financia Review The conclusion:The spy myth clearly served the interests of intelligence agencies, which prospered during the 20th century more than any set of spies before them. The real beneficiaries, however, were the counterintelligence agencies or, to dispense with euphemisms, the secret police, of both Western and Communist countries. The powers granted to them for their struggle against armies of spies were used primarily against domestic dissidents. Terms such as ‘agent of influence’ were used to stigmatise anyone whose activities, however open and above-board, could be represented as helpful to the other side.The supposed role of the secret police, to keep secrets from opposing governments, was, as we have seen, futile. Secret police, and the associated panoply of security laws, Official Secrets Acts and so forth, were much more successful in protecting their governments’ secrets from potentially embarrassing public scrutiny in their own countries.
As spies and the associated fears have faded in their public mind, their place has been taken by terrorists. In many ways, this is a reversion to the 19th century, when the bomb-throwing anarchist was a focus of popular fears and the subject of novels by such writers as Chesterton and Conrad.
As the attacks of September 11 showed us, the threat posed by terrorists is real. Nevertheless, even if terrorists were to mount attacks ten times as deadly in the future, they would still present the citizens of the Western World with less danger than we accept from our fellow-citizens every time we step into our cars.
If the century of the spy has taught us anything, it is that we need to assess the dangers posed by terrorists coolly and calmly rather than giving way to panic.
Hurray for the jury system, as all right-thinking people should be shouting. The Katharine Gun case has been dropped. And the best thing is, the reason for which it’s been dropped.
A lot of people had thought, when the rumours first started spreading that Blair et al were declaring victory and departing the field on this one, that it turned on a neat but unsatisfying technical point of UK law. The idea here was that Gun was planning to call in her defence the legal advice prepared for Blair by the Attorney-General on the legality of the Iraq War in the circumstances in which it was fought. Either out of embarrassment at what that advice said (unlikely) or on the general principle of good government that the Attorney General’s legal advice is never made public (more likely), the government couldn’t agree to this, and therefore the trial couldn’t be brought as it would clearly breach Gun’s human rights and natural justice to put her on trial while depriving her of her defence.
But that ain’t what happened. The clear wording of the Crown Prosecution Service’s statement and the spin from press officers suggests something even more astounding; they dropped this case because they thought they wouldn’t win it. Basically, Blair and pals decided that they did not like the odds of finding a jury of twelve Britons which didn’t contain at least two or three members who were so angry about the war in general that they’d refuse to convict Gun on more or less any charges.
That’s fantastic, for the following reasons:
1. Forget your views on the war itself. Saddam’s gone and nobody can bring him back. All the Gun case was about was whether the UK government should have lied and bullied in the run-up to the war. Nobody will be killed or tortured if we establish the principle that this is not the way in which we wish to be governed, and that was the only issue of Grand Politics at stake here.
2. It establishes a precedent (not a particularly strong one in the legal sense, but one that could be taken as indicative and quite a strong one in practical terms) that there is an implicit defence of justification in charges under the Official Secrets Act. This seems to me like a very attractive position indeed; it is still against the law for spooks to leak, but in extremis, they can follow their conscience, as long as they’re prepared to believe that their cause is so obviously right (or their perception of the national interest so widespread) that they’re sure that a jury would take their side. So in other words, the test of where the dividing line is set between “who are you to make decisions” and “obeying orders is no defence”, is to be set not by spooks interpreting the law, or by politicians, but by juries. Who have a long, long history as an entirely salutary and liberalising force in British politics from the earliest days of the Trade Union movement.
3. And if anyone asks you what you achieved by going on the march to Hyde Park, you can point to this as a definite achievement. Because Blair was scared by the sight of how many people really opposed his war, a small but significant chink has been made in Britain’s ridiculous Official Secrets infrastructure. It’s rare that people stand up to their rulers without some good coming of it, and this appears to be the case here.
Hurray for juries and hurray for the fear of juries, that’s what I say.
Human rights barrister Conor Gearty stole the show at the recent Oxford Political Thought Conference, with a brilliant, witty and well-informed speech. He has an article on Hutton in the new London Review of Books. His view doesn’t exactly coincide with my own, but it is a fascinating look at the changing public reputation of judges, their relations with the media, why this judge and not that one gets picked for an inquiry. It is hard to decide on the most quotable bit, so this will have to do:
One of the more mystifying aspects of the Hutton process was the media’s treatment of Hutton himself, before the publication of his report, as an Olympian demigod, hovering above the fray, fastidious in his search for truth and justice. His appearance and extraordinary accent have helped; the media love caricature, and here was a judge who seemed to have walked into the limelight directly from the 1950s. But underpinning the blind trust that was placed in him, and which has now rebounded so badly, was a more general enthusiasm for the judiciary which is all the more remarkable for having been so recently acquired and for being (as far as the commitment to media freedom is concerned) largely without foundation.
It is not so long ago that judges were the most maligned group in the entire body politic. Their naked partisanship during the miners’ strike, the Spycatcher debacle, and then the succession of miscarriage of justice cases of the late 1980s and early 1990s had established the senior judiciary in the eyes of most people (and particularly in the eyes of the media) as inclined to authoritarianism, unaccountable in their exercise of power and entirely out of touch. The refusal of judges to give any interviews, under cover of antiquated ‘rules’ which a long forgotten lord chancellor had invented, compounded the sense that they were all, or almost all, malevolent recluses.
