Tag: news

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

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is where “the root of hate” is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Cup – on joy, suffering and DV

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local elections – three different boroughs, three different planets

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Make no mistake, 1445 new Reform Councillors is 1445 too many, but this is below the 1625 they were projected to win and to have maintained the same momentum that they had in last year’s elections, they’d have gained 2050.

So, any story that they are building momentum should bear that in mind. They have about 25% of the vote, and slowly declining, and generate enormous antipathy among much of the remaining 75%.

As almost all of the new Reform councillors are new and inexperienced, the scope for screw ups is immense, and that will slow their further momentum, as the experience of their control in places like Stafforsdhire and Kent already has to some extent; but not derail it in areas where they are strong.

I was looking at the results in the three boroughs I either live in or have some connection with and its like three different planets.

In Islington its a more or less straight Labour – Green conflict. The Lib Dems, who ran the council up to 2010 are a faded force. Tories are nowhere. Nor is Reform. In some wards – on a turn out that ranged from 39 to 49% -Labour candidates were getting around 1600 votes. Greens came in over 2000. Overall, Labour held on with 32 councillors to 19 for the Greens.

In Brent everything is fragmented and gone to NOC. 26 Labour, 11 Tory, 11 Lib Dem, 9 Green. Reform are nowhere, even though they’ve managed to bolt on a white racist, angry motorist vote with some of the Hindutva Modi supporting Indians who are still mostly solidly with the Conservatives. A film of a Reform canvassing squad in Queens Park and Kilburn looked like a group of Gujarati football hooligans. Outside Kingsbury tube station last night there was a poster from LBC with Farage on it saying that “Reform is here to stay”. My immediate thought was “not round here you’re not”.

In Thurrock, on the other hand, we are drowning in a Turquoise sea. Reform 45, Labour 2. Conservative 2. On a big turnout. In the East of the borough, despite having the experience of voting in a Reform MP, a former Leeman Brother banker, so obviously not part of “the elite” –  who subsequently lost the whip for dodgy dealings during COVID; claiming grants for companies that had no employees and no turnover – and is, by all accounts totally useless if anyone tries to contact him for help – Reform candidates got voted in with over 2000 votes in several wards. The Conservatives are a busted force, largely because they bankrupted the council when they were running it by investing in speculative solar farms without doing due diligence on the con man who pocketed the money. Greens are weak locally. Labour quite a close second in a few places, but nowhere near close enough. I had a chat with one of the Labour candidates when I was clipping the hedge last weekend. Friendly young black woman, with a competent sort of air about her. She got over a hundred fewer votes than her colleagues, who were both white, which tells you something about this area can still be like sadly, even though its much more diverse than it was. She was also leafletting on her own in one of the wards where there was a projection that Labour could hold out. The leaflet she was giving out had NO political content at all, just a reminder to vote. Without taking the fight to Reform, that could have been counter productive.

There are now a large number of councils where the result is so fragmented that the colour coding looks like a knitting design by Kaffe Fasset; which poses the question of who does deals with whom to do what; and what the national political consequences of that could be.

  • Conservative/Reform blocs are likely to facilitate the reconsolidation of the Right with Reform absorbing the Tories – as both are agents of the Trump administration and will ultimately do what they are told.
  • The dynamic between Labour and the Greens is less straightforward; as all the pressure from the powers that be will be to a) blunt the Greens radicalism b) lock Labour into its current dead end of prioritising military spending and Cold War posturing over the measures needed to improve living standards while doubling down on trying to ape Reform’s xenophobia in the weird delusion that this will attract support. The current Labour leadership seems quite prepared to destroy the Party in so doing.
  • A concrete example of that is the latest teachers pay offer. This is not only below inflation, but unfunded. That means that it would have to come from school budgets; a form of self cannibalisation that will impoverish our schools. The prospect of a teachers strike is now back on the agenda as a result. Not something a government interested in resetting and rebuilding support would want to do.
  • If Labour members want it to survive as a Party with any kind of positive role to play, looking to the example of Pedro Sanchez in Spain – not agreeing to 5% of GDP on war – welcoming migration – stepping up green transition, and building a more positive relationship with China to help do that – would be a step forward.

