Pub Philosopher

Berlin Wall Juke Box

Another installment in the occasional Friday Pub Juke Box series.

In my post on Monday I said that, on the whole, I believe that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc was a good thing. That's not to say that there weren't winners and losers though. I don't often agree with Seumas Milne but he makes some good points here. The experiment in bandit capitalism which followed the break up of the Soviet Union was a disaster. Replacing apparatchiks with oligarchs is not what Russian and east European dissidents died and went to prison for.

So today's juke box reflects the opposing views of 1989. The first is the optimistic "Winds of Change" from Germany's Scorpions, which became the unofficial anthem of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Inevitably, they were playing it on Monday evening in Berlin.

The second is the less well known and much more pessimistic Lurhstaap from Britain's New Model Army. Written in 1989, Lurhstaap warned that 'these changing winds can grow cold and hostile'. The lyrics might seem eerily prescient to those who feel they were robbed after 1989.

And in the shadows of the crowded square, a thousand paper deals go down
And hungry sharks from everywhere smell the blood and head for town

I like both tracks, which perhaps reflects the mixed feelings I had then and still have now. On the whole, I'm glad communism collapsed but we really missed an opportunity afterwards.

 

 

 

 

Why Armistice Day is still important

The Queen led the two minutes silence at Westminster Abbey this morning on the first Armistice Day without any former soldiers of the Great War, the last remaining UK-based veterans having died during the past year.

I always make sure that I have somewhere quiet to go at 11 o'clock on the 11th November. Today I went and sat in a churchyard and was invited inside by some of the church stalwarts who had decided to have an impromptu two minutes silence and prayers. About a dozen of us clustered around a war memorial while someone read the eulogy, then we kept the silence and the vicar said a prayer. I'd never met any of the people before but they made me feel very welcome and gave me a cup of coffee and a biscuit afterwards.

One elderly member of the group said that she knew some of the names from the Second World War on the memorial. Her cousin is one of the men listed. It struck me that even those who knew the fallen of the two world wars are getting on in years now. To have known someone who fell in the First World War you would have to be in your nineties. To have similar memories of the Second World War you would have to be well into your sixties.

While the war memorials are, alas, being added to all the time, the proportion of the population with direct experience of war is diminishing rapidly. Thankfully, most of us don't know what war is like and haven't had to mourn the loss of a loved one. In 1918 and 1945 almost every family was a military family. Nowadays the fighting, and the grieving, is done by a select few.

Which is all the more reason to keep Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day as tributes to those who fell and to those who continue to risk their lives. During and immediately after the world wars, soldiers could take it as read that people were grateful for what they had done. These days the wars are messier, more complex and more controversial but, for the most part, regardless of their political opinions, most people appreciate the sacrifices made by the members of the armed forces.

It still helps to show it though. Just as husbands and wives need to say 'I love you' from time to time, once a year, by buying poppies, attending church services and parades and standing in silence at war memorials, we can show those in the armed forces that we havent forgotten them and that we are still grateful for the sacrifices they make.

 

Hideously un-diverse

Now here is a funny story.

Celebrity actress Emma Luvee-Dahling has attacked the University of Nairobi for having too many black students.

Ms Luvee-Dahling, famous for starring in 1980s films that no one can remember, complained that her white son had been made to feel completely out of place because most of the students at the university are black. He had such a tough time that his mother instigated a cultural awareness campaign on the university's campus, aimed at promoting racial equality.

During one cultural awareness event, a sympathetic student asked, "What can we do to change the blackness of Nairobi province?"

Ms Luvee-Dahling went on to criticise the students for being racially intolerant and the entire city of Nairobi for being overwhelmingly African.

'Nairobi is very black," she said, "it needs to be cracked open a bit."

A spokesman for the university, while being concerned that the feelings of Ms Luvee-Dahling's son had been hurt, was somewhat at a loss for a solution to the problem. "After all," he said, "we are in Africa and most people here do tend to be black."

He continued, "Perhaps if having more white people around had been so important to him, Ms Luvee-Dahling's son should have applied to a university somewhere else."

(By now, most readers will have realised that this story is completely without foundation and that I have made the whole thing up. After all, even celebrity actresses wouldn't say anything quite that silly, would they?)