The deaths of nineteen Chinese illegal workers who were cockling on the treacherous sands of Morecambe bay has generated much comment in the British press. Much of that comment has focused on their illegality, the exploitation of such workers by gangmasters, the need or otherwise for tighter immigration controls, globalization and so on. Indeed. There was a similar burst of indignation when some immigrant workers were hit by a train back in July . But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals. In his Development as Freedom , Amartya Sen discusses two examples where workers, in order to assure basic capablities (such as nutrition and housing) for themselves and their families, have to expose themselves to the risk of injury or death. Jo Wolff and Avner de-Shalit have a paper on this theme (Word format) that is on the programme of the UCL’s School for Policy Studies for this Wednesday, they recount Sen’s examples:
The first is from the southern edge of Bangladesh and of West Bengal in India, where the Sundarban [forest] grows. This is the habitat of the Royal Bengal tiger, which is protected by a hunting ban. The area is also famous for the honey it produces in natural beehives. The people who live in the area are extremely poor. They go into the forests to collect the honey, for which they can get a relatively high price in the city. However, this is a very dangerous job. Every year some fifty or more of them are killed by tigers. The second case is of Mr. Kader Mia, a Muslim daily labourer who worked in a Hindu neighbourhood in Dhaka, where Sen grew up as a child. Mr. Mia was knifed on the street by Hindu people, and later died. While he was deeply aware and concerned about the risk of going to look for a job in a Hindu neighbourhood in troubled times, Mr. Mia had no other choice but to do so because his family had nothing to eat.
Those are third-world examples. But it is not be hard to add to the list of disadvantaged workers who take dangerous jobs to secure the means of life for their families. Whilst some of them involve illegal workers at the margins of society, not all of them do or have done. Mine workers get trapped underground even in advanced capitalist countries and many workers in the oil and chemical industries run a greatly increased risk of death or injury. And many people who have worked with asbestos now face a slow, lingering death.
All of these “normal” examples should give us some perpective on the image of the heroic risk-taking entrepreneur, who typically risks a great deal less than any of these workers do. Those who consider Marx outmoded and are amazed that anyone should take him seriously (scroll to comments) would also find that Capital volume one attends rather more closely to this enduring feature of capitalism than do more conventional accounts.
Trade unions, the Health and Safety Executive and other bodies such as local authorities and the police certainly need to do more to protect people as vulnerable as the Chinese cocklers who died at Morecambe. But we mustn’t forget that the root cause of many such tragedies is that poor people need to risk themselves in order that they and those they love may live. Unless they cease to be poor, and cease to face such unpalatable choices, such events will happen again and again.
UPDATE: See Felicity Lawrence in the Guardian .
Daniel posted on Hutton the other day, and was gracious enough to say that the Blairites should enjoy their day in the sun (whatever else he said elsewhere in the post). During the inquiry, it looked to me as if Gilligan and the BBC were in deep trouble and I posted back in August saying as much . Since the report journalists have been queuing up to denounce Hutton for coming to conclusions other than the ones they were all hoping for and using words like “whitewash”. Typical examples are Gilligan’s mate Rod Liddle (on whom see Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian ), Simon Jenkins in the Times and Peter Oborne in the Spectator (see also Liddle in the Spectator).
In his article, Oborne feels free simply to assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the leak of Hutton to the Sun was the work of the government. Jenkins desribes the inquiry as “a high-risk gamble to conceal Tony Blair’s embarrassment over his Iraq intelligence by implicating the BBC in a suicide.”
The truth is (contra Jenkins) that the Kelly suicide affair was — among many other things — part of a string of episodes used by the press (and following them the BBC) to whip up very personal hatred against Blair and those close to him. Other instances of this are the parading of war widow Samantha Roberts across the print and broadcast media, Cheriegate, the ongoing “The Blairs” cartoon in the Spectator, and the insistent demands that Blair reveal whether his baby had the MMR jab. I doubt that many CT readers regularly peruse the Daily Mail or the Mail on Sunday. I bought the MoS a few weeks ago to get a free DVD of Brief Encounter, but, rather than just chucking to paper in the nearest bin, took time to look at the contents. There was page after page of hatred directed at the Blairs (some of it by Oborne).
Now on one view, with which I have a lot of sympathy, we need an aggressive investigative journalism. Governments have immense resources at their disposal to reveal or not reveal information and to manipulate public opinion and we need a counterweight to that. Fair enough. Except that it is hard to escape the thought that much of the hostile coverage of the Blairs — like the spiteful coverage of the Clintons — is not aimed at the truth or at securing better government. It reflects a loathing on the right from those who think that a Labour government disturbs the natural order of things and on the left from those who feel betrayed (especially over Iraq).
In the UK the news agenda is often set by the press, and much of the press has been in get-the-Blairs mode for a very long time. The point of this kind of journalism is not to hold governments to account but to undermine, belittle and ridicule. The reason the BBC came a cropper over Hutton was that some of its journalists failed to distinguish between truth-seeking and point-scoring, adopted the mindset of their print brethren, and over-reached. It was and is right to scrutinize Blair’s conduct over Iraq, just as it was right to criticize many of Clinton’s actions (the bombing of that factory in Sudan being a good case in point). But since we at CT have had a fair amount to say about and against the villification of the Clintons we ought to recognise that the coverage of the Blairs has started to resemble it.
Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian last week also deplored attack-dog journalism. In doing so, she placed a lot of the blame at the door of Alastair Campbell. She’s no doubt right to make this point, though it can be overstated. It has greater merit as a point about the hypocrisy of Blair’s and Campbell’s indignation towards the BBC given their own embracing of the culture of spin and counterspin than it does as an explanation of why we have the bad journalism we have. I’m certainly reluctant to come out and defend Campbell, and in any case I don’t think a game of “he started it!” is going to be very productive. I do think it worth saying two things, though. First, many of those who claim that Campbell is something new on the bullying and manipulation front seem to have forgotten some of his predecessors. (Notably Bernard Ingham who was worse in may ways.) Second, the “why is the lying bastard lying to me” school of journalism isn’t plausibly represented mainly as a response to Campbell and his ilk since we see it in so many contexts other than coverage of the Labour government. Press coverage of just about any large institution is now predicated on the assumption that that institution (school, hospital, university, company) is a conspiracy of the self-serving and that all utterances by its representatives are to be taken as mendacious lies (unless proven otherwise).
