Brendan O’Neill

The BBFC's war against the 'natural language' of the Glaswegian working class

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:39:00 +0100

Telegraph, 25 May 2012

The British Board of Film Classification gets barmier by the day. It now tells us that there is an acceptable and unacceptable way to say the word “c***”. If, as in Ken Loach’s new movie The Angels’ Share, the characters in a film say that word in an “aggressive” fashion, then the film will be stamped with an 18 certificate. But if they were to utter the c-word in a “non-aggressive” fashion, then the film could be granted a more lenient, box office-friendly 15 certificate. So Loach, whose new film is based in Glasgow, where the c-word abounds, has been forced to excise the more aggressive uses of the word in order for his film to be a 15. He is rightly annoyed that he has effectively been forced to censor “a word that goes back to Chaucer’s time”.

This morning I spoke to Rebecca O’Brien, executive producer at Sixteen Films, Loach’s production company, and she tells me they were all “totally gobsmacked” by the BBFC’s demands. The Angels’ Share is not remotely a harsh or ugly movie in which the swearing is genuinely menacing (indeed, it has been hailed as a “Scottish Full Monty”), and yet still the BBFC sent over what O’Brien calls “a list of aggressive and non-aggressive c***s” so that the production company would know which uses of the word were acceptable and which were not. Sixteen Films were told that they could have “a maximum of seven c***s”, O’Brien says. The film had about 15 of them and so eight had to be excised, all because aloof suits at the BBFC considered them “aggressive”.

Loach said at a press conference that “the British middle class is obsessed by what they call ‘bad language’”. He’s right, but it isn’t the language itself, the actual words, which terrifies the likes of the BBFC and other members of the great and good. It’s the question of who is using those words and to what end. So certain uses of the c-word are now positively celebrated, with Sex and the City types and feminists uttering it as “a word of sexual potency”. They rarely get any flak for describing the c-word as “a cherished part of [our] lexical armour”. Likewise, when the ironic superhero film Kick-Ass showed an 11-year-old girl calling a group of men “c***s”, there was, in the words of the Guardian, only a “half-hearted whimper from the Daily Mail” – everyone else thought that funky use of the c-word was hilarious and Kick-Ass got a 15 from those unelected defenders of common decency at the BBFC.

However, when a bloke – worse, a Glaswegian bloke – uses the exact same word, and not as an expression of “sexual potency” but rather as part of a heated-but-friendly exchange or as a term of abuse, we reel in horror, and the BBFC insists that only over-18s may have their ears defiled by such shocking lingo. O’Brien says the BBFC is effectively demonising the way certain communities speak. It is “incredibly patronising”, she says, “to censor what is for some people their natural language”.

Indeed. As usual with censorship, what is really being smacked down here is not words themselves, but rather the ideas expressed in those words, and the identity of the person who is speaking them. So non-aggressive, “potent” swearing is considered a hoot by the modern middle classes, even, bizarrely, as something empowering and edgy. But aggressive swearing, colourful terms of abuse, blokey utterances of the c-word and f-word still make us feel uncomfortable and have us reaching for the blue pen. Richard Curtis opening his dire Four Weddings and a Funeral with loads of floppy-haired posh people saying the word “f***”? That’s fine. Ken Loach showing Glaswegian lads using an historic swearword that is common among that city’s working class? That’s not on.

Read more of my articles here.

‘Rupert Murdoch’s shadow state’ and other bullshit

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:07:01 +0100

spiked review of books, 25 May 2012

Is Labour MP Tom Watson the most ridiculous man in British politics? I know the competition is stiff – Jacob Rees-Mogg? Either one of Labour’s two Eds? That Lib Dem guy who look likes Beaker from The Muppets and who somehow became something big in the Treasury? – but the answer is definitely yes. Watson’s book on the Murdoch Empire, written with Independent journalist Martin Hickman, is one of the silliest things I’ve had the misfortune to read. It wouldn’t even be worth reviewing if it wasn’t for the fact that behind Watson’s embarrassing lack of self-awareness and teenage levels of self-aggrandisement it reveals a great deal about what is motoring the Murdochphobia of the modern political class.

The fuller-figured Watson is famous for two things: for once claiming the maximum food allowance granted to MPs (£4,800), and for sitting on the Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee which grilled Rupert and James Murdoch, and others, in relation to the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. This book is about that scandal. Or more accurately, it is about a brave man’s ceaseless mental fight to push that scandal to the forefront of British public life and to loosen Rupert Murdoch’s ‘corrupt grip on our national institutions’. That man is, of course, Tom Watson.

So what is Tom Watson like? It’s funny you should ask because the book, though ostensibly about Murdoch’s creation of a ‘shadow state’ in Britain which had a ‘poisonous influence on public life’, has a lot to tell us about the good character of Tom Watson. We learn that he likes ‘sinking pints of real ale’. We know he loves The Doors because we’re told that in order to prep himself for grilling the Murdochs, he ‘shut the door of his office in Portcullis House, put on The Doors album LA Woman at full blast and paced around rehearsing questions’. He doesn’t always drink real ale – we learn that after he interrogated the Murdochs at the culture committee, an event modestly referred to as ‘Democracy Day’, he went to Claridge’s and celebrated with pink champagne.

One particularly unsettling feature of the book is that, because it is co-authored, Watson doesn’t write in the first person. Instead he writes sentences like, ‘One of the nine parliamentarians facing the Murdochs was Tom Watson’, ‘Watson now experienced what it was like to get on the wrong side of the Murdoch Empire’, and ‘Watson ordered a bottle of pink champagne’. It’s all a bit weird. Who could write like that without feeling enormously embarrassed? Brendan O’Neill stopped writing about Watson for five minutes and had a cup of coffee.

The clear aim of Watson and Hickman’s book is to turn the fall of the News of the World into a super-simplistic, Hollywood-style morality tale featuring goodies and baddies. Sometimes they use people’s hair as a signifier of whether they are good or bad. So former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks is ‘a mischievous, red-haired tabloid queen’, while Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who has been writing about tabloid phone-hacking since before phones were invented (it certainly feels like that), has a ‘swirl of receding white hair’. Brooks is also ‘coquettish’, a ‘kisser’, ‘very tactile’, the daughter of a ‘tugboat worker’, who was once a ‘21-year-old secretary’ who ‘hankered’ after a career in journalism, and who devoted her time to ‘working, scheming and networking’ her way to the top. I think this means she is bad. In the film version of the book that probably plays on a loop inside Watson’s head, I imagine Brooks is played by Glenn Close in a scarlet wig.

At times, you wonder about Watson’s mental health. Don’t worry, this isn’t libellous – his friends worry about it, too. We’re told that when Watson phoned his researcher at 3am to have a ‘frantic, whispered conversation’ with her about some scandal that is so boring I have literally forgotten what it was about, she ‘became anxious about his state of mind’. We’re also told that, one time, after The Times did a Reservoir Dogs-style mock-up of Watson and other Labourites who were said to be part of Gordon Brown’s sinister cabal of enforcers and smearers, ‘Watson walked along the beach, in tears’ and then phoned his friend Sion Simon, a former Labour MP, and started ‘literally raving’ and ‘talking crazy’.

Some of his friends might once again worry for Watson after they read his descriptions of Rupert Murdoch’s influence on British public life. Seriously, take out the word ‘Murdoch’ and replace it with the word ‘lizard’, and I’m sure much of this book could double up as David Icke’s next offering. We’re told that Murdoch exercised ‘a poisonous, secretive influence on public life’ and had a ‘corrupt grip on our national institutions’, on ‘prime ministers, ministers, parliament, the police, the justice system’. Apparently he ‘orchestrated public life from the shadows’. From ‘the decks of yachts in the Mediterranean to farmhouses in the Cotswolds’, Rupert and his robots ‘spun an invisible web of connections and corruption’. At one stage Watson leaps from David Icke territory into JK Rowling land, telling us: ‘The names of [Murdoch’s] agents spoke of the darkness: Silent Shadow, Shadowmenuk…’

It sounds eerily like conspiracy theorising. The language precisely echoes that which is used by the 9/11 truthers and Obama birthers who lurk in the underbelly of the interweb: it shares with them a belief that there is a ‘hidden’ or ‘invisible’ sect which controls everything from ‘the shadows’. The last chapter of the book is called ‘Darker and darker’, and it is of course a yet further delve into the dark world of what Watson’s calls the Murdoch-created ‘shadow state’, those mysterious men on yachts who ‘orchestrate public life’ (!) in Britain. In the photo section of the book, we get an unwittingly hilarious mash-up of the Icke outlook and the Rowling style: there’s an olde world map headlined ‘The Cotswold Triangle’ which shows that David Cameron’s constituency is close to Rebekah Brooks’ home, which is close to Elisabeth Murdoch’s home, which is close to the Cheltenham race track where Brooks has been known to meet friends. I say friends. They’re probably her fellow rulers in the shadow state.

Some might think that it wasn’t only on the phone to Sion Simon that Watson was ‘talking crazy’. Yes, of course Murdoch was influential, as you would expect of the proprietor of both Britain’s newspaper of record (The Times) and its bestselling tabloid (the Sun). But the notion that he orchestrated public life, controlling politicians, the police and the justice system from a boat, is nothing more than a chattering-class conspiracy theory, a more respectable version of the sort of bollocks Oliver Stone talks about the killing of JFK.

Watson’s book confirms what Murdoch has become for a Labour Party bamboozled by the public’s indifference to it and for liberal commentators befuddled by the failure of their petty ideas to make inroads with ordinary folk – a catch-all explanation for the travails facing the modern mainstream left and British politics more broadly. Incapable of grappling with the real reasons why Labour’s fortunes are waning and why parliament seems bereft of both purpose and remotely interesting members, the Murdochphobics have become convinced that it is all HIS fault, Rupert and his agents called ‘Silent Shadow’, who have visited upon this land a terrible plague of dumbed-down politics and hollowed-out institutions. Just as pointy-hatted weirdos in the Middle Ages tried to convince their communities that the old woman who lived alone in a hut was responsible for bad weather and crop failure, so modern-day Murdochphobics want us to believe that one Aussie on a yacht is to blame for the fall of Neil Kinnock, the dry spell suffered by Labour in the Eighties, the fact that the Tories are useless and insincere, the lack of public respect for parliament, and so on.

But fear not! For Watson and his merry band of anti-Murdoch warriors (at one stage we’re told that Watson drinks in a pub called Ye Olde Robin Hood – nice) are here to save the day. Thanks in part to his efforts, thanks to the ‘Democracy Day’ he spearheaded in the culture committee when the chief lizard and his son were made to answer for their jealous orchestration of British public life, the Murdoch Empire has finally been ‘exposed by the daylight’, we’re told. ‘It has been publicly humbled.’ Shorter version: ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead.’

Bashing Murdoch has become a sad substitute for asking what has gone wrong with British politics. For the true cause of disarray in British public life, we should avert our gaze from yachts in the Mediterranean and look closer to home. A proper look at Watson’s own Labour Party would be a good place to start. The double standards in this book are so audacious they almost become admirable. Watson complains about the Murdoch drones controlling politics from behind the scenes, yet he then recounts how in 2005 he and ‘a few friends’ visited ‘the Bilash Indian restaurant in Wolverhampton’ where they started hatching ‘a mutiny against Tony Blair’ – confirming that Labour is now as cut-off and Machiavellian and stuck ‘behind the scenes’ as any big corporation. Watson also complains that Murdoch’s minions hacked not just phones but also computers, ‘everything electronic’ – neglecting to mention that his party passed acts of law which grant the state the authority to snoop into ‘everything electronic’ belonging to the public, from our emails to our web-surfing habits. That a leading member of a party which relentlessly invaded our privacy now wants us to be shocked by the fact that he was once followed by a PI in the pay of News International… well, it shows that what Watson lacks in irony recognition he more than makes up for with brass neck.

Watson sings the praises of the Leveson Inquiry, which was set up post-News of the World to interrogate the ethics of the press. He hopes it will put the apparently rabid press (the tabloids, that is) back in its place. In other words, de-fang it, tame it, or what we used to call ‘censor it’. That seems a terribly high price to pay just because a Labour MP is still smarting from the fact that he was once labelled by the Sun as a ‘tub of lard’ and ‘Two Dinners Tommy’ who was involved in Labour’s internal backstabbing ‘up to his bulging and bloated neck’.

Read more of my articles here.

Submission to the British government’s consultation on equal civil marriage

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:05:00 +0100

These are the thoughts I have submitted to the Home Office’s consultation on expanding civil marriage to include same-sex couples.

A major problem with the debate about same-sex marriage is that it has been hijacked by sectarian entrepreneurs. It has been colonised by groups more interested in getting one over on their opposites than in having a serious discussion about the nature of marriage and its potential redefinition to include same-sex couples.

So on the anti-same-sex marriage side, religious and socially conservative elements are using this issue to express their fear and loathing of homosexual relationships in general. And in the pro camp, secularist activists have turned support for same-sex marriage into a marker of moral superiority over religious people, the uncultured and the allegedly ill-informed.

The government, despite posing as neutral facilitator of a consultation on same-sex marriage, is not immune to this process of sectarianisation. For prime minister David Cameron, keen to distance himself from the image of the Tories as a “nasty party” unthinkingly wedded to traditionalism, and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, keen to prove his commitment to what he refers to vaguely as “the values of the open society”, the most attractive thing about same-sex marriage is likewise the opportunities it creates for factional and political advantage.

The problem with this invasion of the sectarians is firstly that same-sex marriage becomes less important for its content, for what is actually being proposed, than for the PR possibilities it creates for both conservatives and liberals. This has generated an extraordinarily shallow level of debate, guided more by the reputational needs of the protagonists than by careful social and historical consideration of the issues at hand.

And secondly, the PR hijacking reduces same-sex marriage to a simple black-and-white, good-and-evil issue, to the sort of moral stand-off more suited to the sixteenth century than the twenty-first.

Cutting through all this, it must be possible to take a position which is neither black nor white, which is thoughtful rather than sectarian. If the government does this, I think it will recognise that the issue of same-sex marriage is rather more complex than its leading ministers have led us to believe, and that rushing to legislate for same-sex marriage may not be wise.

One question policymakers ought to ask themselves is this: Do we regard every form of human companionship as being subject to the same legal definition as marriage? Do we not recognise that there are different kinds of human relationships, which serve different purposes and have different meanings?

Because it strikes me that a key driver of the same-sex marriage campaign is relativism rather than rights, a refusal to make judgements about human relationships or even just to differentiate between contradistinctive human experiences. The campaign for same-sex marriage appears more like a drive towards homogenisation, motored by a relativistic unwillingness to make judgements, rather than a drive towards a more equal society.

Historically, most people, including gay people, accepted that there were important differences between a gay relationship and a relationship of marriage. Where the former is for the most part based in romance and companionship, the latter is something more, certainly something very different: a relationship through which men and women assume responsibility for generational renewal. Marriage is the institution through which society organises intergenerational relations, making it very different to friendship, companionship or homosexual romance.

The urge to redefine this institution is underpinned, not by liberalism or progressiveness, but by the modern-day allergy to privileging certain relationships or even distinguishing between different kinds of relationships and lifestyles. The impetus here is not “Let’s make gay people equal” so much as “Who are we to say that a gay couple’s relationship is not a marriage?”

However, this refusal to make a value judgement about human relationships is itself a value judgement on traditional marriage. The idea that all sorts of relationships can now be redefined as marriage, because we feel we don’t have the moral authority to say “Marriage is distinctive”, represents an implicit demotion of marriage itself. In the very act of refusing to judge between relationships, modern-day relativists issue a swingeing judgement upon marriage, decreeing that it is no longer special or different or key to society’s management of intergenerational relations. It is just the same as every other romance-driven or sexually oriented relationship.

As is so often the case with today’s relativistic, self-consciously anti-judgemental outlook, the refusal to judge does not create a situation where all lifestyles come to be treated as valuable; rather it creates a situation where nothing is really considered valuable anymore.

This cuts to the heart of the problem with the current discussion about same-sex marriage. It is presented to us as a good and timely elevation of homosexual relationships, but it is more accurately understood as an implicit demotion of traditional marriages. The push for same-sex marriage is legitimising the intervention of the state into intimate relationships, where it intends both to homogenise human experience and redefine married people’s identities. In short, this is not the extension of “rights” following demands for equality from below so much as it is the overhaul from above of an institution to which millions of people signed up for quite specific reasons.

