The Death of Blogger

This long-forgotten blog is now being continued on tumblr:

The Death of Politics

“UKIP success prompts Cameron to reach out and show respect”

Man. Calling UKIP a bunch of clowns and fruitcakes was probably the most sensible thing David Cameron ever said and now he’s taken it back. Still, if these local election results mean that UKIP are now a “proper” political party, I suppose it means it is no longer theoretically impossible for me to ever vote Tory, since there may come a day when I have to just to keep the lunatics out.

Anyway. This is what happens when the 3 main political parties are too ideologically close. When all three of them are pro-cuts, anti-union and anti-immigration (but not anti-immigration enough for some), dissatisfaction at the way things are going was always going to result in people turning away from those three parties. I like to think that people are not naturally racist, that they don’t really believe that immigration is the reason we’re in this financial situation. They can’t really believe that, because they watch the news and they know just as well as anyone else that the financial crisis was caused by the banks.

The problem is, UKIP stand out because they’re actually tapping into people’s dissatisfaction. Nobody has the balls to be genuinely left wing or to argue significantly with the status quo, so people go to the right instead. When people can look around them and see that things are not going well, they will look for an explanation and UKIP, in scapegoating immigrants, have given them that explanation. And in a situation where no politician has the courage to say “actually the fault lies with the rich people who are asking you to blame immigrants,” this is what happens.

What people need to understand about Thatcher (and politics in general)

1. Politicians are people who choose to be a in a position where they have vast amounts of power over the population. They have a moral duty to use that power for the greater good and to pay special attention to the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. People who ignore that duty should not be forgiven lightly.

2. Being a woman who achieves power does not make you a feminist. Margaret Thatcher famously hated feminism. She told her friends that she didn’t want to see more women in politics, because she wanted to be the only one. She was actively anti-women.

3. When you hear yourself saying “whatever her policies, she still deserves respect,” think about what you’re saying. There is NOTHING more important than your political beliefs. If you’re political beliefs are deeply wrong, you cannot be a good person. Thatcher had a fundamental lack of compassion for humanity and that helped to destroy a lot of people’s lives. So the argument that I should respect her even though I “disagreed with her policies” is ridiculous, because those policies are at the root of everything she was. And I didn’t just disagree with them. Show me a political or social problem from the last 20 years, and I can show you how Thatcher either created it or contributed to it.

4. I’ve been seeing posts saying “she can’t be that bad, because she was elected three times.” You don’t have to be popular to be elected. This country is deeply fragmented - there are left-wing people on one side who believe in taking care of those who need help and there are people on the other side who only care about themselves and whether they get a tax cut. Thatcher won by appealing to people’s greed over and over. But in fact, the way our voting system works means that someone can become prime minister with less than 40% of the vote (hello David Cameron). So being elected isn’t a sign of public approval.

5. People seem to have forgotten some of the most shocking things Thatcher did. She introduced a tax that poor people couldn’t afford to pay. She introduced a law that made it impossible for teachers to tell school children “it’s okay to be gay.” She helped the Chilean dictator General Pinochet to escape justice despite killing thousands of people. I’m not saying that crushing unions and privatising public industries was forgivable, but it was far from the worse thing she did.

6. If people are celebrating her death, it’s because some people don’t have much in life to celebrate generally nowadays and this is Thatcher’s true legacy. There are homeless people who have nowhere to live because Thatcher allowed people to buy their council houses and now there aren’t enough of them to go around. There are people who have never worked their whole life because they couldn’t get a job in the recessions of the early 80s and early 90s, and once they’d been unemployed a few months no employer wanted to touch them. There are communities that have been decimated because of her decisions. There are families who have waited over 20 years to find out the truth about what happened to relatives who died at Hillsborough because of her decision to back the police. There are plenty of people living miserable lives because of Thatcher, and when someone has to put up with so much crap, you can’t blame them for celebrating when the person responsible finally has the decency to die.

Why people won't let go of their guns

The problem with trying to achieve anything with gun control in the US is that Western neo-conservative societies have all created a culture in the last 30 years where everybody is obsessed with individual rights and individual responsibilities. These things have become part of our national identities, so that any restriction of them, no matter how reasonable, is deeply felt. Talking about our collective wellbeing and the structural barriers that make it impossible for some people to succeed apparently makes you a communist now. If someone needs benefits or welfare to help them survive, we tell them they need to take individual responsibility. If someone tries to make laws designed to protect everybody, we start whining about our rights as individuals.