I imagine that some — including some of my fellow contributors — may believe that lying mendacity is a good working assumption. I’m not certain that they are wrong. But I do think that we can’t have a decent (social-) democratic political culture without sober commentary, honest reporting, a commitment to truth-telling as opposed to a hunger for exposure, spin and counterspin, smear and countersmear. When Onora O’Neill gave one of her Reith lectures on the trust and covered the press, I was pretty sceptical on my blog . I rather think I should have said more to emphasise what was right in her account.
The Economist runs a piece endorsing the Hutton inquiry's rejection of BBC claims that the Blair government's dossier on Iraqi weapons was "sexed up", but runs it under the headline George Bush and Tony Blair exaggerated, but they did not lie.
What, precisely, is the difference between "exaggerated" and "sexed up" ?
I just received an email from a student at Oxford with this announcement from the University’s administration:
IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM THE PROCTORS
The University regrets that it is unable, on health and safety
grounds, to make the Examination Schools available for lectures
and classes today (Tuesday 27 January) because there is a
student occupation of the building.
Students and staff should consult the Examination Schools page of
the University web-site for information about arrangements for
Schools lectures and classes from tomorrow onwards.
There were a couple well publicized cases of fee resistance when I was at Oxford a few years ago, but nothing this substantial. The Guardian has more on the student protests, which are still fairly small, here.
Over the last year, those of us who were against starting the particular conflict in Iraq which took place in the second quarter of 2003, have taken an awful lot of criticism from those of our fellow left-wingers who supported it. Which is fair enough; robust debate is important. But it is a bit much to be accused of supporting the murder of innocents, by people who know perfectly well that you don’t, because you refuse to lend your voice to an already deafening clamor of approbation for a policy which you didn’t support, still regard as misguided, but which happened to have some favourable consequences. For example.
I personally have a very great antipathy to loyalty oaths, but am never happier than when discarding principles in order to fight dirty. So, it’s sauce for the gander time.
I hereby question the “left” credentials, and indeed the commitment to democracy, of anyone who takes the government side against Katharine Gun. Saddam’s gone and nothing can bring him back. Whatever happens in Iraq, happens. The war was fought and cannot be unfought. All that turns on this case, is whether someone who is aware that the government is trying to do something in private which they would not dare to do in public, has the right to blow the whistle. If you think that Ms Gun deserves to go to jail, then all I can say, mes amis is examine your conscience.
[EDIT] Just to emphasise that this is my own personal view, rather than the “party line” of CT. I‘ve not discussed it with any other contributor and suspect that a number of them won’t agree.
Readers of Crooked Timber will know that I have an old and unhappy relationship with the New Left Review. I mention this just to trigger an appropriate level of discounting for bitterness and resentment in the reader. The latest NLR has an attack on the record of New Labour by the person now listed alone as “editor” on the masthead: Susan Watkins. Watkins, married to Tariq Ali and co-author with him of 1968: Marching in the Streets but perhaps best known for the cartoon book Feminism for Beginners , has written an extraordinarily poor rant in sub-Andersonic tones. It begins thus (afficionados will recognise the style):
The Centre Left governments that dominated the North Atlantic zone up to the turn of the millennium have now all but disappeared.
Since when was “North Atlantic zone” a category worth bothering with?
The rant continues through a whole section of Andersonic historical sociology which I won’t reproduce. (Actually, it is Anderson as he might have been rendered by a broadcaster on the old Radio Tirana: simplified and shoutified). Watkins then finishes with the following judgement on Blair’s government:
Judged against its immediate predecessors, an objective audit can only conclude that New Labour has scattered a few crumbs to the poor, while otherwise consolidating and extending Thatcher’s programme; externally, it has a far more bloodstained record. The civilians killed in Blair’s successive aggressions abroad—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq—outnumber Thatcher’s tally by tens of thousands. Such domestic pittances as the regime has distributed count for little beside the destruction of international legality and loss of foreign lives that have been its hallmark. Like any government, Britain’s can only be judged on its record and on a rational assessment of its future trajectory. The sooner New Labour exits the better.
Now I’m no friend of New Labour, and I have severe doubts — to say the least — about whether the latest intervention in Iraq was justified. But Watkins’s list of a series of instances exemplifying Blair’s “successive aggressions” is just breathtaking. I long ago despaired of reading sense in the NLR, but somewhere there was always a flicker of hope. No longer.
I recently finished the first set of political memoirs I can ever remember completing; Matthew Parris’s ‘Chance Witness’. It’s an enjoyable read, though Parris comes across as a cold fish. The early chapters about growing up a colonial child in Cyprus and Africa are much richer than the usual politicians’ gallop through childhood. They pit the young Master Parris as a cradle curmudgeon, familiar with the uncomfortable truths of conservatism from the onset of speech, against his well-intentioned but unreflective liberal mother. At Cambridge, Parris is disappointed by the tribal instincts of the great minds of his generation, and muses that people join labour/conservative/rugger bugger/etc. cliques simply because of their personality types. While he refrains from dishing the dirt on Tory governments of the 1980s in the way we all wish he would, Parris does give into a peculiarly English phobia; a mild but constant dislike, disdain or distrust of Catholics.