The homogenisation drive can be seen in the way the government proposes to replace terms such as “husband” and “wife” with the all-purpose phrase “partner”. Such a move would finally signal that, according to state diktat, all relationships are now the same. We are all “partners” now, whether we’re a young man living with his boyfriend or a middle-aged Christian wife with five children who is devoted to her family and her husband. There is apparently no distinction between these two people. The bureaucratisation of people’s lived identities, the flattening out of titles such as husband, wife, mother and father, which have profound social and cultural meaning for millions of people, speaks to the rather cavalier way in which the drive for same-sex marriage actually devalues traditional marriage.

The state has no right unilaterally to redefine an institution. It has no right to decide and decree that a relationship which for a great many people is about more than companionship, which is about community, society, generational renewal and, in a way, about history itself, is now in fact just a “partnership”, no different to any other loving or sexual coupling.

What we are really witnessing here is the bending of an historic institution to suit the identity requirements of gay activists and the political requirements of the modern elite, with little regard for the role the institution currently plays in both people’s lives and in society more broadly.

The liberal position is of course that homosexuals should have the choice to get married, that they should have the choice to go through some form of marital ceremony. But then the progressive position is to urge them not to exercise this choice. Why? Because the emotional benefits for them would be outweighed by the harms caused by the state’s uniltateral overhauling of the institution of marriage.

This would cause two lots of harm. It will potentially harm individuals currently in a marriage, who will discover, overnight, that their relationship now means something very different to what they thought, and that the institution they entered into has been denuded of its specific meaning. And it will cause social harm, too, by destabilising the institution through which society currently organises intergenerational relations and encourages the assumption of adult responsibility for nurturing a new generation.

If the government can look beyond the positive media coverage it will no doubt get if it institutionalises gay marriage – or more pointedly deinstitutionalises traditional marriage – it might recognise that there is more at stake here than PR points. The real and profound issues are the standing of marriage, the way in which people develop their identities and relationships, the question of how we take responsibility for future generations – and the problem of having the state intervene, largely on a whim, to transform all of those things.

Read more of my articles here.

It’s time to get serious about opposing the EU

Wed, 23 May 2012 19:04:37 +0100

spiked, 23 May 2012

It’s becoming fashionable to criticise the EU. Seven years after the French and Dutch electorates were branded ‘xenophobic’ for voting against the EU Constitution, and four years after the Irish were labelled ‘treacherous’ for the same, the media elites who did all that namecalling are now posing as brave critics of Brussels.

New French president Francois Hollande has won heaps of praise from the liberal media in Western Europe for standing up to Angela Merkel and austerity. The Greek radicals in SYRIZA have got many a soixante huitard hack hot under the collar with their posturing against EU cliques. Everywhere you look, it seems the same observers who once railed against the thick ‘Europhobic’ masses who dared to say No to the EU in referendums are now coming out as Europhobic themselves, or at least as disappointed with Brussels.

But there’s little positive in this rise of what we might call a semi-sceptical attitude towards the EU. Even spiked, which has been implacably opposed to the anti-democratic, initiative-strangling EU from the get-go, must now accept that a deeply problematic anti-EU outlook is on the march in parts of Europe. There are five problems with this Johnny-Come-Lately dislike of Brussels.

1) It’s a remarkably partial critique

The disappointed-with-Brussels lobby only criticises the EU for its economic interventions in sovereign states’ affairs, never for its cultural or political interventions. So while observers are peeved at the EU’s stringent bailout package for Greece, and are alarmed at the power exercised by European suits in the economic affairs of Ireland, they have said next to nothing about the contemporaneous EU pressure on the Ukraine to rewrite its laws.

The Ukraine is desperate to become a member of the EU, but Brussels bigwigs are forcing it to overhaul its political and legal systems first. EU officials have put on ice a landmark free-trade deal and planned ‘political association’ with the Ukraine, ostensibly in protest against the imprisonment of former premier Yulia Tymoshenko but really because they think the Ukraine has the wrong kind of political culture. One EU suit warned the Ukraine that it has a ‘systemic problem’ which requires a ‘systemic solution’, and said there could be no further deal-making between Kiev and Brussels until the Ukraine had satisfactorily instituted ‘concrete strategies to redress the effects of selective justice… free and fair elections… and the resumption of delayed reforms’. EU leaders are boycotting the Euro 2012 football games in the Ukraine in order to heap further pressure on this basket case of a nation to become ‘more European’.

This cultural blackmailing of the Ukraine represents a more intolerable intervention into a state’s affairs than we have seen in Greece or Ireland. Those two nations have largely had their economic independence obliterated, yes, and that is terrible – but the Ukraine is being strongarmed into making ‘systemic’ changes to its entire mode of politics. This echoes the EU’s treatment of member state Hungary, whose democratically elected government has likewise been demonised for passing laws that fall foul of the cosmo-outlook of the PC inhabitants of Brussels. That these acts of cultural imperialism elicit hardly any criticism, certainly in comparison with the angst generated by the EU’s economic imperialism, suggests the semi-sceptical lobby only has a problem with ‘Merkozy’-proposed cuts to public spending and not with the right of Brussels to tell naughty Eastern nations how to behave.

2) It misunderstands the nature of the EU

The semi-sceptical lobby believes a handful of individuals around Brussels, led by the demonic Merkel, are forcing European nations to dance to their tune. In Greece, Merkel is depicted as a Hitlerian figure. Others rail against the troika (the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank) which is enforcing bailout packages, believing it is holding all of Europe to ransom.

This demonstrates great ignorance about the nature and origins of the EU project. It is of course true that Brussels put enormous pressure on democratically elected leaders in Italy and Greece to replace themselves with technocrats. But it is wrong to view the EU as the creation and fiefdom of small numbers of ruthless leaders. In truth, the EU project of the past 40 years arose from the needs of all of Europe’s cut-off, legitimacy-lacking national elites. Feeling themselves increasingly estranged from their own populaces, and more crucially from the political legitimacy that comes with having a connection with the populace, national elites chose to club together in Brussels, to create new institutions which would allow them both to formulate political and economic policy away from the madding crowd and also to derive some measure of political legitimacy from the idea that they were pursuing ‘the European project’ rather than from their own demos.

Fundamentally, the EU represents, not German expansionism or French arrogance, but the collective and cowardly pooling together and dilution of national sovereignty by the leaders of modern Europe. This was not real European unity, a democratic bringing-together of the European peoples, but rather a safety net for the European elites. Where the exercise of national sovereignty demands that the political class have meaningful roots and relationships in society, the post-sovereign, pseudo-cosmopolitan institutions of the EU allow it to pursue politics and economics in an entirely insulated fashion. In this sense, the technocracy created in Italy and the usurping of normal democratic politics in Greece and Ireland are not deviations from the EU project; they’re the logical conclusion to it. We are seeing in brute form what the EU has always been about: the elites’ flight from the political realm into the comfort zone of bureaucracy.

Some now fantasise that Europe might recover if we get shot of Merkel or restrain the troika. But the thing which nurtured the EU project in the first place – the chasm between national elites and their populations – would still be there.

3) It is backwardly parochial

One of the main arguments of the semi-sceptical lobby is that European nations are threatened by terrifying external forces. From the monster that was ‘Merkozy’ to the all-purpose bogeyman of ‘globalisation’, from American bankers to cheap Chinese goods, the semi-sceptics are convinced that alien elements are to blame for the misfortunes of their nations. Their toxic combination of national self-pity and responsibility-avoidance, where the chief aim is to absolve national elites of culpability for the European predicament, means their critique of Brussels frequently comes with ugly protectionist undertones.

So during the recent French presidential elections, all the candidates depicted the EU as one of many ‘global forces’ that threatened to ‘dilute’ France (in Nicolas Sarkozy’s words). Other semi-sceptics point the finger of blame for Europe’s woes at German unilateralism or the EU’s adoption of ‘neoliberalism’.

Here, being anti-Brussels is really an expression of both a profound sense of political powerlessness and also a desire to retreat into the national shell and hide from the world. The obsession with Merkel’s awesome power or with the apparently all-consuming force of globalisation really speaks to an instinctive recognition that national institutions are increasingly feeble and not up to the task of addressing political and economic crises. But unable to account for this enfeeblement of the nation state, the semi-sceptics fantasise that it was destroyed by political and economic Godzillas from without, primarily from Brussels and Berlin. The infantile nature of their critique of Brussels – where they fail to understand that it is a clubbing together of cynical national elites and instead paint it as a neoliberal conspiracy – means they adopt the sort of victim-driven protectionist outlook one normally associates with virulent nationalism.

4) It reduces ‘growth’ to a meaningless buzzphrase

Even more unconvincing than the cultural elite’s recent turn against the excesses of the EU is its sudden conversion to the ideal of economic growth. A media class which for years has demonised growth, depicting it as the destroyer of nature and cause of mental sickness, is now cheering Hollande and other Merkel-critics for insisting that Europe pursue growth not austerity. Even Polly Toynbee, in an about-face that would make Glenda Slagg wince, has gone from her usual shtick of ridiculing Eurosceptics and complaining about the ‘psycho-social stress’ brought about by unrestrained growth to cheering Hollande for being a kind-of Eurosceptic who demands growth…

Here, growth is little more than a hollow buzzword. It is uttered not as a serious proposition but rather as a marker of anti-Merkel decency, a word which shows that you are in the ‘good EU’ camp rather than in the bad old ‘Merkozy’ camp. Yet while Hollande might succeed in getting a few mentions of the g-word inserted into the EU’s austere fiskalpakt, modern Europe’s fundamental hostility to the pursuit of growth will remain intact. The profound intellectual, political and cultural suspicion of growth, as most clearly expressed in the cults of environmentalism and ‘sustainable development’, will still be prevalent.

The semi-sceptics are promoting the mad idea that if you say the word ‘growth’ often enough, it will magically occur. Those of us who are serious about the pursuit of growth because we are serious about liberating people from need know that, in truth, creating the conditions for growth will require: a) getting a handle on what measures must be taken now to stem recessionary trends, and b) waging a war of words against the anti-growth prejudices that have modern Europe in a vice-like grip.

5) It is immature

One of the worst things about the semi-sceptical lobby is its childlike nature. From SYRIZA saying they will withdraw from the Euro if they don’t get what they want to Geert Wilders’ preference for bringing down the Dutch government over agreeing to cuts in public spending, anti-Brussels posturing is best understood as a political tantrum rather than a political position. We’re seeing a process of self-infantilisation. We know that the EU infantilises nations, but what is striking is how much the opposition plays into this game and accepts the label of ‘infant’, behaving like a child angry at its parents rather than as a political grown-up with an alternative to what Brussels is offering.

These Eurosceptics must grow up. If we’re going to oppose the EU – and spiked absolutely thinks we should – then let’s do it for the right reasons. Not because it is an evil entity fashioned by German neoliberals and it would be better to hide behind our national borders rather than engage with it, but because it is a profoundly anti-democratic creation of Europe’s aloof modern elites which actually prevents proper European unity. Bringing the peoples of Europe closer together is a wonderful idea – and if we challenge both the oligarchical EU and its infantile protectionist critics, we might just start to bring that about.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Antisrbizam

Sun, 20 May 2012 18:19:00 +0100

B92 (Serbia), 20 May 2012

Gest koji je Ratko Mladić načinio prvog dana suđenja u Hagu (rukom preko grla) odaslao je talas uzbuđenja u prostoriju rezervisanu za novinare. Nije bitno što je objašnjeno da je gest, zapravo, najverovatnije bio molba za toalet pauzu, a ne pretnja upućena bosanskim muslimanima na galeriji (Mladić je gestom upitao „možemo li da presečemo na trenutak, moram u toalet”). Mediji još uvek naklapaju o tome u ekstazi što je njihov omiljeni zlikovac uradio stvarno zlu stvar prvog dana suđenja na kome mu se sudi što je zao. Dobili su sliku koju su želeli, koja će dalje podgrevati šoubiz performans kojim se bave evo već 20 godina: onaj u kome Srbi igraju ulogu modernih nacista koji vole da ubijaju i siluju, a moralni krstaši zapadnih medija igraju ulogu nezamislivo hrabrih svedoka ove nacističke izopačenosti.

Suđenje Mladiću nema nikakve veze sa „pravdom za Bosnu”. Treba ga shvatiti kao jeftini Nirnberg za moderne moralne krstaše koji će, u nedostatku Hesa ili Geringa, učiniti šta mogu sa Mladićem. Mladić je zamena za nacoša za samoproklamovane reinkarnacije Čerčila, za one sredovečne dokonaše međunarodnih liberalnih medija koji zamišljaju da je njihovo hrabro izveštavanje iz Bosne sredinom devedesetih pomoglo da se obelodani da je nacizam još uvek živ i zdrav i da je utisnut u DNK svakog Srbina. Nema propisnog pominjanja Mladića bez razrađivanja terminologije holokausta, bilo da nas podsećaju da je odgovoran za „najgore zločine u Evropi od vremena nacističkog holokausta” ili da je „arhitekta genocida” ili da je bio odlučan da očisti, istrebi, iskoreni i tako dalje.

Nema, naravno, sumnje da je Mladić čudovišan lik odgovoran za dobar deo varvarstva bosanskog rata - kao što su to i bosanski Hrvati i bosanski muslimani koji su, između ostalog, dobrodošlicom dočekali bivše mudžahedine a buduće članove Al Kaide iz Avganistana da se bore sa njima protiv Srba od kojih su nekima, ti simpatični mudžahedini, odrubili glave. Ali u upotrebi analogije s nacistima u svakoj raspravi o Srbima više se radi o potrebi zapadnih posmatrača nego o tome šta se zaista dogodilo u Bosni devedesetih. U pitanju je njihova očajnička potreba za istorijskom misijom, političkim uzbuđenjem u njihovim inače ušuškanim, neuzbudljivim životima, što je dovelo do toga da je tragičan, gadan, duboko složen rat u Bosni preobražen u jednostavnu reinkarnaciju nacističke čudovišnosti. To, naime, zapadnim liberalnim piscima i aktivistima, koji su imali tu nesreću da žive u izuzetno nezanimljivoj političkoj eri - devedesetih godina prošlog veka - omogućuje da fantaziraju o novom evropskom holokaustu i kako je, eto, njima zapalo ne samo da svet o tome obaveste, već ga i zaustave.

Od Bosne sredinom devedesetih (gde je Novi Državnik Srbe nazivao „satanistima”) do Kosova krajem devedesetih (kad je časopis „Sun” objavio naslov „Nacisti 1999: srpska okrutnost jezivo podseća na Holokaust”) Srbi se neprestano porede s nacistima. Ovo obezvređivanje Holokausta od strane zapadnih komentatora smišljeno je ne samo da se Srbi (koji se opisuju kao ludaci, divljaci, zla kopilad, čudovišta, rečima Mishe Glenny) osude već, što je još važnije, da se laska egu zapadnih posmatrača. Ed Vulliamy odaje ovu maskaradu kada u jednom od svojih brojnih članaka o bosanskom ratu, piše kako je njegov otac „imao čast da se bori protiv fašizma”, dok on ima „čudnu privilegiju” da prati borbu protiv „blede, ali nepogrešive imitacije Trećeg Rajha”, što će reći bosanskih Srba. U zapadnim medijima sredinom devedesetih novinari su pokušavali da budu dorasli očekivanjima svojih očeva i njihovim postignućima u daleko inspirativnijem ratu, tako što će objaviti rat rečima „novim nacistima”.

Sada možemo očekivati da se suđenje Mladiću tretira kao vrsta raspleta ovog samopovlađujućeg brendiranja Srba kao nacista. Svaki Mladićev gest ili komentar držaće se kao dokaz da je on bio više od običnog prosečnog gospodara rata, kakvih zapravo ima mnogo na svetu - novi Hitler, počinilac Holokausta. Bilo je potrebno da Elie Wiesel koji je preživeo pravi Holokaust, dovede u pitanje ovu tinejdžersku eksploataciju istorije Holokausta od strane novinara u potrazi za nekom misijom. Krajem devedesetih on je izjavio - „Holokaust je zamišljen da istrebi sve Jevreje na svetu. Da li bilo ko veruje da su Srbi ozbiljno planirali da istrebe sve Bošnjake, Albance, sve muslimane na svetu?”.

Ponadajmo se da ove reči imaju bilo kakav odjek kod zapadnjačkih piskarala koji hrle u Hag u nadi da vide „novog Hitlera”.

Read more of my articles in my archive here.

The risks of dumping nuclear are too great

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:08:00 +0100

The Australian, 19 May 2012

“Nuclear power kills!” scream green campaigners. Well, so does switching off nuclear power in response to irrational panics.

Indeed, if the post-Fukushima experience in Japan is anything to go by, it seems pretty clear that anti-nuclear hysteria poses a far greater threat to life and limb than does nuclear power itself.

Five people died as a result of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March last year, when the terrible tsunami crashed into the plant’s reactors.