Why the education system does not meet the challenge of climate breakdown…yet

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Photo: Suzanne Jeffery

This is the text of my talk at the Climate and Nature Education Festival on 14th March.

  1. It is obviously in the interests of humanity as a whole to act together to limit the damage done by GHG emissions.
  2. But this isn’t happening – fast enough – because the society/economy/polity/education system we have globally isn’t based on the interests of humanity as a whole and the interests of nations not on the interests of the nation as a whole. When Donald Trump says “America will make a lot of money” on the back of the current oil price strike arising from his attack on Iran, he means the US oil companies that will rake it in from inflated prices, not the people paying through the nose for increased petrol prices at the pumps. On a more parochial level, we hear a lot about “the national interest” and it’s important to be clear that this is not the interests of the people who live in the country, but that of the people who OWN it; which is not only not the same thing but often – usually – contradicts it.
  3. An anecdote. My Dad worked for Proctor and Gamble at the West Thurrock factory for most of his life. When he was about 40 he and several other shop floor “mature work oriented individuals”, as the company put it, were put on a course to make them more valuable and motivated human capital for the company. As part of this they were asked “What do you think the company is for?” Thinking about what they did all day, and being use value oriented, as working class people tend to be, they said “to make soap powder”. “That’s where you’re wrong” they said “The purpose of the company is to make money (Exchange Value in Marxist terms) If we could make more money doing something else, we’d do it”. That’s probably why P&G manufactured both Sunny Delight and Napisan (and in blind taste tests…)
  4. And that’s the crunch. When it comes to many aspects of the green transition that we need, it cuts across profitability. Take insulation. If done properly that cuts demand, costs and CO2 emissions. Win, win, win for us. But lose, lose, lose for the companies that make money off selling the fuel. The same goes for efficiency standards. It’s why Trump is relaxing them. 
  5. And on the level of profitability, for Oil and Gas companies that were flirting with renewable divisions a few years ago (Beyond Petroleum and all that) Fossil Fuel investment has a rate of return between 4 and 5 times greater than investment in renewables. It may be going to kill us to keep doing it, but the bottom line is the bottom line. This is judged in quarterly returns…and in the long term, as Keynes so rightly said, we’re all dead. And that doesn’t just motivate the direct FF companies, but also the banks that lend to them. A CEO of one of the big US banks that pulled out of Mark Carney’s attempt to set up a global financial alliance for transition investment said they were doing so because putting any consideration other than maximum returns for shareholders is “immoral”. This was also expressively put by Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI who said “I think AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” So, that’s alright then…
  6. So, the transition won’t simply not be led by these people, they have been, are and will resist it. And this is not simply at the level of companies and civil society, but state capture. The Trump administration in the US is the acme of this. I’d argue that Trump is not an aberration but an expression of Tech Bro Fossil Fuel dominance in the world’s leading imperialist and petro state in an attempt to reassert its slipping global dominance by bullying other countries into buying their oil and LNG and throwing its immense military weight around ($1.5 Trillion war budget coming next year, so the manic pace that we’ve already seen this year is just an overture) before the 60% of the world that has already passed peak FF use really consolidate that with a flood of cheap Chinese solar panels and get out from under.
  7. A central aspect of this is a war on scientific truth on climate and environmental protection that defunds and deplatforms both study and teaching – presumably on the philosophy that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. And the promotion of abject subaltern political formations that will do likewise across the world, like Reform here. And not just Reform. “The model” for Kemi Badenoch (and this is a quote) “is Javier Millei”. We can guarantee that a Reform/Tory government will mean a direct assault on any attempt to address climate change in schools.
  8. I’d also argue it is no accident that the core of industrial/energy transition globally is China – where, even though they have a very powerful private sector – in the final analysis, the economic plan is determined by the state (and 50% of wind/solar installations are done by state owned enterprises).

