Author: urbanramblings19687496

Retired teacher. Lives in North West London. Grew up in Thurrock in the 1950's and 60's and consequently spent the first 18 years of his life breathing air that was 60% cement. Active member of the National Education Union (formerly NUT) and Labour Party.

Odysseus! Odysseus! All Fall Down!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“The Adventures of Odysseus” was the first book that I got out from the local library at least five times in succession – being nudged that way by a sixties sword and sandals film called “The Wooden Horse of Troy” which was the first story to obsess me as much as dinosaurs already did.

Image from M Hodder Handbook of Archeology 1867 Wikicommons

I got them out so often, not because I was finding much new in it, but because I didn’t want to read about anything else. I also got out “The Adventures of Ulysses”, which I’d hoped would be a similar set of different stories about another hero of the same type, but turned out to be exactly the same book but with Roman names instead of Greek. But I got it out several times anyway. Some of the attraction was the illustrations, which were stark, black and white, based on Greek vases and felt like a different world. The power of this sense of immersion in something recognisable but more vivid than actual life is something I’ve only ever felt since with Lord of the Rings – another totally absorbed five in succession repeated reads when I was a teenager – and another, more richly, lately – and Gormenghast – which I’ve enjoyed three times so far, and I’m sure I’ll read it again.

A lot of people die in the Odyssey. Probably not as many as in the Iliad, where whole passages list who was slain by whom in as relentless a poetic metre as the list of who beget whom in the Old Testament.

One of the mysteries of Christopher Nolan’s film is how it is that no matter how many of Odysseus’s crew get munched to death by the Cyclops, slaughtered by armoured giants, snatched into the air by Scylla, somehow there’s always a more or less full crew until the final shipwreck.

This is a very loud and violent film. A lot of the messages are carried by the images, and some of them are spectacular.

  • The shot of the Trojan patrol riding along the beach towards the wooden horse, sunk in the sand at an angle comparable to the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, on horses so white that they look other worldly; like a posse of doomed angels.
  • Agamemnon standing in front of the fatally opened city gate with his army massed behind him like a black armoured personification of death.
  • The Trojans all in immaculate white, slightly overdressed, with faceless helmets, not very numerous, pampered, well equipped but mown down by the greasy, grimy, black clad Greeks pouring through the gates like an enraged uprising. The sort of Eloi consumed by the Molochs nightmare that must haunt every billionaire on the planet.
  • The looming, glum misery of the Cyclops, even before he has his eye put out.
  • Calypso’s bleached out, hazed out, druggy dreamy beach, scattered with the driftwood of lost memories.

As with a lot of US war films post Vietnam, the notion that a home coming is impossible because the things that the veterans have seen and done means that it is changed, changed utterly to them, even if it is much the same as it was when they left, runs through this one and provides what moral arc it has.

Leaving Troy, having been the author of its destruction through trickery, Odysseus, “the man of twists and turns”, as Homer puts it, heads away from the main fleet to chart his own course through unknown waters telling the crew, and himself, that with a bit of luck and a following wind they’ll be home in no time, but actually because he can’t live with himself for what he’s seen and done. This is posed in the film as breaking Zeus’s law – that demands straight and decent treatment of strangers; essentially “do as you would be done by”. Not a commandment much respected by Zeus Himself of course. But perhaps its too much to expect consistency from gods, any more than it is from mortals with too much power.

In Odysseus’s case this is partly a revulsion at the scale of the destruction of Troy, partly at his cynical sacrifice of a boy soldier in his care, left to tell the Trojans the Horse was a gift with no knowledge of who was in it. This makes no difference to his first landfall to seek provisions, during which his troops steal what they need and burn down the homes of the islanders who have fled before them. There is a weird conversation in which one of his officers asks an old man they have captured “why did everyone run away?” The burning houses behind him might have given a clue to that.

From then on, its a series of ordeals.

