Changing times

Sarkozy and Merkel are not overjoyed, the markets are panicking, the Greek reaction is uncertain, but the decision of Papandreou to put the bailout plan to a referendum is the first real challenge to the assumptions of the European policy-making elite arising from somewhere other than the streets. Amongst the prognostications of doom, Larry Elliott stands out as a voice of optimism, though not about austerity.

There is not the remotest possibility of austerity working, because the impact of such savage cuts is to depress the economy, increasing the deficit rather than cutting it, adding to pressure for still further austerity.

It is certainly risky, but suddenly, from being the supplicant subject to the control of the Troika, Greece has remembered the old adage about debt.  If you owe the bank a hundred thousand pounds you have a problem; if you owe the bank a hundred million pounds, the bank has a problem.

Larry Elliott again:

Greece is now a bigger problem for Europe than Europe is for Greece. The short-term outlook for Greece is going to be bad inside or outside the single currency, but the balance of risks is different for the other 16 members of monetary union. For them, the calculation is simple: would it be better to cut the Greeks some slack in order to prevent a disorderly default creating a domino effect across the eurozone? Or should they take a tough line, threatening to cut off all support in the event of a no vote? That is what is known as a no-brainer.

... All this is pretty obvious. What is perhaps less obvious is that Greece now has immense power as a result of its predicament. It has the rest of the world by the short and curlies.

 Is this the moment that reality finally forces a change of policy?

UPDATE

In answer to my question, no.

The ostrich dies for nothing

In 1806 Pfhul had been one of those responsible for the plan of campaign that culminated in Jena and Austerstadt; but in the outcome of that war he did not see the slightest evidence of the fallibility of his theory. On, the contrary, to his mind the disaster was entirely due to the deviations that were made from his theory ... Pfhul was one of those theoreticians who are so fond of their theory that they lose sight of the object of that theory - its application in practice. His passion for theory made him hate all practical considerations, and he would not hear of them. He even rejoiced in failure, for failures resulting from departures in practice from abstract theory only proved to him the accuracy of his theory.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.

And so to the Eurozone. Will Hutton writes:

... last Wednesday was a watershed moment – when the euro's future looked more certain and the Europeans began to reshape their continent, in particular the financial and political architecture in which their economies will function. They are leaving the 19th-century nation state behind and creating something new. It is a political construct that operates as a self-help club so that each member is stronger and has more freedom of action than it would outside, but for which membership is going to require tough and well-policed terms.

Tough and well-policed eh? I rather think that Hutton's enthusiasm gets the better of him, mistaking centralisation of power for federal integration. The view from much of Greece is of an economic dictat that will impose endless austerity. Maybe this is overstated and the debt write down certainly gives some breathing space. But what this deal does not seem to do is to reform the structural problems of monetary union and redistribute trade imbalances (as Yanis Varoufakis argues here). Instead it still suggests that the cause of the crisis lies in the moral failures of the peripheral states, requiring the constant supervision of the enlightened technocrats at the centre, whatever their previous record.

Even that would be acceptable if it were not for one thing. The theory - austerity and orthodoxy. Faced with the incontrovertible evidence of failure, they are insisting on implementing their plan with a renewed intensity, even as the social fabric of the indebted nations tears apart. A sustained recovery in Europe requires more than wishful thinking that this time the plan must surely work, especially if properly enforced. The elite economic consensus is running on to the rocks of reality. Will they change course?

Mystic Plump

I feel that I can now go public with the amazing prediction given to me by my spirit guide who has been chatting to the late Eddie Waring. England will not win the Four Nations Rugby League competition. I hope I am wrong, but ...

The first round of matches was this weekend and I was at both. Australia comfortably beat New Zealand in a frighteningly tough match at Warrington on Friday. The game was not much of a spectacle. Australia's tactics were dour, grinding out their win without ever displaying the skills that they have in abundance. The most depressing aspect was the use of the latest fad down under, wrestling your opponent in the tackle and on the ground to slow the play-the-ball. This is, obviously, against both the laws and the spirit of the game and negates the speed and skill of backs, rewarding power and strength instead. Disappointingly, it was tolerated throughout by the English referee who let the game slow down to a brutal crawl. Even so, Australia looked awesomely strong and will only get better.

On Saturday, England played the far weaker Welsh side and won comfortably without convincing. The latest move to try and beat the Australians by picking Australians for the English side doesn't seem to have made much difference, even with addition of a scrum half who had previously played internationally for the New Zealand Maoris, but has now convinced the International Board that he is a West Yorkshire Maori. The big test will be Wembley next week, though I won't be going.

The public has supported the games well, both were sell-outs. A full Warrington usually rocks with noise, but it was eerily quiet as the fans were nearly all neutrals. Leigh had their reward for building a smart new stadium, which will also host Swinton's matches next season until our new ground is finally built. They haven't got the traffic management sorted out for big attendances though. I managed to get in to the ground seconds after kick off after taking ninety minutes to travel the ten miles from my home. The Rugby League is hoping for a respectable turn out at Wembley too for a double header and even if England lose they can still make the final by beating New Zealand at Hull. It would be great to get that far, but winning the trophy? If that happens I will eat my ouija board.

Good is better than good

What would you expect if you went to see a play written by someone who died early of pneumonia, probably as a result of his habit of writing naked in a polystyrene lined garden shed? I hoped for something special and that's what I saw on Monday night. It was the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre's fine production of C P Taylor's Good.

The play is thirty years old now, but is still fresh, entertaining too, even if it is about such uncompromising material as the Holocaust. On the surface, the device of rewriting Faust, with a literature professor as the main protagonist, and then charting his slow entrapment by the Nazis from opportunism to complicity could be banal. But not when it is written as a tragicomedy. Nor when it is also an examination of friendship, neuroses and a unique psychosis where, instead of hearing voices, the professor is haunted by snatches of popular tunes.

Of course that is just a device for telling the story. The real theme is the human complexity of what we call inhumanity. It is about how the good become evil whilst still remaining good, at least in their own minds, sustaining their self-image through sophistries. The central theme of the play is that there is an objective reality, one that is tangible, observable and knowable. Experience is not a fiction or a dream, let alone a discourse. The phenomenon that it explores is that when faced with clear and unambiguous evil, good people set out to deceive themselves.

The process starts with incomprehension; 'It isn't as bad as all that, they don't really mean it, it is only for show'. It is painfully hard for any sane human being to immediately grasp the nature of evil. But then, as reality becomes ever more unavoidable, people hide from the truth and with each twist and turn of the path leading to horror, evasion requires greater sophistication, convoluted argument and dense clouds of verbiage. More chillingly, self-deception can lead to complicity, drawing people in ever more deeply through both self-interest and moral cowardice until that instant when the real cannot be dodged and the truth becomes utterly, unavoidably clear. This is the moment of damnation.

At the heart of the play is a lecture delivered by the professor that is Taylor's statement of purpose, except that it is a negative image, a reversal of all he is writing about. It is a soliloquy on the need to remove 'Jewish humanism' from literature, to break with the idea of the novel as an exploration of individual experience, to replace it with a glorification of the collective – to subjugate a person's life to the margins, to render a person meaningless. Taylor is the 'Jewish humanist' par excellence, his drama explores and explains through the lives of ordinary people caught up in a demonic regime.

