It’s been up for a week, but in case you haven’t seen it: petition against Thatcher state funeral here — sign it.

Piss Thatch.

Here’s some videos from Amnesty via blip.tv.

False Start.

The code is False Start

Badminton.

The code is Badminton

Torchure.

The code is Torchure

Citius. Altius. Fortius. Indeed.

[After much exasperation trying to fucking embed these fucking videos I’m off to bed. If you want to see them go to cloud-in-trousers.blogspot.com/2008/07/olympic-spirit.html]

[The plug-in only seems to handle videos hanging off //blip.tv.file/get and these are all //blip.tv/play. Crap.]

The school I went to didn’t, at that time, have much in the way of a school uniform. More really just a dress code - and that was pretty elastic. Still, I do recall being told under no uncertain terms that wearing a T-shirt with the legalise cannabis campaign logo on it was unacceptable.

Perhaps today I could have got away with it by insisting I was a Rastafarian or something and that such garb was required by my religion. But then I would have had to go to court - and this would have been a real drag, which brings me to the case of Sarika Watkins-Singh:

“Yesterday, a high court judge ruled that the exclusion of 14-year-old Sarika Watkins-Singh from Aberdare girls’ school in south Wales because she continued to wear the bracelet - a symbol of her Sikh religion - was unlawful.”

I’m a bit agnostic about the whole uniform thing myself but I think schools should be allowed to insist on one if they want - not least because such policies tend be be strongly supported by the parents.

And schools need to have some kind of dress-code. I appreciate there’s some who don’t agree. But these tend to be either teenagers themselves or the sort of bloggers who, despite being over thirty, are still teenagers at heart. The sort of people who sincerely thought, for example, that the Shabina Begum case was about the ‘right of women to control their appearance’. Bah! These form part of the myriad commentators who have had teenagers described to them. Let’s keep it fucking real, ok? For every one that wants to wear a movable tent to school, there’s a thousand - on a conservative estimate - that would like to turn up looking like hookers. They shouldn’t be allowed to; neither should the boys be allowed to look like extras from a 50 cent video.

And make no mistake, this is what this case is about. I have to say I found the Shabina Begum case amusing - what with all the wailing about ‘integration’ and shit from the usual quarters. Hmph! Articulate and stroppy teenager insists on wearing whatever the fuck she likes to express her ‘identity’ - except her identity just so happens to be about being immersed into a group. Fairly typical British teenager behaviour, as far as I could see.

As is the case with this bullshit bangle case. The response from HP Sauce was entirely predictable - and the comments thread depressingly so. Nevertheless, in his dissent from this, I couldn’t find anything to agree with in what Norm had to say. Don’t get me wrong - from what I’ve read of the school in question, it sounds like it’s run by a load of anally-retentive assholes who have way too much time on their hands. I tell you this: some of the places I’ve taught…if this is all these people have got to worry about - well, it’s pretty easy to identify those who have an easy life in this gig.

But, but - better a school run by anally-retentive assholes than one where no-one’s running it, where the fucking kids are setting the agenda, where the goddam management have effectively surrendered and have instead reduced themselves to ingratiating themselves to the pupils. This is why the court should have found in favour of the school.

Norm argues that secularism does not proscribe wearing religious symbols in public spaces. I agree - but this isn’t - to my mind, anyway - about secularism but whether schools can set their own uniform policies or not.

He is, however, also unimpressed with the argument about uniform:

“The school, it would seem, was willing to allow exceptions of practicality (a watch for telling the time) and - what? - fashion (ear studs). So, not everything on the pupils is quite uniform. By what reason, then, can it be said that an object important to a person on account of her identity speaks to a less important consideration than these two? You will struggle to get an answer to that question.”

Disagree - and methinks Norm is taking the whole ‘uniform’ think a little too literally here. There is, as far as I understand, no specific requirement in Sikhism to wear this particular bangle so the young lady’s ‘identity’ is intact. And I think it’s fairly easy to draw a distinction between this and these two examples. Watches? Goddammit all! If consistency is the problem here, let us insist that every pupil wears one. This would stop the little toads turning up late after lunch claiming they ‘didn’t know what time it was’. And earring studs are not just a matter of fashion. If you have pierced ears but don’t wear them then the holes will close over. So for a school to insist on no earrings at all would amount to them proscribing pupils’ fashion sense when they are out of school - and that really would be intolerable.

