Return of the Bodyless Heads?

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Every year during the Autumnal years in the early sixties, when I was in my last years of Primary school, as the nights drew in and visibility declined on the playing field at the heart of the estate I grew up on, some of my friends claimed that it was haunted by bodyless heads that they had seen floating across it in the middle distance. There was much heated debate about this, with most of us quite sceptical, but the sheer vehemence of those that had “seen” was enough to bring on a wary shudder in our lizard brains – of the same sort that made us nervous of walking up the alleyway behind Cromwell Road in the dark, because the bush half way up, which we knew perfectly well was a bush, looked like a gigantic bear reaching across to grab and eat us. Some Winter evenings we got a bit of the way up, saw the bear bush, hesitated and turned back. An irrational fear that we knew was irrational, but potent nonetheless.

The bodyless heads turned out in the end to be some older kids who’d started the story as a lark, and backed it up by running across the field shining torches up into their faces, giving the impression of eery ghost lit heads floating at speed and sparking shouts of “ITS THE BODYLESS HEADS!” from the gangs of younger kids still mooching about after it was too dark to play football but too early to go home to bed and hasten the next day…and school. Even though we could see the bodies running along, dimly, somehow it was more fun to believe than not.

I was reminded of all that by these bodyless heads in the local precinct. Decapitated dummies, oddly cloned, modelling hijabs and other stylish headgear, balanced on the top of rollable purple luggage; in some ways even more eery than the original fantasy in the field. Somehere, there are complementary headless bodies…

This one looks a bit resentful that someone has taken a lump out of her nose.

Talking to my brother about this revealed an alternative origin story for the bodyless heads. Long before Halloween was a thing in England – we used to do “penny for the Guy” for Guy Fawkes night and no one had heard of Trick or Treating (or “trickle treating”, as the kids in my class used to say) – one of our more creative Primary school teachers got us to carve a Jack o Lantern. Being England in the 1960s, we didn’t have pumpkins, so I think we used Swedes. They smelt really bad anyway. They were quite small and a bit pallid looking, but we put candles in them, and I think some of my classmates might have put them on top of the fence posts at the ends of their back gardens facing onto the Field; so, from a distance in the twilight, the legend of the bodyless heads would have been born. The kids with torches would have been playing into it for a laugh.

How might the war end? Discordant voices from Ukraine.

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“I don’t want anyone else to die,” Natalya says, crying. “Our little trooper is the youngest of all those who lie here.” “Here” is the military cemetary in Lviv. Her son was 18.

What follows are a series of quotes from an article in Meduza based on interviews with people across Ukraine. Meduza is a Latvian based English and Russian language news blog with an unofficial motto “make the Kremlin sad”.

Despite that. what is striking about this selection is how the views expressed differ from the limited range of Ukrainian voices we get to hear in the official media here; which is why I have highlighted them in concentrated form in this blog.

I want to stress that for each of these views in the full article – which is worth reading – there is another arguing for carrying on fighting until the 1991 borders are restored, “otherwise what have we been fighting for?”

In these arguments, the deaths of the future are sanctified in advance and made imperative by the deaths of the past. None of the people who put this view, however, argue that it is possible. It is posed more as as a moral imperative, a revulsion against sacrifice in a lost cause; thereby carrying within it the prospect of a backlash not only against any peace terms that Ukraine accepts, but also those who have conducted an ultimately futile war. So the question “WHAT have we been fighting for?” is inextricably entwined with,“WHO have we been fighting for?” especially as the Kyiv oligarchy’s US puppet masters measure up the country’s natural resources as compensation for defeat.

“This is a separatist city; there are many zhduny here,” he ( a young soldier in the Ukrainian army) says of Sloviansk (a city in Northern Donetsk, close to the front line now) using a Ukrainian term for people who are “waiting for Russia.” “Even the local grandmas look at me like they want me to drop dead.” 

According to Oleksandr, Sloviansk residents with pro-Russian views no longer speak openly “because they understand it will cause them grief.” But Lera says that in some local Telegram groups, they refer to the Russians as “ours,” and local taxi drivers and shopkeepers often use the word “ruble” instead of “hryvnia.” 

