Category: Uncategorized

Erasing Banksy – Art that is a hammer must be suppressed!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“Art is not a mirror, its a hammer” Bertold Brecht.

This image enhances the original, with the symbolic figure of the man in black with a hard hat, almost like the rear view of a CRS riot policeman in the Days of May. The authorities have become part of the performance Art and have confirmed and amplified their role in the mural.

Scrubbing the Banksy mural off the Royal Courts of Justice shows that this is Art that matters. They couldn’t commodify it, market it, sell it, or accept it.

Erasing it from the wall, like the way the “Intelligence Services” destroyed the Guardian hard drive with the Wikileaks documents on it, is self defeating though.

Now we see the image online all over the world, and we see the erasure, and in erasing it, they expose themselves for what they are.

So, the hammer that shapes understanding is in our hands, not theirs.

The only war that matters is the war against the imagination/ all other wars are subsumed in it. Diane Di Prima.

Yvette Cooper’s evasions on “terrorism” invite ridicule.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

For a newspaper that uses Orwell’s “The enemy of nonsense” as a motto/mission statement, the Observer doesn’t half print a lot of it.

Yvette Cooper’s article “Palestine Action’s violent criminality is not lawful protest” (Observer 17/8/25) is a case in point.

What is revealing about it is the extent to which she has to use arguments that distinguish the mass protest movement from the NVDA tactics of PA, while trying to elide the distinction between NVDA and “terrorism”. This is a victory of sorts, because one of the aims of this action was precisly to make this smear spread, as we saw with some of the clumsier police actions in the immediate aftermath of the ban; which might be interpreted as taking an over enthusiastic interpretation of it, but could also be seen as testing the water for how far they could go and how much they could get away with.

Let’s see what she says and examine it.

“Faced with the intolerable scenes of suffering and devastation in Gaza, people across the country are feeling desperate and angry about what is happening and many have joined protests on the streets”. Quite so. Where have you been Yvette? Why have you not joined us if you think that these “scenes” are “intolerable”? More to the point, why does your government tolerate it, continuing with arms shipments, trade, spy flights? Why is there no meaningful pressure on Israel (who you don’t mention in this sentence) to stop?

“Each month the police work with organisers to facilitate safe, lawful protests, and will continue to do so.” The experience of the march organisers is that the police have increasingly placed restrictions on where marches can assemble, their routes, whether they can march at all, and, at the end of one, they arrested the head stewards and General Secretaries of PSC, CND and Stop the War when they tried to walk to the BBC to hand in a letter. This is not facilitating lawful legal protest. It is harassing it.

“Hundreds of thousands have joined pro Palestinian protests, while only a tiny minority have been arrested for breaking the law”, despite the very tight restrictions on protest that are now law and the attempt to interpret slogans like “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!” as “antisemitic”, as if Palestinian freedom is incompatible with Jewish freedom, a contention that is zero sum communalism; and as if Palestine can be free somewhere else. Anywhere but Palestine in fact.

“Anyone who wants to protest against the catastrophic humanitarian situation and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to oppose Israel’s military offensive. or to criticise the actions of any and every governmnet, including our own, has the feedom to do so.” This is posed as though this “freedom” (under the constraints above) is a concession we should be grateful for from a government that has no complicity in the “catastrophic humanitairian situation and crimes against humanity “ being carried out by UK ally Israel in Gaza (and the West Bank).

But, lets bank that. Write it down and show it to any over zealous copper who thinks otherwise, because when she writes; “The recent proscription of the group Palestine Action does not prevent those protests, and to claim otherwise is nonsense” she seems to be unaware that police on the ground, in Kent and elsewhere, have interpreted it as exactly that. If she is backing off from that, good. Carve it in stone. The attempt to chill debate and undermine mass support and mass actions from fear of being accused of terrorism has failed already, not least from well deserved ridicule. The passive voice in her sentence is a bit of a giveaway that she is trying to distance herself from the decision. It is something that simply happened, like the genocide in Gaza, nothing to do with me, Guv’.

However, although she is in a hole, she is still digging. In trying to maintain the argument that NVDA is “terrorism” she has to use arguments that are deeply shallow.

“A group that has conducted an escalating campaign involving not just sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure, but also, intimidation, violence, weapons and serious injury to individuals” she runs together the overwhelming majority of actions with one case, in which one individual who, in the Observer’s words, “faces charges of GBH and 2 charges of ABH against two police officers …the only significant acts of violence against a person in the group’s 365 actions since it was founded in 2020.” We should also note that the defendent has pled not guilty. Nevertheless, the Home Secretary seems to have concluded

1. that if charged they must be guilty

2. that if guilty, these actions are characteristic of the group as a whole (which it is evident that they are not)

3 that this level of violence (what you’d find outside quite a lot of pubs on a Friday night) is the same thing as “terrorism”.