I’m a pagan and as such I insist it is integral to my identity to teach my classes wearing nothing but my birthday suit. Would any court in the land vindicate my beliefs? I sincerely hope not. And neither should they have done so in this case. Let’s not be silly about this. Teenagers like to insist that it is their ‘right’ to do whatever the fuck they want. It’s entirely understandable - it’s a stage of development driven by hormones, acne, shit like that. But a mature society tells them they can’t and gets them to do more press-ups instead. It’s the present lack of commonsense to recognise this, still less to impose this, that goes some way towards explaining why we’re in the state we’re in.

On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part III

Nowt much new but is succinct for all that

Just noticed this. Thought it was funny:

1. “The ‘New’ in New Democrat No Longer Cuts It,” in which Mike Byers, contemplating Canada’s New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton, admits to a suppressed desire, which we shall call Obama Envy, and 2. “It’s Time To Put The ‘New’ Back In New Democrat,” in which former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr., contemplating the state of America’s Democratic Party, admits to a suppressed desire that his party wasn’t so flaky.

I’m starting to miss The Rhinos.

The Iraqi and American army are busily tidying up Al Qaeda, who have begun to relocate to Afghanistan for a more “pristine” jihad.

Tonight Robin Lustig was reporting on the attack on Al Qaeda.

Who do he call in for expert opinion?

Juan Cole.

Jesus wept.

And here is Juan Cole on Afghanistan, getting the boot in early on Obama:

Before he jumps into Afghanistan with both feet, Obama would be well advised to consult with another group of officers. They are the veterans of the Russian campaign in Afghanistan. Russian officers caution that Afghans cannot be conquered, as the Soviets attempted to do in the 1980s with nearly twice as many troops as NATO and the U.S. now have in the country, and with three times the number of Afghan troops as Karzai can deploy. Afghanistan never fell to the British or Russian empires at the height of the age of colonialism.

Nor will the Afghans fall to the Taliban. That’s the point. We are not fighting the Afghans, we are fighting alongside the Afghans.

Dude writes –

…

The right wing had no interest in highlighting Obama’s nuanced position in Austin, either, because there was (and is) a conservative interest in painting Obama as a heedless and irresponsible pacifist, with absolutely no experience of crashing an expensive aircraft on the territory of a country on which the United States had never declared war. In fact, the worst you can say of Obama’s position on Iraq (where we also didn’t declare war but where we did have a long series of U.N. resolutions putting the Saddam Hussein regime outside international law) is that he was a member of that quite large and undistinguished group that constituted the president’s fair-weather wartime friends. Shortly after Baghdad had fallen at a then-cost of perhaps 100 U.S. fatalities, he said publicly that there was no serious difference between the Bush position and his own. It was only by retro-engineering his politics, and pointing to a speech he had made in Chicago very much earlier in the Iraq debate, that he was able to create the idea that he had been both braver and more prescient than his rivals for the nomination.

According to your taste, then, this succession of local and national and now international shifts and adaptations makes Obama either a very ordinary politician or a highly extraordinary one. The timing of events in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to make him an astonishingly fortunate nominee. And fortunate, too, it must be said, in his opponent. Sen. John McCain could have said gravely that only the surge made the talk of American withdrawal –  whether it came from Nouri al-Maliki or Obama — possible in the first place. He could have taken Obama’s words from last February, about the 1st Cavalry vanquishing al-Qaida, and used them wryly and dryly to congratulate the younger man on being willing to learn. Instead, he peppered everything but the target with the inaccurate charge that Obama had always been anti-war and anti-surge. Obama may indeed have been serially for them after he was against them, but that’s different from (and better than) the other way around.

The cliché for the Obama phenomenon is jujitsu, where the strength of your opponent is precisely what you use against him. McCain had one particular strength when this campaign began: his fortitude in respect of Iraq, which entailed (as some people forget) his willingness to criticize the commander in chief in time of war. Now he is in real danger of confusing the two things and trying to make criticism or disagreement appear to be suspect in themselves. If last week hasn’t taught him that this is a doomed tactic — and strategy — then he is unteachable.

All here.

Also: Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens take on the WWII revisionists, centering on Patrick J. Buchanan who is a complete fucknut. Video here.

Chapter two now available here.

Chapter three now available here.

Chapter four now available here.

Chapter five now available here.

Tipping top hat to Doddyman

Jimbo and the Gaurdain exchange emails about ‘Islamofascism’ here.