I’ll end with some thoughts from Antonio Gramsci, who argued that any education system exists to replicate the social order that it serves. And that’s not just a matter of educating for necessary technical skills, but also attitudes, morals, aspiration and narrative frameworks that sustain that society as it is. Our problem is that the society/economy/polity that we have is unsustainable and that sets up a tension and contradictions that we have to fight our way through. The need to anticipate and prepare not simply for “the jobs of the future” but prepare future citizens for a social and economic order that we don’t have yet runs slap up against all the inertia and commanding heights of an education system designed to sustain the order that we have. In that context we have to use whatever levers and footholds we have within the system – embodied in eg the DFE NZ strategy like sustainability leads, climate action plans, national education nature park etc to prise these contradictions apart and push them further – for whole school curricular and campus transformation initiatives and pushing through the ambiguities of the DFE’s “Impartiality Guidance” – on the basis that recognising the reality of climate change is – as the guidance states – true; so Parties that deny it are not basing their politics on reality…and should be treated as such. A clear consensus for the education unions on this point – that climate change is not “above politics” but foundational to any relevant politics is essential – if we want to safeguard our students from Fossil Fuel glove puppets and charlatans.

Blue Labour Blueshirt Blues

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

‘Every day, we should drag a sacred cow of our party to the town market place and slaughter it until we are up to our knees in blood.’ Wes Streeting MP

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

William Blake

Last week, after a 44 year membership, I cancelled my standing order to the Labour Party. This morning I had a standard letter “will you hear us out” inviting me to rejoin.

I thought that it required the courtesy of a reply, so here it is.

Dear Gail

After many years in the Party, including being a ward and constituency officer, I now find that so much of “staying in the fight”, as you put it, requires opposition to what this government is doing.

In the 1970s, when I was scraping National Front stickers with the slogan “send them back” off lamp posts, I never thought that the Party I have voted for all my life would be boasting about how many people it is deporting. I fear that next May’s local elections will be a complete debacle because the attempt to cosplay Reform emboldens them while making Labour voters stay at home, or vote Green, or Lib Dem, or Your Party.

I could go on. Gaza. The gesture of recognising a Palestinian state while taking no measures to put real pressure on Israel to stop the genocide is unconscionable.

Signing up to an annual £77 billion black hole of increased military spending that will suck the life out of the investments we need in infrastructure and green transition. 

The abject attempts to talk up “the special relationship” at a time that the USA is going full rogue state on climate, trade, diplomacy, as its hegemony wanes, and threatens the world with war shackling us to a suicidal course for humanity.

And, because it knows that it is on thin ice on all these issues, the response of the Labour leadership is to close down debate, silence dissent; rule out motions that are awkward, decree entire areas out of bounds, deselect local councillors who do things they don’t like (like twinning with Palestinian towns). Peter Kyle MP responded to the “Unite the Kingdom” march by saying that it shows that “free speech is alive and well in the UK”. Free speech for who? There were 1500 police on duty at that march, which included violent attacks on police officers and counter demonstrators. There were 3000 on duty for the silent, peaceful sit in in protest at the bizarre categorisation of Palestine Action as terrorist (when most people can tell the difference between an Improvised Explosive Device and a tin of paint). Politics is indeed the language of priorities. 

There are still good people in Labour, who want it to remain Labour and not adopt “muscular Conservatism”, as I understand the new buzz phrase goes in leading circles, but I believe at this point that what might be called “Blue Labour Blueshirtism” will work its way through until Labour has shrunk to the depths of the French SP or PASOK in Greece.

The fight continues, and I will be part of it. I hope that many remaining Labour members will be part of it too. We are in unprecedented times, and the old road no longer leads onwards. Bob Dylan wrote a song about that…

Paul Atkin 

Blue Labour, whose organiser Maurice Glasman was the only person from the European Social Democratic tradition to be invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration. They organise on the slogan “Faith, Flag, Family”.

The Blueshirt reference in this is to Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney’s political origins in Fine Gael, the more right wing of the two traditional parties in Ireland, the one that grew from the Free State forces in the Irish Civil War and sent fighters to support Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Recalled bitterly in Christie Moore’s Viva La Quinta Brigada

When the bishops blessed the blueshirts in Dun Laoghaire, As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.

Once again, a song for our time.

Flagging Enthusiasm

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The weather is never kind to bunting, which has a short shelf life.

This Summer has not been quite as mad as the last one, with no full scale riots outside the North of Ireland, but more insidious. The demonstrations outside hotels housing refugees (“illegals”, as they like to say) have hyped up the sexual threat to “our girls” from the “invasion of fighting age men in small boats”, pushed by the Far Right (Homeland Party, Britain First and the like) echoed by the Inside Far Right (Farage) and the dominant Farageiste wing of the incredible shrinking Conservative Party (Jenryk, Philp and other slithey toves) and completely capitulated to by the government, who are trying to fight Reform by being as much like them as possible on immigration.