This lack of a sense of proportion is the nub of the matter. It is always reassuring when the “grown ups in the room”, those responsible for supposedly keeping us “safe”, can’t tell the difference between firecrackers and hand grenades, pots of paint and Improvised Explosive Devices. Arguing, as Cooper does, that “the UK’s world leading counter terrorism system” (close your eyes and it could be Boris Johnson) advised her that PA could be proscribed under the “tests in the Terrorism Act 2000” simply exposes the attempt of that Act to blur necessary distinctions that the person in the street (or Clapham Omnibus) can see plainly, but the Act intends to smear. Regardless of the loose, baggy definition of “terrorism” in the 2000 Act, taking NVDA against companies that produce weapons systems to try to prevent a genocide is a long way away from putting a bomb on a tube train; and everyone knows it.

This is evident in her line, having listed charges that are being prosecuted and defended under ordinary criminal law, that these are considered, in “the assessment of the Crown prosecution Service, a terrorism connection”. What exactly does that mean?

  • Is it that the actions had a “terrorism connection”? In which case any other defendent charged with such actions should reasonably expect to be charged as a terrorist too.
  • Or, is it that the group had terrorism connections. in which case, what are they? Cooper doesn’t say. Perhaps because she’s chancing her arm here, as she is with her dark hints of secret briefings from the ever reliable Intelligence Services (the team that brought us Weapons on Mass Destruction in Iraq) about what PA is really up to (as opposed to what it has actually done. There is no repeat of the story the Home Office put round that PA had funding from Iran; quickly dropped because they knew it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. If the state has to lie about something like this, as it has so obviously done, it is a sign that they realise that they are standing on thin ice.

So, as it stands, the wheels look like they will be coming off this particular bus before they have gone round and round much further.

Coming back to the basics, when Cooper says that there will be “desperate calls for peace in the Middkle East”, I think its reasonable to ask “where are yours?” especially, as she says “the humanitarian crisis worsens, the conditions for hostages deteriorate, the prospects for peace are diminished, and the scenes of children being shot and starved get ever more horrific.” As Cooper is a leading member of a government that is allied to Israel, the state that is doing all this, again, I think its reasonable to ask, what the f*** are you doing to stop it?

The agenda she puts – ceasefire, hostage release (not that she notices any Palestinian hostages) “urgent humanitarian aid” – is what the mass demonstrations have pushed for for nearly two years, and her government has been dragged kicking and screaming to go along with, but it is totally without pressure on their part; and is posed as a regretful word in the ear of an ally that has gone too far under understandable provocation and should be restrained in its own interests.

Where is the arms embargo? Where are the sanctions? Where is the removal of military and intelligence cooperation?

Instead, we have the threat to recognise a “Palestinian state” as a token gesture instead. This is in the context of proposals for a Bantustan – or a series of them -under strict Israeli and allied tutelage.

To shout down dissent as “terrorism” in this context is both desperate and ridiculous and, far from frightening opposition, Cooper finds that she is being laughed at. Truly fatal.

Trying to kill the Truth.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This brilliant graph by Nicki Draper shows what the killing rate for journalists in Gaza actually is. The initial graph is bad enough, but adjusted for time it shows that this is not an average loss of life in a risky job. Does anyone really think that this can be anything other than a deliberate policy, to kill the eyes and ears, stifle the witnesses, carry on the genocide in silence and darkness?

The scale of the killing of journalists by Israeli forces in Gaza has been so great that their colleagues in Western media can’t avert their eyes anymore.

Though the framing is still often grotesque. Jonathan Crook’s question How is it possible for a BBC reporter to have made the following obscene observation in his segment on Israel’s murder at the weekend of Al-Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif: “There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?” goes to the heart of the racist double standards applied by the Western media to their own colleagues in Gaza. How much collateral damage is OK?

As Cook points out, if studio with Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Yollande Knell, Lucy Williamson and Jon Donnison was been hit by an Israeli strike, and all five killed: would any BBC reporter ask “There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?”

The reporter’s question is also absurd. The IDF does not target individual journalists. It targets journalists. No one from outside is allowed in. Anyone on the inside has a target on them.

They do not want the facts getting out. They would prefer it if everyone went about their lives in an innocent bubble, untroubled by disturbing images and news.

But we see them. We know. The bloody tooth paste is out of the tube and you will never get it back in. We will tell others. We will mobilise. This will end.

Chagos : picking up the tab for the USA.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The headline in Monday’s Daily Telegraph was Starmer hid costs of Chagos surrender, with the strapline Official figures reveal total cost is ten times higher than the Prime Minister claimed.

Even in the Telegraph, which could have most of its headlines summarised in an emotional digested read as HRUMPH! this is almost poetic. A veritable broadside of misdirected kneekjerk reactions.

Lets start with Chagos surrender. What they mean by this is the return of the Indian Island archipeligo of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. For Telegraph readers it is a no brainer that an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is more appropriately administered by the remnants of the Colonial Office in London than another island nearby, let alone, perish the thought, the people who actually live there; because where once a British colonist has stood, the Union Jack should fly forever.