A piece by the Drink Soaked Trotskyite himself from October last year on the same here.

Thick Guardianista cunts.

My default position is to prefer the Democrats to win any election rather than the Republicans. I tend not to get too worked up about it when it comes to the presidency though. There are a number of reasons for this but one that is overlooked to a degree I find inexplicable is that the powers of the US president are circumscribed by Congress to an extent that is, I think, without parallel in any other democracy.

In other words, instead of hearing the cliche that the American president is the most powerful person in the world, I think it would reflect reality better if more people said that Congress, in relation to the executive, is the most powerful legislature in the world.

This is one of a number of reasons why I have misgivings about Obama. He has for me the dual advantage of being neither a Republican nor Hillary Clinton - but whatever other problems might occur should he become president, I’d bet on this one: surely disillusion will follow hard on the heels of the euphoria we’ll see should he win the presidential election? This is a function of his limited powers, which will be exacerbated in his case with the fervour of expectations now surrounding him.

Obama is undoubtedly charismatic - but one of the features, and dangers, of charisma in politics is that the carrier of charisma becomes a repository for people’s best expectations almost regardless of what they are or what they do. When you have someone with charisma, people take them as representing almost anything they want - regardless of the reality. This is why, for example, Princess Diana could be for the monarchist the incarnation of a royal fairy-tale whilst simultaneously being an anti-establishment figure to those of a republican disposition - rather than what she was: a publicity-seeking, imploding bag of poisonous self-pity.

As for Obama, what we know - rather than what people want to believe - gives me cause for concern. For one, he strikes me as being woefully inexperienced. He is also rather conservative - having had a record, as far as one can tell, of being somewhat accommodating, flexible, in his stance on a variety of issues if this serves to further his career. There is, as far as I’m aware, no example of him being prepared to court unpopularity over an issue over which he feels strongly. Also, while I won’t pretend to know what is best in this present situation, like a number of people while I welcome his expressions of commitment to Afghanistan, I treat with great scepticism the idea that the American involvement there is something that can be divorced from its role in Iraq.

However - and it was this thought that prompted this post - the more short-term concern has to do with his electoral strategy, and this is related to the whole issue of his charismatic style mentioned above. Maybe it’s pure prejudice, evoked by the sight of Germans getting excited at a public rally and waving flags - even if the flags in question happen to carry the Stars and Stripes - but I can’t help getting the feeling that the tone and manner of his European tour wasn’t very wise. It might play well on the pages of the European press but in America?

It’s the feeling he’s peaked too soon and the assumption that the election is as good as won isn’t going to go down well with a significant section of the American electorate. People don’t like this and this thought floated through my mind: is this like Neil Kinnock’s triumphal entrance at party conference prior to the 1992 election, only on a much larger scale? I have no idea but it occurred to me again when I read Paulie’s short post on the subject:

“Am I the only one that thinks that McCain at 5/2 today is a very good price?”

No, you’re not. I’m not going to have a punt for two reasons:

a) I never gamble. Nothing virtuous about this. Deep down I’m a shallow human being with an addictive personality and an adolescent’s impulse towards immediate gratification. Fortunately, gambling is one vice I simply don’t understand.

b) Even if I did, in this case I trust reason would prevail anyway. Having ignored my own advice - that in politics it is folly to attempt to predict the future - the memory of failing to predict the SNP win in Glasgow East is likely to be a strong deterrent for quite some time.

But no, Paulie is not alone. I’ll eschew any temptation to predict the future this time but we are justified, I think, in remembering what we know from the past: people, voters, do not like being taken for granted - and I think this might prove to be a problem for Senator Obama’s campaign. (Predicting again while pretending not to - I can resist anything but temptation.) He is still just a Senator, right? The thing is, he seems to be surrounded by a whole bunch of people who seem to have forgotten this already. Don’t think the American electorate have though.

Aleksandar Hemon writes about Radovan Karadzic in the New York Times:

[Karadzic] thundered, “Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here.” Throughout his tirade, he clutched the lectern edges, as though about to hurl it at his audience, but then let go of it to stab the air with his forefinger at the word “annihilation.” The Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim, was visibly distressed.

It was a spectacular, if blood-curdling, performance. Mr. Karadzic, who was arrested last week after 13 years in hiding, was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which already controlled the parts of Bosnia that had a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the Parliament, nor did he hold any elective office. His very presence rendered the Parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the Parliament represented.