But far more people died from heatstroke after the Japanese authorities caved in to post-Fukushima pressure and switched off nuclear reactors across the country.

This led to power blackouts, causing air-conditioning systems in homes and public buildings to fail, with predictably disastrous consequences.

So in June last year, three months after the accident at Fukushima and with 35 of Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants in shutdown for safety checks, there was an unusual spike in the number of heat-related deaths.

In the first 10 days of that month, as Japan’s sweltering summer took hold, 26 people died from heatstroke – four times the normal amount for that time of year. A further 13,000 were hospitalised. The greatest number of victims were, of course, pensioners, many of whom wanted to “help the nation by enduring the heat without air conditioning”, according to Japanese officials.

In short, with power blacking out as a result of nuclear shutdown, and with both officials and Greenpeace protesters arguing that everyone had a duty to use less energy while the “nuclear problem” was investigated, patriotic old men and women were left at the mercy of Japan’s cruel summer.

It looks set to get worse. Now, all of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants are in shutdown, following intense post-Fukushima panic and pressure on the authorities, leaving Japan ill-equipped for the coming summer. The Japanese authorities this week warned of “mandatory power cuts”.

Nuclear power contributed a third of Japan’s energy generation pre-Fukushima. Without it, whole towns are being forced to endure periods of blackness and unbearable heat as power fails. In Western Japan, the authorities have forced through a 20 per cent reduction in everyday energy usage, causing pensioners (and their loved ones) to fret about the approaching summer.

The economy has been whacked too. The Japan Business Federation says businesses face a potential billion-yen downturn in the absence of the energy once provided by nuclear power plants.

All of this reveals that anti-nuclear posturing, so beloved of the eco-friendly, bike-riding set, is more than just a trendy, evidence-lite pastime. It’s a posture which has very real consequences in the world, in people’s lives.

Being against nuclear power might make the green-leaning sections of society feel good about themselves, as they make a great display of both their inner organic soul and their fashionable disdain for modernity.

But it has serious and terrible spin-offs, as everyday people reliant on nuclear energy for light, for keeping cool, for living comfortably, are suddenly plunged back into the past.

That is a terribly high price to pay just so some eco-activists can roleplay being brave warriors against Evil Nuclear.

The lesson of Fukushima is that, yes, pushing society forward by embracing nuclear power can be a risky business. But holding society back is also highly risky, more so in fact.

Progress, especially of the nuclear variety, can sometimes have less-than-desirable consequences. But as we saw in Fukushima, and also in Chernobyl before it, it is entirely possible to contain those consequences and to limit the downsides that inevitably come with taking massive leaps into the future.

But anti-progress has even worse consequences. Eco-precaution is potentially lethal; risk-aversion is itself risky. It dismantles the forcefield that man has spent hundreds of years erecting between himself and nature - unpredictable, chaotic, beastly nature - and makes us once again susceptible to nature’s whims.

If that is true even in modern, hi-tech Japan, where the reining in of nuclear power has instantly made summer a more terrifying prospect, it is trebly the case in the Third World. The anti-progress, growth-sceptical agenda promoted there by Western do-gooders and NGOs has consequences which, in the long term, are far more dirty and destructive than pursuing a new Industrial Revolution would be today.

The most striking thing about the Fukushima accident is the impact it has had across Europe. It has unleashed a metaphorical tsunami of anti-nuclear panic, as both politicians and activists who have long felt instinctively uncomfortable with nuclear power have exploited it to shut down plants.

So German chancellor Angela Merkel announced last year that, in response to Fukushima, Germany would shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022. New French president Francois Hollande has promised to close half of France’s very impressive nuclear plants by 2025. SYRIZA, the radical leftists rising to power in Greece, hate nuclear power, describing it as a “lethal danger to the people and the environment”.

The real lethal danger here is not nuclear energy, which, postwar, has killed remarkably few people, but rather the hysterical turn against it, the elite’s rejection of this safe, efficient and brilliant technology that has transformed the lives of huge swathes of humanity.

What we are witnessing is the winding down of the optimism and ambition of the postwar nuclear age. Where that age was built on a belief that man had both the right and a duty to uncover nature’s secrets and create massive amounts of energy from mere rocks and elements, today’s anti-nuclear age is premised on the idea that we should all be eco-meek creatures, never messing with Mother Nature, and making do with living in the dark instead.

No thanks. As Japan has shown us, such fashionable backwardness is disastrous for mankind.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

Sorry, but SYRIZA won't save Europe

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:53:56 +0100

spiked, 16 May 2012

SYRIZA, the radical left-wing coalition that came second in the recent Greek elections, is being talked about as the spearhead of a new European movement against austerity. These edgy young Greeks, whose offices are apparently covered in Communist posters and stickers saying ‘Revolution!’, are reportedly leading a ‘great revolt’ against austerity. Where Angela Merkel and her dwindling minions want to immiserate the workers by forcing struggling Euro countries to cut public expenditure and live more austerely, SYRIZA is at the ‘forefront of the anti-austerity backlash’, commentators tell us.

Are they serious? SYRIZA will lead us out of slow-growth, or rather no-growth, and towards post-austerity? This coalition whose largest party, Synaspismos, says ‘don’t even think about it!’ to nuclear energy on the basis that it poses ‘a lethal danger to the people and the environment’? This coalition that believes that a key problem in modern Europe is over-use of energy, and therefore we need ‘a radical change of the production and consumption models’ to make people learn to live on less energy? This group of activists that demands the institutionalisation of ‘sustainable development’ (read ‘no development’) in order to coax Europeans to ‘live and work as ecologically responsible people’? This coalition that is so uncomfortable with the idea of big economic growth that in 2003 its key member changed its name from Coalition of the Left and Progress to Coalition of the Left and Ecology, lest anyone accidentally think it was interested in pursuing proper progress when all it really wants is to create a vapid-sounding ‘ecologically-oriented, compassionate world’?

Expecting SYRIZA to fight the good fight against austerity and for a more prosperous Europe is a bit like asking Al Gore to front an advert for 4x4s. It isn’t going to happen, because SYRIZA, in its nature, in its ideology, is hostile to the very thing we need to challenge today’s austerity script – a serious commitment to risk-taking, experimentation and exploration in the name of creating more wealth. Indeed, SYRIZA encapsulates a profound contradiction at the heart of the allegedly ‘pro-growth’ movements on the rise in Europe, from the support for President Francois Hollande in France to the rise of anti-Merkel agitators in Greece: these groups pose as anti-austerity yet they embody the very anti-growth prejudices that are widespread in modern Europe and which threaten to store up further misery for recession-hit Europeans.

The most striking thing about SYRIZA is its immaturity. Like the Pirate Party in Berlin, the comedian party doing well in Italy, and seemingly more serious, EU-questioning parties like Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands, SYRIZA, which has failed to set up a coalition government, is a highly juvenile outfit. It seems incapable of taking anything seriously. It prefers to rage against globalisation, against evil Germany, against Brussels and against Greece’s old ruling class rather than provide anything in the way of a coherent strategy for tackling recession and creating the conditions for economic stability, far less growth. Its immaturity is not surprising when you consider its origins – it was forged in the fires of that most infantile of political gestures, the radical anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The history of SYRIZA is in many ways the history of the decline of the old left and its replacement by new forms of left radicalism which are innately hostile to modernity and meaningful progress. SYRIZA is made up of more than 10 left-wing parties, including small outfits like the Anticapitalist Political Group and Ecosocialists of Greece. The largest party in SYRIZA is Synaspismos, which is itself a coalition of left-wing movements and ecological groups. The leader of Synaspismos, 37-year-old Alexis Tsipras, is also the leader of SYRIZA – he’s the man currently frightening Brussels and exciting leftists after leading SYRIZA to a 16 per cent share of the vote in Greece’s legislative elections on 6 May.

Tsipras’s outfit Synaspismos was originally founded in the late 1980s and was initially a coalition between Greece’s two main Communist parties: the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Greece and Greek Left, which was a ‘Eurocommunist’ party. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, there were profound splits and spats in the Communist movement in Greece, leading a huge chunk of the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Greece to withdraw from the Synaspismos coalition. Synaspismos then transformed into an actual political party and pottered along fairly undramatically in the 1990s, winning between three and six per cent of the vote in various elections. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, with the rise of that middle-class screech of rage against modern life that was the anti-globalisation movement, that Synaspismos gathered some momentum and morphed into SYRIZA.

Like many other old left movements in Europe that were still reeling from the fall of Communism in the East, Synaspismos glimpsed in the anti-globalisation movement of the early 2000s an opportunity for renewal, believing it could crib from the shallow ‘anti-capitalism’ of these new protesters. As the BBC’s Paul Mason describes it, it was at this moment that Synaspismos ‘evolved in an interesting direction, reacting to the rise of the anti-globalisation movement’. Synaspismos played ‘a significant role’ in the mobilisation of anti-globalisation protests against G8 summits, particularly in Genoa in 2001. As a result of leaping into the disparate, leaderless and objective-lite anti-globalisation outburst, Synaspismos turned from being a pretty normal political party into, in Mason’s words, ‘a highly diverse umbrella group’ consisting of ‘left Social Democrats, far leftists and ecologists’. A few years later, in 2004, it made its new position as a ‘highly diverse umbrella group’ formal, by bringing on board various other ‘anti-capitalist groups’ and ‘eco-leftists’ and becoming SYRIZA, the coalition now wielding great influence in Greece.

In short, the form that SYRIZA takes – a peculiarly diverse coalition of ageing leftists and youngish greens – is merely a reflection of its degraded political trajectory. SYRIZA is in effect the party-political expression of the middle-class morass that was the anti-globalisation movement. In both its form (various radical groups cleaving together) and its outlook (narrowly anti-Brussels and obsessively anti-Merkel), SYRIZA embodies all the worst traits of the anti-globalisation movement that first came to prominence a decade ago. Writer Noreena Hertz once described that movement as ‘a babel of different languages and objectives gathered under one “anti” banner’. And while she and others sought to depict that as a positive thing, as evidence of a newly energetic, non-dogmatic left that was angry about capitalism, in truth this babel-like movement of people who were just anti – anti-business, anti-Starbucks, anti-war, anti-nuclear – spoke to the profound organisational disarray and ideological decay of the post-Cold War left. SYRIZA was born from that decay.

It is not surprising, then, that SYRIZA embodies the anti-progress prejudices of the army of antis in the anti-globalisation movement. Anyone who looks at SYRIZA’s propaganda will see that it is uncomfortable with development, unless it is of the ‘sustainable’ variety, and that it is antagonistic towards both nuclear power and to what it calls the ‘over-exploitation of natural resources promoted by neoliberal expansionism’. Synaspismos, the central party in SYRIZA, says ‘natural resources are under attack everywhere’, and argues that rather than encourage the further ‘exploitation’ of natural resources for mankind’s gain – or what others of us might call the use of nature’s resources to create a world of plenty – we instead need ‘a radical change of the production and consumption models’. This is not anything like a genuinely socialist call to produce more, and to do it more rationally, in order to liberate mankind from need, but rather is an eco-meek demand to lower people’s horizons (‘radically change the consumption model’) in order to protect nature’s resources from further human exploitation.

It is entirely fitting that Synaspismos was included in the book The Green Challenge: The Development of Green Parties in Europe, Dick Richardson’s analysis of new political parties which ‘accept the critique of industrial society’. Synaspismos is against nuclear power (it is ‘extremely problematic’, creates ‘huge dangers’, and detracts from the importance of ‘saving energy and using renewable energy sources’); it is a fulsome promoter of ‘sustainable development’ (that fashionable modern-day warning against rethinking, reimagining and remaking our world in favour of only doing That Which Can Be Sustained); and it is less interested in making Europeans wealthy than in helping us to ‘live and work as ecologically responsible people’ (patronising much?). Little wonder that in 2003 it removed the word ‘progress’ from its name and replaced it with ‘ecology’ – because like the anti-globalisation movement that transformed its fortunes, Synaspismos and its new mother-ship SYRIZA do not believe in progress as socialists would once have understood it.

Synaspismos and SYRIZA are anti-austerity in the same way that the Naomi Klein followers of the early 2000s were anti-capitalist – that is, in an entirely substanceless fashion, more emotionally than ideologically. Where once radical socialists were against capitalism because they believed in a more rational and full-on conquering of nature and production of stuff – as Sylvia Pankhurst said, we do not call for ‘penurious thrift’ but for ‘a great production that will supply all’ – the radicals of the anti-globalisation movement were against capitalism because they believed it made the plebs greedy, made bankers fat, and really screwed up life for Mother Nature. They were against everything, but were for nothing of any note. SYRIZA has taken this borderline nihilistic ‘anti’ attitude into the discussions about the future of the Euro and the EU.

Some leftists are now disappointed that SYRIZA’s great challenge to Brussels has amounted to little more than a plea that it treat Greece a bit more leniently, rethinking the terms of the bailout package. But there’s nothing surprising about this. Because SYRIZA, for all its radical posturing, actually sings from the same sluggish, sceptical-about-growth, horizon-lowering hymn sheet as every other mainstream political group in modern Europe, right from the Queen of Austerity Angela Merkel to that alleged warrior for growth Francois Hollande. Indeed, the anti-globalisation movement was never much more than a loud, youthful, occasionally bloody expression of the modern capitalist elite’s own lack of confidence in its system. So if SYRIZA, forged in the aftermath of that movement, does at some point form a government in Greece, we will not be witnessing the empowerment of a radical opposition to both economic and intellectual downturn in modern Europe, but rather the institutionalisation of contemporary capitalism’s own self-disgust.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

The bile being spat at the people of North Carolina exposes the ugly elitism of the gay-marriage lobby

Sun, 13 May 2012 10:47:00 +0100

Telegraph, 11 May 2012

Apparently if you oppose gay marriage you are a dumb, ill-informed, brainwashed, knuckle-dragging hick and bigot. At least that’s the message coming out of liberal circles in America this week, as supporters of gay marriage look with disgust upon the people of North Carolina for voting in favour of Amendment 1. A majority of North Carolina’s voters – 61 per cent – voted for the amendment to the state’s constitution, which says: “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognised in this state.” For doing this, for having the temerity to say that marriage should stay as it is, they have been subjected to extraordinary levels of abuse and ridicule.

The media says they’re all “bigots”. Apparently they were driven by a typically Southern hatefulness. In fact, according to the LA Times, “even by Southern standards, [this was a] remarkably mean-spirited initiative”. The LA Times went so far as to argue that President Obama’s newly stated support for gay marriage is “similar” to Abraham Lincoln’s support for the emancipation of slaves, the implication being that it is massively disappointing that modern-day blacks in North Carolina, those ungrateful beneficiaries of Lincoln’s stance, did not vote to “liberate” gays today. Maybe they’ve been brainwashed into hating homos. According to the New Civil Rights Movement, one of the main pro-gay marriage groups in America, in North Carolina “ignorance and hate has enveloped ordinary citizens”, and the support for Amendment 1 shows how “ill-informed, mis-informed and just plain ignorant the citizenry… truly are”.

The idea that hatred and ignorance have “enveloped” the people of North Carolina is widespread. The gay advocacy group Faith in America said voters had been “duped” by religious leaders; they were “uninformed or deceived”. The only reason Amendment 1 passed, says Faith in America, is because of “the populace’s misunderstanding about sexual orientation”. Of course it isn’t possible that voters simply had a considered moral objection to gay marriage – no, they were clearly all brainwashed by religious crazies. The passing of Amendment 1 shows that voters should not be trusted to rule on sensitive moral matters, says the LA Times. Apparently these kind of “anti-gay” votes will continue until “people of conscience put a stop to it by asserting that tyranny of the majority is wrong”. In short, let’s leave the creation of morality to those good people who act on “conscience” rather than to those “ordinary citizens” who have been enveloped by “hate and ignorance”.

Gay-marriage supporters have even deployed borderline racial lingo to express their fury with the uninformed hordes of North Carolina. The secularist magazine Free Thinker describes them as “knuckle-draggers”. So does Daily Kos, the must-read blog of the liberal set: it slated the “hateful, paranoid, bigoted, right-wing knuckle-draggers” who voted for Amendment 1. Sticking with the idea that opponents of gay marriage are knuckle-scraping specimens, Buzzfeed magazine published a very popular piece this week called “14 Steps That Will Evolve Your Views On Gay Marriage”. It showed a monkey in a cage – your typical opponent of gay marriage, apparently – and invited him to become more “evolved” on this important moral issue. Given the widespread criticism being made of North Carolina’s black communities in particular, many of whom supported Amendment 1, all this talk of unevolved knuckle-draggers whose brains are easily controlled by religious cranks is sailing perilously close to racism territory.