The demonstrations have actually been quite small, often attended by the sort of blokes who think assaulting women and girls is their job, and often out mobilised by Stand Up to Racism. Nevertheless, they are said by Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper to have “legitimate concerns”, while the hundreds of thousands who demonstrate against genocide in Gaza are one step removed from “terrorists”, and the government falls over itself to boast about how deportations are up on the numbers the Tories managed, the new restrictions they are bringing in on refugee families, how they plan to house them in containers on old industrial sites, and on and on. 

The success of this strategy can be seen in the polling numbers, which show Labour well behind Reform, as it alienates left voters and fails to attract those lining up with Reform with an air of self righteous indignation: though it should be obvious to them that Farage is a charletan and a bit of a spiv; the sort of bloke who, in wartime, would loudly proclaim his patriotism while nursing a bone spur or two to keep him safely at home in a snappy suit, and then flog you knocked off nylons down the market.

The press is really whipping this up. The headline in the Sun on the day that Lucy Connolly – who’d been inside for a year after writing online encouragement to burn down asylum hotels was “Mum’s Home!” Because nothing says “Mum” more than inciting a mob to burn people to death. She was a matryr to “two tier justice” apparently.

The move to fly Union Jacks and St George’s crosses in public areas – attached to lamp posts and so on – is quite extensive in some areas. Particularly where Far Right activists have painted red crosses on the white stripes on roundabouts and zebra crossings. Why they want people walking on the flag I’m not sure. Some of these in Kent are being flown from quite well to do properties, which should remind us that Nigel Farage is a stockbroker from Sevenoaks, who shows that he is a “man of the people” by banking with Coutts.

This is very reminiscent of Northern Ireland, where Loyalists paint their kerbstones red, white and blue, and Nationalists paint theirs green, white and gold; so you know where you are. The difference is that this sort of identity is entrenched in the Loyalist areas every Summer with vast angry bonfire ceremonies, burning effigies of people they fear and hate, bonding in atavistic loathing. Wickermen for the 21st Century. This year, models of refugees in boats were a popular target; a celebration of the pogrom in Ballymena. Nationalist areas, by contrast, have abandoned bonfires in recent years and turned to more open, hopeful, music and cultural festivals. Better craic by a long way. People looking to make a better future, not marinade in the dubious glories of a lost past, for want of being able to imagine anything better.

To watch the news, you’d think this was everywhere, but when I went into London the week after it started, I kept an eye out and only saw two flags (and one of those was Palestinian) on the whole journey through the East End. I’d have expected more, given that its the Women’s Rugby World Cup and England are favourites; which usually generates a bigger, more innocent, crop of them.

In Grays, there’s a little cluster in a side road off the High Street, where the Conservative Club used to be and just opposite a weird little shop that sells second hand reconditioned white goods (which is almost a metaphor) and those life size tin silhoeuttes of WW1 soldiers that have started populating War Memorials since 2014. (See photos) The shops nearby include a Halal Butchers, several Eastern European Delis (and the wonderful Lulu’s cakes and bakes with its encroaching cafe street culture) an Asian/East African General Store (good spice collection) and a couple of charismatic church venues in repurposed shops; which is probably what they don’t like.

There are quite a few flags in Chadwell. But even there – on the Western fringe of James Murdoch’s seat – former Leeman Brothers banker, elected for Reform even after a conviction for kicking his girlfriend – “save our girls” – but he’d taken out loans for a couple of dubious companies during COVID, one of which had no employees – almost all of them are attached to lamp posts along the main road and alongside the A1089, the massive road that now slices up to the A13 from Tilbury Docks. So, this is a bit like the old NF sticker campaigns but more effective. But, as the saying goes. “Posters in windows means you’ve got support, Posters stuck up in the streets means you’ve got glue” or, in this case, plastic ties and a ladder.

This was also the case right across East Thurrock to Basildon, where, on the long bus ride back from the hospital, I counted just eight flags or strings of bunting in anyone’s windows; and we passed hundreds of houses. There were more on lamp posts, but only in enclaves, not generalised.