Watching the news broadcast covering the session, neither my parents nor I could initially comprehend what he meant by “annihilation.” For a moment or two we groped for a milder, less terrifying interpretation — perhaps he meant “historical irrelevance”? For what he was saying was well outside the scope of our middling imagination, well beyond the habits of normalcy we desperately clung to as war loomed over our irrelevant lives.

Then I understood that he was wagging the stick of genocide at the Bosnian Muslims, while the unappetizing carrot was their bare survival. “Don’t make me do it,” he was essentially saying. “I will be at home in the hell I create for you.”

Karadzic envisioned himself as the hero of an epic poem to the extent that he even, while in disguise, “recited an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, performing epic feats of extermination”.  The fucking maniac.

Read Hemon’s article here.

Hay, I don’t want to say anything, but I think your American flags are broken. They’re not on fire. When was the last time you saw that overseas? You know, I’ve got to tell you. There’s something about a charismatic leader rallying huge crowds of Germans in a large public square.

Jon Stewart in The Daily Show (via Karwan Baschi)

A wave of bombings left 29 people dead and 88 injured in the Indian city of Ahmedabad yesterday, prompting fears of renewed communal unrest. Up to 16 separate small bombs went off in several parts of the city, which has a history of violent clashes between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority. The blasts came a day after seven synchronised explosions rocked the southern city of Bangalore, the hub of India’s burgeoning information technology industry, killing two and wounding five others.Yesterday’s attacks in Ahmedabad happened in two waves early in the evening local time. Some of the devices were hidden in lunchboxes or bicycles. The first series exploded near busy market places. The second, about 20 minutes later, went off in and around a hospital where casualties were being taken. At least six people died there.

‘We saw a blue bag near the trauma centre, and before we could react we saw it explode in a shine of blinding light, and some 40 people were hit by flying shrapnel,’ said Vipul Patil, a doctor at the Dhanwantari Hospital.

No one claimed responsibility but suspicion immediately fell on Islamist militants. Prithviraj Chavan, a junior in the Prime Minister’s office, called yesterday’s bombings ‘deplorable’ and said they were set off by people ‘bent upon creating a communal divide in the country’. That is the sort of language officials tend to use when blaming Islamic militants suspected of being behind a series of co-ordinated bomb attacks across the country in recent years. Targets have included mosques, Hindu temples and trains.

Fucking Indian imperialists — sticking their noses into shit where it isn’t wanted or needed — the religion of peace should make it clear to them that it will not be tolerated.

Not that I want to make a habit of linking to anything at the HuffPo (and I certainly won’t) but this makes mention of a certain someone in a particularly ignorant and filthy way.

And what a ridiculous piece of shite it is. Mere parlour games, froth and moralising philistinism on a grand scale.

For Hitchens’ take on antisemitism look no further than here - originally pointed to on this here blog here. Forget the pathetic psychological similitudes conjured from the cranium of a Yank ‘liberal’.

And just to balance the post out …

Yanks (especially the ‘conservative’ ones) are the thickest cunts on the planet — evidence follows.

A poster advertising an event in Berlin (that’s in Germany for anyone who doesn’t know already).

Complaint from Yank conservative… ‘it’s  written in German’ and this is ‘unpatriotic’. ‘How dare the Germans speak German lingo’ — nb. these sort of people are likely our next government here also following the next general election (although I haven’t completely given up hope that the Zeitgeist will change for the better). You have been warned.

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace - Jeremiah ch 8 v 11

You’d have good reason to ignore the apocalyptic tone of the following post. I might be over-compensating for my failure to predict the SNP win in Glasgow East. There is also the fact that I’ve spent the last ten hours sweltering in traffic with a six year old and a face swollen with toothache. But even without these exacerbating factors, I would be sick at heart tonight because I take the view that for once the rhetoric of the SNP mirrors reality: this result really is an earthquake and I have the feeling the after-shocks will be felt for many years to come, for generations to come.

I find it heart-breaking that the analysis thus far has been so short-term, so self-interested, so petty-minded - focused as it is on Brown’s future and Labour’s prospects at the next election when what is really happening is a strange eruption in Britain’s political firmament. Gordon, apparently, has dismissed leadership speculation with the assurance that he’s “getting on with the job”. But you’re shit at it, Gordon. Unbelievably shit. So shit you could say we’re being confronted with being shit as a form of excellence. Consider the implications: we have lost a seat that has been returning Labour MPs since the 1920s. The third safest seat in Scotland. The fifth in Britain. I’m afraid the SNP are correct to say there is now no such thing as a safe Labour seat anymore.