And then there’s Facebook and Twitter, where people can say about North Carolina what the mainstream media only hints at. The “Visit North Carolina” Facebook page, a mere tourism outlet, has been invaded and taken over by so-called liberals, who are furiously insulting the “jackasses and homophobes” and the “backward f**ks” who inhabit that “disgusting state”. There is now even a campaign to Boycott North Carolina and damage its tourism industry. On Twitter, the people of North Carolina have been referred to as everything from “idiotic f**ktards” to “bigoted motherf**kers” who should all “kill themselves”.

This orgy of bile, from the mainstream branding of North Carolina’s voters as “ignorant” to the peripheral demands that they do the world a favour and kill themselves, shows what is behind the gay-marriage campaign. This is not about rights and equality, or love and happiness. Rather, gay marriage has become a tool through which the right-minded sections of society express their moral superiority over the dumb, the brainwashed, the insufficiently cosmopolitan, the churchgoing. Gay marriage has become a kind of weapon, wielded by the right-on to demonstrate that they are better – that is, less brainwashed and more caring – than your average redneck or country black. Supporting gay marriage has become a kind of cultural signifier, a way of distinguishing oneself from the ignorant throng.

Given all this, it is possible that the voters of North Carolina were not only voting against gay marriage, but were also sticking two fingers up at the sneering cultural elite which has been hectoring them for weeks to do “the right thing” and embrace “liberal values”. In the intensively divided America of 2012, being against gay marriage can now be seen almost as an act of political rebellion, against a faraway elite which fears and loathes anyone who is not like them.

Read more of my articles here.

Posturing against austerity: an infantile disorder

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:23:53 +0100

spiked, 9 May 2012

Given that a Socialist president has been elected in France for the first time since 1981, and that the two main parties in Greece have taken a drubbing in a general election, it’s understandable that the local elections in Italy have been overlooked. That’s a shame, though, since those elections produced a result which speaks powerfully to the state of European politics in 2012. In Italy, an actual comedian was elected, a joker, a man who made his living from making people laugh and who has now become someone who ‘shakes the cage of traditionalist politics’. Indeed, funnyman Beppe Grillo won a ‘massive victory’, leading one waggish headline writer to say that the Italian people had ‘the last laugh in local elections’.

The rise of Grillo reveals a great deal about where European politics is at. First, it shows that much of the current voting, in Italy, in England, in Greece, is motivated by a narrow anti-incumbency sentiment, where the desire is simply to give a bloody nose to ruling parties. So in Italy, parties or independents critical of Mario Monti’s technocratic government (which did not stand in the elections) did well. Secondly, it reveals that the beneficiaries of today’s cynicism with the old mainstream parties are likely to be new, rootless, even one-issue organisations that stand on a ticket of not being like ‘Them’. Grillo’s anti-politics party was born out of his personal blog just three years ago. And thirdly, it suggests, pretty powerfully, that the oppositionists being elected across Europe are a bit of a joke – sometimes literally.

In many ways, the rise of Grillo in Italy’s local elections is less concerning than the success of Francois Hollande in France or of a coalition of apparently radical left-wing parties in Greece, two electoral events which are being crazily depicted as a ‘political revolution’. At least you know where you stand with a comedian; at least you know he’s mostly just joking. The alarming thing about Hollande and Alexis Tsipras, the comparatively youthful leader of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left, is that they are being treated seriously despite the fact that they, too, are a bit of a joke, a comedic interlude in mainstream politics who offer little, if anything, in the way of an alternative. Yes, many of those who voted for Grillo were ‘having a laugh’; what’s truly bizarre is that many of those getting excited by the victories of Hollande and Tsipras are being serious.

Great claims are being made in the wake of the local elections in Britain, the presidential elections in France, and the legislative elections in Greece. Britain’s Labour Party may have secured the votes of just 12.5 per cent of the eligible electorate, but it came top in the local elections, and so we’re told that ‘Labour is back’. The victories of Hollande in France (where he won 51.63 per cent of the vote to Nicolas Sarkozy’s 48.37 per cent), and of SYRIZA in Greece (the anti-austerity, radical left coalition which won 16.78 per cent of the vote), are being talked up as a ‘new dawn’ for European social democracy. According to a Guardian editorial, we have witnessed a ‘stunning victory… for the left in Europe’.

These observers urgently need to take a reality check. Because in truth, the most striking thing about the recent elections in Europe has been the utter absence of any matters of doctrine, of principle, of ideological outlook. In England, France, Greece, Italy, no doctrinal matters whatsoever have been raised, far less contested. These elections are best seen, not as a new dawn for social democracy, but as an unfocused emotional reaction against things – against Sarkozy, austerity, Brussels. Actually, it’s even worse than that. Where once the left was concerned with creating a new reality, one based on systems and values quite distinct from those of traditionalists, today’s emerging left is obsessed with avoiding reality, with hiding away from the harshness of economic life in 2012 and simply saying: ‘Be gone!’ The problem with the newly successful left movements is not just that they’re attracting shallow protest votes, but that they’re extraordinarily infantile, blinkered outfits.

The only ‘doctrine’ uniting the various movements against austerity in modern Europe (both the left-wing and right-wing ones) is the doctrine of responsibility aversion, of shirking seriousness in favour of emotionalism. What the cheerleaders of these movements fail to realise is that being anti-austerity without positing an alternative route out of recession, without any serious proposals for stabilising economic life in Europe, is mere gesture politics. In fact it’s an act of irresponsibility, of wilfulness, where the key aim is to insulate oneself and one’s supporters from the harsh realities of our recessionary times rather than face up to those realities and potentially transform them. The new anti-austerity posturing, to quote an old communist, is an infantile disorder.

Ironically, given all the talk of a new dawn for the left, the fashion for recklessly kicking against any responsibility for thinking about harsh economic measures was set in motion by a man of the right: Geert Wilders. Wilders, leader of Holland’s anti-Islamic Freedom Party, brought about the collapse of the Dutch government last month when he withdrew from negotiations about shaving €16 billion from the country’s budget. The most striking thing about Wilders’ actions was their childish, self-serving nature. He felt that the austerity package would be unpopular with some of his working-class supporters, and also he believes, in the words of one Dutch newspaper, that his ‘anti-Euro agenda will catapult him up the polls’. Having casually precipitated the fall of the government, he then left Holland for a tour of America to promote his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War against the West and Me (me, me, me).

SYRIZA, the left coalition in Greece, and many of the supporters of President Hollande in France, may consider themselves total opposites to Wilders. But their posturing against austerity is not that different to his. They, too, are driven by an urge to wish away economic realities by simply saying ‘No!’. The success of SYRIZA in Greece was indeed striking, but less for anything that that radical left coalition has said or done than for what it reveals about the process of disintegration at work in mainstream European politics. The key dynamic in Greece was not a surge in radical leftism but a demise in support for the two big parties that supported the EU bailout package and which dominated Greek politics for 40 years: the left-wing Pasok, whose vote share fell from 44 per cent to 13.18 per cent, and the conservative New Democracy, whose vote fell from 33.47 per cent to 18.18 per cent. SYRIZA’ s success (it won 52 seats in parliament) is built on little more than an emotional reaction against the main parties and the EU.

As with Wilders in Holland, there is nothing serious or substantial about SYRIZA’s posturing against austerity. The terms most often used to describe its attitude towards the EU bailout plan for Greece is that it plans to ‘walk away’ from it or to ‘rip it up’. A serious movement would think long and hard about what needs to be done now, however harsh, in order to create the conditions for economic growth and prosperity in the future. All SYRIZA does is milk voters’ emotional anger with the old rulers of Greece and effectively shout ‘screw you!’ to Brussels. The main reason SYRIZA is causing great excitement in left-wing circles across Europe is because activists see an opportunity to live vicariously through it, to fantasise that it represents the return of the left or of serious oppositional politics. It doesn’t. Alexis Tsipras is a Greek Ed Miliband, with better TV skills.

Meanwhile in France, President Hollande has rallied people around the cry, ‘Austerity is no longer the only option!’. He says the EU must ‘focus on growth’. He’s certainly right that austerity isn’t the only option, but there are two problems with his posturing. First, it’s doubtful Hollande is a true devotee of growth. Consider his promise to shut down 50 per cent of France’s impressive nuclear power stations by 2025 – that seems more consistent with today’s eco-meek, ambition-strangling outlook than with a serious pursuit of prosperity for all. And second, it’s simply not true that Europe is today faced with a simple choice between Austerity and Growth, like a child picking between brussel sprouts or ice-cream. Indeed, it is only through considering harsh economic measures now, from the reduction of welfare spending to the ‘creative destruction’ of capital, that anybody can hope to create the conditions for growth in the coming period. The key accomplishment of SYRIZA, Hollande and others is to put off into the future the enactment of harsh economic measures, thus making make such measures potentially worse when they come.

Hollande, SYRIZA and others have turned ‘growth’ into a platitude, a mere word they use to get up the noses of unpopular Brussels bureaucrats. These movements’ fortunes are built on the fact that they ‘Just Say No’ to austerity. But that is not enough, certainly not for those of us on the left who are really serious about liberating Europeans from both Brussels’ political deadbeats and from today’s suffocating fashion for low horizons and slowing down progress. While saying ‘No’ to the EU is perfectly fine in something like a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, when the only options are ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, we should expect far more in the way of a programme when it comes to parliamentary and presidential elections. Europe’s new rulers aren’t spearheading a revolution; they’re institutionalising an emotional desire to hide from the recession, and in the process are potentially intensifying people’s future economic hardships. Some leftists.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Democracy loses in the new PC Vichy

Sat, 05 May 2012 12:34:15 +0100

The Australian, 5 May 2012

HERE in Britain, where voting is not compulsory, the BBC is running a television ad designed to encourage us lazy people to get off our arses and vote in elections.

“Everything is politics!” the voice-over woman says in that pseudo-matey fashion adopted by patronising preachers. Apparently everything from the “fat content of our food” (cue footage of an unhealthy sausage sizzling in a pan) to the tidiness of our streets is a political issue. If we fail to vote, we’re missing out on a historic opportunity to have our say on meat and litter and the other apparently burning issues of our day.

Meanwhile, political claims being made of the Leveson inquiry into press ethics grow grander each day. Commentators tell us Leveson is far more than a mere technical investigation into instances of phone hacking at a tabloid newspaper. It is about “cleaning up” politics itself; it is about reforming British democracy.

As one of The Guardian’s Leveson cheerleaders puts it: “The Leveson inquiry isn’t about criminality, or one minister, or even one proprietor: it’s really about what kind of democracy we still have.”

The chasm between the liberal elite’s view of traditional democratic politics (which should be about food and buses and whatnot) and its view of Leveson (which is an opportunity to debate “what kind of democracy we have”) shines a brilliant light on what Leveson has become. It is clearly, in the eyes of the chattering classes, an alternative seat of government, a supreme source of political authority, the place where real politics takes place.

Where the throng is encouraged to worry its pretty head about petty issues, the elite has fashioned a new, aloof, utterly unelected institution through which proper politics can be done.

Leveson is like a PC Vichy: an illegitimate, pseudo-governmental institution that presumes it has more authority than parliament to hold elected ministers to account and to set the political agenda.

The amount of hope the great and the good are investing in Leveson is extraordinary. Where this inquiry started life as a simple, if highly censorious, investigation into press ethics post-News of the World, it is now talked up as a “glorious opportunity for meaningful reform” of British public life, as an Observer columnist put it.

Now that Leveson is discussing the relationship between politicians and the press, some in the smart set see it as an opportunity to reprimand politicians they don’t like and to remake politics.

As one columnist says, there is a “cruel virtue” to Leveson, which is that it is a “show trial” of the powerful. Apparently, its value “lies in the public staging, in the pillory, the humiliation”. That is, Leveson is seen as a kind of new House of Lords, or rather a House of Lord, given that it is ruled over by just one lord of the realm, which has a high duty to rap the knuckles of the political and the stupid.

As a writer for London’s Telegraph gleefully claims, Leveson has brought about “a seismic change in the British political landscape. The rules are different.”

So central has Leveson become to the chattering classes’ pursuit of their own brand of post-ideological, non-mass “clean politics” that it dominates media debate here.

Its discussions and antics, its lawyerly pontifications about the press, politics and democracy, have elbowed aside anything that takes place in parliament itself. Open any paper and you are likelier to read about the shenanigans of these unelected mouthpieces of the cliquish opinion-forming classes than you are to hear about the work of MPs, people actually voted for by normal human beings.

Leveson is now the focal point for political debate and renewal in Britain, while parliament, the only political institution we sausage-eating hordes have some control over, has been pushed aside.

Indeed, elected ministers now cower in abject fear before Leveson and its media lackeys.

Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, has found himself fighting for his political life following revelations about his relationship with News Corporation (parent company of News Limited, publisher of The Weekend Australian) that were made at … where else? At Leveson.

Soon, Hunt - elected by 33,605 people - will have to appear before Lord Leveson - elected by nobody - to explain himself. Prime Minister David Cameron will also appear before Leveson this month. Britain’s elected leaders are effectively being hauled before a “show trial” that exists for the delectation of a small number of cynical liberals.

A Telegraph writer goes so far as to say that, in Leveson-ruled Britain, “politicians can be divided into two categories: those who bought into the News International culture, and those who did not”. In short, a politician’s moral authority is no longer determined by the voters but by the elite Leveson cheerleaders, who have developed new mechanisms for deciding who is Good and who is Bad.

Here, we can glimpse what is really fuelling Leveson: not a simple desire to hold to account the small number of people who did wrong at the News of the World, but a thirst to remake politics in the image of the anti-Murdoch “decent classes”. It is their boredom with parliament and their disdain for the masses that has led them to see Leveson as the saviour of the political realm. In truth, this lordly show trial of politics and the press doesn’t enliven democracy - it endangers it.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

Why we should dismantle the aid industry

Sat, 05 May 2012 08:53:49 +0100

NCVO, 28 April 2012

On Saturday 28 April, I gave a speech on aid and charity at a RESULTS conference at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in London. The speech is published below.

Five years ago, in 2007, two very different campaigns were launched in Africa.

In the first campaign, the Chinese government announced that it was deepening its trade relationship with various African countries. So, it revealed that in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it would be pursuing a $9 billion trade deal, which would involve helping the DRC to build a whopping 2,400 miles of road, 2,000 miles of railway, 32 hospitals, 145 health centres, and two universities.

In the second campaign launched in 2007, in Christmas of that year, Oxfam encouraged us to give the “gift of dung” to Africa. That was actually the wording it used: give the “gift of dung”. Because apparently poor Africans like nothing more than to receive a bucket of shit at Christmas time so that they can fertilise their crops.

Alongside dung, Oxfam also encouraged us to give other “funusual” gifts to Africans at Christmas 2007. We could give them condoms, which are “rubberly jubberly” gifts, Oxfam told us. Or we could become “sacks maniacs” and give poor Africans five sacks of seeds. Or we could give them a goat, which Oxfam described as a “mobile source of income”.

Now, who do you think got the most flak five years ago, when those very different campaigns came to public prominence? Was it Oxfam, for encouraging wealthy Westerners to spend a few bob on giving shit and condoms to Africans? Or was it the Chinese, for promising to build massive amounts of infrastructure in countries like the DRC?

Of course, it was the Chinese. They were accused of exploiting Africa, of stealing its recourses, of being “the new colonialists”, in the words of The Economist. Oxfam’s campaign elicited very little criticism, if any. But in the topsy-turvy world of how we view the South today, helping less well-off countries to develop and modernise is seen as bad, while giving “funusual” gifts to their poor inhabitants is seen as good.

I think the disparity between how those two different campaigns were talked about, with the Chinese being criticised and Oxfam being patted on the back, really cuts to the heart of what is wrong with modern charity and aid. It really shows what is wrong in the aid industry these days, across the board, in relation to both low-income and middle-income countries.

Firstly, it shows that a large part of the “giving culture” of the aid and charity industry is driven by distrust of African politics and society.

So one reason why the Chinese government has been criticised in recent years is because it doesn’t attach conditions to its trade deals. It doesn’t make its trade deals contingent on the DRC and other countries promising to improve their human-rights culture or look after the environment or prevent too many children being born, or whatever kind of stringent conditions normally get attached to financial assistance for Africa.

As one commentator put it, African leaders are clearly drawn towards Chinese investment because the Chinese don’t make them “jump through hoops”. In effect, the Chinese are criticised for dealing with African leaders as equals, for failing to treat them as wicked, untrustworthy children who need clear behavioural guidelines, which is the fashion amongst Western NGOs and aid organisations.

In some people’s eyes, the benefit of something like Oxfam’s gift-giving over Chinese trading is that it largely circumvents African politics and society and just gives stuff to the poorest people.