Surrender implies some shame, as the emotional freight of all those retreats from direct imperial control all through the 20th century gets concentrated on this tiny island far, far away; of which their readers know very little.

The notion of the cost of handing back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is suspicious. Why would it cost anything to relinquish control? It sounds like reparations – the horrifying notion that countries that got rich from exploiting the resources of countries they conquered, keeping them in poverty for the duration, might actually owe them something. Hrumph, indeed! Can’t have THAT!

But as there is no cost to let go of Chagos, what is the cost actually for? Read the article and it admits that the cost is not for giving bup the island, but for leasing back the airbase that Britain expelled the Chagos islanders to build in the 1960s. This base, formally British, is actually used by the United States as a strategic centre for B2 bombers to range across Africa, West, Central and South and South East Asia, China and the Pacific.

Like the agreement to a 5% target for “defence” spending and the meek acceptance of Trump’s tariffs, any contribution to the costs to Britain of keeping this base going – this “terrible deal with huge costs to hard pressed British tax payers”, as Dame Priti Patel put it – is a financial tribute to the United States, so they can bomb half the world with impunity.

Any resentment at this should therefore be directed across the Atlantic, not at Mauritius. But that would involve 1. being honest and 2. punching up.

Their argument that these costs have been misleadingly reported is itself misleading. They argue that methods often used by the Treasury on long term costs to take account of inflation and the “Social Time Preference rate” is an “accountancy trick”. Not an argument they deploy in other contexts.

They then go on to say that the “nominal” cost £34.7 billion over 99 years would be equivalent “half the annual schools budget”. So, a salutory comparison of wasteful military costs with costs of schooling, unusual in the Telegraph, and only made because they have painted the price of subsiding as US air base as an act of reparation, but still comparing an annual cost (in the case of schools) with a cost spread over 99 years – so, not a strictly reasonable comparison.

They are operating more to type when they say that the cost of leaing the base is also equivalent to building “10 Elizabeth class aircraft carriers”; conjuring up a real wet dream of military nostalgia for all those retired Commodores who write them letters; for the days when the Royal Navy had mighty ships of the line and Scapa Flow was full of battleships; instead of being, as it is, a tiny, niche auxiliary force for the US Navy. Oddly enough, playing the same sort of subordinate role as the Air Force does for the Chagos Island base (and other bases here too).

The Wingco at “RAF” Burtonwood.

I had direct experience of the fiction involved in this in the mid 1980s, when a delegation from Greater Manchester CND travelled down to the Burtonwood Air Base to hand in a letter to the base commander pointing out that any nuclear weapons stored there would put the population of Manchester, and the whole North West, at serious risk.

When we asked to see the base commander, a Royal Air Force Wingco came out. He looked a bit like Kenneth Moore, which I don’t suppose damaged his job application any. Everyone else in view was in US uniforms. When we said we wanted to see the actual base commander, he said “I’m the base commander. Its an RAF base”.

So we said, “Really, whats THAT?” pointing to the enormous stars and stripes fluttering on the flag pole behind him.

Writing off the Working Class in Education?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

How the framing of the debate changes!

Time was that relative educational underachievement of global majority children in English schools was put down to ethnicity. Exam results “proved” that these kids were inherently less able than their white peers. Books were written. Media talking heads nodded sagely, “the figures don’t lie”. The shadow of racial status from Empire still loomed across the later 20th Century.

A variation on this was a big scare in the 1980s, that, if there were too many of them, children for whom English was an additional language would inevitably hold back the progress of their classmates for whom it was their only language. A Head teacher from Bradford called Ray Honeyford made a big fuss on these lines and was given credence by TV News, and then platformed as their go to talking head on every other educational issue – on the same lines as Katherine Birbalsingh is today because, after all, Head teachers are all the same.

So, why would you want to talk to more than one?

This argument has disappeared since. In my experience over thirty years of teaching, a child fluent in another language would rapidly pick up English. Even the least fluent picked up F*** off! within a week of playtime. Needs must. Problems with an academic curriculum would come in if the child’s home language, whatever it was, was underdeveloped. Often, a bilingual child would have access to two blunt linguistic instruments. A child with English as a sole language, would have one. The solution for this was innovative, language rich, experiential learning, with lots of practical activity and talk. This benefitted all the students, however many languages they spoke at home. As the phrase went “good English as an Additional Language practice, is good practice”.

But now that some white pupils are doing worse “even than Afro Caribbean students” as one Radio 4 commentator put it yesterday, the clutching at pearls almost audible – “Daphne! The smelling salts!” – this is no longer put down to ethnic inadequacy on the part of the failing students, because the shadow of racial status from Empire still casts its darkness; it must be about something else.