“Our senior philiosophy done at Clare and my director of studies; T. J. Smiley, was an acknowledged genius in his field: logic. Elizabeth Anscombe, the renowned Wittgensteinian scholar, was lecturing at the university and vastly respected - almost mobbed - for her insight. But both Anscombe and Smiley were Catholics. Catholicism is superstition: this much was obvious to me. It did not therefore seem to me that the rigour of Anscombe’s and Smiley’s respective academic analyses could have leaked out much into their worldly lives. Here were two virtuous people who were unquestionably cleverer than I would ever be. My best friend, Andrew Carver, was unquestionably so. But Andrew was casting around unsure what to do, and Smiley and Anscombe were praying to the Virgin Mary. So maybe there was hope for me in the world, maybe I could, after all, get a grip.”
It’s a strange aside, curious rather than offensive, and speaks to a common perception of Catholics as being faintly ridiculous. But there’s another aspect to the widely held English suspicion of Catholics. Reading Parris, I was reminded of Charlotte Bronte’s autobiographical character Lucy Snowe’s mix of condescension and real horror at her encounters with Belgian Catholics. Then again, I thought of Philip Pullman’s trilogy and Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver as illustrations of the (rather good) historical reasons why institutional Catholicism is distrusted by English Protestants, the foot soldiers of the Enlightenment. But finally, I remembered standing in WH Smith’s on Sloane Square reading an opinion piece in the Times which named half a dozen prominent Catholics and asked, given that these people must of course believe in the virgin birth, miracles, saints, and any amount of cant, whether they should have a role in British public life at all. I wondered if the piece would ever have been published, had its subject been prominent British Jews.
But Parris is simply dismissive, and by no means uniform. He has plenty of time for Chris Patten;
“One of the nice things about Patten was that he combined personal probity and religious conviction with a tolerant uncensoriousness of others.”
Which seems to suggest one reason for the general suspicion of Catholics (and indeed Christians in general); the fear of proselytism. Though it still seems odd to ridicule the logicians for (allegedly) keeping their spiritual and professional lives quite separate, and to praise Chris Patten for it.
In any case, ‘Chance Witness’ is an entertaining and informative read, though it relies far too heavily on newspaper columns towards the end and is marked by Parris’ strange aversion to the comma. There are some really choice titbits:
- Parris landed in Yale in the 1970s to study political science. “But at that time everyone in political science in America … was beavering away to show that important truths could be learned about politics through feeding data about the news into computers and establishing ‘correlations’. Five minutes’ reflection was sufficient to conclude this was unlikely to be the case: Yale graduate school looked to spend five decades reaching the same conclusion. I left them to it.”
- “I did not understand New Labour. It feels alien - somehow Soviet - to me. The Tories could be an appalling bunch of shits but they were my shits, and all too human. The new crowd were a very different kind of shit, and behind the warm words I sensed a coldness and a sort of vacuum.”
- “William (Hague) turned up only at the end of that evening at Alan’s (Duncan). He had not joined us for dinner, at which Alan’s other guest was Andrew Sullivan, another Oxford friend. Now a magazine editor in the United States and an acknowledged writer and thoughtful right-wing publicist for gay emancipation, Andrew is one of the first generations of HIV-positive men who are not going to die young, do not need to make a big thing and can get on with their lives. I did not know then he was gay. He was a slight, pale, teasing, alluring, strangely assured young man. Now he’s pumping iron.”
The image of Hogarth’s Gin Lane comes to mind after reading three pieces on Open Democracy on the booze culture in England , Ireland and Scotland . Central Bristol on a Friday and Saturday night is very much as Ken Worpole describes the centre of many British cities: full of inebriated teenagers, casual violence and, eventually, vomit. Dublin — a destination of choice for young Brits seeking to get smashed out of their brains — also has a big problem:
The results of this behaviour are alarming –- doctors, from a variety of hospitals, estimate that from 15-25% of admissions to accident and emergency units in 2002 were alcohol-related. In March 2003, representatives of the medical profession highlighted some of the horrendous consequences of excessive drinking. Mary Holohan, director of the sexual assault treatment unit at the Rotunda Hospital in central Dublin, said the pattern of alcohol consumption had changed greatly. One shuddering statistic that emerged was that in the past five years there had been a four-fold increase in the number of women who had been so drunk they could not remember if they had been sexually assaulted.
That last could be a dodgy statistic (if the number rose from one to four for example) but it sounds like there’s a serious issue.
Yesterday’s Sunday Times printed a long list of people who had refused honours from the British government. An interesting list including Michael Oakeshott, H.L.A.Hart, Isaiah Berlin and Gilbert Ryle. I also scrolled down the list to see if the reason the most successful manager in English football history had not been knighted was that he’d turned them down. No such luck — they never even offered (even though two managers from an inferior team have been honoured).
Would this be possible in anywhere else than Britain? On last night’s Frank Skinner show former Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Mo Mowlam gave an interview in which she attacked Tony Blair for poor judgement. At the end of the show Mowlam (dressed as Cher) performed “I Got You Babe” in duet with veteran porn star Ron Jeremy (dressed as Sonny).
The British Conservatives have recently been trying to get more bright young people to join the party. It looks as though they’ve got some way to go. It’s no secret that the Conservative party is getting a bit long in the tooth (the average party member is over 65 years old). But Matthew Turner really brings their problems home when he takes a look at the products that advertisers try to flog to Conservatives. Turner provides a complete list of the ads in this month’s issue of Conservative Heartland, the official party rag. So what are merchants trying to peddle to the Tories? In consecutive order, it seems to be:
Accountants
Retirement investment advice
Vitamins ‘for a healthy lifespan’
Wine
Savile Row shirts
Medical insurance for the over 50s
Retirement homes on the South coast
Leg ‘relaxa-stool’ supporter
Margaret Thatcher books
‘Back-care’ chairs
‘Easy-bather’ bath aid
Typewriter
Pensioners hearing aid
Branded ‘comfort stretch’ trousers
Reproduction antique gramophone
This is so perfect (especially the comfort stretch trousers, hearing aids and gramophones) that it nearly sounds like a hoax. Apparently it’s not though, and indeed it’s been picked up by Private Eye. Found via Harry’s Place
Peter Briffa, leaping to the defence 1 of soon-to-be-anointed Tory leader, Michael Howard, offers us a revisionist interpretation of Jeremy Paxman’s infamous skewering of Howard in a television interview. Paxman asked Howard fourteen times whether or not he’d instructed Derek Lewis, the head of the prison service to suspend the governor of Parkhurst prison; Howard refused fourteen times to give a straight answer. For Briffa, this is evidence of Howard’s basic honesty.