This confirms that pro-Russian views in eastern Ukraine are a reality, not a “Putin talking point”. In other parts of the country, sentiments like these are expressed.

“If I were [in the politicians’ place], I’d have come to an agreement already, to be honest. I just want the war to end.”

“Yes, we’d like the 1991 borders to be ours, but not [if we have to fight] to the last Ukrainian. If so, let everything remain as it is. Not at this price.”

Borys says he wishes “Zelensky would stop this.” He thinks that Ukraine’s occupied territories should receive neutral status or become part of Russia, so long as the majority of Ukrainians are left alive; joining NATO isn’t worth such losses, he says.

“I think we should start negotiations [with Russia] and then decide the fate of [the Donetsk and Luhansk] regions through an honest poll. So people can decide for themselves which country they want to be in,” chimes in his friend Ihor, 18. 

“Are we going to sacrifice a million [people] for Crimea? And then what will we get?” Valetov continues. “I’m going to say something [that sounds] bad, but the people in Donetsk and Luhansk are no longer ours — with the help of television and Telegram, you can flush everything [Ukrainian] out of people’s minds in 11 years.”

She worries that politicians have gradually turned the war “into a business,” and she doesn’t understand how the money sent to help Ukraine is spent. “I have a lot of friends at the front whose [relatives] equipped them,” she says. “[It’s like,] You want normal body armor and a good helmet? Get it yourself.” 

“I don’t understand why our boys are at the front, but guys from Donetsk come here in their big flashy cars and live it up,” she cries (Maryanivka is about 500 kilometers, or 310 miles, from the front line in Donbas). “Why don’t they go there and defend their territory?!”

Ukrainians are tired of the war for many reasons, including because many of them donate money to support the army only to hear about constant shortages of weapons and equipment. She’d like the war to end with Ukraine getting back its occupied territories, but “if it were going to happen, it would have happened long ago,”

“Do you know what a Pyrrhic victory is? I don’t want such a victory,” he says. “But if our territories are given to Russia, this would be a capitulation, which isn’t right either. Therefore, just freeze the conflict. But on one condition: our country introduces the death penalty for embezzlement today. I’m no supporter of the death penalty, but I think it’s time.”

“They’re stealing our boys!” cries Yevhenia (name changed). Her draft-age son “was taken right from the bus stop” to basic training, even though he should have received an exemption as his grandmother’s caregiver. Yevhenia says her son failed to submit his documents to the military enlistment office in time. “If I’d known that would happen I never would’ve let him go out!” she says, practically in tears.

“It feels like they just want to destroy us,” he explains. “Not just the Russians, but our command, as well. We’ve been sitting at the front endlessly. It’s as if they’re saying, ‘There’s no one to replace you, [so] you have to die here.’”

According to Stanislav, morale is low and soldiers are just trying to survive. “Anyone who talks about peremoha should grab a Kalashnikov and go for it,” he says, using the Ukrainian word for “victory.” “On the Zaporizhzhia front, the Russians are making concrete and fortifying their positions with it. How are we going to break through? I’m horrified at the thought of going on the attack there. We’ll just drown in blood.” 

Asked what to do about the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” Stanislav argues that the easiest solution is to “amputate” the Donbas region. Mentioning the fact that Ukrainians live there makes him roll his eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he says with a sigh.

Sacred Chord in the High Street

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The busker – Your Local Music Man – at the strategic pedestrianised T junction, where the shoppers from Morrisons wandering up George Street past the hulk of the State and the stalls selling funnel cakes, ersatz perfumes at £10 for a bag of three, and hunks of meat in plastic bags, interweave with those meandering along the High Street, is playing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing “Hallelujah”
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I love this song. If only because you’ve got to admire the chutzpah of a man who can rhyme “Hallelujah”, with “do ya”. I realise, as I try to sing along (quietly) that that is the only line I can remember, apart from the chorus (which is a bit hard to forget). I notice a woman walking with her partner in the opposite direction who is also singing along quietly, almost under her breath; meaning that the busker has at least two private duets going on that he is probably unaware of.