If this were about material factors holding back all working class children, that would represent progress. However, the framing once again emphasises the ethnic aspect of this, and in a way that does not recognise that, in addition to all the other factors that hold back working class kids, global majority kids have to deal with racism as well.

The implication of the media narrative now, is that this has been turned on its head, so global majority students must be being unfairly favoured in some way. A favourite target is any attempt to learn in a curriculum that does not reinforce racist narratives. This is absolutely overt in the United States, with inclusive curriculla scrapped and books banned; so our derivative Right will want to echo that to show how patriotically subservient they are to the Big White Chief in Washington. If you’ve had privilege for long enough, equality always looks like a threat.

So, their line is that any effort to allow global majority children to see themselves in the curricullum, or for History in particular to be decolonised, is an attempt to “make white children feel bad about themselves”. Which is odd, because you’d only feel bad about, say, the slave trade, if you identify with the slave traders, not the slaves, out of misplaced ethnic solidarity.

When people like Michael Gove talked about being “proud of our History”, that white solidarity cutting across class and stretching back through time, is what he wanted to reinforce. Let the statues of the slave traders (Colston) and imperial buccaneers (Rhodes, Clive) stand forever for us to look up to, holding us in our place like so many bronze paper weights.

There is a massive difference between wanting to “erase History” and wanting to hold it up to the light. For Gove and his ilk, the point of national history teaching is to provide a national narrative based on the fond delusion that “we” were always the good guys, so anything we do now must be ok. Its that that erases history and makes understanding it impossible. All so we can watch our armed forces bomb and occupy other people’s countries and still feel good about ourselves; and definitely not resist it. While it is often said that “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” it is equally true that “those who prevent history being fully taught intend to repeat it”.

An article in the Daily Telegraph – White working class pupils are being written off says Philipson (11/8/25) demonstrates rather well how this is now being framed. In a paper that argues on the same day that too many students are going to University; too many of the wrong sort of students, you know, the sort that should be learning practical skills that can then be hired by the people who do, and whose families always have; they approvingly quote Education Secretary Bridget Philipson as saying that “it is a “national disgrace that so many young people are written off and don’t get what they need to achieve and thrive. Far too many young people, particularly white working class British (sic) students, don’t get the results they need at GCSE or A Level to allow them to continue to University.” I emphasised British there, partly for its redundancy, but also for the implied “us and them” dog whistle. What are the other students then? Not British? A foreshadowing of “remigration”?

The paradox of the Telegraph’s line lies in the conflict between thinking that working class kids shouldn’t really be going to University, should know their place and stay in it, with the racist indignation that if global majority kids are doing better than any white kids, this is an outrage that cannot stand.

Not that they have any concrete proposals to deal with it. Least of all addressing structural issues that put so many children below the poverty line, 2 child benefit cap perhaps, or investing more into schools – both in resources and educational input – in the most deprived areas. This approach worked very well in London with the London Challenge between 2003 and 2011, which saw Inner London’s exam results going from bottom to top in eight years.

This is relevant because demographic divergence means that economically declining poorer towns, sometimes, but not always on the coast, or in former industrial areas where the industry has died – places young people with hope and educational motivation move away from not into – often retain a proportionately high white working class population. Some of them, to be fair, have moved there from cities because of that, hitching up their ox wagons and making the great trek from London (with no ethnic majority) to, say, Clacton (95.3% white). The paradox of this is that areas with a healthy ethnic mix tend to have schools with higher results, but also higher results among all ethnic groups, so they are running away from better prospects for their kids.

The last Conservative government tried to deal with this by changing the funding formula so that the existing education budget was redistributed. This would have raised spending outside of cities at the expense of running down spending in them. The obvious problem with this is that an improvement does not sustain itself on inertia. The level of investment needed last year will still be needed this year just to stand still. Cut it away, and it all goes backwards.

So, if they were serious about addressing this, there would need to be a London Challenge type intervention – preferably less top down and more engaging with educators – in all deprived areas.

But that takes resources.

And you can’t have that if you need every penny for the Ministry of Defence. Far better to let things languish so that angry and alienated people are pointed towards Reform not a solution.

Here’s how they frame it “Labour is facing pressure to address issues facing white working class Britons amid the growing threat from Reform”. In this framing dividing and ruling the working class is the foundation of the narrative. Solutions that benefit all working class kids don’t get a look in. Instead we have Angela Rayner quoted citing “high levels of immigration” as “threatening social cohesion among Britain’s poorest communities” in a way that “risks fresh disorder”.

So, the issue is not the lack of investment in schools, because little will be on offer; “immigration” is posed as the problem. The problem for Labour is that chasing Reform votes by parroting their poisonous themes instead of genuinely addressing the issues and putting the resources in, will compound and exacerbate exactly the problems she says she fears.

Because, when they talk about “white working class” the active part of the formula is “white”. The last thing they want is any pride in being working class (unless that is clearly defined in the sort of plucky subordinate role – like the way working class characters provided the light relief in Brief Encounter – in which we know our place).