And he is so apposite about the sophistries, the apologetics and the evasions – how we drown in the stuff! Elaborately written shit. Elegant exhortations to murder – historical necessity, race survival, the will of god, eliminate this or that group of persons and we will have the perfect world. There is no objective truth, everything is relative. It wasn't my fault, they didn't suffer, there was no alternative, I was only obeying orders. And, above all, - it was all their fault, they brought it on themselves. And some of the most noisome ordure emanates from the phalanxes of tame academics, writing in impenetrable prose posing as profundity, making barbarity seem reasonable. How many graves have been filled by this stuff?

Good is a memorable play, a fine piece of drama, but when I got home there was a final piece of irony. I glanced at the programme where there was an interview with the director ending with a discussion of the play's contemporary relevance. She is quoted as saying,

"Someone once said that GOOD is a play about moral compromise in a political fog, which I think is a reasonably good description of the series of actions following 9/11 that led us to go to war in Iraq. And the fostering of a largely irrational fear targeted at lazily identified ethnic groups in the wake of that event goes to the heart of what the play is about." 

Actually, I think that is a lousy description of the play. It isn't about moral compromise, it is about the abandonment of morality, and the fog is not "political", it is one invented to conceal an only too clear political reality. But it is the rest that struck me. The sentiment is manifest; Muslims are the new Jews. Except they aren't.

The "War on Terror" is not an attack on all Muslims because they are brown-skinned or because of an abstract hatred derived from some seriously weird racist pathology. It isn't an attack on Muslims at all. Instead it is aimed at a particular theocratic political movement that sees mass murder as a religious duty, is violently misogynistic, calls for the execution of homosexuals, has embraced every genocidal anti-Semitic trope that the Nazis adopted (except, for obvious reasons, the myth of the Aryan race) and now denies the Holocaust, despite showing some apparent relish at the though of killing Jews.

I have no doubt she is a good person. I have seen concrete evidence that she is a damn fine theatrical director. It is just that she too has taken the Guardianista route of apologia, averting her eyes to the reality of evil – to the horrors of the decapitations, the stonings, the public hangings and of the suicide bombs – to the hatred and dehumanisation of Jews – just what Taylor was writing about. Yes indeed, the play is more than relevant to today.

Good is brilliant. Go and see it.

No shit Sherlock

Robert Peston has come up with the least surprising opening paragraph of the year.

The current European Union and International Monetary Fund plan to revive the Greek economy and its finances has failed.

Well I never. Who would have thought it?

As the Financial Times writes that the write down on Greek debt may need to be as high as 60%, Peston quotes from a report by international lenders:

The situation in Greece has taken a turn for the worse, with the economy increasingly adjusting through recession and related wage-price channels, rather than through structural reform-driven increases in productivity.

 Thankfully, Peston provides a translation:

Greece's austerity programme is succeeding in impoverishing Greek people with little in the way of discernible benefits to the Greek private sector and the capacity of Greece to start earning its way in the world.

 Or as Larry Elliott puts it:

The insistence that the remedy for a depression caused by austerity is yet more austerity explains why people are taking to the streets. In Athens, if not in Brussels, Frankfurt or Berlin, they understand that this is the economics of the madhouse.

Pensioners

It is one of my catchphrases. Since my early retirement I keep telling people in a quavering voice, "I'm a pensioner, y' know". Being a pensioner isn't quite the same as sinking back into senility, gazing at a blank TV screen. It can be rather active; somewhat more active and less lucrative if you are a Greek pensioner. There was more disturbing violence in Athens yesterday as the crisis drags on, with Eurozone leaders paralysed through disagreement, whilst the anger on the streets at yet more austerity measures continues and the increasing anxieties about the seriousness of the situation spread throughout governments and financial institutions alike. Martin Wolf makes the most pertinent point in the Financial Times:

What, after all, is the incentive for the Greeks to reform their government and economy if the benefits accrue to creditors indefinitely? Next to none.

Fools who lent money, without asking questions, deserve to share in the pain. They should not expect Greeks to rescue them from their folly, after the fact. 

Meanwhile, Keep Talking Greece agonises over the violence and some irritating comments submitted on her site. Her conclusion:

What do you do if you have no income? You go and demonstrate, you raise your voice against the laws and parliament bills that delete you from the list of living human beings. Or you sit at home and count your cups in the board, deeply depressed. Or you fight with your wife and beat your children. Or if you live in a social state, you sit on your couch and enjoy social benefits. Until the time the doctors declare you’re officially dead. Physically. Then metaphorically, you’ve been  dead for many years, because you never left your couch, raised your voice and fought for your rights.

In the meantime, as a result of my less arduous retirement activity of combining a rather a large amount of part-time teaching at the moment with some research, I stumbled across this wonderful post from Andrew Whitehead about the old political anthem, The Land Song. You should take the time to listen to the unique recording from 1910 embedded on both his site and in the piece he wrote for History Workshop Online.

Hark the sound is spreading from the East and from the West,
Why should we work hard and let the landlords take the best?
Make them pay their taxes on the land just like the rest,
The land was meant for the people.

There is something touching about these old political songs. Is it simply the poignancy of their naivety, the enormous faith they have in the marvels to be worked by their chosen reform? I am not sure, I think that there is more than that. Popular song, and particularly marching tunes, are the accompaniment to action. They are the demotic art form of people shaping their own lives and destinies. The optimism is palpable.

The Land Song became a Liberal Party anthem, but it's provenance is earlier and lies in 19th Century Radical Liberalism, specifically in the Single Tax campaign of Henry George, part of the radical milieu of the time that brought together socialists, liberals, individualists and anarchists amongst others. It was an enormously creative period and I never lose my fascination with the intellectual ferment of the era. (I have posted before on radical liberalism here and here.)

I suppose it is the refrain that reminds me most of Greece today:

Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?

Why indeed? And this points to the fact that the Euro crisis is not just a financial crisis, but one of democracy. One where the vote seems to be powerless against the institutional might of the Troika*. I despair that political leaders seem oblivious to this danger as the indecision persists. And so the demonstrations and strikes continue, not only as a reminder of deep discontents caused by the crisis, but also of an expression of something more, life itself. To be active not passive. To not stand by. To be human.

Here is Paul Berman writing about Occupy Wall Street:

Yes, yes, at Occupy Wall Street the madmen, the madwomen, the Groaners and the neo-Muggletonians will eventually have their day, and the movement will be ruined ... So the movement will stumble and fall, and a lot of young people will feel a little embittered and distraught.

Yet he continues:

That day will come. But not yet! Meanwhile there are realities to proclaim and feelings to vent. Occupy Wall Street and its sleeping-bag neo-hippies and its costumed street thespians and the touchingly hand-written placards and generally the display of eccentricity and impudence have focused America’s attention for a fleeting moment on economic wrongs and inequalities. How wonderful!

Wonderful indeed. And the thread that joins the Georgists to Greece is one of optimism, the assertion of popular pride and the profound hope that something better will emerge from the ruins of today.