for what it’s worth, Howard at least didn’t lie. If it had been Blair, say, or Hattersley, he’d have just denied it and the whole thing would have been forgotten. Howard’s remembered for not dissembling. Not such a terrible thing, really. The Tories are about to choose a teller of uncomfortable truths as their leader.
Briffa seems to have completely forgotten why the sacking was controversial in the first place. Howard had explicitly denied in the House of Commons, in October 1995, that he’d instructed Lewis to suspend the governor. Unfortunately, his denial appears not to have been true, as Lewis and Ann Widdecombe, who was Howard’s junior minister at the time, were later to reveal. It’s worth quoting at length from Widdecombe’s speech to the House of Commons (available in Hansard), which scotched Howard’s leadership chances in the last leadership election but one.
I shall now turn to the censure debate in October 1995. My right hon. and learned Friend (i.e. Michael Howard) said “On Tuesday, the Leader of the Opposition made three allegations:”. He went on to list them and said that the first one was “that I personally told Mr. Lewis that the governor of Parkhurst should be suspended immediately;” He listed the other allegations, and said: “Each and every one of the allegations is untrue.”—[Official Report, 19 October 1995; Vol. 264, c. 524.] In other words, he categorically denied in the House that he had personally told Mr. Lewis that the governor of Parkhurst should be suspended immediately.
Some hon. Members may have watched “Newsnight” on Tuesday 13 May, in which my right hon. and learned Friend was far less categoric. He said of Mr. Lewis: “I gave him the benefit of my opinion in strong language.” I can tell the House that the “Newsnight” version is the correct one.
There is ample documentary evidence that my right hon. and learned Friend did indeed personally tell Mr. Lewis that the governor of Parkhurst should be suspended. The atmosphere at that meeting, attested to in the documents, is of fury and confrontation. I was told in a personal note by one of those present: “This was the subject of the worst disagreement. The Home Secretary wanted suspension, Derek Lewis adamantly refused.”
And even more to the point.
In the debate, my right hon. and learned Friend was asked by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin): “Mr. Lewis says that he was given a deadline by the right hon. and learned Gentleman by which to agree to the removal ofMr. Marriott, after which he would be overruled. Is that true?” My right hon. and learned Friend replied categorically: “There was no question of overruling the director general”.—[Official Report, 19 October 1995; Vol.264, c. 520.]
Oh, yes, there was. As he rather belatedly admitted last week, and as documentary evidence within the Department shows, after Mr. Lewis had been asked to reconsider his decision, my right hon. and learned Friend took advice on whether he could instruct Derek Lewis to suspend Mr. Marriott—this bearing in mind that he had told the House that he had not personally told Mr. Lewis that Marriott should be suspended.
This explains why Howard was at pains to avoid answering Paxman’s question. He’d previously made a statement to the House of Commons which, to put it kindly, was somewhat economical with the truth. He’d then been caught out. But if he acknowledged to Paxman that he had indeed instructed Lewis to suspend the governor of Parkhurst, he would effectively be admitting that he’d previously misled the House of Commons.
Now, Ann Widdecombe has Parliamentary privilege, and I don’t, so I’m going to forebear from commenting directly on Mr. Howard’s past record as a “teller of uncomfortable truths.” But I do invite you to draw your own conclusions, on the basis of the Parliamentary record, and of the interview itself, which I recommend you watch for entertainment value, if nothing else.
1 Link bloggered: scroll down
Michael Howard, the soon-to-be-leader of the British Conservative Party is clearly a man who is trying to reinvent himself. Chris Brooke of the excellent Virtual Stoa reminds us of one of the key paradoxes about the man : that the child of an asylum seeker has promoted policies under which his own father would have been denied entry to the UK. Tom Watson MP lists some of the reasons why Howard was once so reviled.
Via Libertarian Samizdata and the Telegraph comes further evidence that the British police are not particularly careful whom they employ:
A detective responsible for investigating racially motivated crime lives in a home filled with Nazi SS uniforms and tributes to Hitler, The Telegraph can reveal.
Det Con Linda Daniels, who is married to a known racist and BNP member who believes the Holocaust was “exaggerated”, works in the community safety unit at the police station in Notting Hill, one of the most ethnically diverse areas of London.
The unit, one of many set up across the city as a result of the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, investigates “hate crimes”, including “racist crime, domestic violence, homophobic crime and hate mail”.
Her home, however, which she shares with her 52-year-old husband Keith Beaumont, contains a life-size mannequin of a Nazi SS soldier, with swastikas on its helmet and belt, in the hallway.
Kudos to Samizdata’s David Carr for pointing to the story. The sentiments expressed in the accompanying comments thread (her private business, political-correctness-gone-mad, Trevor Phillips just as bad, blah , blah blah) are somewhat alarming).