  • Outwitting the Cyclops, but inviting disaster by vengefully firing an arrow into its injured eye, goading it to crash in blind pursuit, throwing rocks by sense of smell, crushing men and ships in its rage.
  • Not being led into temptation by Circe’s enchanted, but admittedly not enchanting looking, pig swill of a stew; so rescuing his hungry landing party from a short future as prospective bacon and getting an “I wouldn’t start from here if I was you” steer from Circe that the only way back to Ithaca (as a state of mind as much as a place) would be to sail West to Hades to learn what he can learn there.
  • Subjecting himself to the hard truths of the Sirens song, who put him through the wringer by laying his soul bare for him about everything he wants and can’t have, as he’s lashed to the mast with his crew rowing flat out with wax in their ears.
  • Sailing to Hades and back, a twilight zone of the miserable shades of the dead, where Sinon reproaches him for having left him to die on the beach, which Odysseus tries to deflect by saying that he was just a plank away so was “with him” – not much consolation for Sinon but an aspect of Odysseus’s PTSD. Agamemnon warns him of the perils of hubris, of going home thinking everyone is going to welcome you as a conquering hero when, in his case, his enraged wife Clytemnestra had had the ten years of the war to nurse her grief and fury at his sacrifice of their daughter to get the gods to provide a wind to Troy for his ships, and sharpen her plans to stab him to death in his homecoming bath. The blind prophet Tiresias warns him that the route back has to pass between the whirlpool of Charybdis and the monster Scylla and past the isle of Thrinacia, where it would be certain death to kill and eat Apollo’s cattle of the Sun and from which he is chased by all the dead members of his crew that he’d left behind unburied which, to be fair, would have been rather difficult in the circumstances.
  • Avoiding a suicidal decision to take his ship down with him into the vortex of Charybdis, when his crew revolt and make the inadvertent trolley problem decision to steer closer to Scylla, who, surprise, surprise, they don’t know is lurking in the rocks above and seizes six men in her tentacles.
  • Blown by one of those god willed winds onto Thrinacia, the stranded crew decides it would rather drown than starve, leaving Odysseus as the only one who doesn’t eat some of Apollo’s butchered beef, and therefore the only survivor when they put back to sea and the ship is wrecked by a vengeful divine storm.
  • Seven years of lonely amnesia as a drugged out beach bum with a rather bemused Calypso, eased by the mind numbing Lotus flower, but without the intense sexual relationship that would have undermined his uxorious fixation on his wife Penelope. As Emily Wilson notes in her acidic review in LRB, Calypso in this film is not an embodiment of desire so much as a therapist. At the end of this he is eventually mended enough to try to confront his demons, which surface as nightmares.

The end of the film includes a number of classic US cinema tropes – all the bad guys are righteously killed, just like in the Magnificent Seven – but starts with a rather new agey conceit that the way to get to where you want to is to stop trying to control things and submit to the will of a higher power (which carries with it the presumption common in the US, especially among the wealthy, that if you have got where you want it must be the result of deserving to in the cosmic order and possibly the result of divine favour). Putting out to sea in an open raft, he drifts at the will of the gods, before the raft breaks up, he sinks and is born again brothers and sisters; before washing up on the beach at Ithaca, where no one recognises him, even though he looks exactly the same as he did when he left, albeit a bit greyer.

In the meantime his son, Telemachos, has gone in search of him, or news of him, to try to put off the evil hour when his mother is forced to choose among the 105 brawling abusive lowlifes that have occupied his palace and demanding she accept that he’s dead and marry one of them and make them King – at which point Telemachos’s life expectancy would be short. He goes to Sparta to witness the unhappy reunion of King Menelaus with Helen, who’s flight to Troy with Prince Paris was the pretext for a war on the Trojans that earlier dialogue had made clear was more about control of the sea routes for trade with points further East. Menelaus bears a striking resemblance to Andrew Tate and is played as a mysogenist thug, forcing Helen to show Telemachus the scars he’d slashed into the left side of her face as punishment for leaving him. Paris makes no appearance in the film, but given what Menelaus is like, its understandable why Helen might have seen him as a better bet. Helen herself, like most of the women in the film apart from Penelope, has few lines, but she whispers in Telemachus’s ear in genuine anguish before he leaves that if he sees his father again to apologise to him for her part in all the pain and suffering caused by the war; which shows more self awareness and responsibility than any of the male characters.

And, in the end, the suitors are massacred by Odysseus, starting with the immortal line from one of the nastier of them “You’re Odyssieeeergh!” Unlike in the original poem, the slave women who served and consorted with them were not. Even when Penelope’s handmaiden, having betrayed Telemachus’s journey to Sparta to lead suitor Antoninus, is locked out of the safety of the women’s quarters by Penelope with a hard stare and the words “you belong in there” – if she comes to a sticky end, it isn’t shown. Murderous patriarchal slaughter being guaranteed to turn a twenty first century audience right off Odysseus if he did it in the film. Having violated the laws of hospitality by killing all of his unwelcome guests, apart from those who bent the knee as the slaughter went on around them, the final scene leaves a rather callow Telemachus as King. This doesn’t feel secure, as he’s a lamb among wolves: the phrase “Oh sweet child of Summer” comes to mind. Odysseus and Penelope embrace exile, as punishment in form and escape in content, by sailing into the sunset like characters do in so many Westerns, except on a boat not a horse, “chasing the setting sun”. Go West old man. Possibly forgetting that, in their world, and in this legend, where you get to when you go far enough West is Hades. There is also some echo of the other great US cinematic tradition of redemption by road trip in this.