An alternative title for this blog could have been “Loneliness of the long distance busker”: to try to capture the peculiarity of playing music to sparse streets and individuals who drift by without stopping. Only the buskers themselves are present for the whole performance. Everyone else picks up whisps and fragments, more present when you’re close and you know the song, gradually fading into the distance and past if you tune out, or when you turn a corner or get further away. A momentary intrusion, usually welcome, into constant internal monologues, derailing trains of thought in hopefully fruitful ways into wistful memories, or the communion with others that you get from singing along, even when no one else is doing it.

I realsie, also, that I’d done a mondegreen on the first line. The actual lyric is “secret chord” which, given the way that Cohen’s songs are so often drenched in religious poetry, I had always heard as “sacred”. I suppose this is the revenge of the light side to all those Faustian musical deals with the devil you get in crossroads blues and, indeed, School of Rock.

Rearmament is a preparation for war, not peace.

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Questions in the YouGov daily chat are invariably manipulative, but today there was one that was ludicrous.

In the event of a wider war in Europe, involving the UK, how do you think you would cope? Well? Badly? Other?

My response was, as a wider war in Europe, involving the UK couldn’t help but go nuclear, we’d all be dead. FFS get real! I normally keep polite on these polls, but really!

We are now, of course, in an extraordinarily dangerous situation in which a drive towards war is being presented as an attempt to secure peace and all right thinking people across all mainstream parties and media are agreed on it.

Discussions in the media are framed within the presumption of a Russian threat. No one questions the premise, largely because its false and s doesn’t stand up under the remotest scrutiny.

The same programmes sometimes have military speakers like Lord Dannat who assert that “Russia’s military is on its last legs”, as a way to argue that sustaining the war, in the way that the US is no longer willing to do, would soon lead to a NATO win, presumably with one last heave.

The incompatibility of this wishful thinking with the otherwise dominant line that a peace deal in Ukraine would lead to the Russians steamrollering across Europe is never noticed. Its almost as if they are doing it on purpose.

Without making any false assumption of an impending Russian collapse, lets look at the actual balance of forces between Russia and the European NATO powers.

According to GFP – strength in numbers, the leading annual global defense review since 2005 (in their own words) the European members of NATO, excluding the USA and Canada, are spending $445.7 billion on their militaries this year,

Russia is spending $126 billion. So, the FT assertion that Russia is spending three times as much as “Europe” is the opposite of the truth.

That means that without the USA and Canada, European NATO countries are already outspending the Russians by 3.5 to 1 on their militaries.

Add Ukraines $54 billion and the ratio gets to 4 to 1. That looks like this.

Put teeth on this and it looks like Pacman.

Add the USA and Canada’s $936 billion and it gets to just over 11 to 1, but even without them, given this imbalance, it is patently ludicrous to argue that the Russians, already outspent on this scale, have any capacity to attack NATO countries in Europe, even if they wanted to, which they have repeatedly pointed out that they do not.

Therefore, if the aim is “peace” and “defence”, even assuming a continued hostile stance between the EU and Russia, with no attempts to reset the relationship, reduce tensions and find a mutually acceptable modus operandi that would ensure a lasting peace, rather than a pause to tool up for Round Two, there is no need for increased arms spending. The orthodox militray presumption is that a succesful military attack require the attackers to have a 4:1 superiority. That leaves aside the political issue that an attacking power would have to have some degree of popular support to sustain an occupation. As the US and its allies found out in Iraq, even a crushing technological and military superiority is not enough to sustain a grip on a country if the people you are occupying hate your guts and want you to leave.

The current balance in military material is shown by this graphic from Germany, which shows an upward trend in spending from 2014 onwards, and also the greater NATO force in every form of weaponry, even if the US is removed from the equation. The only area in which Russia has more material that European NATO is in satellites and, narrowly, short range rockets; in military personnel, artillery, tanks and other AFVs, ships, aircrafyt and combat helicopters, Euro NATO already has a very powerful advantage; with a million more soldiers, three times as much artillery and attack helicopters, five times as many tanks and six times as many ships.