I can understand why some Americans want to hold on to their guns. Some people have no sense of being part of a wider society and having moral obligations to that society. This is why so many people in America and Europe complain about paying their taxes (god forbid the rich be made to help the poor). There is no doubt that restricting guns would save lives. In the UK, 0.25% deaths are gun related and in the US it’s 9%. That difference is purely down to the availability of guns. But if you’ve been brought up in a society that tells you “look after your own, don’t worry about anyone else and don’t expect any help from us” then you can’t be surprised when people want the means to defend themselves and to hell with the consequences for everyone else.

This 30 year project of Reaganomics and Thatcherism isn’t just economically unviable. It’s killing people. We need to stop obsessing about our individual circumstances and realise that what we do affects others.

A Word on the Riots

Enough. Enough of the fucking bullshit.

I'm not talking about the riots themselves which are, in case you haven't noticed, over and done with. In fact, contrary to expectation society has not actually collapsed around our ears. Everything is pretty much as it has always been. It's easy to overestimate the scale of events when you're caught up in them - especially when you're scared for your lives and your livelihood. No, the "fucking bullshit" I'm talking about is the reactionary knee-jerk response to all of this.

I can understand how those who've lost love ones and those who've lost their businesses would be absolutely devastated right now. The rest of us? We need to get some perspective. A small minority of people (children and adults of all races) took advantage of the opportunity to steal stuff, smash stuff and engage in violence. This is not about "Broken Britain." This is just one of those things that happen from time to time. It's happened in other countries this summer. It's happened in this country before. It's happened in every society since time began.

I've heard so much crap in the last few days from people who think they're experts in society and its problems. Some people will tell you that this happened because teachers are no longer able to hit kids in schools - actually the last riots we saw on this scale took place in the early 1980s, BEFORE hitting kids in school was banned.

Some people will tell you this is the result of "political correctness" (because these people have completely confused "political correctness" with basic human compassion). In fact, the reason police weren't using water cannons on the rioters had nothing to do with "human rights" or "political correctness," it was a tactical decision based on the fact that water cannons are only effective on fixed crowds, as opposed to fast moving rioters.

I saw the father of a rioter on the news today, complaining that "I can't physically tie [my son] to the bed - you're not allowed. I can't hit him - you're not allowed." The problem isn't that you're "not allowed" to hit kids (and there are plenty who still do - make no mistake). The problem is that there are still too many parents who WANT to hit their kids. The reason these kids don't respect adults is because they get nothing from resentment from them.

Immigration has been blamed again and again by a number of idiots, who are either colour blind or just stupid. Most of the kids involved (and they mostly are just stupid kids, rather than criminal masterminds) were white. And you just need to look at the photos of Muslims and Sikhs defending our streets to see that this isn't some kind of clash of civilisations.

The scariest thing about these riots? It's not the rioters themselves, it's the way that common sense flies out of the window as soon as we get scared. Remember when we started making stupid decisions after 9/11, and ended up being attacked by suicide bombers as a result of a rush towards conflict? Did we learn nothing from that? It's not "namby pamby" to acknowledge that the 12 year olds who appeared in courts today are obviously incapable of bringing down society. It's realism. But the truth is, we're so outraged and scared, we're willing to throw all our previously held principles out of the window.

I've just watched the BBC News and saw a reporter hassling the family of a 17 year old who has gone to prison for his part in the riots. When they understandably told him he had no right to be there, he pointed out that their son had been involved in the riots. "Don't worry," a woman shouted, "we'll be paying for it." And she's right. That family will already be a target within their own community (yeah, more violence, that'll fix everything). And now the BBC have pointed a giant fucking arrow at their house. Well done, BBC. It's bad enough you insisted on calling the rioters "protesters" for three days, implying that waving a placard around is the same as torching cars. Now you're actually assisting in perpetuating the violence.

"They have no right to privacy or anonymity," I hear you cry. "They haven't earned human rights," Paul Daniels claims. I'm not having that. Personally, I believe that in times like this we need to stick by our principles, not abandon them. You don't "earn" human rights and you can't sacrifice them either.

