Hopes and dreams

I suppose crass Second World War analogies have a new lease of life as Libya produces its very own Rudolph Hess. One can only hope that this time it really does presage the collapse of the regime. Elsewhere, there is greater uncertainty. The courage shown by those confronting the Syrian regime is breathtaking, born of the same hunger for change and liberty, with no sign of the regime cracking under the pressure. This is from a new web site that should be essential reading.

Like all his fellow dictators, the Syrian president speaks to his public as if addressing children. So Assad does not talk sense or logic. Instead he discusses reform priorities and gives the example of bread and freedom to convince us that food is more important than liberty and to tell us that he won’t lift the emergency law.

He neglects to recognise that the regime stole people’s food through instituting the emergency law. The absence of freedom legitimised and helped the robbery. If Assad had to chose between a daily luxury meal in prison – the Saidnaya military prison, for instance – and regular food in liberty, what would he chose? But his regime does not give us a choice. It steals the people’s food and keeps them in a big jail at the same time.

We only hope that Assad’s speech is not the opening shot in a series of large-scale massacres and arrests, because that seems to be the subtext of his message.

Burkes and Paines

As the Arab rebellions continue across the region, it is as if a legion of Tom Paines are sweeping through the Middle East. I haven't seen the demonstrators waving copies of The Rights of Man, but their sentiments seem to match entirely Paine's support for democratic revolutions to destroy the old autocracy; "Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government".

For every Paine there seems to be an Edmund Burke*; anti-revolutionary, distrusting radical enthusiasms, advocating slow, incremental change. They are becoming more visible as a result of the UN intervention in Libya, though they had always been there, expressing reservations about the revolutions themselves, often making their governments hesitant. They don't ostensibly support the existing regimes, but would prioritise stability over rapid change.

A few Burkes are drawn into denial if not outright apologism. For example, Richard Falk can actually write,

The main pretext given for the intervention was the vulnerability of Libyan civilians to the wrath of the Gaddafi regime. But there was little evidence of such wrath beyond the regime's expected defence of the established order, although admittedly being here undertaken in a brutal manner, which itself is not unusual in such a situation.

But mostly they produce this sort of stuff from Abdelkader Benali - it could be seen as a Western plot, it looks like a tribal war between rival regions, better to have a broader coalition, more Arab involvement is needed, etc., etc. Sometimes the sceptics give credence to regime propaganda, raising the spectre of Al Qaeda or the risk that something could go terribly wrong in the aftermath. Thankfully in Libya, the Paines seized the day at the last minute, though the Burkes still rumble on about not exceeding the UN resolution or not backing regime change, rather than accepting that whilst Gaddafi remains so does the threat to civilian lives. This caution produces talk about a cease fire or even partition, both of which would cement Gaddafi's position in the west and allow him to regroup and rearm. Neither policies have a great pedigree, though both are wonderful excuses for inaction.

And so the debate over Libya is much the same as the one Burke and Paine had over France in the 1790s; the radical, democratic activist against the cautious, conservative reformist. One of the odd things is how conservatism seems to have infected the left, whilst some on the right have become revolutionary sympathisers.

I am temperamentally disposed to be a Paine, so I dislike this cautious conservatism. In Libya it played for time when there was none left, hoping for a fait accompli, meaning that western governments could wring their hands over the coming repression without having to actually do anything about it. And what really strikes me is that the whole critique is based on a pessimistic assessment of what might be, not what actually is. They are fearful, when reality often tells a different story.

There are strengths to a Burkean analysis. Revolutions can go very wrong indeed, especially when informed by impossibilist ideologies. Yet this is not what is happening in the Middle East. What is being demanded is something humdrum, the dignity of an ordinary life lived in the sort of polities that people have seen on satellite TV, on YouTube, or experienced as students in the west. A type of regime where 250,000 people can march against a government policy and even indulge in some minor rioting, without deaths, shooting, arbitrary arrests and torture. They want something that we live with and take for granted, usually grumbling about the harshness of our lot all the while.

This maybe our everyday reality, but we tend to forget that it too needed to be fought for. Here in Manchester we remember our own massacre, nearly two hundred years ago, of peaceful demonstrators demanding the vote. Far more recently we have experienced fascism, war and genocide. We know that there is much that can go wrong, that victory comes with imperfections. We can be certain that once new regimes are in place that there will be a longer struggle for women's emancipation, something that always lags behind when male public freedom often means continuing female public and private oppression. Women's liberation needs its own activism and mobilisation. Even so, today, when we see people struggling and dying to bring down the nasty police states that they were born into and to claim their own imperfect freedom, their own slice of normality, the least we can do is offer some practical solidarity, abandon faux neutrality and search for the Tom Paine inside us.

*Sometimes this should be confused with a berk. For those that don't know, the word 'berk' comes from Cockney rhyming slang - Berkeley Hunt ...

Remember

"No matter how vast the skyscrapers and powerful the cannon, no matter how limitless the power of the State, no matter how mighty the empire, all this is only mist and fog and - as such - will be blown away. Only one true force continues to evolve and live; and this force is liberty. To a human, to live means to be free."

Vasily Grossman
Everything Flows

Choosing sides

In another restatement of conservative isolationism, Simon Jenkins writes,

It is a mystery why Cameron chose Libya for his exercise in neocon "destiny shaping". There are a dozen other candidates that might have succumbed sooner to his aggression.

There is no mystery at all. There is one reason and one reason alone. It is simply because the people who made the popular revolution against Gaddafi asked for it. Once it became clear that the response to anti-regime protests in Libya was to be a massacre of the demonstrators, they asked for western intervention, without troops on the ground or an occupation, to support and protect them. After they had taken up arms as the dictatorship declared war on its people, faced with certain defeat by superior fire-power and only too aware of Gaddafi's promise not to be merciful, they begged for it.

There were only two possible responses that could have been given. Yes, we will offer support on precisely the terms you have requested, with all the uncertainties and difficulties that may follow. Or no, you are on your own, with all the terrible certainties about the consequences for the people.

Cameron, Sarkozy, Obama and the United Nations did not choose Libya, the Libyan people chose them. There are people I know, like and respect (this does not include Simon Jenkins by the way) who think we should have said no. But I, for one, was overwhelmingly relieved that we said yes.

UPDATE
Read Faud Ajami here

The warrant came from the Libyan people who pleaded for help and made a case for that help by their own bravery. These were not people sitting on the sidelines, or idling their time away in exile. They were men and women in a long captivity anxious to reclaim their tormented country.

Bureaucracy

Misery

Apparently the misery index is now at its highest point since ... er ... the last time the Tories were in power. Here is Faisal Islam of Channel 4 News:

The concept of the “Misery Index” is a simple economic concept that adds the ills of inflation and unemployment together into a single measure of our financial despondency. Today’s figures mean that in February 2011 it hit the highest level since Oct ’92 just after Britain was forced out of the ERM (and the then Chancellor was advised by a young Tory hotshot called David Cameron).

So at a time of gathering gloom, international crisis and natural disaster, compounded by deeply irritating news coverage and someone filling my wheelie bin with builder's rubble, how about some reasons for me to be cheerful.

The Arab revolutions are hanging on in there (with a little belated help from their friends). Hull has displayed its best republican traditions by being the only city in the UK not to host a street party for the royal wedding (actually, to be precise, nobody has applied for a license - good Yorkshire folk won't waste money on a bit of paper allowing them to get pissed when they can do it for nowt). Swinton Rugby League Club are on the up, winning again, with supporters coming back and being fun to watch (a grand old club is reviving; we just need that new stadium). I already have my pension. And finally, there is a very welcome new life in the world.