It should go without saying that Brown should go now - not because this will necessarily improve Labour’s prospects at the next election. No, as I’ve said before, as a matter of principle. But the PLP won’t get rid of him, of course - they are, as Oliver Kamm rightly says, the ’sentimental party’.

How late it is, how very late - yet the complacency on display thus far has been absolutely shocking, astounding. And I don’t just mean the Brownites - what else would you expect of people like Douglas Alexander? No, I mean the Blairites too. Feeling pleased with themselves, apparently. How dare they, how dare they? Shame on them. Take this nauseating piece from John Rentoul, for example:

“This morning’s result in Glasgow is the worst possible for Gordon Brown and the best possible for the Labour Party. A margin of 365 votes is so close that it means that, if almost anybody else had been Prime Minister, Labour would have held the seat.”

How wrong is it possible to be? This wrong, apparently. Had Labour held by a few hundred votes with some Blair clone at the helm we are being asked to believe this would represent a victory, a vindication of triangulation? No, no - and here it’s worth while asking who is the author of this historic failure? Blair. Who felt beholden to some undemocratic deal made in some fucking London pasta joint? Blair. Who lacked the balls to sack him despite his egregious disloyalty? Blair. Remind me who endorsed Brown’s leadership bid again? Oh that’s right - it was Blair.

And who, anyway, is the author of the left-behind society? Because it was this that the voters of Glasgow east recoiled against. Disappointing for the Blairites no doubt but I’m afraid there’s precious little evidence that the personality of Gordon Brown was much of an issue on the doorsteps of Easterhouse, of the Gallowgate, of Ballieston. Crime was, housing was, drugs were. Despite his frankly Victorian solutions, it was the Tory IDS who drew more attention to the problems of this part of my city than any Labour MP ever did all the years Tony Blair was Prime Minister. This should be a source of shame for the Labour party in Scotland. They have healed the wound of the people lightly - because they thought they were like African-Americans and the Democrats: take them for granted because they have nowhere else to go.

But unlike African-Americans, Glaswegians have devolution - and devolution brought with it a proportional voting system. I think it would be fair to say that Scottish Labour have yet to come to terms with the shock this has brought. Labour in Scotland advocated both because they perceived them to be in their interests and pushed a soft nationalist line to this effect. This is what now has come back to haunt them. They sought to not so subtlety de-legitimize decisions made by the Westminster Parliament on the unconstitutional grounds that a majority of Scottish MPs failed to give their consent. They shouldn’t complain now when the Tories play the same card - yet they do.

Even had devolution been constructed with impeccable federal balance, there was always the danger that it would set in motion a dynamic of which its authors had no control. How much more with a constitutional settlement that has almost none of these virtues? Once upon a time under Tory rule there was a truism oft-repeated that Labour were the most Unionist party in Scotland. Yet I can’t rid myself of the feeling that this party of the Union has unwittingly become the author of its demise.

Nobody expects:

An Anglican version of the Roman Catholic church’s “inquisition” is proposed today in a document seen by The Times.

Bishops are urging the setting up of an Anglican Faith and Order Commission to give “guidance” on controversial issues such as same-sex blessings and gay ordinations.

The commission was put forward as a proposal this week to the 650 bishops attending the Lambeth Conference as a way of preserving the future unity of the Anglican Communion. Insiders compared it with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body formerly headed by the present Pope as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and previously known as the Holy Office or Inquisition.

Once more New Labour has announced that its solution to poverty is to threaten to make the poor poorer. They have trotted out the old Daily Mail pleasing line, ‘benefits sanctions if you lazy oiks do not do as you are told’. James Purnell’s proposals for reform elicit a familiar response; anger from his own backbenches, anguish from Polly Toynbee and full support from the Tories. This is a curious Labour government.

There has been, rightly, a lot of fuss about recent attacks on human rights and civil liberties. However, there has also been an erosion of economic rights, as embodied in the universalist principles of the welfare state, through an increase in conditionality that has generated far less noise. Rights are disappearing and obligations multiplying.

Shuggy, both on his own site and over here, does an excellent job on Labour’s forward march to 1834 by attacking the notion that poverty is the result of the moral failings of the poor and opposing the concept of ‘workfare’. The comments are well worth reading too. I would like to support his critique by committing further heresies against conventional wisdom.