So, the proposed increases in military spending are not about “defence”.

Particularly not the massive EU military spending pledge by Ursula Von Der Leyen today. 800 billion Euros. Thats $860 billion. Add that to the current spending and you get to $1360 billion.

Compare that to current Russian military spend and you get this.

This is not preparation for defence, it is preparation for war; a war that, with Russia prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend itself, would kill all of us if it were to be engaged in. With the current UK “defence review” arguing that we are in a “pre war situation”, we should take the insanity of those that rule us sufficiently seriously to oppose them.

Post script: the state of public opinion

A YouGov poll reported in the Guardian (7/3/25) shows that the propaganda is working, up to a point.

  • 60% of respondents in the UK thought – falsely -that Russia would attack other European countries within the next ten years. The figures for France and Germany were more sceptical, Italy even more so. Rather important therefore for the reality of the actual balance of forces to be kept from them.
  • Even with this view however, only 24% of respondents in the UK thought that the current level of military support to Ukraine (£3 billion) should be increased and, despite the avalanche of emotive coverage in the last week or two, fewer than half in the UK support an increase in “defence” spending; which will mean increasing resistance to doing so as the cuts needed to sustain it start to bite. Support for increases is also a minority view in France, Spain and, especially, Italy.
  • Only between a quarter and a third in each country believe that the European powers can substitute for the US, which makes the other positions a Potemkin village of a posture with nothing behind it.
  • There is now a lot of hostility to the US within European populations; with 58% -78% now considering it to be “a big or fairly big threat to peace and security in Europe”.

Ozymandias in Gaza

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I think Shelley got Trump in one…

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Thus do I exist, between my ears…

Sleepwalking to war?

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The juxtaposition of the headlines from the Guardian and City AM, as they flopped onto the mat this morning, was unintentionally instructive. “Fight for peace” is in inverted commas perhaps because the Guardian has a vague historical memory that “Peace through Strength” was what all the great powers were relying on in the run up to World War 1, and it worked really well; until it didn’t.

Richard Tice can’t face the truth.

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And his comments on climate change are “absolute garbage”. I suppose being an active fifth column for Trump means that he has to say “garbage” instead of “rubbish”.

Richard Tice can’t do History. The global heating we are currently experiencing is beyond anything that human civilisation has ever had to contend with. The longer term cyclical swings in global climate arising from variations in Earth’s orbit that have been the fundamental drivers of Ice Ages and periods that have been far hotter than today take place over tens of thousands of years are not an explanation for our current period of rapidly increasing temperatures. That can be explored here.

Explore further here. Myth busters 2. Was it really hotter in the Medieval Warm Period?

Richard Tice can’t do Maths. He says that the scientists who agree with him are “not a minority”. The scientific consensus that human activity is generating climate change has the support of 97 – 99% of scientists across the world. However you look at it, 1 – 3% can’t be described as anything other than a minority.

He also says that the costs of dealing with climate change are an insupportable burden. In fact, the costs of not addressing it will be far higher, even if we manage to avoid social collapse.

That can be explored here. Mythbusters #3 “It’s gonna cost you?”  

Richard Tice can’t do science. The basis of science is to pay attention to what you can see going on. His claim that “there is no evidence” for human generated climate change is like a toddler closing his eyes, sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting “la,la,la, I’m not listening”. He and his party are not only out of step with science, but also with popular opinion; not because the rest of us have been brainwashed but because we notice the wildfires and the floods and the increasingly extreme weather, are worried about our childrens futures, and because we are not members of a Party being bankrolled by fossil fuel interests.

He says that the actions of the sun and volcanoes have more effect on climate than greenhouse gas emissions. He does not note that volcanic activity cools the planet*, sometimes severely for short periods, but cannot explain the way that it is heating, nor that current levels of solar activity would also be cooling the planet if left to itself. While natural cycles and events of this sort have heated and cooled the planet even more dramatically than current human activity, these are events that are outside our control, and are not an immediate cause of the global heating we are seeing now, which is down to the burning of vast quantities of fossil fuels. Nor should the impact and velocity of this be minimised. The rate of global heating in the coming decades is projected to be in the order of 65 times the rate during the last deglaciation. We are driving ourselves fast off the map. Whether we drive ourselves off a cliff or not is a matter of choice.