Yep, I can find reasons to be cheerful - hope you can too.

Cuckoo

It is like the first cuckoo in spring. Any action by the west, NATO or the UN is inevitably heralded by a batty column from Robert Fisk. Today's is a pearler.

As far as I can follow the tortuous logic and weird non-sequiturs, he asserts that the intervention is all about regime change (hmm... I thought that is what revolutions were usually about), oil and western hypocrisy. Then ... oh yes ... these are only "rebels" in scare quotes, it is really all about tribalism, Gaddafi has support in Tripoli, it could all fail as well, something worse could follow and, finally, he asks why don't we deal with other tyrants (when, if we did, we would see an identical column from him condemning it in the same terms) etc., etc., etc.

This is lazy blogging, fish in a barrel stuff, but he isn't alone and it seems to me that he is typical of the critics of the UN decision on Libya. They abdicate judgement in favour of cynicism.

Non-intervention in any conflict is not an act of neutrality, it ensures the victory of the strongest. Though there have been unsuccessful and only partially successful interventions in the past, there have also been some catastrophic non-interventions. Every situation involves risks and requires judgements to be made. There is the utilitarian calculation as to both the possible effectiveness and feasibility of intervention. However, the most important one is not merely a calculation of self-interest, though that always plays a part, but a moral, political and humanitarian one - the need to stand with those who demand liberty and democracy in the face of fascism and to oppose the mass murder of citizens by their own governments. The judgement made by the UN was undoubtedly, if belatedly, the right one. Let us hope it works.

From the jaws of defeat

Libyans in Benghazi demonstrate their agreement with the Stop the War Coalition.

More scenes from the Libyan Youth Movement here.

And just in case you wonder why, read this from yesterday:

The global community must act to stop Gaddafi and his forces reaching Benghazi. If he gets here, he will kill everyone.

At last

The UN Security Council has backed a no-fly zone over Libya and "all necessary measures" short of an invasion "to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas".

Arse

Marc Abrahams writes:

In 1995, the Ig Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to two surgeons who painstakingly assembled a study called Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature. Those case reports involve, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; 11 different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a jeweller's saw; a frozen pig's tail; a tin cup; a beer glass; and one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.

Which, rather worryingly from a psychoanalytical point of view, brought to mind this item from Greece.

That’s a really huge radish! It weights seven kilos! Farmer Stavros Stavrianoudakis grew it in his farm in the Agioi Deka area on the island of Crete.

Now that would bring tears to your eyes.

Shame

So after the great Arab revolution comes the great Arab repression. The catalyst is the failure to support the Libyan uprising. If the USA can not only stand by and allow such an unambiguously evil act to take place, but also block others' frantic attempts to secure help, then dictators the world over can sleep soundly and let loose their security forces. We still don't know what the final outcome will be yet, though it seems clear that thousands of brave people who wished to live in dignity and freedom will die cruel deaths simply for wanting something that we take for granted.

This was a great historical opportunity, a chance for a momentous transformation of the Middle East. The failure to understand this, welcome it without reservation and then to take action to support it is a crime. Obama is not the first Nobel peace laureate to have blood on his hands.

Black comedy

I now realise that Pontius Pilate was showing solidarity. Marvellous.

Solidarity with those fighting for their democratic and national freedom is our obligation. We can best discharge it by demanding that the government at long last takes its hands off the Middle East and its people, leaving them to settle accounts with their own rulers.

Surely that should read, 'leaving rulers to settle accounts with their own people' (ed).

The Middle East doesn't seem to agree:

The Arab League endorsed the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya on Saturday and recognized the fledgling rebel movement seeking to topple Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi as the country’s legitimate government, increasing pressure on Western powers to intervene

Crime news

Bill Neely reports:

The town, 30 miles from Tripoli, fell to Gaddafi's son Khamis, who runs the 32nd Brigade, described by US diplomats as the best trained and best armed of all Gaddafi's forces. They're also known as the Deterrent Battalion and they are now involved in a second and rather more chilling clean-up operation.

They are sweeping through Zawiya, rounding up young men they suspect might have been involved in the rebellion. As we left, we saw one young man inside a speeding jeep, bloodstains on his shirt and a soldier virtually standing on him. Troops are going house to house, according to one resident, rounding up dozens of suspects. We talked to one man who said: "People are being arrested for no reason, people who stayed in their homes for the whole seven days of the fighting. You cannot imagine what is happening here."

And as the rebels beg for assistance, NATO and the EU, taking their lead from the United States, have boldly and resolutely decided to do nothing.

Whereas a former US Air Force Chief of Staff thinks replicating the successful no-fly zone over Northern Iraq would be "easy", the Obama administration sees nothing but difficulties whilst, "The director of national intelligence declared before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a chilling example of self-fulfilling prophecy, that 'over the longer term Qaddafi will prevail.'"

One can only hope that Neely is right when he says, " Zawiya may prove a pyrrhic victory for the Great Leader". If he is wrong, heaven knows what horrors will be unleashed on the Libyan people.

The failure to grasp the significance of the revolutions sweeping the Arab world is bad enough, but the fatalistic acceptance of the triumph of violence over liberty is shocking. There is no sense of America remotely understanding where its real interests lie.

And if Gaddafi does win you can see it all now. There will be a brief period of quarantine and then respected journals and earnest editorials will pronounce that there are signs of reform, that a new generation is in charge, that there are 'moderate elements' gaining ground. And whilst this blather smothers the screams emanating from the torture chambers, trade deals will be done, the regime will be 'brought in from the cold', universities will, no doubt nervously, eye the offer of money for prestigious new buildings before snatching the cash and making some self-righteous pronouncement about 'building bridges'.

All the while Arab eyes will be turned towards this masquerade, filled with hate. They will have learned one thing from this woeful inaction; that the West is an enemy of freedom and a friend to tyrants. And they will not forget.

Reality

"My wife scored zero points ...The test was a total waste of time; it was all physically orientated, nothing about her mental state. They asked things like 'Can you brush your teeth?' How that relates to mental health issues is beyond me. It was overthrown at tribunal. I can only describe it as mental torture; she was a mental wreck after it."

"I am waiting for a tribunal, but I'm told that it won't be before June, because there are so many people waiting. I'm stuck on the £65 benefit until then," a woman with ME said, and began to cry.

Just a few quotes from evidence given to the work and pensions select committee at a public meeting about the new work capability assessment for eligibility for disability benefits. This is just the latest in a long series of media reports about the way the test is failing comprehensively. Here we have a toxic mix of outsourcing, incompetence, lack of expertise, spending cuts and a loaded political agenda about 'ending the sick-note culture' running up against a determination not to lose political face by actually listening to the truth. I can't help feeling that a 'scrounger' driven agenda is little more than institutional cruelty.

In the meantime the select committee has come up with a startling new idea:

The chair, Dame Anne Begg (Labour, Aberdeen South), said this was the first time in her nine years on the committee that MPs had ventured out and talked to real people. "We should do this kind of thing more," she said.

I always like the notion of "real people". It makes you wonder what the others are. Surreal people probably, after all we currently have government in the style of Dali.

Resistance

Tonight I watched the superb film, Sophie Scholl, about the arrest and execution of members of the White Rose Group, part of the German resistance to Hitler. It is an intelligent, understated and beautifully written film.