The first is to question the notion of dependency culture. I always thought that this idea of a demotivated underclass languishing on benefits because that it is all they know, if it bore any relation to reality at all, mistook effect for cause. However, let’s take it one step further and ask what is wrong with dependency? Why do we view dependency as being so bad? We are all dependent at different stages of our life; when we are children, when we are old, when we are sick. If people neglect us then, they are called cruel and heartless. A civilised society recognises dependency as a necessary condition in which we will all find ourselves at times and actually supports us through it. Instead, Labour is offering us Victorian parenting, a sound thrashing for our own good.

Secondly, there is a monomania about the only way out of poverty being work. Work may well be a good way out. However, it is also a route in. It depends what you get paid.

Wages depend largely on the position of people in the labour market. Unlike some of his modern followers, Adam Smith was deeply concerned about the dangers of the market depressing workers’ income if their market position was weakened. Much of recent government policy has been devoted to doing just that.

Trade unions have been legislated against, employment protection weakened and the ‘flexible workforce’ promoted. Tax credits may be invaluable to the recipient, but, in reality, they are a state subsidy to employers and encourage low pay. Coercing people into the job market by removing their means of subsistence and getting them to, in effect, work for nothing puts more downward pressure on pay levels.

The way out of poverty is actually to have a secure, adequate income. Flitting between low paid, insecure work and periods of unemployment might look good on the statistics, but is not much use to individuals trapped in the whole dispiriting process.

Thirdly, governments have this wonderful self-confidence that they can shape human behaviour by using an economic stimulus. The problem is that people don’t always respond as expected. And often their choices are damaging and anti-social, but make far more sense in the context of their lives than the approved route. For instance, if you take benefits away from someone with a drug addiction because they do not, or cannot, seek treatment what will they do? Rob you, that is what.

Cutting support may make people disappear from the statistics, but not necessarily into employment. They can sink into the black economy, homelessness, prostitution, crime - they become part of an invisible, disenfranchised poor.

And finally, if, as Shuggy suggests, we have necessary and inevitable structural unemployment, wouldn’t it be better if the unemployed were actually the ones who want to be? They would be happier and better at it than those who want to work.

Let’s be honest about this. Unemployment is a curse. If you want to see the damage it can do, look at the bitter experience of people who lost their jobs when mass unemployment hit under Thatcher. However, low pay, long hours, exploitation, exhaustion and stress are just as much a scourge. To pitch people from one to the other is not progress.

Working in adult education has allowed me to see the fantastic transformation that gaining qualifications and employment can make on individuals. I have also seen the complexity of the problems people need to overcome if they are to make that transformation. They need support, help and real choices, sometimes over a long period of time. The worst thing to do is to is to force them into inappropriate training or work through fear of the benefit officer, accompanied by constant anxiety over the loss of their means of support. An activist welfare policy makes a lot of sense, but not one that punishes the poor for the sin of their poverty and is really designed to cut spending and appeal to the right wing press.

The mainstream left has had to spend much time and energy rescuing itself from the stupidities of the “we are all Hezbollah now” brigade. It also needs to free itself from an authoritarian, centralising and conservative political economy and social policy if it is to be a left worthy of support. In Britain, after Glasgow East, it looks increasingly like this reinvention will take place in opposition. They have only themselves to blame.

This term ‘workfare’, originally coined in the United States, describes a welfare system where the able-bodied unemployed are compelled to work for their benefits. Although sketchy at the moment, this seems to be what the government is proposing.

Here Johann Hari declares himself in favour on two grounds. One is that a system that allows people to languish on benefits for years erodes the work-ethic and as such does the welfare recipient no favours. The other related point is that if we don’t confront this fact, the Conservatives will introduce a much more punitive system.

I had intended to dismiss this second point with a single sentence: being harsh with people to pre-empt the Tories being even harsher with them isn’t a good reason for doing anything. But it occurred to me this needs fleshing out a bit for if he is serious about this as a Tory-defeating strategy, what he is advocating here is triangulation. With regards to welfare, it’s worth taking a moment to consider what the implications of this has been in the United States. It wasn’t Nixon, Reagan or Bush Snr who promised to end ‘welfare as we know it’ but President Clinton. One of the ironies of his presidency is that he achieved precisely the sort of thing his rightwing critics advocated - but gained no credit for it because he was perceived as being on the wrong side of the ‘culture wars’. Ending welfare as the Americans knew it was exactly what he did, for he terminated a federal government responsibility to provide relief to the able-bodied unemployed that had been established since the New Deal. This has laid the foundations for the ‘Wisconsin model’: Johann rightly criticises this punitive system but fails to make the connection between this and the sort of triangulation he is advocating.