The second thing revealed by the China/Oxfam disparity is that Western aid and Western government assistance is entirely small-scale and petty today, and is obsessed with low-level development and so-called sustainability. The reason the Chinese government’s road-building and railway-construction plans have shocked many observers is because they are just so… big.

Is this really “appropriate” for Africa, we wondered? Is it really right that Africa should be made to look more like the West, with the same kind of infrastructure and market forces? Mightn’t this be bad for the environment and for African people, making them as obsessed with material things as we apparently are? These days, in the view of Western governments and NGOs, it is better simply to help poor and middle-income peoples to survive rather than help them to thrive.

And thirdly, and most importantly I think, the China/Oxfam differences revealed how much Western charity and assistance is now all about us - it is all really aimed at making the givers feel good about themselves rather than making the receivers healthier and wealthier.

Ask yourself this: What use is a one-off gift of dung to an African family? How useful are Christmas condoms, when actually these people already receive condoms from just about every population-obsessed NGO worker who knocks on their door? It seems quite clear to me that the true purpose of such patronising gifts is to create a warm, self-satisfied glow in the heart of the person who gives them, rather than to raise a smile on the lips of those who receive them.

This, I believe, is the true impetus behind Western aid and assistance today: it is less about feeding the poor than about feeding the egos of Western campaigners.

Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to middle-income countries. The only reason the British government continues giving aid and assistance to countries such as India is because it feels good. It gives government ministers and various NGOs a sense of direction and purpose in life, where they can narcissistically fantasise that they are saving the downtrodden and the destitute.

Indeed, we now have the utterly bizarre situation where the British government actually begs countries like India to allow it to continue giving aid. Top-ranking Indians have made it pretty clear that they don’t want British aid anymore. As one Indian journalist put it recently – India is “increasingly exasperated at being treated as a needy beneficiary”.

And yet British ministers have pleaded with the Indians to continue accepting aid, because it would apparently cause “grave political embarrassment” if India rejected such largesse. So we now have a situation where rich countries beg poorer countries to accept charity.

I think this says a great deal about modern aid and assistance: it is about addressing our needs, not theirs. It is about improving our lives, not theirs. It is about making us, not them, feel good. You can really see this in this advertising leaflet distributed by the charity Plan, which I have had projected on to the wall (see below). See the poor African girl in rags – apparently “She can change your life forever”. If you give her charity, your life will be changed, your life will be better, because you will have risen above your possibly dull, consumer-driven existence and done something Good.

This is clearly all about you, not her. This is now what poor Africans and Indians represent to many in the Department for International Development and the NGO industry – they are symbolically destitute creatures who can help change our lives by allowing themselves to be cooed over and cared for.

The only problem with this needy relationship between Western activists and the Third World poor is that it requires the poor to stay poor. In order for this relationship to work, in order for Western ministers and campaigners to continue getting a rush from giving charity, the Third World poor must necessarily remain as rather sad-eyed, empty-bellied, child-like creatures. That is why it is no coincidence that “sustainable development” is celebrated and things like Chinese investment are frowned upon - there is an instinctive recognition that in order for giving to retain its moral rush for the givers, the receivers must remain pretty pathetic and vulnerable.

But the thing is, many in the Third World are no longer willing to play that role.

Some poor African countries are implicitly rejecting the Western model of “sustainable development” and embracing Chinese investment instead. India is telling Britain that it is no longer willing to play the role of “needy beneficiary”. What we have here are implicit and sometimes explicit rebellions against the patronising and paternalistic outlook of the Western aid industry.

I think we should welcome this rebellion. In fact, we should assist it, we should echo it, by also calling on our government and on various NGOs to stop giving assistance to less well-off countries. No, not because we want those countries to fail, but because we want them to succeed – and there is a far better chance of them doing that if they aren’t overrun by armies of Western do-gooders telling them to make do and mend and to give up the dream of massive development.

The above is a speech on aid that I gave at the RESULTS conference at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in London on 28 April 2012.

A battle to save France from her non-existent foes

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:03:47 +0100

spiked, 2 May 2012

Commentators go green with envy when they look upon the French presidential election campaign. Where most Western European political offices are stuffed with samey politicians, here’s a campaign which seems to pit right against left, even hard right against far left, in a teeth-baring battle for the soul of France. Observers distressed by the post-political era they find themselves plonked in see in France the resurrection of the left-right divide, the return of that familiar-feeling, old-world clash, which could define ‘the future of Europe’.

This is wishful thinking. Because what the French candidates share in common is far more important than what seems to distinguish them. Behind the fireworks, behind the self-conscious use of left-right rhetoric, the candidates are united in their belief that the French Republic is threatened by external actors and that it falls to them to defend France’s honour. In short, this campaign doesn’t signify the resuscitation of old principles – it confirms that the politics of left and right has been superseded by the politics of fear, and that modern politicians have developed a seriously bad habit of political displacement.

The election appears to have everything a political junkie could wish for. There’s a right-wing sitting president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is known as the ‘bling bling president’ for his love of stuff and his allegedly neoliberal tendencies. There’s his left-wing challenger, Socialist François Hollande, who rails against the financial markets and EU austerity packages drawn up by ‘Merkozy’ (Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel). The closeness of the results in the first round of voting on 22 April – where Hollande won 28.63 per cent to Sarkozy’s 27.08 per cent – has led to excitable discussion of a close-run ‘political fight’.

Even better, in the first round there was an intriguing sideshow involving a sassy, so-called neo-fascist, Marine Le Pen, and a loudmouthed left-winger, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Le Pen, leader of the right-wing Front National, hit the headlines with her attack on certain immigrants and their cultural habits (though she disappointed many hardliners by not being nearly as xenophobic as her dad, Jean-Marie). Meanwhile, Mélenchon, who stood for a Left Front, thrilled radical observers with his denunciations of bankers and ‘Anglo-Saxons’ with their ‘stinking money’. The campaign was ‘shocked into life’ by these ‘fringe performers’, reckons one writer.

In truth, no amount of political rhetoric can disguise the fact that the candidates represent simply different variations on the same theme, that they’re alternative expressions of the same paranoid, principle-free mode of politics that is widespread in modern Europe. Most strikingly, all the candidates have been driven by a profound instinct to externalise the crisis facing the French Republic, to depict France’s travails as a consequence of infiltration by foreign elements, whether Muslim immigrants or ‘stinking Anglo-Saxons’. That is, each candidate has played a version of the fear card, attempting to drum up support by depicting the Republic as a threatened entity which needs a saviour-style president. This is a clash of competing fears not a clash of divergent visions.

Listening to the candidates, you could be forgiven for thinking it is 1792 again and that external armies have lined up to invade France and undermine her values. Sarkozy has got a lot of flak for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, for his promise to ‘secure France’s borders’ against the arrival of ‘tribes [which will] impose the sort of behaviour we do not want on French soil’. Yet this anti-immigrant posturing is closely mirrored by Hollande’s sabre-rattling about the threat of ‘globalisation’. In Hollande’s view, French borders need to be fortified not only against immigrants, but also against the behaviour of ‘foreign markets’, which he claims ‘undermine French national identity and culture’.

Sarkozy and Hollande are united in their fear of globalisation, whether it takes the form of labour movements (immigrants) or financial transactions (markets). The most striking thing about Sarkozy’s border-defending rhetoric is not that it is anti-immigrant, but that it casually flits between scaremongering about immigrants and scaremongering about markets. ‘I do not want to let France be diluted by globalisation’, he said after the first round of voting, explicitly echoing Hollande’s leftish rhetoric. Whether he’s panicking about ‘tribes’ importing problematic cultures or about France being ‘diluted’ by globalisation, Sarkozy is clearly driven not so much by an old right-wing loathing of immigrants as by a profound feeling that the modern French Republic is a porous entity, threatened by alien practices.

This outlook was shared by Sarkozy and Hollande’s fringe opponents in the first round. Left-winger Mélenchon, like his nemesis Sarkozy, was obsessed with protecting French culture against external denigration. Only in his view the spectre haunting modern France is ‘les Anglo-Saxons’ with their ‘stinking money’. Mélenchon said France is threatened by the ‘curse’ of ‘the finance economy’ and the ‘religion of competition’, all of which are undermining ‘French values of love and humanity’.

This viewpoint was almost indistinguishable from Le Pen’s. She also railed against the ‘princes of finance and the banking world’ and the ‘deadly effects’ of globalisation seeping across France’s ‘porous borders’. It is remarkable how much the far right and far left share in common today. Le Pen and Mélenchon were actually singing from the same hymn sheet of cultural paranoia. Their unwitting meeting of minds provided a striking insight into the sense of siege and fear that is shared by both the zombie left and the far right in modern Europe, where both movements have an instinct to batten down the hatches against either evil American culture or foreign immigrants.

The theme of this campaign is not ‘Should France be run according to left-wing or right-wing principles?’, but rather ‘Is France most threatened by Eastern immigrants or Anglo-Saxon culture? By poor foreigners or the princes of finance? By global jihadists or the “global mafia” (Le Pen’s term for the banking industry)?’. All the candidates share an obsession with the porousness of French borders, a feeling that the Republic is fragile and that it is all the fault of various ‘tribes’ or ‘mafia’. Here, we can glimpse the most significant thread in the campaign: a profound misunderstanding of what is driving the crisis of values in modern France, and a lack of any serious political language with which to address it.

All the candidates look outside of France for the source of the republican crisis. They correctly sense that the values upon which modern France was founded – democracy, equality, liberty, universalism – are held in low esteem today. But they wrongly pin the blame for this fact on either immigrants who refuse to embrace French culture or on a foreign-imported ‘religion of competition’. This is clear from Sarkozy’s proposal to make all immigrants do an exam in ‘republican values’. As a colleague of Sarkozy’s has said, ‘Integration has broken down. The Republic has lost its values. Who can deny that France is disorientated?’ Yet rather than uncover the source of this republican disorientation, French politicians try to overcome it by waging ostentatious wars of words against those who are crazily judged responsible for wrecking the Republic – immigrants who can’t pass a test on ‘republican values’, ‘princes of finance’ who undermine ‘French humanity’, and so on.

This is an extraordinary spectacle of displacement. If the Republic is fragile, it’s because the French elite itself is incapable of upholding the values upon which it was built, not because some Muslims have turned up or because Anglo-Saxon bankers are running riot. It is the inability of French leaders in our relativistic era to assert republican values unapologetically which leads them to launch phoney wars against fantasy external infiltrators instead. Even Sarkozy, in one of his attempts to uphold the Republic against foreign ‘tribes’, insisted that he was not saying the republican way is ‘superior’, just that it is ‘different’ – ‘and we want that difference to be respected’. The republican crisis is a product of intellectual cowardice and moral disarray in France itself, not of outside antics.

In this campaign, we’re not witnessing the re-emergence of old divides. We are seeing what happens when politics becomes denuded of ideological content and when politicians have no vocabulary with which to understand or discuss their national problems – moral posturing becomes prominent, fear comes to the fore, and wannabe leaders compete to make people feel scared rather than enthused.

A final point. Hollande is the most interesting candidate, because he represents a trend gathering pace in Western Europe: the mainstream co-option of the populist, democratic reaction against the EU. For 10 years, populations in France, Holland, Ireland and elsewhere rejected the EU in referendums and were lambasted by political elites for doing so. Now, however, in those same countries, politicians like Hollande are seeking to make mileage out of anti-EU sentiment by standing on an anti-‘Merkozy’ or anti-austerity ticket. This is not a positive development. Because the populist reaction against the EU was instinctive rather than fully politically formed, it can easily be taken in unpredictable directions, and Hollande is taking it away from its positive, democratic origins and down the route of a cynical, anti-globalisation outlook shot through with self-pity. If he is victorious in the final vote on 6 May, even those of us implacably opposed to the EU may have to accept that we are witnessing the institutionalisation of a problematic variant of anti-EU rhetoric.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

The Breivik blame game

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:34:52 +0100

ABC News, 27 April 2012

Some people seem to believe that because Anders Behring Breivik quoted them in his mad manifesto, journalists like Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips and Jeremy Clarkson bear some responsibility for the massacre he carried out on the island of Utoya last year.

So convinced are some liberal observers that these right-wing journalists stirred Breivik’s seething cesspit of a mind, making him go out and kill, that they’re now demanding that such hacks “tone down” their rhetoric.

In this week’s New Statesman, Peter Wilby says the similarities between Breivik’s mindset and that of mainstream right-wing writers are “striking”.

Breivik was a fan of writers who opposed mass immigration and who are critical of certain aspects of Muslim culture, Wilby points out. So surely it is now incumbent upon such writers to “mind both their language and their facts”.

In short, journalism can be dangerous, especially strongly worded, right-leaning journalism, the kind that brings decent-minded folk out in hives. And if such journalistic excess is not reined in, says the New Stateman’s editorial, we may well see more of Breivik’s kind.

But hang on - if Steyn, Phillips et al bear some moral responsibility for Breivik’s crimes, is Noam Chomsky to blame for 9/11?

Osama bin Laden loved Chomsky. In 2006, he described him as “among the most capable of those from your side” and praised his theories on the “manufacturing of public opinion” and his “sober words of advice prior to the war [in Iraq]”.

What about Robert Fisk, the left-wing Middle East correspondent for the Independent who is loved by radicals? His words also moved and inspired bin Laden.

In 2004, bin Laden advised people in the White House to read “Robert Fisk, who is a fellow [Westerner] and co-religionist of yours, but one whom I consider unbiased”.

In fact, he “dared” the White House to “interview [Fisk], so that he could explain to the American people everything he has learned from us about the reasons for our struggle”.

Wow, OBL was clearly a close follower of Fisk’s writings. Maybe Fisk should tone down his rhetoric lest it inspire further Islamist terrorism?

Or maybe American author William Blum should be held accountable for Al Qaeda violence.

“It is useful for you to read [Blum’s] book The Rogue State,” said bin Laden in 2006. Bin Laden made it clear that he had imbibed Blum’s theories about America being the real rogue state, talking about the “war merchants” who “supported Bush’s election campaign with billions of dollars”.

Alongside Blum, Chomsky and Fisk, bin Laden was also influenced by Western think tanks (he favourably cited the Royal Institute for International Affairs) and Western environmentalists.

In 2002, he said one of the reasons he hated America is because “you have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto Agreement.”

You could read the same words in any respectable newspaper on just about any day of the week. So maybe greens should “mind their language and their facts”, since it seems pretty clear that they are giving ideas to anti-Western, anti-modern terrorists.

Of course, it would be barmy to blame Islamist terror on Fisk or Chomsky. Just as it is crazy to blame Utoya on Steyn or Phillips.

Individual terrorists, the men who press the buttons on their bombs and pull the triggers on their guns, are solely responsible for what they do, not the writers whose articles they happened to have lapped up.

There is something deeply censorious in the demand that right-wing writers curb their rhetoric in order to prevent “another Utoya”. It is a kind of emotional blackmail, where writers whose views are unfashionable in chattering-class circles are effectively told that if they carry on criticising Islam or ridiculing multiculturalism then more neo-fascists will rise up and gun down innocents.

The New Statesman’s editorial says that so long as the “mainstream press” keeps “fuelling Islamophobia through misinformation and distortion”, there will be “more of [Breivik’s] kind”. Given bin Laden’s reliance on the writings of Western leftists, you could just as easily, and just as crazily, have said in 2005: “So long as the respectable press keeps arguing against the war in Iraq, al-Qaeda will keep blowing things up.”

But that is the striking thing: no-one held Chomsky and Co. responsible for Al Qaeda outrages, whereas there is now a palpable rush to hold Steyn and Co. responsible for Utoya.

There is an extraordinary double standard here. When terrorists cite leftist writers, it’s downplayed. Yet when terrorists cite right-wing writers, it is held up as hard proof that certain political ideas lead directly to violence and therefore those ideas must be urgently rethought and watered down.

In fact, the double standard is so enormous that where respectable commentators now rush to condemn Breivik’s rantings and all those who are allegedly responsible for making him think that way, in the recent past they embraced bin Laden’s rantings. The media, especially the liberal media, frequently pored over and even empathised with Al Qaeda’s rants.

The Guardian once published a bin Laden statement on its actual op-ed pages, raising it from the level of terrorist rant to respectable commentary. The leftist publishing house Verso published a collection of bin Laden’s statements, beautifully bound, under the title “Messages to the World”. In the introduction, bin Laden was described as a “rational man”, while enthusiastic broadsheet reviewers of the book described him as an “eloquent preacher” and a “wonderfully briefed” politician.

I invite you to imagine the stellar fury that would be unleashed if the Daily Mail published Breivik’s words on its comment pages. Or if a publishing house released his rantings in book form. Or if a commentator described him as “eloquent” and “wonderfully briefed”. The intellectual elite would go beserk.