Better demoralisation than class solidarity. And demoralisation of the sort that leads to about double the number of kids now often missing school days than before the pandemic can only be addressed with hope. Of the sort that is now denied by the society we have. Hope of a job. A worthwhile job preferably. Somewhere affordable to live. Preferably decent in a healthy, culturally lively green community. A future not threatened by war or climate breakdown, and education that does not act as an enabler to the first and dampen down serious mobilisation to stop the latter.

Above all, an education that offers working class kids self respect, as unique individuals, but as part of the class that, as Bernadette McAliskey put it on a Bloody Sunday Commemoration Rally on a frozen Sunday in Kilburn forty years back “you built this country…every last stick of it!”

Can’t have kids being aware of that. They might want to build it better.

Armageddon in Gaza

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” W B Yeats

The decision by the Israeli war cabinet to try to fully occupy Gaza to “eliminate Hamas” will kill many, many more people, with intensified military action adding even more to the steadily mounting total of people being starved to death; and, as a side effect that Netanyahu is well aware of, ensure the deaths of all the remaining hostages. As the Duke of Warwick says in Shaw’s St Joan; “It was nothing personal. Your death was a political necessity”.

The reported stand up row with IDF commanders, and the letters from thousands of reservists and nearly 600 retired Israeli security officials and former intelligence agency heads who see no achievable military objective, also reflects the strain that the war so far has placed on the IDF itself and Israeli society more broadly.

Their casualties are tiny by comparison with those suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza of course. The 60,199 fatalities for which the Gaza Health Ministry has records are generally accepted to be a serious underestimate.

There is no doubt that, unless a change of course is forced, there will be many more dying very soon. 12,000 children under five alone are reported as suffering from acute malnutrition in July; and this number is growing as the trickle of food aid forced in by international pressure and condemnation is spread thinner and thinner as time drags on.

Nevertheless, the impact of the war on the IDF is far from negligable, and this will accelerate once they move into the quagmire of Gaza City.

So far, they have lost 454 fatalities and 2,870 injured in the 22 months since October 7th.

To think of that in UK terms, with a population almost ten times bigger – that would be 4,358 dead and 27,552 injured.

To put that into perspective, 179 UK soldiers were killed in Iraq, and 457 in Afghanistan (the latter over nearly 20 years); roughly a tenth as much at a much slower rate. It led to quite a strong sentiment against overseas interventions, even with a proffessional armed forces, that is still a factor to be taken into account.

In US terms, with a population 48 times bigger, that would be 21,798 soldiers killed and 136,320 injured. To put that in perspective, that would be at a rate almost twice as fast as the 58, 281 soldiers the US lost in their nine year invasion of Vietnam.

The Vietnam comparison is instructive, because the US and its allies killed over a million Vietnamese. And they were still defeated, partly because the scale of their murderousness became globally apparent, its inability to stop the Vietnamese became apparent with it, the morale of their conscripted soldiers was crumbling, and draft resistance fuelled a counter culture that was letting all sorts of dangerous ideas loose; so they had to cut their losses and bide their time.

What we are seeing in Gaza is a level of barbarism even more concentrated than when B52s were carpet bombing Vietnamese cities and dropping Agent Orange all over the countryside. The Gaza City invasion will make this much worse.

However, Israel is more capable of sustaining this than the US, even with conscripts, because the war is right in their faces, not in “a land far away”, a high proportion of their population are settlers on a mission to drive Palestinians out, and most see the conflict as zero sum communalism, “us or them”; which has a genocidal dynamic.

Nevertheless, the strains are real. Up to the end of 2024, 672,000 people, mostly young and educated, had left the country. Thats almost 10% of the population. This is paralelled by a 10% hit on its economy, which any Gaza City invasion will compound.

The question now is how bad things have to get before Netanyahu runs out of road, or their society cracks, or the US makes the calculation that the damage to its own global standing from underwriting all this is worse than the salutory effect of the apocalyptic warning it gives to the whole global South of what could happen to you if you step out of line, and pulls the plug. Which it could have done at any point since this began, It hasn’t.

When Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian has (almost) given up on apologetics and even Tim Stanley can write in the Daily Telegraph that “its now impossible to ignore the nevidence of human suffering (try as you have, Tim) or the sham of the official Israeli narrative that says no one is starving or, if they are, its because Hamas stole all the food“; the tectonic plates have already shifted and Netanyahu is standing on thinner and thinner ice, and every bomb he drops cracks it more.

In the period ahead, we will have to mobilise more and more against this, and break the complicity of our government in it.

Previous

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This morning, instead of the Guardian flopping onto the doormat at 4 in the morning, the great, grey, grim, gruesome masthead of the Daily Telegraph was visible poking through the letterbox like an ultimatum in Gothic.