So, full of sound and fury, but signifying what? Any treatment of an old story is a dialogue determined, or at least strongly influenced, by the concerns of the present. A theme running through the film is awareness that “our Age of Bronze is collapsing”. As is America’s unipolar moment. Leaving aside the quibble that no one in the Bronze Age would have called it “the Age of Bronze” the Homeric epics were set at a time, around 1200 BC, that the interlocking civilisations of Mycenaean Greece, Crete, Egypt, the Hittites in Anatolia and Mesopotamia collapsed and regressed, primarily under the impact of a series of earthquakes, a shift in weather patterns that led to drought and failed harvests, then hunger, social dislocation, strife and mass migrations. The film uses the notion of “the People from the Sea” as the external threat that everyone is worried about, that turns out to be a description of the Greeks themselves, arriving at Troy, as they did, on their 1,000 ships. So the civilisational collapse is attributed to a breakdown of internal moral order, symbolised when the Greek soldiers sacking Troy behead the priestess of the temple of Athene, and the head of the goddess’s statue falls off with hers. From then on, whenever Athene manifests herself to Odysseus, it is always in the form of the executed priestess, who looks rather reproachfully at him, as well she might. When Odysseus complains to her that the gods don’t talk to humans in a way we can understand, she says “who doesn’t understand thunder, and fire and floods?”

In the Gotterdamerung of Fossil Fuel Imperialism that we are currently living in, very obviously Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch…I could go on.

Risk of nuclear war or climate breakdown? Buy tinned food!

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Erm, following the nuclear holocaust, could you tell me when normal public services would be resumed?

Very fair question. We have got it in hand of course. Following Armageddon, we do hope to have public services working very smoothly fairly soon after the event. But I feel in all fairness, that I must point out to all of you, that it must needs be something in the nature of a skeleton service.

The Beyond the Fringe Civil Defence sketch, 1960

There are three key things to grasp about the Government’s Emergency advice to stock up on tinned food and bottled water to deal with possible pending emergencies.

  1. They expect these emergencies to happen; and one aspect of this advice is to get people to be fatalistic about that and not try to avert them.
  2. They expect people to respond to them primarily as individuals. The first job of government is to keep people safe, but if their policies lead to a disaster, its over to you.
  3. The preparations they propose are nowhere near adequate to deal with the scale of the emergencies.

Lets look at these in a bit more detail.

What kind of emergency?

They list four big ones.

  • Increased geopolitical tensions. This is a euphemism for getting ready for a war. Part of the “whole society approach” to the increases in war spending that are needed for the full scale war in Europe within ten years that the top brass have in mind is to get people psychologically prepared for it; so it becomes acceptable and conceivable without too much resistance. What’s missing in this bland phrase is that rising “geopolitical tensions” are primarily being driven by the UK’s core ally the USA and its unprecedented war drive, cutting medical coverage and food stamps to pay for a $1.5 Trillion war budget next year, making covert and overt interventions on every continent, fomenting an international race war while deploying a Black and Tans style militia (ICE) against its own ethnic minorities, pulling its allies into similar self impoverishing austerity and xenophobia. As any direct military threat to the UK comes from blowback from involvement in US sponsored wars and proxy wars, the key action that can be taken to keep the people safe is to stop being involved in them. If its possible for the Spanish government to stand up to Trump and refuse the use of their bases for bombing attacks on Iran, it should be possible for the UK to do the same and go further by pulling the RAF back from spy flights over Gaza. If we want to avoid a step by step escalation of the war in Ukraine to the point that the stakes are so high that nuclear weapons are used, we’d better start de escalating and negotiating now. Its what a majority of people in Ukraine want too.
  • Climate change impacts. You know. Those things that the fossil media tell us aren’t happening, or, if they are, are nothing to do with the climate actually changing. But, as we’ve seen, we are now in a situation in which wildfires are threatening urban areas. Homes are being burnt out. In the UK this is small so far (18 in Wennington in 2022, 37 across the whole country this year) but entire neighbourhoods have been burnt out in North America and Australia in recent years (over 6,000 homes burnt out in Palisades in LA last year) and in France this Summer 300,000 people were evacuated from around Bordeaux when a wildfire threatened the city. This Winter, we will see severe floods. And these will intensify in the years to come. In this context there are two obvious points. 1) The government should be shouting from the rooftops that climate change is a problem that requires a much bigger set of changes to limit the damage. The National Emergency Briefing campaign for a national TV broadcast to level with the population is an apposite demand, and this should be the first part of part of a plan to mobilise people to deal with a real existential threat with a sense of mission that its possible for us to save ourselves; and we’ll do it collectively, and not just at home but internationally. 2) Putting out a general appeal for people to prepare for emergencies in general doesn’t hack it. We’re not going to be able to ride out a wildfire or stop a flood with a stockpile of baked beans.The flood risks are known, fire risks not so predictably. The FBU’s call for a summit on fire risk is vital to get a proper grip on it beyond a vague contemplation to ban disposable barbecues. The local authorities in each area will need a plan for evacuations, emergency supplies and relocation centres and these will have to be widely known; especially to the people directly threatened. We have to bear in mind that, while all these events are local, there will be more and more of them happening simultaneously, so robust planning, and national back up, is essential to avoid being overwhelmed. In these circumstances, the market will not provide.
  • Cyber attack risks and Infrastructure vulnerabilities. These are relatively smaller scale than the big two above. A paradox of infrastructure vulnerability is that the only way to make it robust is to invest in it. If every spare penny is siphoned off into war preparation, infrastructure (from the small scale like potholes to large scale like the electricity grid) will continue to crumble and therefore remain vulnerable. Large scale cyber attacks big enough to require people either to have to stay at home or be evacuated would have to come from “state actors”; which would be blowback from a confrontational war policy pursued abroad – so the way to avoid that is to abandon that style of foreign policy and look to the sort of “win, win global cooperation” that China argues for.