This double standard makes it pretty clear that the real reason illiberal liberals are now linking Breivik’s violence to writers such as Steyn and Phillips is simply because they hate those writers’ ideas, and they long to squish them through a process of post-Utoya fearmongering about “bad journalism” giving rise to fascist killers.

But the ideas propagated by Chomsky and Fisk? They like those ideas, and so they don’t mind if they occasionally inspire the odd bit of terror.

Read more of my articles for ABC News and other publications here.

Is Murdoch really a lizard in a suit?

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:07:21 +0100

spiked, 26 April 2012

So there he was, the secret ruler of modern Britain, the dark, rotting heart of the British state, the man who has wielded his ‘extraordinary power’ in order to ‘manipulate officialdom’ and extend his influence over ‘politics, the media and the police’. I hope you weren’t fooled by Rupert Murdoch’s diminutive stature or his octogenarian demeanour as he appeared before the Leveson Inquiry yesterday, or his denials about using his ‘political power to get favourable treatment’. Because this small, old newspaper owner is, in fact, the mastermind of a ‘shadowy influence-mart’ who has exercised a ‘malign influence on our politics for the past 30 years’. And now, thanks to Lord Leveson, we finally have an opportunity to ‘banish’ this ‘tyrant’ from our shores and a ‘glorious opportunity for meaningful reform’.

At least, that’s what the Leveson cheerleading squad, the media and celebrity groupies of this inquiry into press ethics, would have us believe. These people are rapidly taking leave of their senses. Their depiction of Rupert Murdoch as the dastardly puppeteer of the British political sphere has crossed the line from rational commentary into David Icke territory, sounding increasingly like a conspiracy theory about secret rulers of the world. And their claim that Murdoch singlehandedly ruined British politics – that he is, in the words of one commentator, the architect of modern Britain’s ‘heartlessness, coarseness and spite’ – speaks to their inability to get to grips with the true causes of political crisis today. Yesterday’s shenanigans made it pretty clear that Murdoch-bashing has become a cheap substitute for grown-up debate.

It is of course true that Murdoch is very influential, as you would expect of a man who, in Britain alone, owns both the newspaper of record (The Times) and the bestselling tabloid (the Sun). But not only do the Murdoch-maulers overestimate how influential he is; more importantly they misunderstand the origins and nature of his influence in modern Britain. It is not that Murdoch set out to create a ‘shadow state’ that could ‘intimidate parliament’, as madly claimed by Labour MP Tom Watson. Rather, it was the increasing alienation of parliament and politicians from the public which boosted Murdoch’s political fortunes, making him the go-to man for ministers and MPs desperate to make a connection with us. In other words, Murdoch didn’t destroy British politics in his scrabble for greater influence – it was the already existing death of British politics, its loss of meaning and purchase, which, by default, made Murdoch influential.

Much has been made of yesterday’s revelations that Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, had close contact with Murdoch’s News Corp during its bid for BSkyB. Hunt’s emailing of sensitive, useful information to News Corp officials is cited as proof, in the words of Tom Watson, of the ‘shadowy contacts’ cultivated by ‘the power-hungry executives of News Corp’ who were desperate to get a ‘commercial advantage over their rival media groups’ (everything is ‘shadowy’ in the view of conspiracy theorists). But the far more interesting part of the Hunt/Murdoch scandal is the belief, and desperate hope, of Conservative ministers like Hunt that they could make political gains by cosying up to Murdoch. Forget, for a second, the harebrained idea that Murdoch has some magical power to make politicians eat out of his hands, and ask instead why politicians are so extraordinarily keen to butter him up.

What the Hunt fiasco reveals – just like the Thatcher/Murdoch and Blair/Murdoch hook-ups before it – is that ours is an era in which politicians who lack old-fashioned means to make a connection with the public now hope to connect with us through the media. Murdoch is only as powerful as politicians have allowed him to be. It is their lack more than his ambition, their desperation to tune into public sentiment rather than his determination to control this country’s political life, which has empowered the so-called ‘Murdoch Empire’ and made one newspaper owner influential. The revelation that David Cameron met with James Murdoch in 2009 to discuss the Sun switching its support from Labour to the Conservatives; the exposure of Hunt’s rather teenage antics; the discussion of a so-called ‘Chipping Norton set’ made up of politicians and Murdoch men who had cosy drinks and chats in that part of Oxfordshire… what these all reveal is not the awesome power of Murdoch, but rather the extent to which politicians who have no meaningful constituency have become dependent on media networks.

Consider Tony Blair’s relationship with Murdoch in the late 1990s, which was by the far the snuggest get-together between a politician and News Corp. Murdoch didn’t barge into Downing Street and demand that Blair pursue certain political goals, as the Murdochphobics crankily claim. Rather, this special relationship was a product of the fact that Blair, a new kind of cut-off politician, more reliant on PR and spin than on anything like proper grassroots support, saw in Murdoch a way of touching base with the public. It was Blair’s aloofness from the public, his party’s growing disconnection from everyday people, which led him to see Murdoch’s newspapers as some kind of conduit between him and us, a magical channel between the political elite and the little people. Murdoch’s influence during the New Labour years was not the cause of the political rot in the 1990s; it was a symptom of the political rot, of the hollowing-out of Labour and of British politics more broadly.

This goes double for the post-Blair breed of politician, from Cameron to Nick Clegg to Jeremy Hunt, none of whom has any real connection with the public and all of whom are thus more reliant on media networks than on electoral enthusiasm. Indeed, even politicians who ostentatiously spurn the ‘Murdoch Empire’ are themselves dependent on media patronage in lieu of getting any love from the public. Consider that great warrior against all things Murdochian, Vince Cable. Who do you think is the author of his popularity? It’s the media – the non-Murdoch, ‘respectable’ media, that is, which anointed him ‘St Vince’ and made him spokesperson for middle-class decency. Likewise with Nick Clegg. The entire Cleggmania phenomenon (remember that?) was a liberal media creation. As spiked said in 2010, Clegg has been turned into ‘the High Representative of the media class, the Chosen One of that tiny but influential elite of opinion-formers’.

Because of the profound crisis of British democracy, the moral and political chasm that now exists between the rulers and the ruled, politicians care more for stuffing their little black books with media contacts than they do about engaging with the throng. It’s just that where some of them cultivate their oligarchical networks over Pimm’s in Chipping Norton (how vulgar!), others do it over fairtrade macchiatos in Islington. The same process is at work, though: alienated politicians seek out media men who might help them find a language with which to communicate with Them (ie, us).

Yet instead of getting to grips with the disarray of modern politics, the Murdoch-haters invent increasingly demented fairytales to explain Murdoch’s power. They talk about a shadowy cabal of News Corp heavies descending on Chipping Norton to grab the political class by the scruff of its neck. What we have here is a chattering-class conspiracy theory, with commentators fretting over Murdoch’s ‘mighty machine of corrupting political influence’ which apparently controls British politics ‘beneath the surface’. Replace the word ‘Murdoch’ with the word ‘lizard’ and none of this would look out of place in a David Icke missive.

We end up with the worst of all worlds: an unwillingness, or inability, to examine why British politics is in a parlous state and how this boosts the influence of the media class, and the propagation of Icke-style tales about evil Aussies coming over here and ruining our parliament, our police and our public culture. Then they fantasise that everything will get better once Murdoch is ‘banished’, like children crying ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead!’. But how, exactly, would the expulsion of Murdoch improve British political life? Cameron will still be Cameron, Labour will still be pointless, St Vince will still be a myth, and the public, wisely, will still be wary of the lot of them.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Why society should never institutionalise a "right to die"

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:43:00 +0100

On 24 April 2012, I gave a speech at St Michael’s Hospice in Yorkshire arguing against the “right to die”. The speech is published below.

Over the past month, there have been two interesting and seemingly unrelated news stories about old people – two media stories about pensioners which seem to be quite distinct, but which I think are linked in quite subtle and important ways.

The first news story was about the alleged problem of pensioners using up too many of society’s resources. And the second news story was about the importance of the right to die, the importance of assisted suicide, especially at a time when we have more and more old people suffering from dementia.

So the first news story was about the alleged problem of pensioner greed and the second news story was about how important it is today to give pensioners who are suffering the right to die if they want it.

Now, these stories were not reported in the same breath; they did appear not on the same pages on newspapers. But you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that they might be motored by the same misanthropic outlook, that it might not be a coincidence that in an era when we tend to consider older people and sick people as an economic or environmental burden, we also have a campaign saying that it would be good to give these kind of people the right to kill themselves.

The first news story, about pensioner greed, really blew up following George Osborne’s announcement of a granny tax. In his budget, Osborne said that the personal allowance enjoyed by over-65s – that is, the amount of their income that is tax-free – would be cut back from its traditionally high level.

This gave rise to a big debate about the relative wealth of modern-day pensioners and why it is apparently a big problem for society. So, many respectable commentators on broadsheet newspapers said the granny tax is a very good idea.

Even commentators who hate the Tories and who typically see red whenever Osborne cuts something celebrated the granny tax. The Guardian said we should ignore the “predictable outrage” about the granny tax and we should not feel sorry for old people because, it told us, many of them have “two cars and twice-a-year jaunts to Tuscany or Madeira”. Instead, it said, we should feel sorry for twentysomethings, who are apparently the real victims of the recession.

The reason all these serious commentators backed the granny tax was not difficult to work out: it’s because there is a very powerful feeling today, amongst respectable thinkers, that there are too many pensioners around, that people are living too long because of that pesky medical advancement we have had over the years. And this grey army, as some people call it, is using up society’s scarce resources.

So the granny tax supporters reminded us that many pensioners live alone, some of them in three-bedroom houses, which means they are referred to as “bed blockers” – that is, they are using up space which could be given to young families.

Other granny tax supporters reminded us that it costs a lot of money for the NHS to look after elderly people, especially those suffering from dementia.

So, we were told, it is only fair that all these pensioners should stump up cash to the government and pay for all the resources they are thoughtlessly using up. In other words, pensioners are a bit of a pain, they’re a bit of a drain on society’s resources, they’re an economic burden, and therefore it’s right that they should pay a normal amount of tax.

The pensioner ‘burden’

And that takes us on to the second news story, which appeared at the same time but was not, as I say, explicitly linked to the first – which was the ongoing discussion about assisted suicide, or voluntary euthanasia as I think we should call it.

So, MPs have been debating proposals put forward by the Director of Public Prosecutions for relaxing some of the rules on assisted suicide, for clarifying when it might be acceptable to assist a suicide and when it is not.

This “right to die” is a very popular cause amongst commentators and campaigners today, particularly amongst those who consider themselves secular, liberal, humanistic and so on. And they like to present their campaign for the right to die as a very simple issue of personal liberty. They say it is just about defending people’s right to exercise autonomy and to exercise control in the last moments of their lives.

But, often, these agitators for the right to die unwittingly reveal the somewhat eugenicist underpinnings to their campaign; they unwittingly let slip the fact that there is a slightly creepy core to this rather fashionable campaign for the right to die.

So Melanie Reid, who is a popular columnist for The Times and who was disabled in a very bad accident a couple of years ago – she wrote a personal column a few weeks ago on why it is important that people should have the right to die. It was a popular column amongst campaigners. Another Times columnist described the column as an “unanswerable case for the right to die”. Others, on Twitter, said it was beautiful and moving and so on.

I think it’s important to look at Melanie Reid’s column, because alongside her personal commentary about being disabled suddenly in middle age, her column also contained the following sentence. It said:

It is ridiculous that an educated society, facing an unaffordable explosion in dementia and age-related illness, is still prevaricating over [assisted suicide].

I think that’s an extraordinarily revealing sentence. Because what it’s really saying is that assisted suicide is an important thing that society needs because there are a lot of sick, old people; because there are a lot of elderly people with dementia and that apparently is no longer affordable for our society, for the NHS and for the economy.

What we can really see here is a quite explicit mashing together of economic and social arguments for the right to die. If you strip away the libertarian gloss that people put on this issue, the way they glorify it as a “right to die”, strip that away and you can see the eugenic, cost-benefit core in much of today’s campaigning for legalised euthanasia.

Cost-benefit analysis of human life

You see this quite a lot these days – the presentation of the right to die as a solution to the problem of there being too many old people and too many sick people. So alongside Melanie Reid’s wildly applauded claims that we need the right to die because society is facing an “unaffordable explosion in dementia”, we recently had Baroness Warnock arguing that some elderly people might consider their “duty to die” if they feel that they are a burden on their family or a “burden on the state”. Baroness Warnock said: “If you are demented… you are wasting the resources of the National Health Service.”

Last year, in a very influential piece published in the New York Times, David Brooks drew a link between the current recession and the failure of society to grant people the right to die. Under the revealing headline “Death and Budgets”, Brooks said: “The fiscal crisis is about many things, but one of them is our inability to face death – our willingness to spend our nation into bankruptcy to extend life for a few more sickly months.” In short, not allowing people to die is destroying the economy and society, because these sick people are really expensive.

Again and again, campaigners who claim only to be interested in giving sick or old people greater autonomy at the end of their lives, talk about the fact that letting people die will save society money and resources. This side of the campaign for the right to die has extremely uncomfortable parallels with the past. Earlier supporters of euthanasia also argued that old and infirm people were an “unaffordable” burden.

For example, in justifying its euthanising of disabled people, the Nazi regime said the following: “They represent a spatial and economic burden… damaging the demands of those fit for life through the heavy expenditure which they occasion.”

Now, I am not for one minute calling modern-day right-to-die campaigners Nazis. No one is going to force people into euthanasia or kill off the disabled. However, both then and now, a key, depressing part of the campaign for euthanasia, or assisted suicide as we now call it, was the idea that the sick were too costly and that they were therefore an annoyance to both the state and to healthy, living people.

I think those two news stories, taken together, are very revealing. The first about pensioners being a burden and the second about why it would be good to institute a right to die – taken together they are a very interesting package of stories.

Because what I think they demonstrate is that there is a reason why the right to die has become a very popular cause today. It’s because we live in an era which finds it very difficult to attach moral meaning to human life. We find it very difficult today to value human life in any serious, moral or existential sense.

In fact, we now increasingly see human life, or certain forms of human life, as toxic and burdensome. And there is a subconscious drive from there towards the idea that we need assisted suicide. There is a link between contemporary society’s inability to value human life, to see it as anything more than an economic or environmental cost, and the fact that it is now extremely fashionable to demand the right to die.

It seems pretty obvious to me that the campaign for the right to die is bound up with the fact that we live in an era in which newborn babies are referred to as “carbon footprints” and old people are referred to as “bed blockers”. It is this modern disdain for human life which leads to the rehabilitation of the idea of voluntary euthanasia.

Valuing human life

One of the great shames in the discussion about the right to die is that you very rarely hear the humanist case against it. Opposing assisted suicide has become the preserve of the religious. Which is a problem because there is a very important humanist argument to be made against assisted suicide. Assisted suicide, in my view, is driven by very misanthropic, anti-human ideas, and therefore it makes perfect sense to me that humanists ought to be opposed to it.

In terms of both what is driving the campaign for assisted suicide and what impact it will have on society, I think there are very good reasons for humanists to reject it. Those are the two things I want to quickly look at now: the question of what is driving this campaign and the question of what impact assisted suicide would have on society and people’s lives.

Firstly then, on what is driving this campaign. As I said earlier, I think it is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, bound up with contemporary society’s inability to attach moral meaning to human life.

I think the campaign for assisted suicide is part of today’s broader rehabilitation of Malthusian thinking – the idea that human life itself is a problem in need of a solution, a burden which must be eased.

Malthusian thinking is everywhere today. It’s become utterly mainstream. I’m sure all of you know that Malthus was the mad eighteenth-century reverend who basically invented the idea of overpopulation. He was obsessed with poor people breeding too much, he was obsessed with the underclass having too many children. And he argued that Nature simply couldn’t provide enough stuff for all these people and therefore it was inevitable that some of them would die off.

It was basically a very early and brutal form of environmentalism – the idea that there are a fixed amount of resources and stupid human beings are using them all up.

Malthus was extraordinarily influential, both during his own lifetime and after it. He was very influential on the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these largely racist movements that believed certain people should be prevented from breeding. Malthus also influenced the green movement more recently. The early green movement in the 1950s and 60s was explicitly Malthusian and was explicitly opposed to the creation of “too much” human life, believing that it was a burden on society and the planet.

All of these movements were influenced by the misanthropic Malthusian outlook which said: if there are too many mouths to feed, there will be disaster, there will be environmental destruction, and therefore the onus is on society to curb the creation of more life and limit the number of human beings we have on the planet.