An email this morning brings a copy of a begging letter from Guardian columnist Paul Foot, on behalf of his Socialist Workers Party (British version) comrades Lindsey German and Alex Callinicos. (Full text below). The letter arises because said “comrades” accused Quintin Hoare and Branka Magas, long-time scholars of the Balkans and, as it happens, friends of mine, of being apologists for the government of Holocaust revisionist Franjo Tujdman. Not unreasonably, given that the accusation was wholly false and a grave libel disseminated by the several thousand sellers of the SWP’s literature, Hoare and Magas sought the advice of m’learned friends. German and Callinicos have had to back down and apologise for thus damaging their reputation (apology here ). Foot’s letter appeals to the convention that disputes on the left should not be taken to the lawyers (a very convenient convention for a an influential and powerful organization which resorts to tabloid-style smears against its opponents). He also claims that “The publisher, Lindsey German and Alex Callinicos cannot possibly afford these sums.” Since the sum involved is about £13,000 and Foot and Callinicos at least are reasonably affluent, this claim is plainly untrue.
The text of Foot’s email:
This is an appeal to all socialists and free thinkers to contribute to the enormous costs of a case brought against socialists by socialists. In August last year, the editor of Socialist Review, Lindsey German, and Bookmarks Publications, the socialist publisher, got a letter from the well known libel lawyers Peter Carter-Ruck and Partners on behalf of their clients Quintin Hoare and Branca Magas.
The letter complained about an article written in 1993 by Alex Callinicos (who also got a letter) and included in the book The Balkans, Nationalism and Imperialism, published in 1999 by Bookmarks. The details of the complaint were spelled out in a statement read in open court recently. Hoare and Magas complained that one passage in the article meant they were both
‘apologists’ for Franjo Tudjman and his regime in Croatia.
This letter is not concerned with the allegations in the original publication. It has been a long tradition in the labour movement that arguments between socialists should be conducted openly and should not, except in extreme circumstances, be tested in the courts by the libel laws.
The reason for this tradition is simple. As soon as lawyers get involved in these arguments, the expense of the action in almost every case far exceeds both any damage done by the libel and anything a socialist publisher or author can possibly afford. This history of this case vindicates that tradition. Quintin Hoare and Branca Magas are well known in British left wing circles. From the outset Bookmarks Publications and Lindsey German made no attempt to justify their article. They sought to settle the matter as soon and as
cheaply as possible.
After much correspondence they agreed to make a statement in open court apologising for the article and agreeing to pay each of the plaintiffs £1,500. Carter-Ruck’s bill for these proceedings is likely to be over £10,000.
This means that the total bill for bringing the action and pursuing it, though it was undefended, is more than three times the payment made to the two people who made the complaint. And this for an item in a book whose total sale at Bookmarks and other bookshops in the year before the
complaint was less than 50!
At no stage did Mr Hoare or Ms Magas approach Bookmarks Publications without their lawyers. They went straight to their lawyers, at no expense to themselves, since Carter-Ruck were operating on a “no win, no fee” basis.
Bookmarks Publications is a small left wing publisher with very few funds, all of which go into developing new publications. The publisher, Lindsey German and Alex Callinicos cannot possibly afford these sums. Hence this appeal to anyone in the socialist and labour movement who would like to express their disapproval of pursuing political arguments through the law courts.
Paul Foot
Apologies for a post which will of necessity not be of interest to anyone who doesn’t follow UK politics, and will not necessarily be understood by anyone who doesn’t follow the media circus surrounding UK politics. But I’d just like to use the columns of Crooked Timber to send the following short message to people working in UK political journalism (I happen to know that at least two people in that circle read us).
If you think that you can prove that Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, has an alcohol problem, you should say so and risk being sued. If you can’t prove it, you should shut up about the subject. But either way, please spare us the current round of innuendo, jokes and photographs of the man with a glass in his hand. It’s childish, it’s dishonest and it’s unfair to your readers (like me) who end up without a clue as to whether this is a piece of common knowledge within Westminster that’s being hushed up, or just a piece of fairly childish and malicious injokery. You’re the bloody British press, not popbitch.
Sorry about that. I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
There’s a scathing piece about the competence of MI6 in today’s Guardian by Sir Peter Heap, once our (main) man in Brazil. Heap’s distinguished career in the Foreign Office has evidently exposed him to some bits of prime silliness by the spooks.
A taster:
As a diplomat who worked in nine overseas posts over 36 years, I saw quite a lot of MI6 at work. They were represented in almost all of those diplomatic missions. They presented themselves as normal career diplomats, but often, indeed usually, they were a breed apart. And it normally only took the local British community a few weeks to spot them. “That’s one of your spies,” they would say at an embassy social function. “Spies, what spies?” we would reply. “You’ve been watching too much television.” But they were usually spot on.In one capital, the MI6 officers rarely wore suits to the office while the rest of us did. “Why?” we asked. “Because we would stand out when we go outside the capital to meet our contacts,” they would reply. Maybe they scarcely noticed that they already stood out pretty distinctly in the city. If the local expatriates could identify them in weeks, it presumably only took hours for a hostile intelligence service to spot them, even if they did not know them by name already.
I’ve just discovered that complete versions of both Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are available on DVD. On to the wish list they go. And I recommend you follow those links and buy them yourself, too.
Question for discussion: Compare and contrast the political culture that gave us this series to the one that produced The West Wing.
The Yes Minister website throws up a classic dialog from the show on the value of opinion polls. Read on for details.
Sir Humphrey: “You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don’t want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Do you think they respond to a challenge?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?”
Bernard Woolley: “Oh…well, I suppose I might be.”
Sir Humphrey: “Yes or no?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told you can’t say no to that. So they don’t mention the first five questions and they publish the last one.”
Bernard Woolley: “Is that really what they do?”
Sir Humphrey: “Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren’t many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result.”
Bernard Woolley: “How?”
Sir Humphrey: “Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Are you worried about the growth of armaments?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes”
Sir Humphrey: “Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?”
Bernard Woolley: “Yes!”