In the immediate period ahead, we are looking to try to save human society from the worst consequences of this, and no political force that abdicates its responsibility to do so should be given the time of day.

Explore further here. Mythbuster 1. “Phew! What a scorcher!” Overheating is good for you?  

There are indeed “experts”, who are telling us we are in serious trouble and need to take urgent action, “vested interests”, like Tice and the Carnival or reactionary grotesques and “swivel eyed anti net zero zealots” at the ARC Convention this week, seeking to “rebuild the foundations of our civilisation” on lies, fantasies and racist paranoia, and “then people who tell the truth” like the IPCC and the climate movement.

Tice and all of those who can’t face the truth are dinosaurs having a last hurrah.

*There is a caveat on this that some extremely large eruptions unleash large quantities of greenhouse gases which can have a significant heating effect.

Why George Monbiot is wrong about the war

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George Monbiot’s comments about the war in Ukraine on BBC Question Time last week are completely disorientated, and disorientating for anyone who swallows them.

His columns in the Guardian are often a haven of well argued, deeply felt sanity in a time when the impasse of capitalism, the decline of US hegemony and the ever mounting climate crisis are driving most columnists in most papers well off the rails and up the wall, but the one entitled A Trump win would change my mind about rearmament (Guardian 5/7/24), was profoundly confused, and underpins the line he took on QT.

He argues that Trump’s Second Coming should “end… our abiding fantasies about a special relationship” without reflecting that, in abusive relationships, abiding fantasies are often clung to harder to avoid having to face facts. There is no doubt that the British ruling class will cling to it as hard as it needs to.

As it is, few, now, have any delusions that this relationship is one of equals. A deferential cringe is built into it, and everyone knows it. The relationship was abjectly summarised by Tony Blair when he told the British Ambassador to Washington to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. We have seen what this looks like on film. “Yo! Blair!”

What makes it “special” is being one of the closest US henchmen in their global dominance: one of the “five eyes” countries that share Intelligence gathering (the US and what used to be called the “White Commonwealth”) that is at the core of their system of alliances.

George spells out what this has been about, listing just a few of the brutal and deadly military interventions and coups “we” have been party to since the Second World War – Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza – with the US as number one and the UK desperate to believe that its number 2.

Although he recognises that these alliances, with NATO as its core, defend a rules based order that “favours capital over the democratic state”, he doesn’t draw the structural conclusion that this also constitutes a Global North military bloc forged to keep the Global South in its place. So, the interventions he mentions were, and are, not random pieces of malevolence that just happened to happen, but systematic attempts to assert global power and dominance. This is posed in these countries as “defence”.

The military forces at their disposal are the tools do do this job, and the stronger and bigger they are, the more they can get away with doing it.

So if, as George argues, our principle is that we are opposed to “imperialism, fascism and wars of aggression”, we have to recognise that not only do we live in a core imperialist state ourselves; one that has committed many wars of aggression in our lifetimes, but that that state is integrated into the system of alliances that guarantees the existing unjust global order.

We therefore have to restrain its capacity to carry out these wars as an act of solidarity with its victims in the rest of the world; in the first instance those in Gaza.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz was a guest at the NATO summit in July and Israel has had representation at the alliance since Turkiye lifted its veto in 2016, and a cooperation agreement since 2017. The ongoing US, and UK, arms and intelligence supplies during the genocidal IDF operations in Gaza underline what this alliance is for.

George argues that the UK and EU have “leant on the US for security”. What this means is being part of the world’s most aggressive and high spending military alliance. NATO accounts, with its allies in the Pacific, for between 67 and 75% of global military spending (depending on how you measure it). The strongest powers within it – the US, Japan, Germany, France – are boosting their military spending rapidly (Germany and Japan doubling theirs); while simultaneously complaining that it is not “realistic” to expect them to stump up their promised $100 billion annual contribution to help the Global South develop sustainably. In fact, just the increase in NATO military spending since 2015 amounts to $543 billion a year (with a total spend in 2023 of $1341 Billion). So, building up military capacity gets five times as much commitment as the promise to alleviate climate breakdown in the Global South – a promise that has never been fulfilled.