The second and third points go together. The first issue is the need for government to actively avert the threat, not to exacerbate it by going slow on climate mitigation or adding to “rising geopolitical tensions” by pushing for a war. Anyone who thinks that doubling war spending to respond to a supposed “Russian threat” should reflect that the European NATO countries – on their own without the US – spend £3.50 for every £1 the Russian Federation spends on its armed forces and have twice as many service personnel. Aiming to double that can hardly be seen as a necessary defensive measure. Quite the contrary.

Supposing that there really is a war on the scale that they are contemplating, there is no way that it could avoid going nuclear. In which case, whether you have a few extra tins and bottles of water, or a wind up Radio to hear the King telling us to “Keep calm and carry on” as we all die, is going to be neither here nor there. There is an element of Protect and Survive about all this. In 1980, planning to introduce US nuclear cruise missiles to UK bases, the Thatcher government sent a pamphlet to every home in the country giving ludicrous instructions on how to make yourself safe in the event of a nuclear bomb being dropped on your city. This included making yourself an impromptu bomb shelter by unscrewing your bathroom door and hiding under it in the bath.

This image of Hiroshima after the bomb indicates how effective such an approach would be. Because people were aware of this at the time, the pamphlet proved to be a massive own goal for the government, anti missile groups mushroomed all over the country, and one of their campaigning tools was to act out Protect and Survive instructions in street theatre performances in town centres. Hundreds of thousands marched with slogans like “we won’t die for Thatcher” and “Jobs not bombs”.

The current instructions are more subtle. They don’t talk about nuclear war but “geopolitical tensions”, so the psychological conditioning is just enough to generate an unease that can be mobilised, but not enough to alarm people so much that there’s a mass backlash.

The deliberately small scale quality of the advice gives the impression that large scale disasters can be managed domestically. This is the equivalent of the bathroom door over the bath or the idea practiced dutifully in US schools during the 1950s that if you saw the flash of a bomb, you could survive the impact if you were to “duck and cover” under your school desk because “an atomic bomb can burn you worse than bad sunburn” (!!!) . As the schools would have been wholly incinerated, the purpose of these drills – and comparable civil defence drills for adults – was to keep the population in a mobilised Cold War mentality. It broke down by the end of the decade as people increasingly resisted taking part in them and responded to city wide drills by gathering in parks in protest against them.

The advice for a 72-Hour Emergency Kit is to stockpile, Important documents, Water (2L per person per day) Non-perishable food, Battery/wind-up radio, Torch and batteries, First aid kit, Medications, Phone charger, Cash. While it makes sense to have some of this in any case; what kind of war do they think would last for 72 hours? Perhaps the type that would make these preparations totally futile because we’d all be dead in an afternoon. Most of these items are not quantified, but the amount of water proposed is illustrative of how token this is. Two litres per person per day. At present, the average UK citizen uses 144 Litres a day, 32 of them to flush the toilet, 10 for drinking and cooking. Even being minimalist about it, 2 litres isn’t going to go very far. Trying to flush a blocked toilet with bottles of Evian? Perhaps the intention here isn’t to deal with large scale emergencies but to provide cover for water companies, which are increasingly disinclined to provide people with bottled water when they have been cut off fro long periods due to leaks. They are already under no obligation to compensate people if there is a water shortage due to “exceptional weather conditions” like the Summer droughts that are now becoming normative.