The response of Yvette Cooper, in her last week as Home Secretary, was to say that there should be more of them because the flag “brings us together”. This is in the context of a couple of youngish blokes in Basildon who filmed themselves painting St Georges crosses on the white background of some first floor flats above a row of shops while abusing a woman in a hijab, “Oi! Raghead!” etc. Really bringing us together. They have, thankfully, been arrested for criminal damage and racial abuse. It takes a really dim sense of entitlement to assume you can film yourself doing stuff like this and for it not to be taken down and used in evidence. If Reform were in government I guess they’d just recruit them to the British version of ICE, so they can deport most of the people who look after us in Care Homes and Hospitals.

I note in passing that Gary Lineker has just won the BBC presenter of the year award. Cue Match of the Day theme.

Looking droopy

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.

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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“Island of Strangers” my arse! Labour List’s apologetics for Starmer’s dive into the gutter

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

On my way back from the shops yesterday, I passed two neighbours chatting in the street outside their houses. A woman in a hijab with her small child was bantering about ice cream with the bloke next door, who was audibly Eastern European. They obviously knew each other well, and got on. Friends, not starngers.

This is in Thurrock, an area that was Brexit central, with a 72.6% leave vote in 2016. I find that, nevertheless, this is an area that is converging with Brent, where I normally live, the most ethnically diverse borough in the country. My neighbours in both places are not simply diverse, they are also ethnically mixed. As is my family.

When I used to analyse the ethnic monitoring stats for the school I used to work at in Islington, the fastest growing group was “mixed”. So, far from immigration making us an “island of strangers” many of us are getting on well enough to be as intimate as you can get.

In this context, and in the wake of Keir Starmer’s pedestrian dog whistling about immigration on Monday, Labour List’s article Local elections: Reform took four times more Labour seats than other parties is disingenuous. It implies, without stating it, that the loss of SEATS to Reform must mean that there is a loss of VOTES to them. And what follows from that is that there is a need – in the framework of the sort of electoral pragmatism that cares not what platform a Party stands on so long as it wins on it – to “address the concerns” of Reform voters in order to win those votes back.

This is a fallacy for three reasons and one principle.

  1. Reform has the momentum on the Right, and cannibalised the Conservative vote. Whether they will eat the whole Party before the next General Election is open to speculation, but it seems likely. These elections were held for the most part in Tory held areas that have been Conservative since the Jurassic and have now voted for a different, even worse, kind of Conservative Party (in the hopes of getting back there).
  2. The Labour vote did not migrate to Reform in a big way. It mostly stayed at home. Feedback from the doorsteps in the Runcorn and Helsby by election was that it was the cuts to winter fuel allowance that was the biggest demobiliser; so people who voted for a change from austerity and “hard decisions” taken at the expense of the poorest last Summer, were now less than enthused by what the Party had to offer.
  3. The government has been trying to cosplay Reform for some time, even to the extent of putting out ads boasting about how many people they have deported in Reform colours (which would be taken by most people as a Reform ad anyway, so self harm in more than one respect). The week of the elections saw announcements on a tougher line on immigration from Yvette Cooper on the presumption that the approach “Reform is right about immigration, we are trying to stop it, vote for us to stop Reform” would do anything other than legitimise them; and demoralise anti racist Labour voters. And, so it came to pass…

Tony Blair remarked after the 2017 General Election that if Corbynism was the way to win, he didn’t want to take it. Given the interests that have made him an extremely wealthy hollowed out husk of a man, this is hardly surprising. But the point applies in the opposite direction. Anyone even pretending to be on the Left who starts trying to exploit – and create – false divisions in our communities is doing the Right’s job for it. For the Labour Party, a lurch onto Reform’s xenophobic turf is a jump into quicksand.

The next lot of local elections will be in the cities. Reform is likely to still make the running on the Right. Labour, if it carries on trying to compete with it on its own terms, while presiding over austerity and an arms drive, instead of making a sharp turn to wealth taxes and investment in infrastructure, public services and green transition, will shed a collosal number of votes, to the Greens, to Independents (especially purged former councillors) even to the Lib Dems in some places, and many will stay at home.

Apologetics of the type that Labour List just published, will help drive that outcome.