The Telegraph is a gloriously reactionary paper, whose columnists barrage its readers with nerve edgy variations on the theme of “we’ll all be murdered in our beds” to keep them scared and angry, and its news sections are barely calmer. It was ever thus. When I worked permanent nights in a choclate factory many years ago, I used to read the Telegraph to keep me awake; because a mind that is boggling finds it hard to drift off.

A characteristic article this morning headlined Hunter gored to death by buffalo he was stalking explains how “a millionaire trophy hunter…was killed almost instantly by ‘a sudden and unprovoked attack’ by the animal”.

They write this with no sense of irony; after all, all he was doing was stalking it to shoot it. The natural order of things. No provocation at all. There’s a whole world view in that.

Doing its bit to calm down tensions over “migrant hotels”, their lead article on p4 is headed Migrants in hotels linked to hundreds of crimes, with the strapline, in case anyone misses the point, Residents have been charged with violence, child abuse,domestic assault and shoplifting and a little highlighted indent gives the figure 425 for the “number of offences people living in hotels the Home Office use to house migrants have been charged with”.

Many of their readers, happy to have their prejudices confirmed, that “they” are a threat to “us”; and that this is a characteristic that can be freely atributed to all “migrants”, will read no further. But the tortuous use of language in the headlines, for anyone paying attention, is explained by sentences buried deep in the story, but which explode it from the inside out, again, for anyone paying attention.

First, these are figures for people charged, not people convicted. So, this will be the highest possible number.

Second, “Not every defendent who lists one of these hotels as their place of residence is necessarily an asylum seeker. It has not been possible to establish how many of the offenders identified by the Telegraph are currently applying for asylum in the UK”. So the highlighted number is bollocks. They know it. But they print it anyway.

Third, “The court records show that a significant proportion of these offences are alleged to have been perpetrated against other apparent asylum seekers”. Its notable that they don’t specify a figure, or proportion for this, though doubtless they could. Possibly because it draws the sting from the implication that “they” are a threat to “us”.

Showing the same inversion of reality that they deploy in the Big Game Hunter vs Buffalo story, they state “…police are under pressure to routinely disclose the nationality and migration status of suspects to protect community cohesion and to address a perception among some groups that asylum seekers are carrying out a disproportionate number of offences”. Note the unspecified character of “some groups”. Who might they be, I wonder?

Perish the thought that papers like the Telegraph, in its own revealing words, offering “a sense of the numbers involved”, and doing so by playing them up, could be promoting that “perception among certain groups” the better to whip them up, while retaining implausible deniability with weasel words.

On this issue, as on so many others, like so many of those arrested in the racist riots last summer, the Telegraph definitely has previous.

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Another Ukraine is impossible – without a defeat for NATO and the Oligarchy; update – Ukrainian support for war sinks even lower…

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

It is all too often a characteristic of movements without power to seek consolation in fantasies – and delusions of granduer.

The Plan for “Another Ukraine” from Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, and endorsed by John McDonnell and others rests on gigantic contradictions.

Graph from Ukrainian support for war effort collapses, which continues

More than three years into the war, Ukrainians’ support for continuing to fight until victory has hit a new low. In Gallup’s most recent poll of Ukraine — conducted in early July — 69% say they favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who support continuing to fight until victory.

This marks a nearly complete reversal from public opinion in 2022, when 73% favored Ukraine fighting until victory and 22% preferred that Ukraine seek a negotiated end as soon as possible.

  • With a majority of Ukrainians now wanting peace,
  • and recognising that reconquest of Russian speaking territory in the East and Crimea is not realistic, even if they wish it were,
  • and driving the war on and on is now dependent on increasingly aggressive and deeply unpopular press ganging,
  • as soldiers from the front desert in increasing numbers

USC nevertheless continues to play its role of covering NATO’s control of Western Ukraine with a series of progressive sounding fig leaves.

On the one hand they call for “trade unions and civil society” to bloc with the British, European “and allied” imperial states to carry on cheerleading for the war, on the other they call for outcomes which cannot possibly be achieved through working class subordination to such a bloc.

  • The chance of a Ukrainian reconstruction under the aegis of Western powers that does not leave Ukraine’s natural resources exploited “by Western corporations and oligarchs” is nil. The existing reconstruction plan, agreed by the Ukrainian government and the West in 2022 hands the job over to Blackrock. This simply cements the process of privatisation of land and assets that accelerated sharply after 2014, and is partly what Western intervention in Ukraine is FOR.
  • Likewise, what level of fantasy do you have to be capable of to imagine that any reconstruction deal in Ukraine, run by its current Oligarchy in subordination to the EU and US, would “empower Ukrainian trade unions and civil society” or “withdraw the proposed Labour Code that restricts workers’ rights and unions”? Thats the last kind of deal they’d even consider, unless they are defeated. The authors of this “plan” must be aware of that, but they put it up all the same.