All this takes pressure of government to put in anything serious to back up public safety- and lets private companies off the hook to protect their profits. Serious public safety preparation is desperately necessary for climate breakdown, and completely pointless for a nuclear war. As they are actively preparing for the latter while ducking the former, the advice that they are offering actually puts us more at risk by psychologically prepping people to make war conceivable while playing down the consequences of climate change; which worst case projections (3C rise by 2050) now indicate could collapse the world economy by half between 2070 and 2090 and lead to the deaths of 4 billion people (almost one in two of the current global population) if the projected war doesn’t kill us first. There needs to be an urgent reversal of priorities, so the government acts consciously and consistently as a peacemaker while mobilising the entire population in a maximum effort to avert climate disaster.

Signs of Suburban Drought

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On the forty fourth day without rain

A park that’s like a bleached savannah

A woman carrying an umbrella over her head under a pitiless blue sky

Blackberries, small, hard and bullet like as they ripen

Crows foraging in the shade under the trees with their beaks gaping

Old men wearing shorts for the third month in a row

An absence of barbecues

Trees beginning to wither

West Ham Station – Its Soooo Bracing!

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An announcement on the tannoy at West Ham station as we slog across the bridge between the main rail platform and the Jubilee Line cautioning people not to run and jump anywhere in the station. Burdened as we are with two heavily laden wheelie suitcases with hefty bags perched on top (and a shopping trolley for all those extra things we might find a use for back at the flat) and looking around at all the other passengers determinedly trudging for A to B, or B to A, heads down, no nonsense, mindless commuting, this strikes us as a superfluous comment.

Knowing of someone who was killed in an escalator accident, I know that it isn’t.

Nevertheless, it conjures an image of a happier world in which it would not be necessary. One in which passengers leap and dance across the concourse with safety and impunity like the cast of Fame or the Jolly Fisherman, frolic in and out of the lifts, bound along the corridors – while always keeping to the Left of course – like a corps de ballet – and land triumphantly on the platforms like Simone Biles after another Olympic Gold winning performance. All journeys by dancing parkour.

The Jolly Fisherman (now the mascot for the town) from the 1908 “Skegness, its so bracing” poster by John Hassall for the Great Northern Railway. Joie de vivre in the rain.

On the platform of the Hammersmith and City line, a very short man is wearing a black hoody emblazoned with the slogan “overcome your fear of heights”.

Outside the Ya Hela dessert place on Kingsbury Road, a group of heavy set, balding mustachioed geezers hunched over coffees; one of them looking like he’s picking his fingernails with a screwdriver.

A little further down an old Chinese lady is laboriously and slowly crossing the road, pushing a huge rectangular shopping trolley that almost comes up to her chin and is fully laden. A bloke approaching on a moped, rather than slow down or weave a little to his right to avoid her, beeps at her – presumably on the presumption that she is a disguised athlete who can just skip out of his way. J offers her some help and she smiles, as people do when you see them.

The new double decker bike shed outside Kingsbury station doesn’t get a lot of direct use, but since its been up, its guarantee of a place to lock your bike has meant that the extended stands to its East have been far busier and there has often been a herd of Lime bikes parked brightly in the space to its West. Lime bikes seem to be getting a lot more use now, and I haven’t seen any of them dumped carelessly across paths like I used to; campaigns to get them banned because of that having fallen thankfully flat. Proof that, as with so much in life, the key to success is having some reserves.

Things can only get hotter?

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This was a letter I sent to Labour List last week. They didn’t publish it. Possibly too hot for them.

There was nothing in Andy Burnham’s speech about climate change at the end of two lethal heatwaves. The government should publish in full the Intelligence Services report Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security;suppressed last October because “the government was unwilling to face the issues raised.” 

The redacted 14-page version published in January warns that national security, financial prosperity and food security are under threat from the climate crisis and collapse of vital ecosystems that support food production, with six of nine planetary boundaries crucial to maintaining a liveable planet already crossed with every critical ecosystem on a “pathway to collapse”.

As this is the greatest threat both to national security and human survival more broadly, throwing our limited resources into the gaping maw of Trump’s demands for war spending is suicidal in more ways than one.

The appointment of John Healey as Chancellor means that war spending will have first dibs on everything; which will mean investing in anything that actually improves people’s lives will be squeezed through an eye dropper while BAE Systems and Lockheed suck in the cash as our infrastructure deteriorates, not least from the impacts of increasingly common extreme weather. 

Stick with these priorities and things can only get hotter.

Only by unthinking obedience to our leaders can we remain free?