As I viewed it, I could not help but think of the hundreds of similar dramas being played out in prison cells and torture chambers across the globe - right now - as I type this. I also watched the news tonight with irritation and frustration as a foreign policy 'expert' talked of the danger of a no-fly zone in Libya. He said that immediately Gadaffi knew about it he would place human shields by the anti-aircraft guns or move them near to schools or hospitals, preventing an attack on air defences without which a no-fly zone could not succeed. He failed to explain how an anti-aircraft gun in Tripoli could stop planes from protecting the rebels from air attack in Benghazi.

I have seen and read so many excuses for inaction in recent days whilst Gadaffi uses the time to cement his power and organise his security forces to defend the regime. Yet, as Christopher Hitchens puts it,

Doing nothing is not the absence of a policy; it is, in fact, the adoption of one. "Neutrality" favors the side with the biggest arsenal. "Nonintervention" is a form of interference. If you will the end—and President Barack Obama has finally said that Qaddafi should indeed go—then to that extent you will the means.

And in this vacuum of inaction who knows how many brave protesters, Libyan Sophie Scholls, are facing their own premature deaths or incarceration in unspeakable places for the crime of demanding freedom whilst the democracies dither.

Academic affairs

He's not the first and no doubt not the last,

It’s evidence of a towering intellect at work – an aspect of Saif’s personality we know escaped people who met him and even tried to teach him.

And the odd million quid made no difference at all, obviously. The tangled morality drama continues with revelations about Anthony Giddens' jolly to Libya, the fruits of which you can read here.* He won't be the only one cringing at the moment, Benjamin Barber's "recipe for peace and partnership" will be a piece he will regret for ever more.

This is much more than a story about gullibility, it reflects the difficulties faced by universities as they are driven to find funding from ever more dubious sources and an associated abandoning of an academic ethic in favour of a commercial one. The dilemmas are often real enough, would I have turned down that sort of money for adult education? Mind you, I doubt if the proceeds of the systematic looting of a nation would ever be offered to anything so humble and this points to something else.

The use of prestigious educational institutions to enhance the reputations of dodgy regimes is a lot cheaper, and far more respectable, than buying a football club and is an opportunity made more available by the amoral temptations inherent in unpredictable and inadequate funding. But this is not all. These deals only come to those at the top of the system and are grasped often as a way of keeping the elite in the elite. I can't see a queue of Russian oligarchs and Gulf State potentates lining up to buy Swinton Rugby League Club. Morals are being abandoned to hold on to status as much as to maintain financial viability. After all, status and power are such comfortable bedfellows.

At least one leader has fallen, yet the main one clings on and no PR company will help him, only Western dithering and available fire-power matters here.

*And if you think that is embarrassing try reading The Third Way.

"An old-fashioned revolution"

Salman Rushdie on moving beyond the politics of religion.



Via

The Barcelona of the North

That was one slogan the marketing people dreamt up to sell Hull to the world. Yesterday, on a grey, cool early spring day it was more Alfred Hitchcock than Luis Bunuel.

But, my, was it good to be back and see all my old friends. Hull is a great place, lovely people, distinctively quirky.

When I left my old job over a year ago I was distraught at what I had lost - not just leaving behind a long career in adult education, but the 'troika nights' in a local curry house, the chats about jazz and rugby league in the house of a friend instead of doing what I was supposed to do and teach him how to use his computer, the early evening meals at Pave in splendid company. I needn't have worried. They are still there, as are my friends, waiting to be enjoyed. And today, back in Manchester, I'm still smiling.

In denial

I have just finished reading James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's excellent Climate Cover-up, an analysis of the methods of climate change deniers written by the creators of DeSmog Blog. The difference between this and the many other books around at the moment is that it examines the campaign itself, rather than the science. Surprised to see the sudden emergence of dissent, often from people with little or no experience in climate science, at the very moment that decades of detailed research had coalesced into a mainstream scientific consensus about the nature, causes and consequences of climate change, the authors spotted something that was firmly within their area of expertise - a public relations exercise.

They found that underlying the denial movement was a campaign, often using the same techniques, and sometimes the same people, that had been used by tobacco companies to obfuscate the links between smoking and health. And the motivation was also the same. It was instigated by corporations, in this case the energy companies, to limit the impact of scientific evidence on public policy that they perceived as a threat to their interests. Rather than seeing a real controversy Hogan and Littlemore identified the existence of a highly professional campaign of disinformation.

The basis of this campaign was not alternative scientific research, the book points out that the industries' private investigations confirmed the scientific consensus, nor was it attempting to prove that human-made global warming did not exist. What it was trying to do was to create an impression that there was no consensus amongst scientists, that a debate still existed and, by doing so, attempt to forestall and delay political actions on climate change that could damage their profits. Once such an impression was established, the media's fetish with 'balance' would ensure that reports would include 'both sides of the argument', increasing the impression of doubt and debate despite it being, in reality, entirely absent amongst the experts.

The technique they used is simple, but very clever. The first move is to start an "astroturf campaign". This is a neat way of describing the creation of an artificial grass-roots movement. It is done by mass letter writing, emailing, article writing, blogging, etc. It is no use at this stage trying to get things published in the national press, instead they targeted local and regional media. These are likely to be more open to the material than better resourced and staffed publications and to accept items that more prestigious organisations would probably reject at this stage. A growing presence in local reporting and secondary media provides the basis for gaining a national presence.

Secondly, they created an "echo chamber". That involved setting up a range of organisations that would repeat and confirm the assertions. Tame experts were hired and oil money poured into existing and new think tanks with impressive titles, if far less impressive levels of scientific respectability. And this is where the campaigners struck gold. The arguments against the scientific consensus gained a life of their own, not through the cynical espousal of a corporate agenda but through wholehearted, utterly honest and obsessively passionate believers that sixty-years of detailed, empirical research amounted either to a massive conspiracy to distort the truth or to a colossal error made simultaneously by thousands of scientists, an error exposed, in the best tradition of much popular entertainment, by some enterprising amateurs, a whole raft of Miss Marples confounding the experts by their superior powers of deduction.

When the book deals with some of the issues themselves it points out that the main case against the scientific consensus consists of 'zombie arguments'. These are ideas and supposed evidence that have been put forward, fully examined, shown to be false, firmly laid to rest, yet are still bouncing around the echo chamber as if they had never been contested. The standards applied to the undead are not those applied to mainstream climate science where self-confessed errors of detail and continuing areas of uncertainty are misrepresented as totally invalidating the whole thesis.

What the book can't explain is the success of denial, where polling evidence suggests substantial minorities in the developed world now favour its arguments and political movements, such as much right libertarianism, have uncritically adopted it as their orthodoxy. Why has something constructed as an echo chamber turned into a hugely amplified loudspeaker system? All Hoggan and Littlemore can do is register their alarm and astonishment that something so empirically flawed should actually be growing rather than diminishing.

I suppose we should really expect this. Whenever we see a threat there is always a movement of counter-intuitive, reassuring ideas that deny either the importance of that threat or sometimes its very existence. Let's look at an historical example, the peace movement in inter-war Britain. It is impossible to deny that pacifism is both serious and deeply moral. It is an expression of a physical revulsion at the horror and brutality of war, reflects a deep conviction that its evils undermine any good that may emerge and that it needs to be eradicated by non-violent action. Necessarily, it is a minority movement. When Orwell wrote that "pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist" he was being unfair. Pacifism abhors fascism, militarism, imperialism, dictatorship and all the vehicles by which war is manufactured. What he was right about was that the consequences of a policy informed by pacifism would have ensured the triumph of the Nazis.