To achieve either of these aims would require the defeat or overthrow of the Ukrainian oligarchy. Or sufficient pressure on it by a mobilised working class in western Ukraine, with international support in the context of a defeat, that would force it to make concessions. This is not possible if sections of the Left in Ukraine, and internationally, continue to subordinate the working class to backing the war effort in a framework of a national unity that lionises Fascists like Stepan Bandera, denies self determination to the large Russian speaking minority, and seeks to “Ukrainise” the others. When the resistence to conscription becomes a movement for peace, on this “plan”, USC will oppose it.

Trying to mobilise support for increased weapons flows, and the (unspecified but enormous) finance required, means an attack on working class living standards across Europe. Do John McDonnell, or any of the other signatories, imagine that European imperialist governments are going to put the costs of this war onto the backs of the class whose interests it serves? And, if we did have governments committed to massive wealth redistribution in the imperial heartlands, would they also not be looking for a peaceful modus vivendi with the Russians, and others?

This line of thinking becomes positively farcical when they state that we have to “Recognise Trump’s alignment with Putin”. Really? Now?

This line was a convenient one for the European ruling classes, who have used it to mobilise support for exactly what Trump wants, a doubling of European “defence” expenditure, when they already outspend the Russian by 3.5 to 1, during the period when Trump was trying to woo the Russians away from their international bloc with China – the better to pick them both off later. This has been characterised as a “reverse Nixon” or “reverse Kissinger”; which underlines one reason it hasn’t worked. The Russians have a bitter experience of how that worked out for them last time.

Commentators from Timothy Garton Ash to George Monbiot talked this up a storm while they could; and its possible they believed in it. Its a bit more difficult to sustain now that Trump is shooting his mouth off about apocalyptic sanctions on countries that continue to trade with the Russians and deploying nuclear armed submarines “close” to Russia as an explicit warning. And, after a brief revival during the Alaska talks Trump is now making statements like this.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia”.

“Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND. How did that work out? Regardless, this is a war that would have NEVER happened if I were President – ZERO CHANCE. Interesting times ahead!!!”

Making Trump’s “betrayal” of Ukraine, as if it was ever anything other than a poisoned pawn for US interests, a major plank in mobilising opposition to his state visit in September now looks absurd as well as self defeating. Getting angry that the core of global imperialism is not being aggressive enough in one of its proxy wars, is a self destructive emotion. What do they want him to do, send more nuclear subs?

Now he knows that his wooing attempt on the Russians has failed, Trump is trying to cut his losses. If he goes for a deal at the Alaska talks, this will be to try to freeze the conflict more or less as it is, so that the current inexorable Russian advances are stopped before the Ukrainian Armed Forces collapse like the South Vietnamese Army did in 1975 – putting the asset stripping deal he has already made with Kyiv at risk. This is not inevitable, but tipping points do get reached. Either way, even if he doesn’t, he has already outsourced the resourcing of the war to Europe. So, if the war continues, Ukrainians will fight and die, US arms firms will profit, and the European working class will pay for it.

This is not in our interests.

The last, and probably most important, point is what they mean by a “just peace”. It seems an a priori position on their part is that a “just peace” is one that does not take any Russian concerns into account; a Western imposed one.

In my last blog on this issue I asked USC supporters three questions about the initial Russian proposals to settle the conflict in Ukraine without a war in 2021. These were;

  1. No further NATO expansion
  2. No forward deployment of US forces or weapons into Eastern Europe
  3. A ban on Intermediate Range Missiles
  4. A limit on military manouvres and activities
  5. Limits on nuclear weapons
  6. A Mutual Security Pledge
  7. Establishment of Consultation Mechanisms
  8. An Indivisibilty of Security Principle.

These seem to me to be to be the basis of a just peace, not simply for Ukraine, but for Europe as a whole. The questions for USC supporters are

  • which of of these proposals do you disagree with?
  • Would an agreement on these lines be a viable way to end the war?
  • Would an agreement on these lines have avoided it in the first place?

I have had no answers. The silence is deafening.

As it is impossible at this point in the war for the West to impose a peace on its terms, the USC “plan” is nothing more than the subaltern Left playing its part in NATOs current attempt to spin the war out in the hope that something will turn up, while it retools its military industrial complex enough to intervene more directly by the end of the decade.

This would, of course, be a suicidal course of action that will be averted by resistance to rearmament and a NATO defeat in Ukraine; at which point “another Ukraine” becomes impossible to avoid.

Ursula Von der Liar

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

When Ursula Von der Leyen sealed the EU’s abject capitulation to Donald Trump, adding to the Euro NATO pledge for 5% of GDP to be spent on “defence” by the end of the decade and doing a “deal” for a lower tariff than Trump had originally threatened with no reciprocal obligations on the part of the US; she copper bottomed it with a pledge to import $750 billion worth of US fossil fuels in coming years.