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Moments of crisis tend to expose unthinking mantras that have held up conventional wisdom for decades with the assurance of Doric columns on a bank; but which only look solid because they are unexamined.

The recent article – ‘Andy Burnham is right: Social cohesion is key to national security’– on Labour List by Sara Khan and Matthew Godwin (not Goodwin – a different character altogether) is a collection of such mantras. In previous times these may have locked together like an impervious Lego wall of unexamined presumptions, but now stand exposed as flimsy stage furniture for a play that has exceeded its run.

They start with a quote from Burnham. “I see strength at home and our strength in the world as indivisible”. This sounds similar to, but is a long way from, Clive Lewis MP’s argument that national security will be undermined if the transfer of spending from improving people’s lives onto war preparation impoverishes people and neglects social and physical infrastructure that is already crumbling. A modern version of a line an old Labour Party member in Bermondsey came out with at the start of the Thatcher Prime Ministership; “a few more years of this government, and we’ll all be living in tents surrounded by cruise missiles”.

Instead, they pose the sense that 61% of people in the UK have that “the social contract is broken” not on the feelings people get when they smash their suspension or bike wheels on pot holes, have to wait for 8 hours in A&E (and have to get a cab there because it will be quicker than an ambulance) struggle to cope in a heat wave, have to pay through the nose for heating because their house is badly insulated, see their rivers filling with toxic waste while the water companies falsify tests and bank their dividends: none of that. For them its the result primarily of ideological interventions by “our international adversaries – particularly Russia and Iran” who are seeking “the destabilisation of Western democracies” and to “disable the Western Alliance”.

They go on to outline a series of far right propositions that now have mass support, with 40% of people thinking of “Tommy Robinson’s” marches as “patriotic”, 33 per cent supporting calls for “remigration”, 31 per cent supporting the view that non-white people will never be as English/Scottish/Welsh as white people and 29 percent believing in the ‘Great Replacement’ theory. At no point do they join the obvious dots that these views reflect those we are being bombarded with from the world’s leading bully pulpit – the Presidency of the United States. They mention a meeting between “Tommy Robinson” and Elon Musk’s Nazi father without noting that “Robinson” is being funded by Musk; who is also promoting Rupert Lowe and Restore; who split from Reform because Farage was wary of linking up with him. Nor do they make any mention of the overlap between the US and UK Right and Far Right, seen recently in the ARC conference in London (an “anti elite” event that cost its participants £1500 for a ticket) denouncing everything from the reality of climate change to any notion of equality, nor the wholesale capitulation to them by the Conservative Party, nor the ongoing flow of funding, ideas and media, with US shock jock radio and Fox News the model for loss making but potent platforms like GB News, nor US tech bro platforms prioritising far Right content. This supplements the deep penetration of US influence at every level of the British state, particularly its military and Intelligence services. To misquote LBJs observation about J Edgar Hoover, in the case of British society, the USA is both in the tent and pissing in.

And this poses a big question about “Western Democracy” (with or without capital letters). Do the authors consider the United States to be democratic? They talk of the need to emphasise the differences between “Western Democracies” and “authoritarians”. Leaving aside Peter Theil and Alex Karp’s opposition to “democracy” (for the masses) as antithetical to “freedom” for the billionaires who run the show, and Marco Rubio’s racialised notion of “European civilisation” battling against the developing world, that should be kept in its place – and the people who live there, who should be kept out – that’s in the context of the Trump government unleashing ICE on communities across the country, levels of gerrymandering and voter suppression that are verging on the surreal, attempts to define social democratic opposition as “far Left Terrorism” by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. So, supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America, like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and broadcasters like Amy Goodman, along with “anti-fascists” in general are now defined as “terrorists” by the administration. And that’s just domestically. Internationally they have sanctioned the International Criminal Court and its judges – international rule of law anyone? They have funded and backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and invasion of Lebanon, backed and funded Far Right candidates across Latin America, put Cuba under siege in a way that is causing terrible suffering, launched a globally destabilising war on Iran which includes attacks on civilian infrastructure like hospitals, energy and water treatment plants that can only be described as war crimes, have bombed Nigeria and are lining up an intervention in Mali. And that’s leaving aside its trade wars and attempts to assert “Global Energy Dominance” by doubling down on the fossil fuels that are making the planet less and less habitable the more we burn them Its no wonder that a majority of people in a majority of countries across the world see the United States as the most destabilising country in the world. That includes majorities in the UK and…the United States.