The army now is marching on, the battle to begin,
The standard now is raised on high to face the battle din,
We’ll never cease from fighting ‘til victory we win,
And the land is free for the people.

*The European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB)
Hat tip to Dan for the Whitehead link.

Quack!

Once of Steve Job's worst ideas.

Kindness

When I worked in adult education in Manchester, over twenty years ago now, we had a number of students with mental health problems. Occasionally they were difficult people, but mostly they were delightful. One, who became a member of our pub quiz team, used to write letters to politicians and anyone in authority, all of which could be tactfully described as odd. I learnt to judge a politician by the replies that were sent. Most were of the standard 'thank you now go away' variety. Yet there were many more that were kind, supportive and simply nice. Only once did a single prominent politician take a letter seriously and sent a reply that was almost indistinguishable from the original.

I often think of that and of the time taken out of a busy life to simply be kind. It is a corrective to our overly cynical view of politicians. What they could never know is how much it meant to my student to be treated with respect and dignified with a proper reply. He was always proud and delighted. Whatever political differences I may have with them, I will always think back to those letters and recognise the decency that remains.

This was brought to mind by this lovely story, now all over the internet, about Christopher Hitchens, an eight-year-old aspiring freethinker and her request for recommended reading. It is more commonplace to be nice to a child, especially such a precociously intelligent one, than to an adult with mental health issues, but how much easier it would be for a celebrity to be either patronising or dismissive. Now, assailed by Christians because of her new found celebrity, she has found her own voice:

I've read the Bible and frankly it's ALL scary!!! You have to learn that sometimes kids need to boost their intellectual capability and look beyond God! 

In all, I take heart that the cause of freethought is alive and well in Texas and I have learnt something else, that one of the authors I admire can be added to my roll call of politicians as someone prepared to take the time to be kind. It is a special type of decency.

Simply grand

Manchester has an unjust (well, partially anyway) reputation for rain. Yesterday it lived up to its stereotype as a solid, persistent drizzle seeped down from dismal skies. The worst weather for running rugby and on the day of Rugby League's Grand Final at Old Trafford as well. Still, I was there with 69,000 others in a noisy crowd of families and drunks (and occasionally drunk families) for the annual occasion that decides the Super League champions.

It looked like it would be a close game, the top two teams had been knocked out at the semi-final stage, so third played fifth. And it was fifth placed Leeds who won it by playing exciting rugby in wet conditions, blitzing the more conservative St Helens in the last ten minutes of a high quality encounter.

I had mixed feelings about the result, a win for Leeds is never popular in these parts. Also, this was St Helens' fifth consecutive Grand Final defeat, a painful record for some fine players and for the fans an ordeal of dashed hopes. However, there were big pluses. The match was won by scintillating attack as well as awesome defence, something that used to be a Saints trademark. Most of all, it was won by a British coach. Australian coaches have raised the standard of the game over the years, but now there is a tendency not even to look at good British coaches and instead to farm out jobs to untried Australian assistant coaches on the grounds of their nationality alone. Occasionally the decision comes up trumps with the likes of Tony Smith or Ian Millward, but often it produces an identikit unimaginative approach of power and defence at the expense of the flair that was typical of the British game. So for the game to be decided by two moments of sublime skill and speed by a 5' 5" British scrum half, Rob Burrow, made the day for me. All the tries are here - enjoy.

What a mess

Larry Elliot finds the only possible explanation for the Euro crisis in Lewis Carroll.

The climax of Alice in Wonderland is the courtroom scene in which the issue is "Who stole the tarts?" In the case of the eurozone, the easy answer is that it is Greece, which failed to play by the rules, borrowing too much and cooking the books so that the rest of the members of the single currency club were ignorant of the dire state of the Hellenic public finances. In fact, the real culprit is Germany, which has failed to appreciate that for monetary union to work, the big creditor nations have a responsibility to help the debtor nations by expanding domestic demand. The German political class appears to believe both that every country in the euro area can be as competitive as Germany and that Germany, in those circumstances, will continue to run a massive trade surplus. That's a logical absurdity the Reverend Dodgson would certainly have appreciated.

In the meantime, faced with the need for action, finance ministers have, once again, decided to dither.

What of the people caught up in this? Well, never underestimate their resourcefulness or their sense of justice. But for every positive action there are also the consequences of despair. Then again, where does the welfare of people fit into the world view of the technocrats trying to fix the economy of Wonderland?

UPDATE
More through the looking glass here.

(G'day)

Vampires

Back from a fascinating trip to that well-known centre of anarchist agitation - Tunbridge Wells. Well, in the late Nineteenth Century it was the place where the first British anarchist newspaper was produced. These days perhaps it isn't quite as lively. I am tired, so my thoughts turn to garlic ... seriously they do. Watch this:

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

No alternatives?

Let’s get this straight. The Greek economy — and with it the Euro — is disintegrating because Greek politicians are implementing austerity, not because they are failing to.

Ann Pettifor

Despite all this, we should remember that Greece represents a mere 2% of the European economy. It is just not worth this huge polarising crisis or incredible psychodrama. The Germans and the European Central Bank are treating this not as a straightforward economic issue of indebtedness and default but as a morality play in which the Greeks must be punished.

Susan George 

 Greece's great economic crisis has been a gradual war of attrition. Massive job losses, tax increases and galloping inflation have sapped the nation's energy and, increasingly, Greeks no longer believe what their politicians say. With cuts instead being blamed for slashing consumption, deepening recession and missing deficit-reducing goals, austerity is seen as a pointless exercise that far from exiting the country from crisis has exacerbated its plight.

Helena Smith

Austerity is not the only option, it is a choice to make the poor pay for a crisis they did not cause.

Owen Tudor

The problem has been the unwillingness to refinance first Greece, then Ireland, then Portugal. Their share in the euro area public debt to GDP ratio is ridiculously low:  cancelling the debt would have been less painful.

Riccardo Bellofiore

There are choices, but they are not easy.

Pride

This is a revealing report about football's attempt to try and deal with homophobia.

The makers of an educational DVD that aims to raise awareness of homophobia in football have expressed their frustration at not being able to secure the support of a gay Premier League player they asked to take part in the film ... 

"We approached him thorough a third party and felt quite confident of getting him involved [in the DVD]. But he ultimately refused. There is a log jam in regards to this issue, a final taboo which, in the short term at least, does not appear close to breaking. We're certainly not going to out anyone against their will but, at the same time, getting gay footballers involved would make a big difference in tackling this issue."

The film makers couldn't even get a straight footballer to appear, whilst the Professional Footballer's Association indulged in the sort of sophistry that prevents change, blaming the crowds rather than taking any responsibility for giving a lead themselves.

... the PFA chief executive, Gordon Taylor, suggested that post-Fashanu, and despite its increasingly diverse nature, British football remains too hostile a territory for players to even associate themselves with homosexuality. "It would be unfair to ask an individual to back a campaign like this in case they got targeted by crowds," Taylor said. "It's a macho environment and we believe the time would be more appropriate when crowds are more civilised." 