This is a core part of Trump’s attempt to dig in on the fuels of the past – he has to bully his subordinate allies into buying the stuff, even if its not in their economic interests to do so; and they will struggle to find a use for it. As long as they cough up, that’s not his concern.

Von der Leyen, in the process, seems to have caught Trump’s habit of telling giant lies with breezy self confidence. She repeated her comment from December last year that US LNG is cheaper than Russian natural gas. “We still get a lot of LNG (liquefied natural gas) through Russia, from Russia. Why not replace it with U.S. gas, which is cheaper for us and reduces our gas prices?” she said at the time.

This is not simply untrue, it is the OPPOSITE of the truth. Ask any German consumer or business. At the end of last year Germans were paying 74% more per unit of gas than they were before the sanctions imposed on Russia and the blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline.

Possibly more disturbing than the lying, is the way that these comments are reported without being debunked, as are Trump’s continuous assertions that wind is “the most expensive form of energy”, when it is one of the cheapest, which is why it is growing so fast.

We should also note that US LNG has a carbon footprint 33% worse than coal.

Dancing in the Haunted Darkness – Moments of Reprieve

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

When I was an over serious teenager in the early 1970s, making myself very unpopular by putting a CND poster showing a mushroom cloud erupting out of a skull in a 6th Form Common Room full of people who just wanted to listen to Led Zeppelin and have a good time, I developed a philosophy of life that decreed that, in the face of global hunger, the threat of nuclear war and the destruction of the natural world it was immoral to enjoy it.

At the time, this was described as a “denial of life” by some of my closest friends and partners. But it seemed to me that a sense of guilt was a motivator, that the resolution of inhuman acts was a precondition for any happiness that could be justified; without reflecting that moments of joy don’t have to be justified; and a capacity to carry on wouldn’t be possible without them.

I expect I am not alone in getting vicarious imaginary montages, seeing horrific scenes from the news projected onto everyday landscapes. The first time J and I went into central London after the IDF started its mass bombing campaign in Gaza, we talked about how fragile the buildings in Leicester Square now seemed, how easily they could be shattered. Going to Basildon Hospital for my Mum’s most recent appointment we passed the three tower blocks that mark the northern edge of Chadwell and dominate the surrounding countryside, and I couldn’t help thinking that in Ukraine they would be a heavily shelled command post, a fortress in a waste land. While the hospital, so calm, friendly and orderly, humming along so functionally with its shops and cafe and pharmacy, would be a smoking hulk with desperate hungry staff trying to treat patients in the ruins with no anaesthetic, little or no medicine and no beds were it in Gaza. These are virtual, vicarious flash backs, not part of lived experience with no smells, little sound, just images, like a ghostly son et lumiere in the mind, but becoming an everyday part of psychic life.

In this context, when S and I were an hour early to the pots and pans protest for Gaza outside Downing Street last night, we took our sandwiches and sat under the shade of the plane trees in St James Park to catch a breath. We watched the geese and herons, moor hens and ducks like we had when she was little; the children eating ice creams in the sunlight.

On one level, given what we were there for, it seemed almost obscene to be enjoying this, the peace of it; even eating while 2 million people are being deliberately starved, but on another level it was an act of defiance. Finding moments of peace, moments of joy, moments of human kindness or wonder is a reprieve when under unendurable attack. When not under such attack, but aware of it, it becomes almost a duty to experience as much of our humanity as we can in the face of such strenuous efforts to degrade and dehumanise.

On the way out of the park we came across a Mum in a bright hijab and her daughter feeding a parakeet with an apple and half a strawberry. Parakeets are always exhilarating. This one kept fluttering down from rustling about in the tree above with the rest of its loudly chattering squadron, stretching out its neck and its bright red beak, then flinching back as it got too close. The little girls eyes were wide and bright with wonder.

In Moments of Reprieve, Primo Levi is making an argument for finding any human salvage you can in the most inhumne possible conditions, writing a set of short stories as an elegy to prisoners in Auschwitz, who through tiny affirmations of their humanity – a juggling trick, finding a slice of apple – discover ‘bizarre, marginal moments of reprieve’ amidst the horror.

In a discussion of the finale of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony on Radio 3 this morning, Tom Service argued that the ending of the movement is “off the wall”, because Beethoven has the double basses at the bottom of the register accompanied by the rest of the strings in a grinding and remorseless grim cycle of a theme in a lower key than the rest of the orchestra, which is hurtling around in a whirlwind of a joyful dance that ends in a blazing triumph; and the one is the condition for the other.

The conductor Charles Hazelwood, who was abused as a child, has said that “when I conduct Beethoven I feel the abuse in every bar”, because Beethoven’s Dad punched lumps out of him as a child, and as a result “It’s horribly uncomfortable for me to work with, right until the final performance which is always pure ecstasy”. Even when that mournful, somewhat depressive teenager, Beethoven always did that for me too, because his music absorbs the horror and misery and is driven by it to triumph over it.

As we must now.