But what of this erosion of the work-ethic, which is the central thrust of Johann’s argument - as it is of most critics of the current system? Of this business of people living a life on benefits he says:

“This isn’t what the Welfare State was intended to look like. You were not supposed to fall asleep in the safety net and raise your kids there so they know nothing else.”

This is quite correct. Beveridge, when constructing his famous report, envisaged the experience of living on unemployment benefit - as it used to be called - to be a temporary affair. But it’s worth remembering why: Beveridge imagined that unemployment benefit would cover those temporarily afflicted by seasonal and frictional unemployment. The more severe problems of cyclical and structural unemployment were something he thought could be solved through the then fashionable doctrine of demand-management. Easy to understand why these ideas should be in vogue in a nation emerging from the experience of total war; easy to understand how they came to be dashed on the rocks of experience, as indeed they were in a seventies Britain trying to cope with the combined challenges of newly-industrialising countries and oil-shocks.

Which brings me to this: to me there are two questions that Johann doesn’t really grapple with here. These are: what causes unemployment and how does welfare system work? I can’t pretend to give a comprehensive answer to either of these questions but I do want to suggest a couple of things that are missing from what I consider to be a fundamentally moralistic, and therefore flawed, analysis of these social and economic problems.

Of the first, I think this has to be acknowledged: unemployment is not a function of the morality of the poor - it is a function of capitalism. You don’t have to buy into the vulgar Marxist notion of capitalists conspiring to create a reserve army of unemployed labour to bid down wages. You don’t even have to be a Marxist of any kind to recognise what I consider to be two incontrovertible facts that can be verified from economic history. The following should, in my view, be accepted as a bare minimum:

a) Mass unemployment has been a periodic characteristic of capitalist economies from their genesis simply because they lack any inherent mechanism to prevent it.

b) To maximise profits, capitalists using the best technology available will economise on labour wherever possible.

These leaves workers who are available to move into areas where they can produce goods and services for which there is greater demand - but it is the transition that is the problem. This is what economists call structural unemployment. Now, in making this transition, we are asked to believe that it is self-discipline and moral character that is causing the difficulty here and it is on this point I have the greatest disagreement with David Cameron and his New Model Tories - and by extension with Johann Hari in as far as he with him. And while he would no doubt strenuously object, agree with him he does. If you’ve read the piece linked above, you’ll have read the morality tale about his pal ‘Andy’ who started smoking spliffs at school and never bothered getting off his arse after that. An anecdote perhaps - an anecdote certainly but we are assured this is no isolated case:

“Go to the place where I was born – Glasgow East, site of the potentially Brown-busting by-election this Thursday – and you will see them spreading before you in great concrete estates of poverty. You can taste the ennui in the air. Ask the kids what they want to do when they grow up and they shrug with heartbreaking indifference and say, “Dunno”.”

I’ll decline the injunction to ‘go there’ on the grounds that I’ve already been there. Taught there - and in this capacity it’s a case of swallowing the ‘ennui’. But there’s no point in making this observation without asking why this is. There’s the problem of unemployment, which won’t go away no matter how many people get on their bikes - but there’s something else as well and it has to do with how our welfare system works.

It is characteristic of Victorian piety to demand from the poor a moral fortitude that their critics neither exhibit themselves, nor expect from their peers. This is why, for example, David Cameron can smoke weed and snort coke and all that happens to him is that commentators admire the way he deflects ‘unjustified’ questions about his ‘private life’. But the left-behind society has no such privacy.

The other curious thing about our society is that we are asked to believe it is only the well-off and the rich that respond to incentives to work. Don’t tax incomes or profits too much lest you incentivize inertia, the Thatcherites told us. Very well - so why doesn’t this apply to the poor, the low paid, the unemployed? I can’t claim to set the world to rights but I can make a small suggestion: we might want to consider reforming a system that has a marginal benefit withdrawal rate starting at 100%, falling to something around 80% when you break into the ‘applicable amount’ and your housing benefit starts to disappear. Then there’s the rate of marginal tax once you break out of the benefits threshold altogether. Maybe a minimum citizens income might be an idea? Not sure about this myself but right now I’m thinking it would be preferable to this notion that the poor should be forced through ‘community service’ to genuflect towards the work-ethic.