I can understand why people are angry enough to label the rioters "scum" and no doubt some of them deserve that title. But a lot of them were just children, doing stupid things because that's what children do. I see kids like that every day in my job and the truth is, when they eventually realise that there are people who really do give a shit about them, most of them are capable of turning their lives around. I've met kids who were involved in all kinds of trouble with the police, yet they're now off at college or in steady jobs. How do we reach those kids? Not by calling them "scum" and assuming they're all monsters, that's for sure.

Part of the reason we're so shocked by these riots is precisely because this kind of thing doesn't happen very often in this country. We have it pretty good in general. There are fuckloads of problems in our society and some of them played a key part in these riots - kids with no aspirations other than to own stuff are inevitably going to steal stuff when the opportunity presents itself). But when you compare our situations to those in Eastern Europe, Africa, Southern America and Asia, there's no fucking contest. None whatsoever.

Was it an unacceptable situation? Yes. Is it a signal of society's imminent collapse? No. The worst thing we can do is allow these events to frighten us into going back on all the progress we've made in the past few decades. Councils are talking about evicting the families of people who were involved in the riots. That's only going to force MORE people into crime. What about the innocent siblings of those who were involved? What about the elderly relatives? The police are trying to restore the public's faith in their abilities by naming and shaming everyone charged. What good can come out of tarnishing the name of an eleven year old girl for the rest of her life? David Cameron is now going to use these events to push forward his ridiculous "Broken Britain" agenda. The true lessons we should be learning here, about the folly of cutting police budgets and the inability of politicians to react quickly to unexpected events, will be lost.

The riots were not a failure of liberal values. If we put more money into the police, they would have been ended sooner. If we gave kids something to aspire to, rather than teaching them that the only thing that matters is what they own, they wouldn't be going out and nicking stuff. We all talk about "community values" but if you spend your life being hassled by the police and sneered at by your community, why the hell would you owe that community any loyalty?

This is a failure of conservative values - values that teach us that owning nice things is more important than who you are. Values that tell us that keeping taxes down is more important than having properly funded police forces. Values that tell us that anyone who frightens you is "scum" and has sacrificed any right to compassion or understanding.

And now, because people are too poorly educated to understand how we got there, we're just going to get more of the same.

The US Debt Crisis and the Rise of the "Fuck the Poor" Movement

It amounts to this, basically, and if the news programmes could just say this outright instead of unnecessarily complicating it, I think a lot of people would have a clearer idea of what is going on...

The US has something called a "debt ceiling." This is a limit on how much money they can borrow and it is something the US imposed on itself during the first World War. The debt ceiling is continually raised so that the state can meet its legal obligations - paying interest on the debt, fighting wars, paying Social Security and funding Medicare. Naturally, the cost of these obligations keeps going up when you're dealing with the current global financial mess, because more people are out of work, less people have health insurance and the level of debt keeps going up.

Raising the debt ceiling is a pretty routine thing normally. It happened 17 times under Ronald Reagan and 7 times under George W Bush. Over the summer of 2011, the debt ceiling needed to be raised again. For this to happen, Congress needs to approve the decision and the Republicans were not having it, largely due to the influence of the Tea Party.

The Tea Party are basically lunatics, much in the same mould as Margaret Thatcher who once declared "there is no such thing as society." This is the Tea Party position - instead of paying a reasonable level of tax to fund the state so that the state can meet its obligations to the people, the Tea Party want lower taxes and a smaller state. It's an "everyman for himself" movement, which basically equates to "fuck the poor." If you look at their support base, they also tend to be anti-immigration, anti-gay and anti-Muslim. And their favourite politician is Sarah Palin.

The Tea Party wanted to use what should have been a routine thing to call for a smaller state, for public spending cuts and some even went so far as to suggest the US should default on its loans (which would have led to even higher interest rates on the debt). So the Republicans held out for spending cuts, refusing to raise the debt ceiling without them. The Democrats wanted tax increases along with a smaller amount of spending cuts. A deal was eventually reached, but the consequences are this:

1. The Tea Party are now being taken seriously.
2. Bigger spending cuts than originally planned will occur.
3. The stock market is jittery, which has international consequences.
4. The US' credit rating has been downgraded.