In the 1930's pacifism broke out of being a tiny sect and entered the mainstream. The Peace Pledge Union was formed after a letter by Rev Dick Sheppard in the Guardian (where else?) invited people to write in and pledge that they would "renounce war and never again support another." Hundreds of thousands of people eventually did so. And this movement too was built on denial, the roots of which lay in an entirely rational fear. What was being denied here was the real nature of the Nazis and the horrible sacrifices that were necessary if they were to be defeated. Hard core pacifists did not duck the issue, but the bulk of the supporters were drawn into a form of magical thinking, that their moral purity would somehow spare them from the attentions of Hitler by touching his reasonableness and humanity. It took fifty million corpses to prove them wrong.

And this is the whole point about denial in all forms, it only really takes off when the threat is real. Only then do we see something marginal begin to move into the mainstream. The book recounts how, as the evidence piles up, climate change deniers are shifting their attention to the promotion of ameliorative technologies as an alternative to reducing emissions or even arguing that global warming will be beneficial, anything to avoid facing the consequences of dealing with the causes of a warming world. Caught between helplessness and hedonism people turn away and, to paraphrase Orwell, sleep the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the lapping waters of rising seas.

Soft bigotry

It isn't as obscene as Daniel Ortega's reported comments in Nicaragua, that Gadaffi '"is again waging a great battle" to defend the unity of his nation', but the slow, equivocal and hesitant response by Western governments to the risings in the Middle East has disappointed. Today the main political row is about whether the government has acted quickly enough to get British nationals out of Libya, rather than the failure to apply sanctions and enforce a no-fly zone as the anti-Gaddafi forces are calling for.

In addition, the welcome given to the successful revolutions has hardly been ecstatic. This isn't just because the overturned regimes were, embarrassingly, strong allies and reliable customers for the weapons that they used to keep their people downtrodden, there is also a note of caution about what comes next. It seemed that every news broadcast I watched during the Egyptian revolution raised the question as to whether this was to pave the way for an Islamic state (ignoring the demonstrations against just such a state in Iran), despite the vehement declarations of the protesters that this was not the case. Now the discussion is more about the danger of power vacuums. These, of course, were some of the justifications for support that the dictatorships offered the West - it is us or something worse. Although, looking at the events in Libya, you have to wonder what on earth could be worse. Gadaffi's rehabilitation over recent years has been one of the most odious pieces of Realpolitik I can recall.

So why should this be? In this piece Issandr El Amrani resurrects a wonderful phrase, "the soft bigotry of lowered expectations", to explain the West's uncertainty.

For several decades, there has been a soft bigotry of lowered expectations in the west and among Arab elites about the Arab world. The prevalent thinking about this region of over 300 million souls is that it offered no fertile ground for democracy, either because democracy risked bringing political forces hostile to western interests or because democracy is not a value that has much currency in the region.

The phrase was originally used in an educational context. I recognise precisely what it describes and the resultant damage to the confidence of some of the amazing people I have taught in adult education, where our job was one of reconstruction and encouragement. I expected wonderful things from my students and was rarely disappointed. Shouldn't we be feeling the same about the new opposition to the vile kleptocratic dictatorships that litter the Middle East? Shouldn't these democratic risings, these demands for freedom, be unalloyed good news? Isn't it possible to argue that the protests are evidence of the defeat of theocracy in many parts of the Arab world, its marginalisation and its irrelevance to the aspirations of the people?

Of course there are real dangers of the revolutions being betrayed, though that is less likely if more international support is forthcoming. But El Amrani puts it beautifully:

Libyans are not condemned to be ruled by Gaddafis for eternity; Moroccans do not have to settle for an absolute monarchy, no matter how enlightened. Encouraged by their neighbours' example, they have higher expectations for their future, and so should you.

Creativity against nihilism

In this context, the opposite of nihilism is creativity. The mood for change, the hunger for individual freedom that is spreading through the Middle East, is an opportunity more than it is a threat. When Egyptians decide en masse to reform their society and think constructively, and take responsibility for their nation into their own hands, they will be less inclined to blame outsiders for all their misfortunes. This is precisely the time to restart the peace process. The new situation demands bold creative political thinking, not a retreat to the sourness of the bunker mentality, or an advance behind yet more concrete.

Ian McEwan

Read it all - yes, you really should read it all.

Only one

The gallery is described as "the barracks where Adolf Hitler began his rise to power". As the old ditty would have it, the main exhibit of a single red ball seems rather appropriate.

The people's sport

At least the prices hit the headlines. The European Champions League final is to be held at Wembley this year and the cheapest seat available on open sale is £176. This is the cue for interminable meanderings about queuing up to pay 2/6d to watch Best, Law and Charlton - not that I saw much, short stature and shallow terracing had a lot to answer for in those days. Some things have got better. We used to sneer at 'armchair supporters' who would only watch on TV, now that is all many of us are able to do, simply because of the cost. But this is not my main complaint. If you look at the ticket allocations, 25,000 seats out of 90,000 in total have been set aside for corporate hospitality. Each one of those marks a real fan excluded to make way for a corporate junket. Something about it makes me feel queasy.

It was a sharp contrast spending a freezing afternoon at the Willows watching Swinton beat one of the pre-season favourites for promotion, Oldham, in a thrilling game of open, running Rugby League. Swinton spread the ball wide and overran the opposition with great tries only to be slowly pegged back by a second-half comeback as Oldham pulled their game together with some devastating attacking kicks and the aid of a heavy penalty count in their favour. Swinton held out and clinched the game with a fine 79th minute try to win 29-20. This was a real people's game, it is just that there aren't that many people. A crowd of 776 risked hypothermia to see it, actually an improvement on the last couple of seasons. I reckon that those few got it right, people forking out for the Premiership don't know the treat they are missing.

UPDATE
See the tries here

Voting behaviour

The logic is impeccable



Thanks to Steve

Porn

George has been reading Fanny Hill.

Many years since I first read the latter and pleased to come, if that's the right word, upon passages like:

...and pleasure milked, over-flowed me once more from the fulness of his oval reservoirs of the genial emulsion...

That, sir, is pornography with proper eighteenth-century cojones, which is to say prose with oval reservoirs.

Magnificent.

A Valentine's Day massacre

Of adult education that is. Glasgow University's Department of Adult and Continuing Education is the next to be lined up against the wall. The rifles are cocked, but instead of meekly smoking a last fag and accepting their fate they have torn off the blindfold and are fighting back - through Facebook. Well, it worked in Egypt.

Once again a round of cuts have left adult education vulnerable and deemed to be disposable. And once again adult educators struggle to find the words to justify what we do in a sector awash with managerial jargon and macho posturing. The staff from Glasgow got it right when they commented,

It's also about control. They want to control what is being taught and Dace is far too free, far too 'lawless'.

The problem the authorities have with us adult educators is not that we are outlaws who roam the hills ready to ambush the unsuspecting and rob them of their treasured possessions. Instead, we do something different, something that is poorly understood and that is often beyond the comprehension of the powerful. Adult education is not just valued by its students, it is loved. Tutors have to be stupidly dedicated and ridiculously flexible to make it happen. Organisers have to be creative and entrepreneurial. I suppose that makes management think that we are rather letting the side down.