Malthusian thinking is so widespread today that people are now frequently referred to as “eco footprints”. We are all encouraged to measure our eco footprint, to use carbon calculators to work out how toxic our lifestyles are and what we need to do to lessen our impact on the world.

Demonising existence itself

You can very clearly see this Malthusian thinking in the discussion about older generations, in the discussions about the grey army using up society’s resources. The modern Malthusian view of problematic old people really comes through in the debate about the right to die. So one commentator in a British broadsheet a couple of years ago, who was arguing for assisted suicide, made the point that a patient with dementia costs the NHS eight times as much as a patient with heart disease.

You constantly see this cost-benefit analysis being applied to human life, at the exact same time as people argue that we need the right to die. So there is a very clear link, I believe, between Malthusian thinking and the idea that it would be beneficial for society if we had the right to die, to deal with the “unaffordable problem” of sick old people.

What we have today is a situation where human existence itself is seen as a problem. We even have a situation where some thinkers elevate non-existence over existence – they argue that non-existence is superior to existence. So David Nicholson-Lord, who is a mainstream campaigner for population control who writes for the New Statesman and other left-leaning publications – he said recently: “A non-existent person has no environmental footprint. The emissions saving is instant and total.”

In other words, it is better if a person did not exist than if he did exist. When there is little moral value attached to human life, when human life is judged simply by its environmental or economic impact, you have this truly bizarre situation where non-existence comes to be valued more than existence. Today, some people see non-life as better than life, because it is cleaner, it is cheaper and it makes no environmental impact.

All of this contributes to the discussion about the right to die – to the discussion about saving money, saving resources and saving Mother Earth by preventing the creation of new human life or preventing the extension of already existing human life, by preventing women from having too many children and discouraging old people from living too long. All of those things are bound together, where you have a real impetus to save resources by demonising and restricting the creation of life.

Of course, this is all presented to us as a voluntary thing. It is all about giving people choice, apparently – the choice whether to end their lives, the choice to have fewer children, and so on.

But I think we need to tease out just how voluntaristic this really is. Because it seems to me that lots of moral pressure is being exerted in this debate. You know, when population controllers tell a woman in the Third World, for example, that if she has too many children then the planet will go up in flames, she isn’t being given a choice – she’s been given an ultimatum: “Stop breeding or the planet gets it.”

Likewise, when we constantly hear the message that elderly people are an economic burden, that they are taking up too much space and are “blocking” bedrooms, that their problems of dementia are “unaffordable”, then we have to ask ourselves – how truly voluntaristic is the new drive for assisted suicide? Isn’t there some pressure here, pressure on old people to do “the right thing” for society, to ask themselves if they have a “duty to die”, as Baroness Warnock put it, in the name of helping the NHS and society?

Does this really give people choice at the end of their lives, or just make the end of their lives feel a bit depressing?

A ‘green light’ to suicide?

And secondly, there’s the question of the impact that legalising assisted suicide will have on society and on people’s lives. Not only do I think that this campaign is being driven by some pretty Malthusian, misanthropic thinking, but I also believe that if assisted suicide was to come to pass then it would be have a detrimental impact on a whole swathe of people.

It would be bad for everyone involved. Firstly, ironically, it would be bad for people who want to die – for people who are terminally ill and who actually want to end their lives. And secondly it will be bad for people who want to live, for people who may well be old, who may well be sick, who may well be disabled, but who for a huge number reasons want to continue living.

It will be bad for people who want to die because it will actually formalise their end-of-life decisions. I should make it clear that I am not one of those people who thinks everyone should wait around until God tells them that they are allowed to die. I don’t believe in God, and I recognise that throughout history human beings have helped other human beings to die. That’s just a fact. It has happened in hospitals and in family homes – for as long as there have been human beings, there have been people helping their loved ones to end hard or painful lives.

That is a perfectly understandable and humane part of human life.

But it has always happened very discreetly. It happened behind closed doors. People didn’t really talk about it. It was something sorted out between families and doctors, free from the purview of the state or the morality police.

The problem with formalising it, the problem with bringing it into the open and legislating for it, so that it becomes an acceptable thing to do, is that you bring bureaucracy into this end-of-life moment. You transform this end-of-life moment from a private, painful choice that small numbers of people make into a kind of bureaucratic exercise. There is even a proposal for euthanasia panels – where people will have to make their case for the right to die to faceless suits they have never met before.

The legalisation of assisted suicide would replace love with law. It would take these painful end-of-life decisions away from that arena where you are surrounded by people you know and trust and love, and put it into the arena of lawyers and politicians and directors of publication prosecutions – people you don’t know and can’t trust.

So ironically, legalising assisted suicide is not a good idea even for those people who do want to end their lives in the final few weeks or days.

And also, more obviously, legalising assisted suicide will be bad for those who want to live, for all those sick people and elderly people and disabled people we rarely hear about because they don’t have newspaper columns and they don’t have public platforms to speak from – the majority of the ill and infirm, who want to carry on living because they can see real moral value in their lives and real moral value in their relationships.

It’s bad for them because I think it puts moral pressure on them. When we continually hear that it would be a good thing if society allowed very sick people to die, what does that say to very sick people who want to live? When we continually hear that dementia is unaffordable and that’s why we need a right to die, what does that say to people with dementia who don’t think their lives are worthless and who still have moments of joy and happiness?

We are putting pressure on certain groups of people to think: Am I a burden? Do I cost too much money to look after? Is my continued existence the cause of the recession, as David Brooks claims, or the cause of environmental destruction, as greens claim? Would it be better if I didn’t exist?

The other reason why legalising suicide would be bad for people who want to live is because it would give a green light to suicidal thoughts. Because if society says it is okay, in fact it is quite good, for really ill or old people to have this choice and to make this decision, what society is then doing is sending the message that suicide is a good response to hardship; that giving up in the face of extreme pain or hardship is something that society should sanction. It would give a kind of official blessing to defeatism. And I don’t think that is something society should ever do.

Whatever we think of individual cases, where a family helps a loved one to die, when it comes to society itself, the social and political world we all inhabit, there should never be a blessing for defeatism. Society should always value life and struggle over giving up and death. Society should always elevate living and fighting; those are the values society should promote, rather than the public validation of suicide that is demanded by the voluntary euthanasia lobby.

‘Refusing to take an interest in exsitence’

It’s worth going back to the writings of GK Chesterton on suicide. Yes, he was a Catholic writer, but his remarks about suicide should ring true for those of us who consider ourselves humanists.

Chesterton described suicide as “the ultimate and absolute evil”. The reason it is evil, he said, is because it represents “a refusal to take an interest in existence”. A refusal to take an interest in existence – that is a very good description of what we have today, where non-existence is seen as good and existence is seen as problematic and expensive and dangerous.

There’s a line in Chesterton’s essay on suicide where he says the following: “The suicidal person defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.” In other words, suicide is not only a crime against yourself, it is a crime against the whole world, against existence itself, because you are turning your back on everything. Today, the campaigners for the right to die also defile every flower by refusing to encourage living for its sake, by refusing to say, as society ought to, that human life is a good and valuable and morally virtuous thing.

The above is the text of a speech I gave at St Michael’s Hospice in Yorkshire on 24 April 2012.

Why luvvies and liberals hate Israel

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:07:00 +0100

The Australian, 21 April 2012

A new ailment is spreading through the chattering classes. Symptoms include an aversion to art or literature created in Israel, an intolerance of all foodstuffs produced in Israel, and an allergy to the Israeli flag, the Israeli football team and Israeli professors. If you or any of your friends have those symptoms, get help: it is possible you’re suffering from Israel Sensitivity Disorder.

This most middle-class of maladies is widespread in respectable circles. It has flared up very badly in Britain during the past week, with some of the most prominent carriers seeking to keep an Israeli theatre company off this sceptred isle.

Habima, Israel’s national theatre company, is due to perform at the World Shakespeare Festival at London’s famous Globe Theatre. Theatre troupes from every corner of the earth will be there, including from the new nation of South Sudan (whose actors will perform Cymbeline in Juba Arabic) and from New Zealand (in the first Maori-language performance of Troilus and Cressida). Some authoritarian states are involved, too, including China and Zimbabwe.

But it is Habima’s involvement, and Habima’s involvement alone, that has riled Britain’s luvvies and liberals. In a letter to The Guardian, actress Emma Thompson and others said they were “dismayed” at the inclusion of Habima in this global festival. Apparently, by inviting Habima, the Globe is “associating itself with policies of exclusion practised by the Israeli state”.

That is, it is infecting itself with the Israeli toxin; it is failing in its duty to keep itself clean of any contact with Israel and Israeli artists, as every member of decent society apparently must now do.

This extraordinary (and thankfully failed) attempt to ban a theatre company from a global festival follows on from last year’s ugly interruption of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at the Proms, an eight-week season of classical music that takes place at the Royal Albert Hall every summer. Musicians from across the world take part. But when the influential Israel-bashers heard that an orchestra from that country was taking part, their hives started to itch.

And so these “philistines for Palestine” (as an editorial in The Australian labelled them) jeered and shouted “shame” as the orchestra started to play. Watch the video on YouTube. It’s a truly depressing spectacle, as the orchestra’s solo violinist tries to make his music heard above the din of those who think that nothing Israeli should be seen or heard in polite society.

These censorious attacks on Israel’s art fit neatly with broader campaigns to boycott its academics and produce.

Across the West, anti-Israel agitators demand that universities refuse to have any dealings with their Israeli counterparts while right-on shoppers make a virtue of the fact they never buy Israeli oranges or coffee.

There’s something very ugly in this PC loathing of everything Israeli-made. You don’t have to look far into the historical records, certainly here in Europe, to see that nothing good comes from the boycotting of shops run by “those people” or the attempted ghetto-isation of their culture and practices. Surely Britain’s anti-Israel luvvies have at least watched Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, the Holocaust-based tale of a man deprived of his true love - making music - because of what he is?

Of course the drowning out of Israeli music at the Royal Albert Hall and the attempted exclusion of an Israeli theatre company from the Globe are nothing like putting Jews into a real, walled-off ghetto. But all involve a process of ghetto-isation, a process of marginalising people on the basis of their origins.

The aversion to all things Israeli has gone way beyond a normal political boycott. The obsession with avoiding Israeli stuff has nothing in common with the positive boycotts carried out by political radicals in the past, whether it was suffragettes boycotting Britain’s 1911 census or blacks in the American south boycotting buses with segregationist seating.

Rather, the avoidance of Israel and all its ideas and wares has become a weird way of life for some people, where the aim isn’t to achieve tangible political goals but rather an inner sensation of super moral smugness.

Hating Israel is no longer a serious political stance so much as a cultural signifier. It’s one of the key ways through which the chattering classes now advertise their decency, their caring streak, their loathing of “evil” and their pity for “victims”.

And therefore, the more conspicuous they can make their loathing of Israel, the more loudly and colourfully they can declare it, the better. That is why they constantly write letters to newspapers, tell everyone that they studiously avoid Israeli shops, and wear the Yasser Arafat-inspired keffiyeh - because these are all signifiers of moral worth and thus must be made visible to all and sundry.

Hating Israel is now like wearing a red ribbon for AIDS or making a virtue of eating only organic foodstuffs.

Its consequences, however, are far more dire than donning a ribbon. For the end result of all these self-serving anti-Israel antics is that one tiny country is singled out for chattering-class opprobrium and in the process is transformed into a pariah state. These anti-Israel activists claim to be concerned that Israel is becoming an apartheid state, yet they themselves practice cultural apartheid against Israel.

Habima has come in for some flak in Israel, too, because at the Globe’s festival it is planning to perform what some consider to be Shakespeare’s anti-Semitic play, The Merchant of Venice.

Yet that play also contains a profound plea for tolerance that the anti-Israel lobby would do well to heed: “Hath not a Jew eyes? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

When Mondays were happy days

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:00:10 +0100

The Big Issue, 16 April 2012

This month is the 25th anniversary of the end of the 1980s, of the moment when that ridiculous decade came crashing to a merciful halt.

It was April 1987 when the Eighties were put out of their misery. Not by a disaster or a revolution, but by the arrival on the British music scene of six freaks from the North who went by the name the Happy Mondays.

Their appearance went largely unnoticed at the time. It was a while before they had their first hit.

But the rise of this wild-eyed, maracas-shaking lad band from Salford, with their weird fusion of disco funk and punkish vocals, would help prick the pomposity of the Eighties and usher in a bracing if shortlived era of old-fashioned hedonism.

The Mondays’ first album was released 25 years ago. Bizarrely titled “Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)”, it’s not their best album and it didn’t impress the music press much.

But in a year in which everyone was salivating over U2’s The Joshua Tree and similar SERIOUS MUSIC, the Mondays’ bangin’ paeans to constant partying (“No days off… we’re 24-hour party people”) were a sign of things to come.

They were the John the Baptists of the baggy/acid/rave movements that rose up at the end of the Eighties and which stuck two fingers up at the po-faced dross that had preceded them. (Cont’d below.)

The Mondays were like creatures from another planet in late-80s Britain. Everything about them ran counter to what us youngsters had come to think of as pop culture.

This was a time when we were being told (by the bloody kids off Grange Hill and their patron Nancy Reagan) to “Just Say No” to illegal substances. Yet the Mondays, always smirking and dancing like apes, as if their limbs were being controlled by a drunk puppeteer in an alternative universe, made it look like it might be fun to “Just Say Yes”.

The arrival of the Mondays also coincided with the AIDS panic, when we were forever being warned, by everyone from Thatcher to responsible pop stars, to treat sex with caution. The era of sexual abandon ushered in by those Sixties “cats” was out, and now we were told to think twice before leaping into another’s bed because you might die.

And yet here was a new band whose on-the-road antics would put Mick Jagger to shame and who later in the 80s joyously clambered into a jacuzzi with glamour models for a photo-shoot for the Daily Star.

And, of course, the 80s was the decade of socially aware music, of pop stars coming together to sing sad songs about starving Ethiopians and persecuted South Africans.

The explosion of the Mondays reminded us that concerts were for moshing at not for receiving updates on the prison conditions of Nelson Mandela.

Their music didn’t give a toss about Mandela or Thatcher or the arms race. It wasn’t designed to educate us, but simply to thrill us, and sometimes to chill us, to make us feel something rather than want to do something. In that sense, it had more in common with original rock’n’roll than with the rest of what had happened in the Eighties.

The Mondays’ music was properly rebellious. Ageing rock critics imagine that bands have to make coherent political statements before their output can be labelled “protest music”. But it was the very lack of statements in the Mondays’ music, the absence of social awareness, which made it “protest”.

The Mondays’ very existence was a protest against the wordy earnestness of the bands that had preceded them, against the Bono/Geldof attempt to turn popular music into a tool of right-on change. In saying nothing, the Mondays said loads, to young people at least. Singer Shaun Ryder was the anti-Bono.

Hilariously, a few years later U2 were playing catch-up with upstarts like the Mondays, releasing their ill-advised dance album, Achtung Baby, in 1990. But it was too late (and too lame). The Eighties were over, being bleeding heart was out, and, as the Mondays’ storming cover version of the Thin Lizzy song put it, “The boys were back in town”.

It didn’t last. Nothing does. Despite the Mondays’ best (and unwitting) efforts, the forces of reaction won out, and the Nineties and Noughties were cautious decades, in which sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were frowned upon once more.

But for a brief moment in the late 80s, the Mondays reminded us that it’s okay for young people to be dumb and to experiment. There’s a time for seriousness, and it isn’t when you are 14 or 15 or 16 years old.

Read more of my articles for the Big Issue and other publications here.

Let's liberate youth from the grip of welfare

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:55:34 +0100

spiked, 12 April 2012

The most striking thing about the UK Conservative Party’s proposal to cut housing benefit for the under-25s was the reaction to it. The proposal itself, floated last week, amounts to just another desperate stab by the Tories to reverse recessionary trends by trimming state handouts. But the handwringing response, the panic about men and women in their 20s having to move back to the family home if their benefits are slashed, revealed a great deal about the pity and fatalism that underpin today’s pro-welfare arguments. You would think that the only choice young people have these days is between being mollycoddled by mum and being sustained by the state.

Number 10, as part of the government’s determination to reform welfare, suggested last week that unemployed under-25s should no longer have their rent paid by the state. Its reasoning, unfortunately, was pretty naff. It pointed out that, since many under-25s these days continue to live in the family nest (as part of what some commentators refer to as ‘Peter Pan syndrome’), then it isn’t fair that other under-25s are subsidised by the state to ‘live independently supported by housing benefits’.