 Now if football is macho, what about Rugby League? Footballers roll around on the floor for hours when they break a fingernail, whilst in last month's Rugby League Challenge Cup Final one player played most of the game with a badly broken finger where the bone was sticking out through the flesh (in a handling game!) and another came back on to finish the match after dislocating his shoulder. Tough - you bet.

So when Gareth Thomas, the openly gay Welsh Rugby player, switched to play League he got loads of stick in the dressing room - not for being gay, but for having played Union. And when Castleford fans gave him homophobic abuse, the club was instantly fined. It wasn't all plain sailing, Thomas was still prepared to be a pioneer and he talks about it superbly in this marvellous profile. But both he (and other players who have come out), together with the Rugby League were not prepared to hide and have taken a stand against prejudice.

And if that is admirable, then what about Sheffield Eagles? They had a float at the Manchester Gay Pride parade. They also backed the Rugby League's "Homophobia - Tackle it!" campaign by wearing a special shirt with the slogan on it in their home game against Widnes. Tonight they got their just reward, beating Leigh to win a place in the Championship Grand Final from fourth place.

Football's global reach gives it a unique possibility to act as an agent for change. It is able to reach into societies where rampant homophobia is supported by government legislation, yet is reluctant to take a stand on an issue that matters to millions of players and fans world-wide. Not for the first time, it has a lot to learn from Rugby League.

Milking blood

What is going to happen to Greece?  When austerity was embarked upon as a response to the horrendous deficit, critics didn't demur about the need for reform and the reduction of the Greek sovereign debt. However, they argued that austerity at a time of recession was not the way to do it and that the social and economic consequences of austerity programmes in a contracting economy could be dire. Without investment, measures to promote growth and with Greece lacking the ability to adjust their exchange rate, a policy of increasing competitiveness through 'internal devaluation' (reducing living standards) would shrink demand in a time of recession thereby, they argued, raising costs and lowering the income of the Greek state. The resulting sharp economic downturn would end up increasing the deficit. David Blanchflower has called this a "death spiral". Guess what has happened? Spot on. The response - more of the same? Yep, you got that right too.

Why should that be so?  Chris Dillow sees moral and political pressures preventing a number of perfectly feasible solutions, leading to the horrible indecision of European policy makers. I would highlight the extraordinary strength of the ideological belief in the economic consensus in the face of its failure. Larry Elliott, who had long predicted the implosion of both the banking system and the Euro from a social democratic perspective, echoing Vince Cable's war-time rhetoric, remembers Beveridge and calls for a rejection of the dominant model of political economy, something that Cable eschews:

Our political masters should look at the current benighted state of Britain and conclude that it is time to start planning for a post-crisis world. They need to accept that the model of the past quarter-century was unfit for purpose. That's what Beveridge concluded in 1942. He would come to the same conclusion today.

Across Europe, the mainstream left has conspicuously failed to construct and articulate alternatives, offering little hope for change. They have failed the most important political challenge presented to them for a generation. In the meantime, ordinary Greeks are in despair and social pressures mount.

I think back to the 80s. Then the debt crisis belonged to the developing world. It didn't seem to matter so much to the wealthy nations in those days and rarely found its way to the front pages or produced embarassing political rhetoric at party conference time. The solutions that the IMF imposed were the same as the ECB are insisting on today. The writer, Susan George, published a powerful book on it, A Fate Worse than Debt, and made a TV documentary of the same name. I remember the end of the film. It featured an interview with Julius Nyerere.* He concluded,

You know, there is a limit to the cow. The cow only has so much milk. You can't go on milking the blood, you'll be in trouble. And at present, they're really milking blood from the South. These countries can't pay it - so they'll collapse.

 Just how much milk is left in the Greek economy? 

*Transcript here

Today

It's that time of year again.

Decline and fall

When I was younger I remember reading the journalism of John Pilger with some admiration. His style was exemplary and I was particularly taken with his work on Cambodia. This was the time when the UN refused to recognise the government installed by Vietnam after the invasion that ended the genocide. Instead, they gave the Cambodian seat to the representatives of the Khmer Rouge, then busy mounting a terrorist campaign from the border with Thailand with covert support from the West and China. Pilger's exposure of the horrors of Pol Pot's regime and his support for the intervention that brought it down made an impression. Even if he was too uncritical of the Vietnamese, he was an eloquent advocate of a successful humanitarian intervention that was being opposed by powers locked into a cynical foreign policy. Then something began to go wrong.

It really started with the civil war in Yugoslavia and his opposition to Western action against Serbia.  Where now was his belief in humanitarian intervention? The only way he could maintain consistency was to distort the evidence in order to say that this intervention was somehow not the same as Vietnam's, not merely mistaken or inauthentic, but in some way duplicitous. Instead of exposing massacres and human rights abuses, as he had in Cambodia, he indulged in denying them in the teeth of overwhelming evidence. In doing so, he started down a dark path that leads away from evidence, truth and a commitment to expose the evils of the malign, to a place of mirrors where the crimes of those you are inclined to support are miraculously transformed to become all the fault of those that you oppose. It is the paranoia of partisanship. He was not alone on this journey and his descent continued through international crisis after crisis until we reach Libya. Even the UN decision to support the revolution against a gruesome dictatorship could not disturb this mindset and when I read a piece he published on the Stop the War Coalition's site, I knew he was lost. Even by the baleful standards of  that organisation, it slumps into the gutter.

For Pilger, the Libyan revolution "is a coup by a gang of Muammar Gaddafi's ex cronies and spooks in collusion with Nato", who "told journalists what they needed to know: that Gaddafi was about to commit "genocide", of which there was no evidence" (apart from the thousands of unarmed demonstrators killed already, Gaddafi's direct threat, the aircraft bombing rebel areas indiscriminately and the tanks rolling into Beghazi, together with the impassioned pleas of those about to die - but then that's what happens when you abandon truth in favour of prejudice). But it gets worse. The revolution - oops, sorry - "revolution", was down to "Nicholas Sarkozy, a Napoleonic Islamophobe whose intelligence services almost certainly set up the coup against Gaddafi". Why? No prizes for guessing.

"Nato attacked Libya to counter and manipulate a general Arab uprising that took the rulers of the world by surprise. Unlike his neighbours, Gaddafi had come to power by denying western control of his country's natural wealth. For this, he was never forgiven, and the opportunity for his demise was seized in the usual manner, as history shows".

Of course, there are a few inconvenient facts glossed over here, like the fact that Gaddafi was gleefully handing control of his country's natural wealth to the West in return for rehabilitation and that the UN (it was a legal intervention led by NATO and mandated by a UN resolution) dithered for ages about whether to do what the increasingly desperate revolutionaries were asking for. Rather than manipulating the revolution, they saved it from certain defeat. For those of us with longer memories, this makes a refreshing change.

All this would be bad enough, yet there is something worse lurking underneath. Missing voices. The voices of ordinary Libyans. Certain that the reason why the UN provided air support for the Libyan revolution is counterfeit, the likes of Pilger have to dismiss the explosions of joy at the end of Gaddafi's regime. And, ironically, by doing so they are infantalising the people, seeing them as manipulable subjects of the imperial powers, incapable of expressing their own feelings and taking action for themselves. And it makes me wonder just who are the imperialists now.