Sir Humphrey: “There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample.”
A brief follow-up to Henry’s post covering the link between the nuttier strains of Ulster Unionism and the UK Conservative Party.
On reading Henry’s piece, I happened to remember that last year, the Conservative member for Basingstoke, one Andrew Hunter, decided to resign from the party and join the Democratic Unionists with a view to standing for the Stormont assembly in that interest.
There are two facts to which I’d draw attention:
But still: did the voters of Basingstoke know that was what they were getting?
The Hutton inquiry seems to mark the total dissolution of any boundary between reporting and commentary. (Perhaps this is the counterpart, on the journos side of the dissolution of the boundary between information and spin on the government’s side). A prime example is surely this report of yesterday’s evidence in the Guardian. The report places fantastic weight on one word in one sentence, a word which admits of another quite reasonable and sensible interpretation. To whit:
The dramatic last-minute call to come up with new evidence was contained in an email from an unnamed intelligence official. It said Downing Street wanted the document “to be as strong as possible within the bounds of available intelligence”.
The word “strong” is taken by the Guardian’s reporters as a synonym for - to use the current parlance - “sexy”. But “strong” might just as well mean something like “robust” in this context. It also seems reasonable that the government should wish that its briefings be the opposite of “weak”. (I don’t mean to single out the Guardian especially here, almost every report extrapolates an angle from the tiniest detail.)
I missed the beginning of the Hutton Inquiry and I’m only just beginning to catch up. The details of yesterday’s evidence have been pushed down the headlines by the bigger news from Iraq and Israel, but it seems to me at least that yesterday’s evidence marks a major shift in favour of the government and against the BBC. Campbell performed well, but the really important revelation was Andrew Gilligan’s email to an aide of Liberal Democrat MP David Chidgey (Original email here). Gilligan - himself an “unsatisfactory witness” to the same select committee - is revealed both to have planted (if that’s not too strong a word) some of the questions that put David Kelly under so much pressure, and (despite having huffed and puffed about the need for journalists to protect sources) effectively “outed” Kelly as the source for his colleague Susan Watts. No wonder the BBC’s support for Gilligan seems to be fading, with their reaction limited to an anodyne “We are looking at this e-mail and will deal with it in the context of the Hutton inquiry.”
We shouldn’t forget, of course, that the government deliberately focused on the narrow issue of Campbell’s role in their row with the BBC in order to deflect attention from the big issue of whether the WMD case for war was deliberately exaggerated. But as far as the immediate political battle goes, the BBC looks to be on the ropes.
Thanks to Mick Fealty, who left a comment in the “Sources” thread below, for the pointer to David Steven’s piece on the blogging activities of Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist at the centre of the Kelly/sexed-up dossier affair.
The whole business of whether the “dodgy dossier” was “sexed up” by the British government and whether Andrew Gilligan’s report about it also went beyond what he was entitled to claim looks likely to damage all concerned in the wake of Dr David Kelly’s suicide. I’m trying to keep an open mind about the various possibilities, though things look much less good for the BBC today, in the light of their admission that Kelly was the source for Gilligan’s story. The BBC have also shown poor judgement in getting former Guardian editor Peter Preston to pontificate in their defence. Writing about journalists’ duty to protect their sources Preston observes:
if your source talked to you under conditions of anonymity, would you do everything in your power to protect him - including maintaining silence even after he’d identified himself to his bosses and talked, not entirely frankly, to the foreign affairs select committee?Of course. No question of that either. Sources come in many shapes, forms and conditions of confidentiality. Once they place their faith in you, your faith and your room for manoeuvre belongs to them; and after their death, their family.
Can this be the same Peter Preston who, in the early 1980s, complied with a court order to reveal that civil servant Sarah Tisdall was the source of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian? Tisdall was subsequently sentenced to six months in prison.
I’m surprised this one didn’t get all that much play in the weblog world; Gorgeous George finally filed suit the week before last against the Telegraph. There was a lot of suspicion going round earlier that he wasn’t going to; Telegraph editor Charles Moore has certainly been talking a bit of smack to this effect. My guess is that what has happened is that Galloway has reached a point where he is reasonably confident that he will be able to finance the Telegraph suit out of the proceeds of a settlement with the Christian Science Monitor. I’m pretty sure that the CSM will settle; they’ve been caught bang to rights, and their apology won’t count all that much since they made it after Galloway sued them. Soon we’ll find out what kind of barrister GG’s retained, and shortly after that we’ll find out if the Telegraph is really as confident as they appear, or whether they’ve been bluffing a pair of deuces, hoping that with his charity under investigation and the Arabic contributors who’ve supported his lifestyle over the last few years perhaps backing off a little, he wouldn’t be able to afford the price of a ticket. If the Telegraph ends up settling, though, we will have been deprived of what could potentially have been a wonderfully entertaining trial.
As you might guess from the above, I’m a libel fan, even perhaps a “buff”. I love high-profile politicals libel trials; they’re usually more intellectually challenging than showbiz ones, and they usually end up establishing some important precedent which helps expand the frontiers of free speech. Furthermore, there’s always the chance that somebody will perjure themselves and end up in clink (Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian should be heartily congratulated for having inaugurated the British newspaper tradition of celebrating a won libel case by passing over your files to the boys in blue; normally I don’t approve of snitching, but it has certainly helped to restrict the overuse of the libel courts by celebrities and sportsmen). To help try and share my enthusiasm with others, here’s a sort of “pre-season guide” to the form, some of the background and some things to look out for to enchance your armchair libel enjoyment.