Flippancy aside, the depressing thing about the strange death of liberal adult education is that it is taking place within an intellectual vacuum. There is little debate about what a university is for beyond the latest slogans. Adult education always stood for a different vision of the university as an open and inclusive institution. And I suppose that this is not a case we have made that well, often struggling to find utilitarian justifications rather than parading our idealism. It may be time to make a stand on principle. Who knows whether it will be our Tahrir Square moment or another re-enactment of the Somme, though I can't help thinking that all our efforts will be met with condescension and indifference and it will be a new generation that will one day have to rediscover what should never have been cast aside in the first place.

Thanks to Shuggy

Gone

Now is the time for celebration

Egypt's struggle of endurance is not a conflict of visions, it is the conflict between a vision of freedom and a blind clinging to power that uses all means possible – terror, lack of food, simple tiredness, bribery with raised salaries – to squash the will to freedom.

Though the next steps are far from clear, it will be hard to resist the momentum. A great day whatever.



Video via TG

Last Friday

Nearly. Sunday at Leigh next.

Changing times

It appears that the army has chosen sides and the rumours of the impending resignation of Mubarak has propelled Egypt back into the lead story on the news. The protests may have been growing but the coverage shrank, assuming that people have the attention span of a gnat. Meanwhile the conservative commentariat have been brushing up their pessimism and talking up the threat of a new Iran in Egypt. So this interesting piece of analysis is well worth reading.

...the ascendant socio-political power of a new national-development-oriented coalition of businessmen and military entrepreneurs, as well as the decisive force of micro-enterprise and workers’ organizations consisting of women and youth -- a force that portends well for the future of democracy and socio-economic inclusion in Egypt

Read it all and, if it really is the endgame, celebrate a people's ability to overthrow a tyrant.

UPDATE
Keep the champagne on ice.

HT Nick

Common sense

There are further signs of trouble for the Big Society, Cameron's pet project. The Economist points out:

I knew the government was in real trouble on Tuesday, when the Daily Telegraph's revered "Matt" drew a front page pocket cartoon of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet locked out of a privatised Hundred Acre Woods. As a rule of thumb, when the country's most loyally Conservative newspaper accuses a Conservative government of hurting Winnie the Pooh, things are going badly wrong.

In this case it is the privatisation of woodland that is under discussion. Library cuts, a by-product of reductions in local government expenditure, are also getting a bad press with campaigns being set up, whilst today has been declared Save Our Libraries Day.

Clearly, the government is having problems selling their ideas and the difficulties are not merely presentational, they go to the heart of the project. Here is the Economist again.

...the public is mistrustful of any vision for Britain that blends altruism with the profit motive. And that is a big problem for the Big Society, which just does not add up if it does not include a dose of private enterprise.

This gets to the nub of the matter whilst simultaneously missing the point. Public suspicions are not simply to do with the profit motive, despite the past evidence of the personal enrichment of executives as a consequence of previous privatisations, I think that they are rooted much more in the question of the ownership of common property.

I have blogged before about the closure of the much loved College of Adult Education in Manchester and pointed out that the sense of ownership felt by staff and students was a chimera, despite the College being publicly owned. This is the feeling that millions of library users are getting right now as they face the loss of their local libraries up and down the country. Just like the College, many libraries had been built up by voluntary action and donations, sometimes over a period of a hundred years or more, before being adopted by local authorities. This move into the public sector offered protection and further investment beyond the abilities of private citizens to provide and it was a success until the cuts came. When that happened, those years of investment counted for nothing. Something that had once belonged to the community was no longer theirs and could be disposed of at will.

If this shows the limits of public ownership, you can multiply the problem of alienation many times over for private ownership. A privatisation that hands public assets over to a restricted group of individuals or corporate entities is a process of enclosure, taking what had once been the collective property of a community and turning it into the disposable assets of those who are unconcerned with the common good, except where it enhances their private well-being. Municipalisation allowed the exercise of limited control through the ballot box, privatisation removes both ownership and control. Of course people are suspicious. They are right to be.

The Big Society is certainly shrinking the state, but it is not growing civil society. And trashing the infrastructure that supports a network of voluntary and independent action is hardly the way to promote it. Ironically, a real Big Society initiative would not be cheap, certainly not in the short-term. It would involve investment in local facilities, supporting voluntary sector organisations and funding professionals to deliver services. And at its centre has to be a concept of communal ownership that is inalienable, the re-establishment of the commons, implying too a partnership with the state in a long-term commitment. If this was the case we might see a warmer welcome for the idea. Today suspicions seem only too well founded.

Trivial pursuits

For the first time for ages I came out of a Swinton Rugby League match having enjoyed myself. Not for the first time in ages Swinton lost, but narrowly (22-28) to Halifax in the Northern Rail Cup. Halifax are the Championship champions, the top side outside Super League and a division higher than the Lions. It was a thriller that could have gone either way. What a start to the ground share at the Willows. Could this be a promotion season to go with a new ground back in Swinton? Here's hoping.

The words of a protester

A moving and chilling post from Egypt

The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay "because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people". This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can't.

I hope he is wrong.

Changing times

There is a lot of commentary on Egypt filling the press. These two had something distinctive to say. First there is Hitchens:

People do not like to be treated like fools, or backward infants, or extras in some parade. There is a natural and inborn resistance to such tutelage, for the simple-enough reasons that young people want to be regarded as adults, and parents can't bear to be humiliated in front of their children ...

...The whole lumbering apparatus of the Egyptian state conspired to make itself appear humorless and thuggish and to convince its people that they were being held as serfs by fools.

Then there is a moment of sanity and clarity from the ever optimistic Gershon Baskin exploring the consequences of the uprising for Egypt's future relations with Israel.

The future of Israel is not linked to the corrupt, nondemocratic regimes which we prefer to call “moderate” Arab states, but to the masses of people who are willing to take to the streets to demand their rights. When we understand that correctly, we will make peace with Palestine, we will have real democracy and we will be a lot more secure.

Random thoughts

Comparisons have been made between the protests in the Arab world and the collapse of communism in 1989. I don't think it is an exact parallel, but in one sense they do have things in common. In 1989 the relaxation of its grip by a hegemonic power, itself in its own death throes, allowed the contradictions inherent in Stalinism to destroy the whole rotting edifice. It strikes me that, similarly, we are now witnessing the end of the post-colonial state.

There is a central contradiction in the notion of post-colonialism, the idea that national liberation is nothing more than a process of replacing foreign oppressors with new tyrants drawn from your own people. Some liberation that is.

Allied to this was the idea that development could be achieved through a centralised authoritarian state that restricted the liberties of its citizens, suppressed human rights, engaged in all the classic brutalities of the police state, but promised the benefits of modernisation in return. Instead, over time, the model presented a beautiful opportunity for the new elites to loot their own countries, whilst playing games with geo-political power politics to secure external backing.

In the wake of the debt crisis of the 1980's, predominantly caused by the actions of the old corrupt elites, countries experienced changes of government and were exhorted to 'liberalise' their economies. Neo-liberal orthodoxy was brought to bear through a process know as structural adjustment. It was assumed that this would usher in a new era for these nations, an opportunity to join in the global market, to become free and prosperous. This was always wishful thinking. In many cases exploitation intensified, political transgressions were brushed under the carpet and the tendency towards increased polarisation in unregulated corporate capitalism proved to be a godsend to new plutocratic elites who revelled in the opportunity to build free-market kleptocracies.