It is a curious journey that Pilger has undertaken. But it is one that shows what happens when you abandon critical thought to allow a predetermined narrative to overcome any commitment to principle you might have once had and try to shoehorn a messy reality into a tidy explanation that suits your prejudices. Thinking back to my early admiration, I can only see it as a tragedy, not a farce.

Thirteen

I left Greece on the thirteenth, arriving back in Manchester the temperature was 13C. I am certain that those numbers should be the other way round. A cheery weather man on the TV said it would go up to 18C tomorrow. That was the temperature at night when I started to feel a bit chilly. I am cold.

Taking a charter flight from Skiathos to Manchester is an easy way to travel. I caught a tourist boat one-way to the island, with the captain's wife being very jolly and welcoming after she had phoned me the night before to say that a party had booked and that it would be running. There weren't many of them. A small group of Eastern Europeans were swaying in time to the Lady Ga Ga CD playing over the boat's loudspeakers on a blazingly hot day as we swayed past some gorgeous island scenery before pulling into the main town's harbour. Then to the airport.

As we sat on the tarmac with the cabin doors open, hot air flooding in, a fly buzzed into the aircraft and settled on a single hair of a balding man's head. The doors closed and the fly spent the journey going up and down the plane. There seemed to be something utterly tragic about it. Its short life, instead of being spent in heat and a surfeit of rapidly decaying organic material, perfect for a satisfactory insect existence, was going to end on a dismally cold runway in Manchester. At least I knew what I was doing.

Thirteen looks like a distant aspiration today as the drizzle falls and the skies lower. The forecast for tonight is for it to drop to five.  My liking for Greece is not solely based on the weather, though it doesn't half help. I just can't help wondering why, when the great human migration out of Africa took place, they didn't stop at the Mediterranean and think, 'this will do fine'.

The Greek view

And tomorrow I head off for George Michael land.  Oh bugger.

Via and HT to

Cat on windowsill

Here is a picture of a Greek cat on a windowsill.

Doesn't look much like Hitler, or Stalin, nor even Pol Pot. Do you think it will catch on?

September

It is a glorious September here.  The skies are cloudless, the fruit trees are laden. Though the temperature is in the 30s there is an autumnal softness to the heat. Now the holidays are over, the crisis can resume.

There are threats that the next tranche of the bailout will not be paid (meaning that the government could run out of money in October), strikes and demonstrations are starting again, there have been riots in Thessaloniki - by both protesters and football hooligans - whilst the perversity of EU trade imbalances are shown by the strangest story of the week, Greece spent €1.5 million importing olive oil from Germany!

The Euro crisis has neither gone away, nor has it been solved. Policy makers' extraordinary faith in austerity is being challenged by those who are expected to be austere. And still the sums don't add up.

Looking out at the tranquillity of late summer in Pelion it is hard to see the economic storm brewing, but the dénouement is looming. The Cheshire Cat has posted a good analytical piece on the black comedy of orthodoxy. His conclusion?

The Euro is a badly built road on an impossible terrain. Flattening everything may succeed in forcing Euro economies to converge towards a desolate landscape of abandoned businesses.  The strength of Europe has been its rich diversity; its weakness its inability to accept diversity.

Principles

So now we know what 'bringing Gaddafi in from the cold' really meant.  Not just nice profitable deals, the renouncing of weapons of mass destruction and the dubious enrichment of academic institutions, it also meant rendition, torture and chummy communications and collaboration with some of the worst criminals of the regime.

It is called 'realism' in the jargon, the pursuit of interests at the expense of principles. It used to be called appeasement and generally ended in things like the Second World War, but we don't use words like that any more for anything other than propaganda purposes. Nowadays it is seen in things like the attempt to talk with the Taliban as part of a strategy of withdrawal - I think 'reconciliation' is the preferred word here.

The opposition to this is principled internationalism, supporting people against oppression, even if there are short-term costs and considerable risks. In Libya, the popular revolution forced a choice between the two and, to the credit of the governments who enabled the UN resolution, the old policy of accommodation fell. The regime's defeat became inevitable, even if the future of Libya remains uncertain.

One of the things that this whole affair shows is just what is possible if you give a tyrant the gift of secure and supported tyranny. This raises questions about those who accuse Western interventions of bad intention, such as being 'all about oil'.  Compare the benefits of cosying up to amenable dictators with the risks you run trying to overthrow them. Even if naked self-interest is part of the mix of motivations when making the choice to intervene, so too is a sense of principle, without which governments would have let Gaddafi crush the revolution with public hand-wringing and the continuation of private deal-making. And when that principle is absent, all we are left with is the acceptance of cash and the awarding of degrees, played out to the distant echo of the screams of the tortured.

A fine cause

Any support for my friends and former colleagues will be appreciated. My old, and much loved, adult education department is threatened with closure. The campaign has just begun. A brand new Facebook page is here.

UPDATE

And one of our former students has just posted this to the page, which says it all:

Please, please, PLEASE like this page to help save the fantastic Centre for Lifelong Learning. It's where I got my degree. It's where I learned to love learning. It's where I learned to be my own person and stop following the crowd. It changed my life and I often feel it's where my real life actually began. The knowledge and skills I learned there have not only helped me, I use them (probably on a daily basis) to help others too - family, 'real-life' friends and Facebook friends. This place means so much to me, I will be heartbroken if others are denied the same opportunity I had.

Doom

As us educators settle in the hollow, we scan the ridges of the hills all around us and we see the enemy on the horizon, gathering strength, adding new recruits by the minute, darkening the skies. Words. Jargon words. Thousands of them. All are waiting to swoop down and smother us with meaningless verbiage, each with their own bureaucratic tasks and performance indicators. We look up and know our fate.

In dank offices, chained bureaucrats craft and polish their latest phrases, garlanding them with ugliness, removing any connection to reality. They hand them to their superiors who trail obsequiously to the dark lords whose malicious eyes gleam with delight as they carefully select the ones that serve their fiendish purpose – the eradication of joy. A sinister smile plays on their lips and they croak with a scarcely concealed delight, "issue a policy statement".

At least that is how it seemed to me when I found out that an institution I know and like had renamed its reading week, employability week.

And right on cue comes this splendid defence of educational values from Alan Smith, not as an expression of the decadent pursuits of an elite of aesthetes, but for those outcasts at the bottom of our list of social priorities. Prisoners.

Why would they want a job at all? Most of us don't want the jobs we have; we wouldn't turn up for work were we not bribed to do so. People tend to live for the weekend, for holidays; most of us skive and take sickies when we can. Anything but work. It is simply not convincing to offer work to men in prison as if it were the answer to their ills. I have found work to be the source of most of my ills and when I look at the faces travelling to work in the morning I see that most of you feel the same way. On top of that, many prisoners expect that the jobs on offer to them on release will be unpleasant and badly paid. 

Not many people are tempted by work and yet education is fading away in favour of employability. Employability has a robust, commonsense vigour about it that is lacking in philosophy, art, history, literature, but it is a delusion. I don't think that it does any harm to put schemes of training in place, in fact for people like the vacuum cleaner guy they provide opportunities for harmless fun, but don't expect them to do much good. Education always does some good; it opens the way for curiosity, delight and self-esteem. Most people are in prison because of neglect, damage and abuse; they do not need to know how to do a bit of vacuuming, they need to know what it is to be human. 