If some of this seems familiar, it's because we're facing a similar situation in Britain - a conservative, anti-state movement that is seeking to use the worldwide financial crisis (caused in itself by their own policies in the 1980s) to do what they've wanted to do all along. These people do not believe in fundamental human ideals such as looking after one another, living up to your responsibilities and helping the disadvantaged. They talk instead of "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps" despite the fact that the vast majority of them come from priveleged backgrounds themselves and have never had to pull themselves up by anything.

And I think, fundamentally, there are a lot of people who oppose the ideals of these movements. Only nobody has ever bothered to explain it to them. Instead, we describe the US debt ceiling crisis or the Eurozone crisis as if these are concepts too difficult for the average person to understand. And the only part that comes through clearly is the sense of overwhelming fear.

Understand this: we are in a bad economic situation and the roots of it were laid in the 1980s. We had a recession then too, and we were so scared of having another that we flew off in the wrong direction - getting rid of the regulations and laws that stopped private companies from doing whatever the hell they liked. And it has led us back here again. We can either keep hold of our ideals - the idea that the most vulnerable in society must be protected and that this is the number one priority of the state - or we can panic again and lay the roots for another economic crisis in 30 years time.

That's assuming, of course, that we get out of this one first.

They Still Don't Get It

And now the backlash against the backlash has started. Last night on Twitter, Alan Sugar appeared to suggest that Rebekah Brook's resignation from News International should be an end to the whole thing. This morning, Jeremy Clarkson has come to the defence of the tabloid press, warning "we may well end up with a press that can't expose a thing." Why I should still be interested or irritated by anything Clarkson says after all these years is anyone's guess, but this kind of nonsense beggars belief even coming from him.

Even after the last two weeks, it appears that the tabloid press still don't get it. This isn't just about phone hacking, and it isn't a freedom of the press issue either. In a free society, we all have the right to free speech but we don't automatically have the right to a massive platform from where we can abuse that right to manipulate others. And the right to free speech doesn't come with the right to violate the law either.

The phone hacking scandal is just the latest in a long line of examples where the tabloid press has violated the right of privacy in order to sell newspapers. It has nothing to do with "the public interest" when reporters hide cameras in women's bathrooms in order to see if they're doing cocaine. It has nothing to do with the public interest when police are paid for information on celebrity arrests. It has nothing to do with the public interest when a reporter dresses up as a sheikh in order to entrap people into committing crimes in public. It certainly has nothing to do with the public interest when they print medical details of the prime minister's son having cystic fibrosis (and however that story was obtained, it still should not have been published). This is about one thing, and one thing only: selling newspapers.

The defenders of the tabloid press are so out of touch, they don't realise that this isn't only about the phone hacking anymore. Members of the public have been complaining for years about the focus on celebrity and the cut-throat approach of tabloid reporters. Whilst politicians, celebrities and other journalists have been restrained by fear of the tabloid press, the general public has been clamouring for years for something to be done about it. Murdoch and his cronies have abused the "freedom of the press" argument, not to expose truth but instead to fuel people's love of gossip and prejudice.

It is terrible, yes, that some pathetic excuse for a human being thought it was okay to hack Milly Dowler's phone. And yes, it's a good thing that Rebekah Brooks has now resigned. But it doesn't even scratch the surface. Taken together, the accumulated stories reveal a newspaper that felt a sense of entitlement when it came to accessing private information, a culture fuelled by arrogance and disregard for the human consequences. That's why, unlike many in the press, I will not mourn the News of the World. Even if nobody working there in 2011 ever had any knowledge of phone hacking, these were still people who used unscrupulous means to violate the privacy of mostly innocent people. These were people who sought to manipulate the political agenda, to sit in judgement of celebrities and ordinary people and to ultimately sell as many newspapers as possible without ever taking responsibility for the consequences. The final News of the World was a sort of "greatest hits" issue, featuring reminders of past scoops such as a shot of Michael Jackson's deathbed. If this is the stuff they're NOT ashamed to be associated with, then it really is a good thing that the miserable little rag is gone for good.

It started out as being about phone hacking. Now it's gone beyond that. This is about a tabloid press that focuses on the insignificant and trivial, that has too much influence over our elected representatives and that uses a culture of fear to keep itself beyond the reach of the law. Most of all, it's about one man who owns a larger share of the British media than is legal in many other countries, who has used that platform to push forward his own free-market neo-liberal political views and who has made an enormous amount of money by exploiting the British people, without even paying tax in this country.

It's not over until Murdoch is gone.