Because the poor are different from us: they have less money.

Karadzic’s local was called The Madhouse. In the TV pictures yesterday the bar was displaying photos of Mladic and RK, and the regulars were fervent that he was a hero, that he did nothing, killed no-one, ordered no-one to be killed. Evidence? Pah! Fixed. Conspiracy!

Note that it isn’t, He killed them and it served them right! or It was either us or them. It’s just as in the case of Kuntar’s welcome back to Lebanon. As it is every time.

1. Denial (It never happened, we don’t do wicked things.)

2. Historicising (It happened a long time ago, it wasn’t us. Not personally.)

3. Fiction (So and so has written a novel, but who’s to know what’s true, what’s fiction?)

4. Myth (It is the sort of thing that happens in the scheme of things, an archetypal pattern. It’s not real life.)

5. Justification (Those who claim to be victims are clinging somewhat unnaturally to the myth. It must serve their purposes. They are devious. No wonder people hate them.)

6. Someone like Karadzic was bound to come along and do what was necessary.

Familiar? Aways interesting to see what stage we’re at.

If anyone doubts the malignity of fundamentalist obscurantism try this unlikely meeting of minds.

Dr Daniel Deng Bul, the Archbishop of Juba and Primate of the Sudan  …  yesterday said that Sudanese Christians were being murdered by Muslims because the Anglican Church was seen to approve same-sex unions.

So why are they killing Muslims as well? Oh well, I suppose it makes a change from blaming the Jews (sorry) Zionists.

Reuters reports: 

The European Commission issued a scathing indictment of corruption in Bulgaria on Wednesday, suspending aid worth hundreds of millions of euros (pounds) and barring two key payments agencies from receiving EU funds.A report on the management of European Union funds by the latest and poorest EU member said the fight against high-level corruption and organised crime was not producing results and the Commission had to act to protect taxpayers’ money.

Corruption? Organised crime? Has the EU not looked elsewhere — slightly closer to Brussels? Is it not going to act to prevent taxpayers’ money being given to racists and fascists?

Note to Bob: It’s not a matter of indifference — or not — to the EU, it’s a matter of hitting the Italian state where it causes the most pain and embarrassment.

Alternative therapies allow you to get in touch with your inner self and heal the whole body. Our clinic spiritually cleanses you with a range of traditional methods, many tried out in 1992:

In that year, almost every Muslim was burned out of his or her home and either murdered or deported from Foca. But this was normal at the time and Foca is most renowned for rape as a weapon of subjugation. Serial testimony recounts the systematic mass rape of women and girls, some as young as 12, at centres such as the Partizan sports hall. They were assaulted all night, every night. ‘Only the women over 50 were safe,’ recalled a shopkeeper, gang-raped by uniformed soldiers at the sports centre: ‘I counted 29 of them,’ she said, ‘then lost consciousness.’ ‘I think all my life I will feel the pain I felt then,’ said another, who was 15 at the time.

Partners:
Dr Crippen
Dr Mengele
Dr Shipman
Dr Karadzic

It is worth reading Ed Vulliamy again on the search for Karadzic from The Observer last December

Quality post from the Denhammeister here.

N.B: watch out for the tell-tale phrase of the apologist: “victor’s justice”.

Mr Glass was invited to Downing Street to receive an award from the Sheila McKechnie Foundation for his protesting work with Plane Stupid.

Tosser.

I have just found out that Walt Whitman’s stuffed canary is kept in Bolton Library in Lancashire. Not only that, but the Library also has one of the most important Whitman archives outside the USA. This surprising information comes from a super pamphlet, With Walt Whitman in Bolton: Spirituality, Sex and Socialism in a Northern Mill Town, by Paul Salveson.

The publication chronicles a group of radicals and socialists gathered around J W Wallace, a Whitman enthusiast, who struck up an unlikely, long distance friendship with the poet from 1887 until Whitman’s death in 1892. The group continued and had links with the leading figures of early British Socialism, notably Edward Carpenter, together with Keir Hardie and Katharine and Bruce Glasier.

The left they belonged to was far from orthodox, it experimented with a range of ideas, many of which were hardly impressive, but others provide insights that are relevant to a libertarian left and laid the foundation for modern sexual politics. At a time of left realignment the rediscovery of what became marginalised traditions is of more than academic interest.

(Thanks to Mike)