That looks like this.

George, nevertheless, argues that a Trump restoration would be “a threat to our peace, security and wellbeing” not so much because the US would

  • go full rogue state on climate – with an estimated 4 billion tonnes of additional emissions from pro fossil fuel policies and attempts to break up the Paris process – “drill, drill, drill!”
  • give Israel carte blanche to double down on the Gaza genocide – “you’ve got to finish the problem”
  • or seek to provoke a war with China,

but because he thinks he would break up NATO, supposedly in cahoots with President Putin; citing his remark that he would be quite happy for Russia to invade any NATO member not spending as much on its military as Trump wants it to and would “end US support for Ukraine” which would “allow Putin to complete his invasion” teeing up “an attack on a NATO country within five years”.

This is where George’s argument aligns with that of other Guardian/Observer columnists and editorials, including the increasingly frenzied Simon Tisdall; one of whose columns last year condemned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as “overly fearful of nuclear escalation”. Perish the thought that anyone would be worried about that. Tisdall’s critique of last year’s NATO summit was, as ever, that it did too little to escalate the war in Ukraine. No fear of nuclear escalation for him; arguing for no fly zones in the West of the country and missile strikes into Russia, for an alliance that is not “afraid of a fight” in face of the threat that an incoming Trump Presidency would try to force a peace by accepting a partition of pre 2014 Ukrainian territory because he is, as the Observer editorial puts it on the same day, “a keen admirer of Vladimir Putin”.

This profoundly misreads whats going on. Trump is in no kind of bloc with Putin. He’d like to break Russia from its alignment with China, though that ship has long sailed. What Trump is trying to do now is to bully subordinate European allies into taking most of the military weight in Europe off the US. This is so it can concentrate on China; which he sees as the main challenge to the US world order. This will be costly for the countries that do it, but that is of no concern to Trump. Thats the price they have to pay to stay in the kind of “special relationship” with the US that allows them to be at the table and not on the menu, even if it means they will be increasingly relegated farther below the salt.

Trump is not a diplomat. He does not issue quiet threats on secure telephone lines to allow appearances to be kept up, as Joe Biden did for Obama. He is a corrupt wheeler dealer with mob boss characteristics. He doesn’t spare anyone’s feelings. He bullies openly, so everyone is clear who the boss is. Remember his official visit in 2018? That calvalcade of armoured limousines that was longer than the Mall? Those hideous Osprey aircraft repeatedly buzzing London’s airspace?

And it is already working. 23 of NATOs 31 non US members now hit the 2% target, “more than twice as many as two years ago” according to Jens Stoltenburg and the only way is up, with Germany already committed to 3.5%. Job almost done.

So, when George says the “UK and Europe will need to find the means of defending ourselves against a Trump regime and its allies” he misses the point that the UK and EU countries are the allies of the US and, as everyone in the new cabinet is keen to point out, the UK will accomodate to whoever is in the White House because it has to, so they will remain core allies of “the Trump regime” too. David Lammy is quite explicit about that, saying that Trump is “often misunderstood” over NATO, and pledging increased UK spending to stay in the club. Increases in military spending by European countries is exactly what Trump wants. It won’t be used “against a Trump regime” but to facilitate it, and cover its back in Europe so it can go after China.

The key point for the climate and labour movements therefore is that the policy choice to sink or swim with the US alliance will clash with having to break from it to resist climate breakdown. A very concrete way that this is posed is, when it comes to priorities, will the Starmer government jump to Trump’s tune and increase military spending to 2.5 or 3% or even 5% of GDP, or does it put those resources into its mission for clean energy by 2030? They are unlikely to be able to do both.

Trump wants to pull some US military resources out of Europe to concentrate on China because the US can’t do both any more. Thats why commentators like Tisdall are spinning fantasies. NATO has been unable to supply Ukraine with enough material to “win”, because it can’t.