There are five main defences against a libel action under English law; absolute and qualified privilege, truth, fair comment and innocent dissemination. There are also a couple of rarer ones; “vulgar abuse” isn’t libel, and you can’t libel someone who is already so publicly disgaced that he has no reputation worth protecting, but the big five are the only ones that you’d expect to see seriously advanced in a court of law. Absolute privilege and innocent dissemination clearly couldn’t apply to the Telegraph articles, and I very much doubt that anyone would bother trying to claim that they were purely comment, so we’re basically down to two possibilities.
Truth
To be honest, I think that the Telegraph is on a sticky wicket with this one, and I very much doubt that they will try to use it. They are probably on strong ground with respect to the authenticity of their documents; the experts who knocked down the CSM papers appear to have said that the Telegraph ones have all the key characteristics of official Iraqi documents, but that isn’t likely to be the matter of Galloway’s complaint. The point is that, in all likelihood, the Telegraph would have to prove that the actual allegations were true and that Galloway actually did take the money, and the burden of proof is all on them.
(By the way, it is often regarded to be a terrible injustice that the burden of proof is on the defendant in libel trials. This isn’t the case. The burden of proof is on you if you decide to use truth as your defence. As with any other defence, you have to prove that it’s valid to use it, or it isn’t a defence at all. If you’re making a statement that is potentially defamatory, you jolly well ought to be able to prove it beyond reasonable doubt.)
Proving that Galloway took the cash is going to be next to impossible. All he has to do is stick to his story; that he had no knowledge of the documents and never met the guy who wrote them, and unless he does an Aitken (embellishes an otherwise winnable libel case with an unnecessary but provably false statement made under oath), he’s in the clear. The Telegraph hasn’t proved that he took the money (only that some Iraqi documents say he did), and if it’s found that they claimed that he did, then they’ve libelled him.
Of course, this turns on the question of how the court interprets the Telegraph articles. A modified version of the defence involves a hybrid of truth and fair comment; establishing that the assertion that the documents were genuine (truth) and that everything else the Telegraph said was fair comment on the fact that the documents said what they said. It’s an attractive defence, but my worry about it is that something of the sort was tried by the Guardian in the Jonathan Aitken libel case and it didn’t work. There, Mr Justice Popplewell found that the Guardian had accused Aitken of procuring prostitutes for Arab businessmen and that they couldn’t hide behind the defence that they were only reporting that people had said things to them. As I say above, if Aitken had stuck to suing them on this specific claim, he would almost certainly have won, but unfortunately the need to clear his name for his political career meant that he had to also sue them on a number of other matters, which led him into the perjury. The Telegraph’s lawyers will be aware of the precedent, and it looks to me as if they have attempted to ensure that the Telegraph stories on the Iraqi documents are a bit more tightly worded than the Guardian’s stories on Aitken, but I’m not sure they’d be so massively confident that the lawyering has been watertight as to rely on it in court. In general, the British courts have been of the opinion that if you print it, you own it.
Qualified privilege
More likely, according to the blatts I read, is that the Telegraph will claim a defence of qualified privilege. Privileged statements are not libellous even if they are both false and defamatory. The difference between absolute and qualified privilege is that the small class of statements covered by absolute privilege (basically, testimony in courts and proceedings of the Houses of Parliament) cannot be libellous in any circumstance, while statements covered by qualified privilege are not libellous so long as they were not made maliciously. The idea is that the doctrine of qualified privilege is that there are some kinds of statement which ought to be held to a looser standard than others. For example, there is a qualified privilege for people defending themselves against an attack (a precedent established by the McLibel trial). On the face of it, the Telegraph might think about wanting to sue Galloway for accusing them of printing forged documents (a claim he has stopped making), but I doubt they will bother to do so as this is the sort of remark that would be covered by qualified privilege. There’s a decent summary of the relevant law available here
There are all sorts of ways in which a defence of qualified privilege might be available, but the interesting one is the one available under Section 15 of the Defamation Act 1996, which allow qualified privilege for “material that is of public concern and for the public benefit”. The UK newspaper industry has been all over this one for years, as it looks as if there might be enough of a loophole there that the section could be stretched into a generalised public interest defence of the sort which is available to (though scandalously rarely used by) the American press. The case of Reynolds vs. Times Newspapers in 19991 brought us a step closer with this judgement, which might be enough to work with, if the Telegraph can show that publishing the evidence about George Galloway was in the public interest and that they weren’t ludicrously unfair to him.
There are two great things about this defence (for me; from the point of view of settling the actual issue it’s amazingly frustrating; win or lose, Galloway’s name is neither cleared nor blackened). First, if the Telegraph wins, it establishes a public interest defence which can be used profitably on all sorts of future occasions. Second, because everything turns on whether there was a legitimate public interest in publishing evidence which tended to discredit a prominent spokesman against the war, there is a massive opportunity for Galloway’s lawyers to turn the whole thing into a massive judicial referendum on the war. Particularly, they can start calling all sorts of loose cannon witnesses from the fringes of the intelligence community. They’ll also be able to get loads of serving MI6 officers into the dock to testify under oath “Yes, sometimes we forge documents”. It will all be tremendous fun, and will keep the general issue of dodgy dossiers and lies about Iraq in the newspapers for at least six months. Pull up a deckchair and a copy of Halsbury’s Laws of England, sit back and enjoy. The cricket’s going to be rubbish anyway.
I don’t suppose anyone will mistake this for legal advice, by the way, but just to keep things clear, it isn’t.
1The former Taoiseach of Ireland sued the Sunday Times for an article entitled “Goodbye Gombeen Man” which claimed he’d lied to the Dail. The jury found that he hadn’t, but awarded damages of a penny because they thought the article wasn’t malicious. The Sunday Times tried to get awarded costs because the lack of malice meant they’d have a full defence if the article was covered by qualified privilege. It went to the House of Lords, who chucked it out, but seemed to leave the door open.)
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