Those of us who have worked in adult education know this only too well and see it as universally applicable. Mind you, it is wrong to sneer at vocational training, this can be brilliant for lots of people. So, for example, a good shop steward's training course can be as liberating as the history that I used to teach. Both are education in the broadest sense of the term. It is all down to the quality of the course and ultimately what the student wants to get out of it. The problem is a narrowing of education and its bureaucratisation, an attempt to turn it into a controllable process with pre-determined outcomes. My experience is that, like most human activities, education is unpredictable, open-ended and lifelong. It ails when it is not free.

Even so, in our beleaguered state, it is great to see people like Alan Smith handing us some powder so that we can prime our rusting muskets as we prepare to make our stand.

Triumph and tragedy

Victory

Overshadowed

Simplicity

We are in for a week or so of tenth anniversary pieces about 9/11 (was it really ten years ago?).  There will be undoubtedly much sophistry and casuistry, whilst the conspiracy theorists will hang around, lurking in the shadows and still doing real harm. So it was nice to read Christopher Hitchens in praise of the obvious.  He concludes:

But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and "free speech fundamentalism." The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of "ancient hatreds" but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

RIP

Dana Wilson - a real Lion

Sporting news

As Swinton lift the Championship Division One trophy despite losing to Rochdale in their final game, it is pleasing to read that there is a worse run sport than Rugby League.  The Greek football season has kicked off. This is despite the fact that only thirteen of the sides that make up the sixteen-team top division are known.

The story goes like this. Volos, the nearest team to here, who sparked much celebration in the spring by winning Europa League qualification in their first season in the top division, lost their place and were relegated to the fourth division, together with Kavala, due to the failure to break ties with owners implicated in match fixing. This caused a little local rioting and a court case. The first led to some tear gas being let loose by the police, the second to an injunction preventing their replacement. So the two teams promoted to take their places, Doxa and Levadiakos, have not had their licences approved. In the meantime, Iraklis avoided relegation last season but were then relegated because they submitted a forged document. Now they have won their appeal and so will stay up. That means that Asteras Tripolis, who were relegated, but then allowed to stay up because Iraklis were relegated in their place, have now been told that they have been relegated after all. Needless to say, Asteras Tripolis are also appealing, so nothing has been resolved. With all this in the air, the season actually started.  Interesting.

Nearly gone ...

Psychopathic dictators, distanced from reality, totally convinced of their own historical necessity and by the adoration that is bestowed on them, even if such obeisance is practised at the end of a gun, suddenly discovering the inconvenient fact that they are hated can only explain such loathing in terms of the failings and disloyalty of their ungrateful people. So, by unerring logic, they assume that in such a case the people must die. And, even if their regime has to go down to defeat, they want to take the people with them. So, despite the clear outcome of the revolution in Libya, the rhetoric about victory or death (at this stage it just means death) comes spewing out of the fleeing family, condemning more people to suffer unnecessarily.  One can only hope for a swift end.

As the dust begins to settle where the revolution is secure and life resumes, with all the uncertainties of the post-revolutionary period, the stories spill out.  Here is the reason one rebel took up arms:

Before February, he was indifferent to the Gaddafi clan, happy enough to bank a decent salary as an oil engineer. He had studied in London for a master's in business administration. He had never even seen a machine gun, still less handled one.

All that changed on 21 February, when Gaddafi loyalists began cutting down demonstrators in the streets of Tripoli with anti-aircraft weapons.

Yep, a bit of a game changer that one. It would be hard to remain indifferent at that point. Scared, yes. Indifferent, no. And that is the moment when a regime enters the beginning of its end, when people take action instead of succumbing to fear.

Without the UN's air support the struggle would have been crushed for a generation. The regime faced a choice when a wave of popular demonstrations threatened its collapse and rumours spread that Gaddafi was on his way to a Venezuelan retirement home. Instead of admitting that it had lost all support and legitimacy, it decided to kill the people. Libyans begged for help as they took up arms and, at the very last minute, it came. As a result, James Kirchick can write in a thoughtful piece in Foreign Policy:

The other remarkable thing about Libya is that it is the only Arab country where America is not just liked, but loved. (Speaking with Libyans, I never feel I have to lie and say I am Canadian, as I sometimes do in other Arab countries to avoid potentially dodgy situations.) That its people love America precisely because their country has been bombed by it is all the more noteworthy.

Yet still the commentators witter on. In the latest off the production line, Andy Beckett picks up pertinently on the tendency of the British press to behave like a small child on a long car journey; 'Are we there yet'?  'No dear and we are not stuck in a quagmire or a stalemate, it is just a long way.' However, he then follows an old trope about the absence of military experience of political leaders, making it too easy for them to go to war too quickly (if they had left it any later in Libya there would have been no revolution left to support!). Then the cynical side swipes appear, "Bellicose British journalists who opine about such conflicts from a safe distance"; "A defeated British bogeyman such as Gaddafi"; all accompanied by a lament for the decline of the influence of the peace movement.

What this complaint about war in general does is to ignore the specific causes and consequences both of action and inaction. And one is back to the old point that systematic, brutal violence by a state against its citizens left unmolested is not peace. Quick and risky action, which is expensive and can be complained about at leisure, is a gift of life and of a future to oppressed peoples seeking to throw off their oppressors. The majority of the Libyan people will be grateful that such inhibitions and reservations did not prevent United Nations support coming their way in the nick of time.

It isn't necessary to share the nationalist triumphalism of the Sun, or to see war as a glorified football match, to understand that military action can be overwhelmingly moral, despite its undoubted horrors. It is as important a sense as our moral revulsion against the barbarities of an unjust war, such as the one that  Gaddafi chose to unleash on his people. Unless you are an absolute pacifist, you cannot escape judgement about the relative merits of specific wars, rather than reject war as an option in all circumstances.  And in making a judgement, especially now conflicts have been stripped of their Cold War contexts, the support for popular liberation against the dictatorial instinct for mass murder might just be a good guide.

The Free Voice of Labour

Time for something completely different. This delightful documentary, from 1980, about the American Yiddish Anarchist newspaper, Fraye Arbeter Shtime, is a brilliant piece of social and labour history. It lasts around an hour, but watching it will be time well spent.

"You have to be idealistic or you might as well take a gun and blow your brains out"


Thanks to the commenter here

Cognitive dissonance

Simon Jenkins: Even though it worked and the result is welcome, it was still wrong.

Seumas Milne: Even though it was a success, it is a failure and a betrayal.

Robert Fisk: Doomed, I tell 'e doomed!

And still not gone yet ...

As the events in Tripoli continue to unfold, this short article from Shadi Hamid provides a coherent argument about the importance of interventions and the lessons to be drawn from Libya.

It's odd, but not necessarily surprising, that critics of the Libya intervention were calling it any number of things: mistake, quagmire, dangerous, an Iraq repeat, and so on. It is odd because the ultimate outcome -- the rebels winning and Qaddafi falling -- never seemed much in doubt. It was a matter of when, not if. For both better and worse, Libya confirms the reality that the role of external actors (in this case, the United States and Europe) can still be decisive in the Arab struggle for freedom.