Some pro EU commentators like Timothy Garton Ash argue that this gives the EU the chance and need to step up and become a serious military power in its own right and George now argues “I now believe we have to enhance our conventional capacities, both to support other European nations against Russia and…perhaps to defend ourselves”.

This presumes that the Russians are at war because they are on some crazed mission of global conquest. In fact, their stance throughout has been to seek mutual security pacts so that they don’t feel under threat from NATO; which, at the moment, they do. This has been the case since Gorbachev proposed a “Common European Home” in 1991. The US and NATO have never accepted that and it has been a US mission to break up any mutually beneficial economic arrangements, partcularly between Russia and Germany, the better to maintain US dominance of the continent.

Seeking such a peaceful arrangement, following a ceasefire in Ukraine, using the war as a terrible example of what everyone in Europe should agree that we need to avoid, is the preferable, alternative course to rearmament and war preparation.

Because George should think about what he’s saying. If there is a war in Europe, even if it stays conventional through some miracle, it will look like Eastern Ukraine or Gaza on a gigantic scale. The attempt to “defend ourselves” militarily will be suicidal, even if nuclear weapons can be kept out of it. War won’t “defend” anyone. Mutually assured destruction can be done conventionally if alliances are not “afraid of a fight”. The danger in proposals to seriously retool the UK, and other, military industrial complexes to be able to fight just such a conventional war of attrition with Russia by the end of the decade, is that this carries its own momentum and will become a self fulfilling prophecy, displacing diplomatic alternatives. If the UK military gets into a position to “fight and win a war in Europe”, the UK ruling class will be tempted to try to do so.

An alternative approach that would avoid economic ruin and a step by step escalation towards war, would be to welcome the US departure and seek mutual security arrangements with Russia in a “common European home”, as Gorbachev put it. A localised version of that was, after all, what the Russians were asking for in the Winter of 2021, which NATO refused even to discuss.

The US uses NATO to maintain its own dominance over Europe – political, military, economic. Which is why Trump’s threats to reorder it, with the US pulling back its commitments to nuclear and air cover and the European powers expected to dramatically increase conventional forces on the ground could end up as an own goal.

A recent poll showed strong majorities in the UK in favour of both NATO and retaining the UK’s nuclear weapons. This is because these are framed as a way of keeping the population safe from overseas threats.

This begins to crack – and you get a mass anti war movement – when that mask slips. In 1980, the incoming Thatcher government, eager to turn the screw in the Cold War and gain compliance with stationing US medium range cruise missiles in the UK, scored a spectacular own goal by issuing a civil defence booklet to every household in the country called “Protect and Survive”, as a guide on how to survive a nuclear war (with no more equipment than you’d find in the average garden shed). After decades in which the “nuclear deterrent” had been motivated as a way to make nuclear war unthinkable, it suddenly became apparent to every household in the country that 1. the government was actively contemplating having one and 2 that the self protection measures outlined in the booklet – like making a do it yourself shelter (for one) by unscrewing your bathroom door and putting it over you as you took shelter in your bathtub – were absurd.

Millions of people realised that it was our government that was putting them at risk and the sense of vulnerability that had always generated a strong anti nuclear and anti war sentiment in Glasgow – as the nearest city to the Holy Loch base of Polaris, and then Trident, submarines – became more widespread – and linked up with the reaction against the monetarist crash that also came in with Thatcher. “A few more years of this government”, as one old campaigner in Bermondsey put it, “and we’ll all be living in tents surrounded by cruise missiles”.

See also, https://urbanramblings19687496.city/2023/07/02/ukraine-ecocide-and-complicity-or-why-the-climate-movement-should-not-allow-itself-to-become-a-fig-leaf-for-nato/

If Reform were a car…and slim pickings in the High Street

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Altered Images: People with sharp eyes will notice that there is a blur, like an inverted shadow, just under the front bumper of this car. This is where the number plate is in real life. Thinking it discourteous to the car’s owner to identify it that precisely, I found what I thought was a rubber/block out tool in the “edit” function to cover it up; which turned out to be an AI tool to erase parts of a photo you might not want and replace it with something that looks like the background. Images have always been fakeable, and to some extent the camera has always lied, as well as enhanced; but now anyone can do it. The saving grace of this is that it is so obvious, once you look. A bit like AI as such, close to reality, but a bit off. As Eric Morcombe might have said, “you can see the join”.