The current protests appear to be predominantly a challenge to oppressive political structures, but the demonstrators are also talking about inequality, youth unemployment, grinding poverty and declining wages at a time of rising food prices. So we are not only seeing the contradictions in post-colonialism at work, but also those inherent in neo-liberal political economy. This more than a crisis of governance and the establishment of democracy has to be a precursor to deeper social and economic change.

An economic shadow hangs over the whole process. Unless we can build new models of political economy the revolutions may fail and open up the path for other movements. In the short term though I am optimistic. The destruction of these nasty tyrannies is welcome and the political systems that replace them may well be democratic, robust and open up opportunities for economic change. As the post-colonial state crumbles the new economic orthodoxy could begin to go with it. And if we are witnessing a global phenomenon rather than merely a regional one, the crucial question is about which country is next. Do you think that in a few years those hagiographic editorials about China might need revisiting?

It's Friday, let's er ...

Proponents of localism in Britain need to take note, in Malawi the controversial Local Courts Bill will make farting in public a criminal offence.

Once again it is time to celebrate liberal values and universal human rights in opposition to petty tyranny. As in 1789 the French were in the vanguard.





Chapeau tip Kev

Nothing

It's a challenge.

Via

The Guardian

Comment is Free

Betrayal by the West
These stooge saboteurs have acted as tools of western imperialism



Adolph Hitler
The Guardian, 21 July 1944



Now thanks to the Guardian we know the truth. The latest leaks show that the illegal war launched by the war criminal Neville Chamberlain did not simply aim at the defence of Poland but at regime change, here in Germany!

As if that were not enough it has now emerged that the assassination plot that mercifully failed yesterday took place after covert contacts with sinister forces in the Western alliance. As early as 1938 secret talks took place between the German military elite and the arch-imperialist, oppressor of India the so-called Lord Halifax about the overthrow of the legitimately elected(ish) Government of the Democratic Third Reich.

After all, who elected Stauffenberg? Who did he and his fellow plotters represent? The only mandate given them was the one emanating from the US-led world order that has always conspired against our people and sided with our oppressors.

You couldn't make it up if you tried. Pass the piano wire Alice.

Comments

A Cademic
University of Penge

Indeed, Aldoph nails these warmongers. Here's to your brave resistance against the imperialists.

B Onkers
Islington

Objectively it is clear that genocide is a perfectly reasonable response to the problems of the German State. After all, who would not want to systematically murder six million people if their country had been forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles twenty years previously?

******

Overstated? Not by that much.

Dr Dolittle

As far as British politics is concerned the Observer's Diary of a Civil Servant series is one of the most illuminating columns around. A few weeks ago it highlighted concern about David Cameron's "hands-off approach":

When the prime minister taunted Ed Miliband at PMQs about when he would start doing his job, an awkward question was whispered across Westminster. What exactly does the prime minister do?

Despite being amused by the accusation, Cameron's indolence doesn't bother me. It's his politics that I worry about. This week's column took the opposite tack:

Governments are like sharks. They need to keep moving or they die. For many decades governments have formed a consensus view that strenuous activity, and the appearance of strenuous activity, is the best way to show that you are working hard governing the country. The civil service must balance the farcical tension between real work and the appearance of work.

This sounds familiar. One of my complaints about some managers in the various places that I have worked in the past is not that they were lazy, it is that they worked phenomenally hard - doing the wrong thing. I suppose it's one way they can justify their escalating salaries; ferocious activity when we all wish that they hadn't bothered.

The best managers let you get on with what you have to do and intervene or offer support when something goes wrong or when you need it. The worst constantly re-organise, invent new systems or keep adding extra bureaucratic tasks that continuously pile up, making your job more arduous than it ever should be. And when we have governments vigorously doing the wrong thing in the shortest possible time, without space for reflection, simply to prove that they are active, we get the worst of all worlds.

I once worked with someone whose pet saying was that if you want something done well you need to ask a lazy person. He reckoned they will always find the quickest and easiest route so that their leisure isn't interrupted for too long. Workaholics create useless toil, for themselves as well as others. It is pathological behaviour, though in our macho managerial world it is seen as virtuous. I could go on, but now I fancy a little nap.

A herald of spring

Standing on the terraces at the Salford v Swinton friendly on a freezing Friday night, I heard the first shout this year of "gerr'm onside ref!" Yes, the Rugby League season is about to begin.

Swinton will be playing at the Willows this year, sharing with the old enemy for just one season. Then everyone is hoping that they will be back in a new ground in the Borough of Swinton and Pendlebury. If that does not happen the future of a grand old club must be in doubt after twenty years of peripatetic exile since selling Station Road for housing.














For some more pictures of Swinton and the old ground in better days see here.

It was a credible performance from the team against Super League opposition and maybe this is the starting point for a renaissance. But in the meantime could there be a better way of spending a bitterly cold evening ... er ... yes, I suppose there could be a few ... rather a lot in fact. Never mind. I enjoyed it.

In agreement

From here:

If readers enjoy attacks on liberal hypocrisy, then they should not enjoy them too much. The worst that I can say about the prevailing liberal view that Israel is a perfect source of evil is that it mirrors the settled view of the friends of Israel who see it as a perfect victim and blot out all thought for the Palestinian in the process. It should be possible to combine the ideas that Israel has a right to exist, that the Palestinian demand for a state is a just one and that the liberal enemies of religious and secular tyranny in the Arab world need our help.

Spot on.

Technology

Why not? It's Friday.

Thanks for the memories

There is an interesting article in the New York Review of Books by Gordon S Wood discussing a study of the flimsy grasp of American history exhibited by the Tea Party movement. What drew me to the article was his general theme that there is always "a tension between critical history and popular memory, between what historians write and what society chooses to remember". He calls for us to value the emotional resonances of memory in addition to the academic study of history. It was that notion that got me thinking of the politicisation of memory and, in particular, its role in the recent history of the Labour Party.

Some years ago a friend who worked in a charity shop gave me an old copy of a long out of print history of the Labour Party by Francis Williams, Fifty Years March, first published in 1950. It had obviously been the proud possession of a party member as it had a picture of Harold Wilson, snipped out from a newspaper, sellotaped to the fly leaf. A few years later, in a second-hand bookshop in North Yorkshire, I came across another of his books, this time on trade union history, Magnificent Journey. The names say it all. This is not academic history. The books are proud celebrations of the inevitability of the glorious rise of working class political movements to their rightful prominence. They are an embodiment of the sentiment satirised within the Labour Party by the mocking acronym THIGMOO - this great movement of ours. They are the triumph of memory over history, but as Wood points out, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Such popular sentiment, at least within the party, became contested by the rise of New Labour. The very idea of novelty implies a rejection of the past in favour of a new modernity. Torn between two competing descriptions of Labour's historical image, they eventually abandoned the idea of Labour as a successful party that needed modernising in favour of the acceptance of the Jenkins thesis, that the division of the left caused by the formation of the Labour Party was a disaster, opening the way for the dominance of the Conservatives. Much was made of the description of the twentieth century as the conservative century.

Thus the Labour Party's very existence was cast in the role of an historic mistake, a rather curious position to be taken by its leadership. The Attlee government could be mythologised to an extent, it was long enough ago not to trouble too many memories, but the rest was seen as a long sequence of failure. Hence, New Labour had arrived to change all that, to be distinct, modern, youthful, successful and, above all, aspirational. The past belonged to 'dinosaurs' who wouldn't change, who could not see how out of touch they were. After the long exclusion from power as a consequence of the split in 1981 (a time when Jenkins was clearly less attached to his thesis) this could seem to make sense. However, it did not answer the question about how this basket case came to be the only credible alternative government to the Tories and was actually ahead in the polls when the New Labour ascendancy began.