 And he remakes a point that should be reiterated constantly:

When you have the ability to act, doing nothing is no longer a neutral position. 

Going, going ...

They are still wittering away whilst Gadaffi falls:

You hear no such appeals to humanity while Nato, in the name of the rebels (whoever they are), prepares to lay siege to Tripoli, a city of nearly 2 million people.

Libyan rebels are now advancing on the capital city of Tripoli with the aid of Nato strikes; this is sure to result in a real bloodbath, as opposed to the one that was conjured in Benghazi this past winter.

 In the meantime, in Tripoli, Simon Jenkins' readers take to the streets.

And the Alex Crawford video mentioned in the previous post has now been uploaded to YouTube.

 UPDATE
And still the miserable tendency of the liberal press grumble on - this from the Independent. Ignore them, read this instead:  The Top Ten Myths About the Libya War. I particularly liked this:

The Libyan Revolution was a civil war. It was not, if by that is meant a fight between two big groups within the body politic. There was nothing like the vicious sectarian civilian-on-civilian fighting in Baghdad in 2006. The revolution began as peaceful public protests, and only when the urban crowds were subjected to artillery, tank, mortar and cluster bomb barrages did the revolutionaries begin arming themselves. When fighting began, it was volunteer combatants representing their city quarters taking on trained regular army troops and mercenaries. That is a revolution, not a civil war. 

G'day hat tip.

"Freedom!"

An astonishing video report

Alex Crawford, accompanying the rebels, said the opposition fighters had been greeted with scenes of jubilation as they made their way through the outskirts of the capital.

As they entered the city, their cars gridlocked the roads, she said, and hundreds of people came out onto the streets to greet them.

"These scenes are amazing - there are hundreds of people who have come out onto the streets to greet this convoy of rebel soldiers.

"You can hear them singing and dancing, it is an amazing scene.

"We are now just a very short distance from the centre, with more and more people are coming onto the streets."

Strange and stranger

Anyone who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome knows that it is no joke and is massively physically debilitating.  In the early days of its identification people also had to fight off the stigma of it being seen as a psychological, rather than physiological, disease. This is rarely the case today, but though I knew of the early debate, I knew nothing about the extraordinary actions of CFS militants until I read this article today.

One researcher told the Observer that a woman protester who had turned up at one of his lectures was found to be carrying a knife. Another scientist had to abandon a collaboration with American doctors after being told she risked being shot, while another was punched in the street. All said they had received death threats and vitriolic abuse.

The reason? They were investigating psychological factors as part of the syndrome.  Remarkably, none of the researchers believe that the causes are purely psychological, they think that there are external factors such as a virus infection as well. Yet this has not stopped the intimidation.

Many of the extremists' claims are bizarre, said Professor Simon Wessely, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. "They say I am in league with pharmaceutical companies in order to suppress data that shows a link between viruses and the syndrome. But why on earth would drug companies do that? If they could link the condition to a virus they would be well on the way to developing lucrative treatments and vaccines. It is crazy."

So here we have conspiracy theory, deep mistrust of properly conducted scientific research, and ... well, who knows what else? It is the same sort of obsessive behaviour and half-digested pseudo-knowledge that fuels the 9/11 Truthers, the climate change deniers and many others who ignore established fact in favour of the fictions that feed their imaginations. Research into CFS though? That's a new one on me.

Past and present

It was one of those remarks that pull you up short when you are teaching a class. A few years ago, I was coming up with the usual liberal stuff about deprivation, anti-social behaviour and the criminal justice system, when a student sat back in her chair with a look of disgust on her face and said, "It’s all right for you, you don’t have to live next door to the little bastards".

I think that this gives a clue as to why some of the most potent condemnation of the riots has come from people sharing the same background as the rioters, something that Christopher Hitchens noted as part of his reflections on the perennial violence of British society.

Rioting in Britain is not a novelty, the product of some new social disease.  Riots have been a feature of British society for centuries.  Frequently, they were the way people defended and extended their rights. Industrial relations were often carried out through riot. Workers were known to demolish employers' houses until their demands were met and machine breaking was not just a feature of the Luddite rebellion. Food riots were endemic as were rural riots against enclosure, turnpikes and, during the Swing riots of the 1830s, the introduction of the threshing machine. Workhouses were burnt down in protests against the Poor Laws. And politics was always a riotous affair.  Whilst my leftist soul looks on these with sympathy, we have to remember that  'King and Country' mobs were as prominent as radical ones, as were anti-Irish disturbances and, going way back to 1190, a wave of anti-Semitic pogroms culminated in the appalling massacre of the Jewish population of York in Clifford's Tower.  Our attitude towards riots should reflect precisely who was doing the rioting and for what reason.

It is difficult to pin down the latest wave of disturbances. The proximate cause of the rioting in Tottenham was very different to what took place in, for instance, Salford. The riots were limited to a few cities and towns, appear to have been short-lived and were carried out by relatively small numbers of people. Motivations for participation were different, ranging from excitement and opportunism to anger and alienation. But there was also something taking place that was unpleasant and disturbing.  The result was that, rather than uniting communities in protest, they divided them, with large numbers of working class people expressing disgust.

Part of the hostility was down to a continuing generational conflict, part a moral revulsion at the destruction and, let's not forget them, the murders that accompanied the rioting and looting, although there is more to it than that. And this is where the views of my student comes in.

For anyone living on what are euphemistically known as 'problem estates', this wasn't a riot; it was a breakout group. Sporadic arson (accompanied by attacks on fire-fighters), joy riding, burglary and the sort of systematic bullying and intimidation that can even drive people to suicide are some of the everyday difficulties people face that can make their lives misery. It is a part of the backdrop to poverty. The same people who attacked property in town centres were, or were assumed to be, often the same ones who make the struggles of poverty so much worse. Hard experience had already bred antipathy.

In addition, there is evidence of some heavy violence in places with a history of gun crime and drug wars. And that is not all, if there has been an overt political agenda, in some places it seems to have been set by the far right. Riots are not arbitrary affairs; their targets are rarely random. Asian businesses have been consistently picked out wherever rioting took place, gay communities have been under attack too. (The gay village in Manchester was safe though. It was well aware of the threat and set up its own defence group to see off any potential attackers.  Seriously, you would not want to mess with these guys.) In Salford, the police have fingered the far right as one of the main instigators of the attacks on the Precinct.

This rings true to me. I worked with many students emerging from troubled backgrounds who were directed towards adult education after problems with the police, drink and drugs, or gang related activity. This was a time when the social services and probation officers were under less pressure and more sympathetic to offenders. I met some fascinating and very able people, but the stories they told about what they were leaving behind made my flesh creep. And politically they had invariably come from the far right.

So, the working class sense of disgust is hardly surprising and I cannot shake off a sense of unease about these events. They strike me as troubling actions by troubled people. However, I have no sympathy at all with the indignation of the conservative right.