And the wall came tumbling down

It was Timothy Garton-Ash, in his book Free World, who pointed out that two of the world's most significant post-war events occurred on 9/11. Writing the date in the European way, the 9th of November appears as 9/11. That was the day the Berlin Wall came down.

In the intervening years I have often been struck by how people even ten years younger than me don't appreciate the enormity of that event in quite the same way. Perhaps you have to be at least 40 to have any real experience of the Cold War world.

My awareness of international politics was shaped by adults' conversations about the Russian threat. When I began to read newspapers, retired generals were writing articles about how the Red Army could be at Calais in 48 hours and about the spread of communist influence in Africa and South America. When I grew out of Enid Blyton books I started reading the later Biggles novels; the ones where his arch enemy Erich von Stalhein transfers his loyalty seamlessly from the Abwehr to the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. There was no doubt that, in fighting the communists, Biggles was up against a threat every bit as bad as the Nazis he had battled in his earlier adventures. On the TV, Funeral in Berlin and Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy reminded us of the threat from Soviet spies.

On long journeys to Cornwall my dad would keep me and my sister amused by telling us to look out for cars from other countries. We'd tick them off in the AA book as we saw them. But there was no point in looking for PL, H or CS, my dad said. Those people were not allowed out of their countries so you'd never see their cars.

For my twelfth birthday I got a short-wave radio and, when I should have been doing my homework, I listened, fascinated, as the Eastern Bloc radio stations, like Radio Moscow, Radio Berlin, Radio Bucharest and the terrifying Radio Tirana, blasted their propaganda across the airwaves. As darkness fell, their blood-curdling call signs would drown out all other radio signals.

I was left in no doubt that, to the east, was a malevolent and brooding enemy, a land of grey days and cold silent nights, where secret police watched every move and armies massed, just waiting for the order to roll through the German forests and enslave western Europe. I knew who our enemies were and that they meant us harm.

Crazy though it may sound, these weren't just the thoughts of a child with an over-active imagination. Most people believed that the threat from the Eastern Bloc was real. It influenced both international and domestic policies in all European countries. Even in the early 1980s the Labour Party's commitment to unilateral disarmament was a significant factor in the flight of many of their supporters to the SDP and the party's disastrous defeat in the 1983 election.

The atmosphere began to change when Gorbachev became president fo the Soviet Union but even then, few people could have guessed just how quickly the Soviet empire would unravel. One by one, in 1989, the communist regimes collapsed. Apart from in Romania, the regime change was almost bloodless. But then the Soviet Union fell apart too. We discovered that the Red Army we had feared for so long had probably been incapable of launching an attack on the West for many years. Like the empire it had protected, it too began to collapse as soldiers deserted and sold their weapons to criminals. For a while it seemed as if Russia itself would disintegrate as its component A.S.S.R.s began to break away during the 1990s.

Like many people, by then I felt that we'd had too much of a good thing. I had spent my formative years wishing for the destruction of the Soviet Union but I was relieved when Putin stopped the rot and restored stability to the ruined Russia.

Looking back from 2009 the Cold War seems a lot longer ago than a mere two decades. Most of the former Russian satellites are now in the European Union. In the intervening years, I visited many of the cities from which the communist radio stations once prophesied the imminent collapse of the West.

I discussed Bulgaria's application to join the EU with a journalist and an academic, over a beer in Plovdiv's beautiful square. I had a night out in the trendy bars and clubs of East Berlin. I wandered in amazement round Ceauşescu's palace in Bucharest, the world's second largest building and a monument to oppression and forced labour. I whiled away and afternoon talking to a Czech woman and a Slovak man in a beer garden in Žižkov. I got drunk with Russian nuclear scientists on a train from Yekaterinburg to Moscow. I saw the office from which Stalin sent millions to their deaths and chatted with a Ukrainian about the threat of terrorism as we watched the aftermath of the Beslan siege in a bar in Irkutsk. And, perhaps strangest of all, I now chat to Polish people most days; they live next door to me. Cars with those once-rare PL registrations are more common than French or German vehicles in my part of London.