It is this drive for a New American Century that underpins the rise of the Far Right in every country where the US has influence. In a country like Britain, where the US Embassy is a positively Viceregal building, this leads to “mainstream” parties bending the knee and repeating the lines they are fed from across the Atlantic to keep in line and out of the firing range. Hence Starmer’s “Island of Strangers” speech. That struck a bum note for most of us here, but its audience was in the White House. Its effect, along with the performative cruelty of immigration control measures modelled on the US, was to help legitimise “extremist views” so they are now indeed “polluting the mainstream”.

That is where “the root of hate” is.

For the authors, all this seems to have come from nowhere. There is no active agency involved. By omission, the US still stands as the core of the “Western democracies” that they want to defend – not what it actually is. For good measure, we should note that only a minority of people in the US think that their country is a democracy in Harvard’s surveys of opinion; because it is not run in the interests of the majority. The sense of broken social contract, particularly among young people, comes from “deep economic insecurity, eroding trust in democratic institutions, and growing social fragmentation”.

To put that another way, fail to improve people’s lives and that erosion will continue, handing people over on a plate to the far Right. Such a failure is baked in to the plans to increase war expenditure to a level that will suck the life out of any meaningful attempt to invest in improvements in anything else. In that situation, the house will indeed be divided against itself. Demands are arising for social justice, for proper levels of investment; something Andy Burnham is acknowledging with the real, albeit small, gestures in that direction in his first week, like the £2 bus fare cap. However, paying for that not by taxing the wealthy and reducing inequality but by seeking to squeeze money back from international climate finance is a wrong road and a short one. Similarly, more agency at local level in Burnham’s devolution agenda, while welcome, can only go so far without the investment needed to solve the problems that people identify. Once a renewed squeeze for arms spending kicks in, the pressure will be felt in all those unrealised aspirations. Can’t help but be. In that context, it becomes imperative for the ruling class to deflect any resistance downwards away from them and ruthlessly drive divisions among the majority, so the mainstreaming of racism isn’t something to be avoided for them, but a necessary tactic.

Khan and Godwin are, possibly despite their intentions, playing a soft part in this drift. In drawing a veil over the actual role of the United States, a veil with “Western Democracies” written on it, pointing to “international adversaries” (of the United States) as the culprits – and, inevitably, lazily and mendaciously smearing the movement against war and genocide in West Asia as “coopted” by “Islamic extremists” – they fail to deal with real contradictions that tear holes in their worn out world view; and become complicit in the suppression of democratic dissent that, again following US models, has banned Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation, gagged defendants, suppressed the rights of juries and threatened barristers with jail for reminding them that they have them.

Their solutions to “heal the wounds that divide us” do not involve any reassessment of the UK’s auxiliary role for the US; which at the moment is taking the form of aiding and abetting bombing runs into Iran from RAF Fairford that are primarily hitting civilian infrastructure. A big majority opposes this complicity. We are being ignored.

Instead they argue for a “Total Defence” strategy that requires ideological conformity at home as part of military credibility abroad. That in turn requires an even stricter policing of dissent on traditional and social media. The paradox of their argument is that they are right that far Right arguments have for the most part been capitulated to and promoted not tackled, but because they don’t identify where these arguments come from, nor in whose interests they are being put, they end up (start out) aligned with the very forces that are pushing them; and the “anti extremist” agenda, in being directed against US targets, boils down to policing internal dissent from the Left “like we did in the Cold War”. So much easier for the UK’s traditional alliances if no news from Gaza is allowed to filter through unmediated by “reliable sources”.

So, we end up with a “democratic” society in which deviation from standing to attention and saluting the right shibboleths – which will increasingly be the Right shibboleths – will be treated as treason and terror. Be prepared.

Approving Rosebank and Jackdaw will not “keep the North Sea Working”

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

There is a lot of media hype that Andy Burnham will approve the Rosebank oilfield and the Jackdaw gas field in his first week as PM, even though the government has been very clear up to now that doing so won’t take a penny off bills nor help energy security, as most of the production would be for export.

They would also do virtually nothing to defend jobs. The most optimistic projections of jobs creation from Adura – the lash up of Shell and Equinor set to run the projects – is for 3,500 jobs “at peak production”, so short term construction jobs, and 880 long term jobs to keep them going. This is a much larger projection than that of the BBC in 2023, which had 1600 in construction and 450 long term; but taking it as good coin, it is a miniscule proportion of the jobs lost (at a rate of 725 a month) since 1979.

That looks like this (even using Adura’s, possibly inflated, figures).

As you can see, the long term jobs are barely visible. Comparing the new Rosebank and Jackdaw jobs with the projected jobs decline up to the early 2030s shows a similar picture.