What a complete load of steaming ordure is flowing out of the orifice of the conservative press, even more from the office of the Prime Minister. All the old tropes, 'break down of community', 'decline of moral order', 'decay of civilisation', 'single parents' - no, 'single mothers', never forget that this argument is heavily gendered, decrying feckless women lacking the firm smack of the masculine discipline that features heavily in their fantasies. There have been endless streams of the stuff, lubricated by the laxative of moral indignation, all accompanied by the foetid stench of class hatred.

And this isn't new either; every generation has indulged in the same dreary guff. The Economist's Bagehot blog got there before me in using Geoffrey Pearson's marvellous book, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, a mainstay of my reading lists for years (and now shamefully out of print). It is a great post and worth reading in full.

There is nothing as unedifying as the spectacle of an establishment in full moral panic. In a chapter in his book, Customs in Common, E P Thompson wrote of the macabre theatre that was the Eighteenth Century riot, a masque of performance and ritual. Thompson was not just writing about the actions of rioters, he included in this notion of theatre the grim and bloody reaction of the courts. Little seems to have changed.

Today the punishments may not be as draconian, but the use of the law as an exercise in humiliation is still with us. And now the dust is settling, the first detailed reviews of convictions and the courts are showing an unsurprising pattern. Much harsher sentences are being handed out (with, thankfully, some successful appeals and acquittals beginning to follow) and, of course, they show that the majority of rioters were poor, unemployed and from 'deprived' areas.

And so we are left with the unmistakable correlation of deprivation and disaffection - a disaffection that can produce violence, much of it self-destructive, just as it harbours outrage at that violence within the same community. This is even more so in a society that parades its inequalities, rewards its failures with grotesquely huge pay-offs and is suffused with the sort of suburban self-satisfaction that is nurtured by well-rewarded mediocrity. If you strip out opportunity and hope, then people will create their own alternatives with the materials that they have to hand and the results, as this astonishing piece about Argentinian football shows, are not always pretty.

Champions!

After a nervous afternoon following texts from a friend at the ground and Internet news feeds, it is celebration time. Swinton beat South Wales 40-28, whilst Keighley lost at Workington, to become Championship Division One champions with two games left to play and win automatic promotion. A grand old club is on the way back.

Last night

Sunset

Dusk

And the August full moon

Mooning

It is the night of the August full moon. And we are promised a meteor shower too.
The radio will be playing songs about the moon all day, people will stay up late and maybe there will be music and dancing.

It is a sentimental time, so perhaps we should take a walk ...

Shush

Thanks Daniel

Hooligans

And in the meantime, groups of feral rating agencies are roaming the world economic system, burning credit ratings, wantonly removing 'A's, smashing share prices and throwing rocks at anyone trying to come to the rescue. France is the latest country to be engulfed.

Random thoughts

It is holiday time in Greece so all is quiet on the rioting front, not so in my other home of Salford. I found what was happening there disturbing. National Greek rioting followed the shooting of a teenager in December 2008. It was aimed at the police. Riots and demonstrations have taken place against the austerity packages. They were aimed at the government. But Manchester and Salford? What was going on?

Obviously, riots like these are not the sign of a healthy society or of an economy that is functioning smoothly, but I am sorry I cannot see this as an uprising, a proto-revolutionary movement or even an outburst of inchoate rage at the Tories. What was on view in my other home was something that is very familiar to all who live there, seriously screwed up young people. Only this time there were more of them in one place. Not that many, a few hundred perhaps, but enough to be effective.  Unlike in Greece, where much of the nation was broadly in sympathy with the protests, if not their methods, the people of Manchester and Salford seem horrified.

Here is Martin Bright:

I remember talking to Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company in the aftermath of the killing of Damilola Taylor and she said she was concerned that some children in her project had become “suicidally uncaring”. She meant that there was a group of young people who were so damaged that they had no empathy for others. Many of them were effectively homeless. Most disturbingly, they had developed their own parallel morality. This was over a decade ago. 

You can read more from her here. From my former work in adult and community education I can recognise what she describes and think back to the really tough minded activists who work hard to overcome nihilistic, destructive alienation and the wonderful projects that can do so much to rescue people. I would also argue that the best work is not done by the state, its role is ambiguous as it is an enforcer as much as an enabler, it is done by the voluntary sector, doing difficult work with difficult people. It is just that the state is the only viable source of the necessary funding and this is being stripped away, leaving only the parallel world. This is no liberation.

I don't see a just society emerging from the ashes of a fully insured Miss Selfridge, but there was a thought that I couldn't let go as I watched the pictures and read the feeds of what seemed more like a systematic exercise in looting than a riot. Immature and damaged children, and yes they are children, were the ones who will appear on the CTV footage and later on in the courts. What of the fences who take the goods off them, the ones who make the money, the ones who hawk the stolen goods around? They aren't on the streets or the cameras. This was no heroic uprising, it was exploitation of the already exploited, of the vulnerable and immature. It was child abuse.

Simple pastimes

They always used to say that every man should have a hobby. You know the sort of thing; collecting model trains, building replica ships out of matchsticks, splitting atoms.

Choices

When you need a little light relief, turn to Simon Jenkins.  In the midst of the most awful guff he always comes out with a gem. In this terrible piece on Libya he pulls out a general principle, an 'iron law' no less:

The iron law of plunging into someone else's civil war is choose the side most likely to win and make sure it does.

So that's what you should do. Franco? A dead cert. Lets get the RAF up there with those Luftwaffe chaps and bomb the crap out of Guernica. Pol Pot? A clear winner - if you need any help spotting those intellectuals to be exterminated, we're your boys.

I don't think so somehow. In any international conflict with global implications (aka "someone else's civil war") the basis of choice is not who is the likely winner, that would usually be the best armed and equipped, it is who you would want to see win. It is a moral and political choice. And in many cases, the side who we would like to see victorious is often the least well equipped. It may well consist of popular, democratic forces lined up against the tanks and troops of a fascistic dictatorship. And that is why intervention is necessary at times, to prevent them being crushed with all the consequences that may result.

The amoral, 'realist' perspective that Jenkins comes out with is actually unreal, detached from a real world where we face the constant necessity of making ethical judgements, taking risks, fulfilling our responsibilities and standing up for our principles.

Hard times

Everyday difficulties in Greece, described here by Angelique Chrisafis.

And it ain't over yet.

Kill or cure

The OECD are confident. But, as Aditya Chakrabortty reports from Greece, others are not so sure:

One senior investment banker is more blunt: "People are scared that the government doesn't know what the fuck it's doing." 

Reading this, together with his other report on a complex loan deal of dubious legality, you have to say that they might have a point.

Greece certainly needs reform, though the real point is which reforms it needs and which it could do without, and it also needs investment. At the moment we are seeing the start of a reform process, linked to austerity packages drawn from the manuals of orthodoxy, being cheered on by international institutions and bright-eyed American trained technocrats. In the meantime sceptical Greek people are conducting a quiet run on the banks and withdrawing cash. We will see who is right.

Phew, what a scorcher

I saw this report yesterday about the excessive heat in Britain (28C - a pleasantly warm late evening here).

Parts of Britain have enjoyed sunshine and scorching heat as temperatures were higher than in Sydney and Rio.

It forgot to mention that in Sydney and Rio it is winter.