In short, the government is toying with the idea of exploiting today’s powerful sense of stasis and risk-aversion among young adults, their preference for staying put with their parents rather than leaping into the unpredictable world of adult responsibility, as a means of saving the state cash. It is effectively saying to those under-25s who have moved out but who claim housing benefit: ‘Why don’t you move back to the boxroom you grew up in, like other under-25s have done?’ This is a rubbish case for cutting housing benefits. There is an argument for removing that benefit from under-25s, but it should be done in the name of encouraging them to fend for themselves, and giving them the space to develop the independence required to become an adult, not as a sly way of coaxing them to go crawling back to mother.

Currently, 380,000 under-25s claim housing benefit. Around 57 per cent of these have children, and of course it would be unwise simply to slash the housing benefit given to low-paid young mums and dads. But the other 43 per cent, many of whom get a reduced version of housing benefit called the ‘shared room rate’, are a different matter. It is worth seriously asking whether these people should get housing benefit. Yet as soon as the government asked that question (badly), its critics went mad. Removing the benefit would leave ‘thousands of vulnerable young people… with nowhere else to go’, said the homeless charity Shelter. Apparently, many under-25s ‘simply don’t have family’ to fall back on and therefore ‘rely on housing support to keep a roof over their head’.

This view was echoed by commentators, one of whom asked of the government’s proposals: ‘What if [housing benefit] claimants don’t have a family to return to?’ But hold on – since when has the only choice facing hard-up young people been to live with their families or be subsidised by the state? The assumption in much of the criticism of the government’s proposal – that if job-hunting youth don’t get their rent paid by the authorities then they will have to move back home – is treated as commonsensical. But it is no such thing. It is underpinned by its own prejudices, and by an extraordinarily degraded view of people in their 20s as dependants, as overgrown children who must be cared for.

There is another choice for young people, and it is one that was enthusiastically embraced by earlier generations of working-class and even poor youth – that is, to live independently of both the parental home and the state’s purse by working when you can, looking to friends for help, and developing a social network that you could call on for tips, jobs, assistance. Millions upon millions of young adults pursued that life route in recent decades, sometimes struggling to pay the rent, yes, but at the same time recognising that that struggle had an almost unquantifiable pay-off – the freedom to live in independence, away from your parents’ petty rules and out of sight of the authorities. The idea that work-seeking under-25s must either live at home or in state-paid accommodation is an entirely new one, and it reflects the liberal elite’s deeply prejudicial view of working-class youth as effectively ‘incapable’.

Shelter’s phrase – ‘vulnerable young people’ – sums up how many men and women in their 20s are now viewed. In effect, there has been an extension of childhood, right through to the age of 25, so that it is now seen as perfectly normal to say either that these people should move back home (as the government suggests) or that they must have their needs catered for by the state (as the government’s critics say). What gets lost in this degraded argument between two different kinds of pity for the poor is the idea that, actually, these young adults are capable of taking control of their lives, of putting a roof over their heads by hook or by crook - yes, even in an era of mass youth unemployment. In 1970, my parents came to London from the west of Ireland when they were in their late teens, with nothing, and they went all-out to find work and accommodation. They, like many others back then, would have been alarmed if anyone had referred to them as ‘vulnerable young people’.

Some might ask: ‘But why force young people into a situation where they must struggle to put a roof over their heads, when the state is willing, for now, to give them housing benefits?’ The answer is simple: because encouraging under-25s to become reliant on welfare is a deeply destructive and damaging trend, which can harm both communities and individuals. Very often, we hear torturous debates about what will happen to youngsters if we withdraw their welfare – apparently they will starve, go mad, turn to crime, etc. But we rarely hear discussions about what the already-existing system of welfare is doing to young people, about the impact that the cult of welfarism is having on young people’s capacities and expectations right now. The fretting about the harm that will befall under-25s if we cut welfare distracts attention from the harm that is already befalling them as a direct consequence of welfarism.

The reason it might be a good idea to cut welfare to many under-25s is not because it will save the state money, but because it might go some way towards reasserting the importance of youthful ambition and independence over reliance upon the faceless, heartless bureaucracy of the welfare state. The ages of 16 to 24 are a key part in every person’s life. It is the time when one becomes an adult in biological terms and fights to become one in moral, social terms, too. It isn’t easy. It involves ripping up old bonds (especially with parents) and taking big risks by venturing into the unforgiving world and working out what you want to do and who you want to be. Through experimentation and risk-taking, through striking up new relationships, and yes through episodes of privation, a young person becomes an adult, wiser and more sussed than he would ever have been if he had remained a dependant.

The thoughtless provision of welfare to under-25s seriously interferes with this scary but creative process. It neuters young people’s aspirations to independence by replacing their dependency on parents with dependency on the state. Worse, it hampers young people’s development of new social bonds by encouraging them to be more reliant on the state than on their newfound neighbours, friends or just strangers, people who might provide them with work or opportunities. Where once young people were expected (and wanted) to leap into the adult unknown, now they have the option of wrapping themselves in the comforting if soul-destroying blanket of welfarism instead.

No, cutting welfare to under-25s won’t solve every problem of today’s independence-phobic, anti-adult culture. But it will go some way towards elevating the virtues of risk-taking and struggle over dependency and self-pity. Have you ever noticed that it is always people who are the least reliant on the welfare state – well-off commentators or think-tankers – who are the most passionate defenders of it? That is because they know nothing of its detrimental impact on individuals and the communities they inhabit. I’ve heard enough speculation about what will happen if we remove welfare from under-25s – let’s discuss what is happening in the here and now, to real people, as a result of the welfarism that is so thoughtlessly and patronisingly backed by liberal politicians and agitators.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Alan Davies has committed a thoughtcrime against the post-Hillsborough cult of emotional correctness

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:14:25 +0100

Telegraph, 11 April 2012

The furore over Alan Davies’s perfectly sensible comments on Hillsborough raises a question: what are you allowed to say about that tragic event? All Davies said is that it is ridiculous for Liverpool FC to refuse to play a match on the anniversary date of the Hillsborough disaster, which is true. We don’t normally hide away from the world on the anniversaries of terrible events. We don’t all stop using the London Underground on 17 November (the anniversary of the King’s Cross fire of 1987 that killed 32 people) or keep our children home from school on 21 October (the date in 1966 when a slag heap killed 116 schoolkids in Aberfan). So why shouldn’t Liverpool, like every other team, play football on 15 April?

The Twitterstorm and media handwringing over Davies’s comments confirm that Hillsborough is now surrounded by a forcefield of emotional correctness, by an extraordinary air of religiosity which demands that we all follow certain mawkish rituals and agree never to depart from the Hillsborough dogma. That is Davies’s real crime – he didn’t speak ill of the Hillsborough dead or make an offensive joke at their expense; he merely questioned the bathetic ideology that now surrounds the Hillsborough disaster, which insists that normal life must go into shutdown on 15 April every year as Liverpudlians once again weep their tears and whip their backs. He effectively committed a thought crime against the cult of emotional correctness, daring to ask why we must make endless performances of public mourning in response to terrible tragedies like Hillsborough.

The Hillsborough disaster was a key turning point in the development of the mourning sickness that has modern Britain in its grip. Of course, the initial response of Liverpudlians to this disaster in 1989, their expressions of shock and grief, were genuine and understandable. But since then, those reactions have become ritualised, robbed of their original intensity and turned instead into emotional dogma, which everyone is expected either to adopt or certainly to respect. Davies, in simply saying to Liverpool FC “What are you talking about, ‘We won’t play on the day’?”, has committed the grave offence of failing to observe and correctly repeat the emotional Catechism of the Hillsborough religion. What he should have said, if he was a good, Scouse-fearin’ individual, is: “Yes, of course, it is absolutely right that Liverpool should not play football on this sad and painful day.”

In many ways, the reaction to Hillsborough was the prototype for later outbursts of emotional correctness, from the weird weepy reaction to Princess Diana’s death in 1997 to the media hysteria that greeted the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007. In all those instances of public mourning, in all the Shared National Experiences of ostentatious grieving, the rules and rituals set in motion after Hillsborough have come into play. Thou must make a public performance of sorrow. Thou must never deviate from the emotional script. Thou must not question why we weep, year in and year out, and just get on with weeping. Thou must wallow in one-off tragedies forever and severely chastise anyone who says “Life moves on”. Those are the stifling, speech-restricting, thought-policing, miserable, mawkish rules of emotionally correct modern Britain, and they were written and made gospel on the back of the Hillsborough disaster 22 years ago. God help anyone who deviates from them, as Davies has discovered: he has received hate mail and death threats for daring to question the grief gospel.

Some people attribute the enforced emotional sensitivity over Hillsborough to the peculiar touchiness of Liverpudlians. Liverpool is “self-pity city”, we are told, where they love nothing more than to play the victim card. Perhaps. But if that is true, then we are all Scousers now. Mourning sickness and emotionally correct hysteria are widespread in twenty-first-century Britain, stretching from Liverpudlian housing estates to the London eateries of the Guardian-reading set. It can be glimpsed in everything from the hunting down and imprisonment of an offensive drunken tweeter who refused to go along with the “Pray for Fabrice Muamba” trend to the broadsheets’ haranguing of Jan Moir for not being sufficiently mournful following the death of Stephen Gately. The post-Hillsborough era is one of extraordinarily restrictive emotionalism and censoriousness.

Davies has now repented for his sins, making a public apology for his comments and offering to make a donation to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign – the modern equivalent of doing penance. He shouldn’t have apologised. We need more upfront, unapologetic criticism of the backward modern idea that there is a correct way to feel, a correct way to grieve, and even a correct way to think.

Read more of my articles here.

Pathologising dissent? Now that's Orwellian

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:56:00 +0100

Global Warming Policy Foundation, 10 April 2012

A few months ago, for a joke, I set up a Facebook group called ‘Climate change denial is a mental disorder’. It’s a satirical campaigning hub for people who think that climate change denial should be recognised as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and that its sufferers – who probably engage in ‘regular chanting and intensive brainwashing sessions in cult-like surroundings’ – should be offered ‘eco-lobotomies’ to remove ‘the denying part of their brain’. The group now has 42 members. Yes, some have signed up because they get the joke, but others are serious subscribers to the denial-as-insanity idea. ‘Thank God I’ve found this group’, says one new member, who is sick of other Facebook groups being ‘hijacked’ by unhinged eco-sceptics.

The idea that ‘climate change denial’ is a psychological disorder – the product of a spiteful, wilful or simply in-built neural inability to face up to the catastrophe of global warming – is becoming more and more popular amongst green-leaning activists and academics. And nothing better sums up the elitism and authoritarianism of the environmentalist lobby than its psychologisation of dissent. The labelling of any criticism of the politics of global warming, first as ‘denial’, and now as evidence of mass psychological instability, is an attempt to write off all critics and sceptics as deranged, and to lay the ground for inevitable authoritarian solutions to the problem of climate change. Historically, only the most illiberal and misanthropic regimes have treated disagreement and debate as signs of mental ill-health.

This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’. It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse.

Leading green writers have welcomed the West England get-together to study the denying masses. One eco-columnist says the conference might generate ideas for dealing with those who are ‘pathologically’ opposed to the environmental movement (pathology, according to myOED, is the study of ‘morbid or abnormal mental or moral conditions’). Environmentalists recognise the inherent elitism of saying that, while they brave few can see things clearly, the rest of us are somehow disordered (greens are the ‘watchful ones amongst the slaves’, according to one environmentalist writer); yet they seem unashamed. The eco-columnist says this weekend’s conference will be useful because where ‘mainstream politics now largely “gets” environmentalism’, there is still a sceptical mass, ‘a baying and growing crowd, largely consisting of people resistant to the prospect of ever having to alter their lifestyles’. Apparently this crowd ‘gathers to hurl invective’ at environmentalist ideas, such as recycling and low-energy lightbulbs.

In a sense, this vision of elite, brainy environmentalists on one side and a baying, insult-hurling crowd on the other speaks, however accidentally and however crudely, to an underlying truth: environmentalism remains a largely elitist project, beloved of politicians, priests and prudes keen to control people’s behaviour and curb our excessive lifestyles, and it rubs many ‘ordinary people’ up the wrong way. Of course much of the public goes along with the environmentalist ethos, bowing to the central idea that mankind is destructive and observing such rituals as sorting their rubbish, but they do so half-heartedly, recognising that, fundamentally, greens’ anti-consumerist, anti-reproduction, anti-travel arguments run counter to their own personal aspirations. Yet rather than recognise this frequently hidden divide between the green elite and the ‘baying crowd’ as one built on differences of opinion, on clashing aspirations, even on rational assessments by sections of the public that recycling is a waste of time, increasingly environmentalists pathologise it, turning it into evidence of their wisdom in contrast to the public’s mental instability.

University departments, serious authors, think-tanks and radical activists are embracing the ‘psychological disorder’ view of climate change scepticism. At Columbia University in New York, the Global Roundtable on Public Attitudes to Climate Change studies the ‘completely baffling’ response of the public to the threat of climate change, exploring why the public has been ‘so slow to act’ despite the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. Apparently, our slack response is partly a result of our brain’s inability to assess ‘pallid statistical information’ in the face of fear. The Ecologist magazine also talks about the ‘psychology of climate change denial’ and says the majority of people (excluding those ‘handfuls of people who have already decided to stop being passive bystanders’: the green elite again) have responded to warnings of global warming by sinking into ‘self-deception and mass denial’. An online magazine called Climate Change Denial is dedicated to analysing the public’s ‘weird and disturbed’ response to climate change.

John Naish, the celebrated author of the anti-consumerism treatise Enough!, says our consumerist behaviour, with its promise of ‘ecological disaster’, ultimately springs from the fact that we’re all using the ‘wrong brain’. Our culture, all those flashy ads and temptations to buy, buy, buy and be fat and happy, is aimed at stimulating our ‘primordial instinct’, our ‘reptilian brain, which is responsible for arousal, basic life functions and sex’, says Naish. It neglects and makes lazy our ‘neocortex, the intelligent brain we evolved in the Pleicestocene era’. In short, we’re behaving like animals rather than intelligent beings; indeed, says Naish, our consumer culture is sending us ‘knuckle-dragging into ecological disaster’. In a less hysterical and monkey-obsessed fashion, Al Gore, the king of climate change activism, says the media are warping people’s minds and actively encouraging thoughtlessness and climate change denial, giving rise to a public response to ecological disaster that is not ‘modulated by logic, reason or reflective thought’.

The labelling of those who question certain scientific ideas or green ways of life as ‘deniers’, ‘addicts’ and ‘reptiles’ with a ‘baffling’ inability to understand The Science and act accordingly has a deeply censorious bent. If ‘climate change denial’ is a form of mass denial and self-deception, a fundamentally psychological disorder, then there is no need to engage in a meaningful public debate; instead people just need to be treated. Thus the Ecologist says ‘denial cannot simply be countered with information’; indeed there is apparently ‘plentiful historical evidence that increased information may even intensify denial’. The respected British think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, goes so far as to insist that ‘the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new “common sense”’. This is the logical conclusion to treating disagreement as ‘denial’ and dissent as a ‘disorder’: no debate, no real information, just an insidious demand to change The Culture in order to relax the wrong side of our brains or to inject us with a new commonsensical outlook.

The psychologisation of climate change denial – even the very use of that term: denial – reveals how utterly aloof and cut off are the environmental elitists from mass society. They cannot comprehend, indeed are ‘baffled’ by, our everyday behaviour, our desire to have families, our resistance to hectoring, our dream of being wealthier, better travelled, our hopes of living life to the full. For them, such behaviour is irresponsible and it runs counter to the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. They seriously expect people to make life decisions on the basis of pie charts and graphs drawn up in laboratories in Switzerland, rather than on the basis of what they and their families need and, yes, what they want. That the green lobby is so perturbed by our failure to act in accordance with scientific findings shows the extent to which, for them, The Science is a new gospel truth and religious-style guide to life, and anyone who disobeys it is a sinner, heretic or deranged individual, a moral leper of the twenty-first century.

Psychologising dissent, and refusing to recognise, much less engage with, the substance of people’s disagreements – their political objections, their rational criticisms, their desire to do things differently – is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. In the Soviet Union, outspoken critics of the ruling party were frequently tagged as mentally disordered and faced, as one Soviet dissident described it, ‘political exile to mental institutions’. There they would be treated with narcotics, tranquillisers and even electric shock therapy. In George Orwell’sNineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien, the torturer in Room 101, offers to cure our hero Winston Smith of his anti-party thinking. ‘You are mentally deranged!’ he tells him. Today the word ‘Orwellian’ is massively overused, to describe everything from fingerprint library cards to supermarket loyalty cards, but treating your dissenters as deranged? That really is Orwellian, and we should declare permanent war against it.

Read more of my articles here.