On the Reform principle that everything was better in the old days, this is an Austin Cambridge from the 1960s, but adorned with a St Georges flag badge that no one would have used back then. Perhaps its a bit unfair on the car, which is clearly loved, and has a sense of humour. A sticker in the back rear widnow reads “In rust, we trust!” Of course, Reform doesn’t much like the 60s, a decade forged in reaction to the loss of Empire. With the possible exception of 1966.

Romanians in the High Street in December, singing Christmas Carols. There is often music there now. A young woman this afternoon was singing Bowie’s Life on Mars from Hunky Dory, an album with a lot of songs I feel compelled to sing along to, regardless of who’s watching. Take a look at those

Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh, man, look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh, man, wonder if he’ll ever know…

I tell her she has a voice and a half and make a small offering. There’s a slightly hollow feel to all this, as the quality of the music and the performances is much better than the audiences it gets, which is rather sad. Just a few rather alienated looking shoppers drifting slowly past and not paying a lot of attention.

A damp Tuesday morning and there’s a guy playing the guitar in a style that has the sort of echoey spciousness you get with Mark Knopfler or, on a good day, Hank Marvin. As I limp up from George Street, the tune seems familiar, but I don’t recognise it until he starts singing.

They wanted me to go to rehab…

But I said, No, No, No!

I don’t have the time…And my Daddy says I’m fine…

He finishes just as I draw level.

“The sad thing is, her dad was wrong, wasn’t he…”

A smile and a nod.

“Lovely version, by the way” and another small offering to add to the tiny number of coins in his guitar case.

Meanwhile, up at the big, all the things you ever might need at knock down prices thats where Marks And Spencers used to be, and had a closing down sale for about six months…

Better able to plan ahead than the old one?

A magnificently retro poster in the local laundrette, that has probably been on the wall there since it opened in 1967. Built to last. Better than the Austin Cambridge anyway. The styling was quite old fashioned even then. The wasp waisted, stylish woman in high heels and tight knee length dress (because you always dress up to do your washing) has a feel of 1962 about her. The washing machine is clearly happily besotted with her.

The Norbot solution?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In the exit corridor in the local Morrisons, between the toilets and the foodbank donation box, there’s a display for a firm that does patios and front garden paving. Blown up Before and After photos provide a visual focus. The before pictures show unkempt and bedraggled front lawns. Next to them are “neat and tidy” areas of paving.

I look at them a bit depressed, and the salesman takes this to be a sign of interest and asks if I want to find out about what they do, how they do it etc etc.

I point out, in a friendly sort of way, that what they do looks like a desert. Its lifeless.

He says that unfortunately that’s how they make a living.

I reply that there are a lot of people in that sort of situation, but what they are doing is helping create a problem with flash flooding, because there is no exposed ground to absorb any of the extra rain that we are now going to be getting every winter.

He points out the “soakaway” – a small drain in the middle of the paving (an absolute bottom line for this kind of total paving approach, which at least drains excess water run off into the soil below, without which the sort of storm we are now getting will just overwhelm the drainage system and add to flash flooding lower down as the water gushes back up through the drains) and says that there can be a lot of ground in back gardens.

My response is that thats fine as far as it goes, but removing all the greenery from the fronts of houses makes streets souless and sterile, citing the way that grass verges have been paved over and trees rooted up to make way for cars to park, and hedges have been replaced by fences or open paved areas making streets feel bare, mean, lacking in rest. Parting shot, with a smile, “we need more greenery”.

He shrugs and smiles back, and waits for the next prospective customer.

I think any trees strategy for Local Authorities should incorporate a hedges campaign, to offer whole streets financial aid to replace fences with hedges, opening up a small amount of extra ground, but also greening our streets, providing habitat for birds and insects to complement the bee corridors and wildflower sewing in the local parks and surviving grass verges.