Assuming that government policy changes and these fields are approved. It is quite evident that the long term jobs in Rosebank and Jackdaw are a drop in the bucket and no amount of additional licences and tie ins will make any qualitative difference to the scale and speed of the job losses; as there are no other substantial fields left, and the remaining North Sea reserves cannot be “economically” extracted.

From a jobs point of view its a distraction from the main issue, because, without a plan for a transition to offshore renewables work, 60,000 workers will still lose their jobs within the decade whether they open or not. We need unity between all the North Sea unions and the climate movement to campaign for such a plan; which is the campaign we should have had all along.

For a whole society resistance to militarisation

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Suitably amended Imperial War Museum Poster (see balloon) on a tube station somewhere in London.

Alternative, or additional, graffiti could include speech or thinks bubbles from either character saying things like;

Say No to WW3!

The enemy is at home, and above us

A rifle is a weapon with a worker at both ends

We are currently getting an onslaught of military recruitment ads and what might be called “cultural interventions” designed to normalise the militarisation of society. I have recently seen buses painted camouflage colours and patterns with army recruitment ads along the sides, and lots of posters on the tube montaging soldiers bodies onto footballers feet to cash in on the World Cup. This is a well financed attempt to make our everyday environment scream militarist presumptions. Anything we can do to add a little challenge will make people think.

We can’t buy space, but we do have felt tip pens.

World Cup – on joy, suffering and DV

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Having not watched the match, I knew that England had beaten Norway in the World Cup when I was woken at one in the morning by the sound of two short sharp fireworks and someone playing a few bars from “Hey Jude” loudly enough to be heard across the neighbourhood, presumably on the assumption that everyone who hadn’t watched the match would nevertheless want to know the result, but considerate enough to keep it brief. Earlier, S had reported a scream from half the houses in the street when the equaliser went in.

On the market earlier in the day, stall holders were selling England Football shirts, on what might have been the last day there may have been a demand for them. As it is, they have until Wednesday. Argentina. No history there…

There’s a lot more mixes of flags hanging out of windows now, England and Egypt, England and Brazil among immediate neighbours.

Fans I’ve seen in team shirts vary from those who wear them lightly, and those for whom it seems to be an outward embodiment of a bitter soul. One with a ’66 replica top yesterday with a harassed expression taking two kids for a walk using leads that they were way too old for. Another guy in standard white, wearing it almost as an act of self punishment from the expression on his face. He didn’t look as though he was enjoying life at all, and brought to mind Nick Hornby’s remark that football is essentially about suffering and how we cope with it.

Not well in some cases, with the match more of a detonator than a relief for the sort of men who just need a trigger. Research from Lancaster university from 2013 indicates that incidents of domestic violence increase by 38% when the England men’s team lose, and by 26% when they win or draw, and 11% the following day regardless of the result. Most people will enjoy the win with a warm glow and endure the loss with a fatalistic shrug (and perhaps a verse or two of “we’re shit and we know we are”) and get on with life: but in over 300 reported cases that the police were sure were linked to the football during the European Cup in 2024, they didn’t. And has its generally reckoned that only one in four domestic violence cases are reported, the real figure could be over 1,200.

As Farah Nazeer, chief executive of Women’s Aid, who are running an awareness campaign to try to inhibit the behaviour and embolden survivors of it to report it, throughout this World Cup put it, “For women and children who are victims of domestic abuse, the ‘kick-off’ takes on a different meaning.”

This isn’t peculiar to England. According to UNESCO and UN Women, “Across the globe, the number of reports of domestic violence made to the police rises with depressing predictability during major sporting events, such as the World Cup,”

Awareness campaigns of this sort should be run by governments through the media platforms screening the events, in a format that undermines the springs of the behaviour and seeks to defuse the time bombs that are ticking inside far too many men.

Boxed in by Tanks?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

John Healey taking out his service revolver to apply the coup de grace to Keir Starmer has been followed by immediate manoeuvres by the militarists to box in his successor.

  • Rachel Reeves, evidently on borrowed time, announces that increased war spending will be set before Andy Burnham takes over.
  • Wes Streeting, one of the three possibly Chancellors to replace her, signals his support;
  • while Al Carns lurks in the shrubbery hinting at a leadership run if there’s any hint that there are better uses for our resources.

This matters because if the commitment to meeting 5% of GDP on war spending is met, the financial commitment will be so huge (£70 billion extra per annum) that it will suck the life out of anything positive a Burnham government might do to improve people’s lives.

Without that, Labour will lose the next election; so, this pressure should be resisted and Burnham should stand up to Trump in the way that Pedro Sanchez has.

This is a letter to Labour List, which they may, or may not, publish. Facebook blocks my blogs, I guess because Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like what I say. So, to bite back if you think its worth passing on, please do