New Labour's selling point was that they offered the prospect of electoral victory. They proudly trumpeted the fact that no Labour government had ever won two successive full terms, implying that even when they won power they were swiftly rejected by an electorate that did not like what they saw. Now, due solely to the modernisers, this was going to change; they alone held the secret of success.* And it is here that the academic historian in me begins to bristle.

The weasel word in that claim is "full". This is a slippery concept in a system without fixed term Parliaments. As governments can call elections at any time within a maximum five-year period it is rare for them to serve a full term. But even taking the claim at face value it scarcely holds water. In 1966 Labour actually won a large majority after having been in power since 1964. Ah. Proponents of the thesis of electoral failure would point out that the first period wouldn't count as a full term, though I think that increasing your majority from 4 to 98 by calling an early election might suggest that they were not that unpopular. Then they also gloss over the fact that the 1945 Labour government was actually re-elected in 1950, though with a small majority. Attlee had no need to call an early general election in 1951 and could have served a full term. And even then the reason Labour lost decisively was solely down to the electoral system. Labour polled the biggest share of the vote they have ever had and lost to a Conservative Party that gained more seats with fewer votes and who subsequently went on to harvest the credit for the long post-war boom.

If the electoral results don't fit the thesis of failure, what about the idea of a conservative century. Well, it is true that the Conservative Party governed alone for more than half the 20th Century, but a conservative century? Compare life in 1900 with life in 1999 and what you see is a century of radical reform and of social liberation. Tories both accepted and built on the reforms of the 1906 Liberals and, crucially, the foundations laid by the 1945 Labour Government. There was no challenge to the consensus until the Thatcher years and, taking the century as a whole, the 80's look to be an aberration rather than the norm, despite being so firmly fixed in our political imagination. It would be historically more accurate to describe the century as predominantly social democratic rather than conservative.

Labour played a key role in establishing a social democratic political economy both in the war-time coalition and in sole power between 1945-51. However, the 1964-70 and 1974-79 Labour administrations, especially with Roy Jenkins (he gets around a bit) as Home Secretary, were to augment this by overseeing the liberal reforms that started to unravel authoritarian state moralising - the legalisation of homosexuality, legal abortion, ending the death penalty, relaxing divorce laws etc., as well as expanding educational opportunities through new universities, including the Open University, and stimulating a growth in adult education.

Labour could therefore be seen as the party that represented a combination of a social democratic political economy, the expansion of the social state and a commitment to civil liberties, to egalitarianism, tolerance and diversity - marking a partial withdrawal of the state from regulating and punishing what it saw as aberrant human behaviour. I suppose that this legacy might prove to be a bit bothersome to a grouping that wanted the Labour Party to embrace neo-liberal economics and some aspects of social authoritarianism.

Neither the model of a heroic champion nor that of a mistaken failure stand up to serious historical examination. Yet what matters is not what historians say, but the popular memory. And the idea of Labour as a failure, so eagerly promulgated by sections of the party itself, has staying power. It is now being milked to the full by Coalition politicians who repeat the mantra about 'the mess Labour left behind' at every opportunity.

And this points to a big problem. What happens when the faction that claims to know how to be electorally successful actually fails? There are two lines the party can take. The first is to argue, as Blair does, that Labour lost because it ceased being New Labour and so it must renew the faith to win again. The second repudiates New Labour in favour of something different. This is what the current leadership seems to be trying hesitantly to do. I would argue that in order to do so they need to revisit the idea of popular memory and start the task of rehabilitating the Labour Party's past, seeing the party as the historic vehicle for a politics that combines collective economic action with the advancement of individual social liberties. Such a vision offers us the prospect of a party willing to learn from mistakes and change with the times certainly, but also sees it as a political movement that is seeking to rebuild and renew the triumphs of the past, rather than one trying to repudiate self-confessed, semi-fictitious failures. It won't be easy.

*They did. It was called the Conservative Party, which at the time showed an insatiable appetite for self-destruction.

Two states

I refuse to hate and I do not believe in revenge; hatred is an illness, and the enemy of peace.

Which, under the circumstances is remarkable, described graphically in this fine interview following up on an iconic moment.

Plus ça change ...

On the 7th of November, Brandreth, Turner, and Ludlam ascended the scaffold. We feel for Brandreth the less, because it seems he killed a man. But recollect who instigated him to the proceedings which led to murder. On the word of a dying man, Brandreth tells us, that "OLIVER brought him to this"—that, "but for OLIVER, he would not have been there." See, too, Ludlam and Turner, with their sons and brothers, and sisters, how they kneel together in a dreadful agony of prayer. Hell is before their eyes, and they shudder and feel sick with fear, lest some unrepented or some wilful sin should seal their doom in everlasting fire. With that dreadful penalty before their eyes—with that tremendous sanction for the truth of all he spoke, Turner exclaimed loudly and distinctly, while the executioner was putting the rope round his neck, "THIS IS ALL OLIVER AND THE GOVERNMENT."

This extract is from one of the most devastating pieces of 19th Century polemical writing, Shelley's 'An Address to the People on The Death of the Princess Charlotte' (1817), contrasting the public hysteria surrounding the death of the Princess with the execution of the Pentrich Rebels.

Oliver was a government spy and agent provocateur who lured the people of Pentrich, Derbyshire and a smaller group in Holmfirth, Yorkshire into staging a futile and hopeless rising. Oliver's involvement led to the acquittal of those from Holmfirth, but the punishment of the Pentrich Rebels, convicted of High Treason, was savage.

And now, in gentler times, the same tactic of infiltration and provocation has been seen again, though in truth it, and the mindset that produces it, had never gone away.

Healthy pleasures

One of the most solemn moments in the evolution of the principle of authority was at the promulgation of the Decalogue. The voice of the angel commands the people, prostrate at the foot of Sinai:

Thou shalt adore the Eternal it said, and nothing but the Eternal;
Thou shalt swear by him only;
Thou shalt observe his feasts, and thou shalt pay his tithes;
Thou shalt honour thy father and mother;
Thou shalt not kill;
Thou shalt not steal;
Thou shalt not commit fornication;
Thou shalt not commit forgery;
Thou shalt not covet nor calumniate;
For the Eternal commands thus, and it is the Eternal who has made thee what thou art. Only the Eternal is sovereign, wise and worthy. The Eternal punishes and rewards; the Eternal can make thee happy or unhappy.

All legislators have adopted this style: all, in speaking to man, use the words of a sovereign. Hebrew commands in the future tense, Latin in the imperative, Greek in the infinitive. The moderns do the same thing. The tribunal of M Dupin is as infallible and terrible as that of Moses. Whatever may be the law, from whatever lips it maybe proclaimed, it is sacred; even when pronounced by that fateful trumpet, which with us is the voice of the majority.

Thou shalt not assemble,
Thou shalt not print,
Thou shalt not read,
Thou shalt respect thy representatives and functionaries whom the fortune of the ballot or the good pleasure of the State has given thee,
Thou shalt obey the laws which their wisdom has given thee,
Thou shalt pay thy taxes faithfully,

And thou shalt love the Government, thy lord and thy god, with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, because the Government knows better than thou what thou art, what thou art worth, and what is good for thee; and it has the power to chastise those who disobey its commandments, as well as to recompense to the fourth generation those who are agreeable to it.

When Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote this in his 'General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century' in 1851 he had yet to encounter the health lobby. The problem for the workers of his day was eating at all. Now, with the abundance available to affluent people in the developed world, the old formula needs reviving.

Thou shalt not eat fatty foods,
Thou shalt not drink (apart from a single glass of red wine - an antioxidant you know darlings),
Thou shalt cut down on salt,
Thou shalt not smoke (anywhere),
Thou shalt drink hot water and overpriced herbal infusions rather than pollute your body with caffeine,
Thou shalt count calories and units,
Thou shalt worry about your cholesterol levels constantly,
And thou shalt love bran, muesli, and other tasteless crud with all thy heart and all thy soul for they maketh the bowels perform with satisfying regularity and yea even frequency.

And those who disobey these commandments shall be visited with plagues of obesity, epidemics of diabetes and the vengeance of high blood pressure. And lo! the NHS will be bankrupt and it will all be your fault.

And so I was pleased to read this piece that asks us to, "Imagine a world in which public policy declared that pleasure is the principal means to health". What a nice thought. The author, Richard Klein, is inviting us to rediscover Epicurus and assert a new Epicurean philosophy.

I particularly liked this:

For many people, a life without the oil of drink becomes too much to bear. A little wine eases the vague and subcutaneous unease that stress puts on our muscles; a martini induces a moment of forgetfulness when the anxieties and fears of the day recede. In pursuit of happiness, Americans are insistently encouraged to consume vast quantities of anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants, but booze is never publicly celebrated. Rarely do we hear about the charms and benefits of alcohol, or the sociability it has promoted from the dawn of time, or the pleasure and consolation it has infused into the lives of billions over the course of human history.

I will drink to that.

In part this is a reflection of long standing struggle between the moralists and the hedonists. A peculiar feature of our social history is the spreading throughout the nineteenth century of notions of respectability to growing sections of what had been a boisterous working class. Much of this was imbibed by a section of the left who posited future utopias that would lead to the remaking of people as earnest, thoughtful, sober ascetics. I like to celebrate the eclectic bunch of libertarian leftists, radical liberals and others who saw this as social control by a stifling middle class rather than social improvement.

None of this is to deny that there are very real issues of both private and public health; alcoholism is no joke neither are the effects of carcinogens such as tobacco, all is not a fabrication by the moral puritans. Yet this is recognised by an Epicurean approach that is about understanding the body and its pleasures, thereby limiting self-harm and exercising restraint. But there is something hidden by this obsessive concern with diet, which Klein does not address, the great global public health issue of our times is not fibre but poverty. Poverty kills, poverty stunts physical and intellectual development, poverty is the real health crisis. And so an emphasis on pleasure as a principle of health must mean pleasure for all, not the conspicuous consumption of the good things in life by a few.

In the British context it is often said that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than Marx. In this sense, at least, this is a pity. As Klein points out, Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on Epicurus.

The people's breakfast

A Labour MP reveals her breakfast of choice.

I'm pretty routine about breakfast. I get up at about 6.30 and have hot water to which I add fresh ginger and a slice of lemon – very good for the immune system. Then I go down to the gym. I usually eat at 7.45am. I have porridge – I'll ring the changes – maple syrup, nuts.

Not a bacon butty after a skinful down the working men's club then?

Bet I live longer than her.

Top of the pops

Bob from Brockley has tagged me and it would be churlish not to respond, especially as I can't think of anything else to write about on a wet afternoon the day before I return to the UK. So here are my top ten books from 2010.

I was lucky to read two great, and I mean great, novels last year. Both are translations and have been rendered into beautifully poetic English by their respective translators. These are the first two of my choices.

1. Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is wonderful. I commented on it here and George Szirtes gave it a fine review here.

2. Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows is astonishing. It tackles the same theme as Fallada, the persistence of humanity in the face of unimaginable cruelty. It also deals with complicity in tyranny and is strangely redemptive. Here the similarities end. The book was unfinished at Grossman's death and, as a novel, it is incomplete with a limited narrative and undeveloped characters. As a result each chapter stands less as part of a narrative but as an intense prose poem. The book begins as a scream of rage and anguish at the brutalities of the Stalin era and then falls into a meditation on Russian history, Bolshevism, guilt and innocence, and a continuing faith in human freedom.

...there is no higher happiness than to leave the camp, even blind and legless, to creep out of the camp on one's stomach and die - even only ten yards from that accursed barbed wire.

And this is his theme; "There is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom". Crushing freedom means destroying humanity itself.

3. As if that historical and political intensity was not enough I was gripped by Nicholas Gage's Eleni, an investigation into the execution of his mother in the Greek Civil War. This dramatic personal history was conceived as an act of catharsis and of justice and it is also a superb piece of social history of village life and death in the mountains of Northern Greece.

4. And the theme continues with Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, an account of a curious Israeli/Palestinian friendship mediated through the family home of both. One family lost the house in the expulsions of 1948, the other gained it after leaving Bulgaria, having narrowly avoided the Holocaust.

Phew! Time for something different.

5. Bluebird by Vesna Maric is light, slight and a delight. It is a memoir of a Bosnian refugee. I liked it because she ended up in Hull. And, as all of us do who find ourselves there, loved the place.

6. Why do so many of these lists not contain poetry? I am lucky that through blogging I got to know George Szirtes. His poetry is personal, complex, and is haunted by the shadows of the Europe of the 20th century. I bought his collection, The Burning of the Books, in 2009, but read it in 2010. Brilliant.

7. The reason why I put off reading the poetry is that it refers to a classic novel that I had not read. I have now. Elias Cannetti's Auto Da Fe is a darkly comic picture of almost autistic non-communication.

8. George is also a translator and through him I discovered the work of Sandor Marai. Esther's Inheritance is a dazzling novella that subverts the genre of the lost lover.

9. Now to more prosaic matters. Andrew Rawnsley's The End of the Party is an entertaining narrative of the final two terms of the New Labour Government. It is court politics, doesn't really engage in important issues of policy or political economy, but it is fun.

10. Finally, what can I say about this? By far the worst written book I have read for many years; verbose and cliché-ridden, full of startlingly inappropriate metaphors, surprising judgements and frequent lapses into purple prose. Tony Blair's A Journey is a book in urgent need of an editor and a ghost writer. But if it had been better written would it have the same gruesome fascination? It can occasionally be disarming and charming, sometimes incisive (such as the chapter on Northern Ireland) and often very strange. An absolute turkey - best consumed at Christmas and it seems to last for ever.

As for tagging others? No, not now but join in if you like.

To everything there is a season

There comes a time in any conflict when the causes that propel people into combat lose their meaning, when ideological certainties become so much hot air, clung to solely by fanatics. The same too happens to oppressive regimes when the constant demands for slavish approval from their citizenry collapse in a spasm of collective disgust. War weariness is too negative a term, it implies resignation, instead there is an overwhelming desire for the dignity of ordinariness, compelling acts of courage against the abnormality of lives lived in servitude or subject to arbitrary violence.

Each moment is an opportunity, a crack opening up in what had seemed to be an irresolvable situation. We saw it in Burma and Iran and now, with this declaration from Gaza (on Facebook of all places) we can get a tiny glimpse of the constituency for peace and a settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict. It isn't much and may turn out to be of little or no significance, but it is there.

When these moments occur you need imaginative political leadership, rather than politicians who are cautious and complacent in their certainties, or, even worse, harbour a complicity with the fanatics, born out of of fear and a certain sneaking sympathy. And, of course, the recent peace talks failed. Yet again.