If you'd told me in 1979, or even in 1986, that any of these things would happen I'd have thought that you were mad. I assumed that I would never be able to visit eastern Europe and that eastern Europeans would never come here. Even now, although it all seems very normal these days, sometimes I still stop myself and think 'this is just great' because, compared to what went before, it is. I wonder what George Smiley, Harry Palmer and Biggles would make of it all.

In 1989 I knew some Germans who, that November, sensing that something was afoot, were heading home to Berlin. I was briefly tempted to throw some clothes into a bag and go with them but I had recently started a new job and had a lot on at work. I was at that point in my 20s when the spontaneity of youth gave way to the responsibility of age. I can't now remember what was so important at work but it stopped me from being there to see that hated wall come down and to witness what will surely be one of the most symbolic world events in my lifetime.

They are having a party in Berlin tonight, only this time without the mullets, bleached jeans and white socks. They are trying to get as many people as possible who were there at the time to walk across the Bornholmer Bridge. Earlier today, Germany's first Chancellor to have grown up in the DDR walked across the bridge with Mikhail Gorbachev and former Polish President Lech Walesa. Angela Merkel, the former FDJ member, is now leader of a united Germany's centre-right government. That is surely a measure of just how far we have come.

Re-joining the EPP is the best way to protect British interests

I've been out of the country for a few days so I missed the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and the humiliation of David Cameron which followed. Despite squirming as the cast-iron guarantee of a referendum turned to rust with astonishing speed, he appears to have emerged relatively unscathed. As Jackie Ashley says, the Labour party is now in such a mess that it can't land a punch on David Cameron, even when has so obviously made an arse of himself.

Of course, the situation in which the Tories now find themselves has been predictable for some time. Once the Lisbon Treaty was ratified by all member states a referendum was pointless. Mr Cameron gave his cast iron guarantee as a sop to the Europhobes in his party, hoping, like Mr Micawber, that something would turn up, in the form of a rejection by another EU state, which would allow him to stage his referendum. When pressed on the obvious what-if scenario of all the other EU countries ratifying the treaty, the Tories could only respond with a weak promise not to let matters rest.

David Cameron may be a lot of things but he isn't stupid. He knew that the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty would kill his referendum. The treaty is now a done deal and it can't be amended without the agreement of all member states. There is nothing left to have a referendum about.

That hasn't stopped the Europhobes in the Tory Party demanding one though. Like spoilt children, they are threatening to stand in the middle of the shop, stamping their feet, screaming and screaming until they get what they think they were promised. Not that it's clear what such a referendum would actually be about. At the moment the working title seems to be Britain's relationship with Europe. I'd like to see them draft a simple referendum question on that.

Mr Cameron is trying to offer them some other sweeties to keep them quiet but these are just as vapid as his not-letting-matters-rest promise. His proposed sovereignty bill would simply confirm what already exists. The Telegraph's Bruno Waterfield dismisses it as a "symbolic crowd pleaser". It would be a farcical waste of Parliamentary time.

Most boneheaded of all, though, must be David Cameron's desertion of his mainstream conservative allies in Europe in favour of a fringe grouping of eccentrics and no-hopers. Whether or not these characters are Nazi sympathisers is irrelevant. Even if they were a well-meaning and principled bunch, they would still be powerless outsiders. The group is inherently unstable. Five of its component parties only have one MEP. It would only take two of them to leave the group, or to decide they don't want to be MEPs any more, and the whole grouping would fall short of the minimum requirements for a European Parliament Group, thus depriving the Tories of what little influence they have left.

Now, more than ever, it is crucial for Britain's governing party to have influence at the European Union's top tables. Even those who have looked at it closely find the Lisbon Treaty confusing. No-one is really sure what it will mean in the longer term. Like all sets of rules and regulations, the subsequent interpretation will determine how it comes to be applied in practice. That interpretation will happen through the usual EU horse-trading processes and, increasingly, in the European Parliament. The people likely to have the most influence over this process are those in the European People's Party, the group from which David Cameron has just walked away.

We don't know what Europe will be like in ten years time, when we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but we can be sure that it will have been shaped by people like Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Donald Tusk, together with their allies in the European Parliament. If David Cameron really wants to protect British interests he should ignore the tantrums of the Europhobes and go back to join the grown-ups in the EPP; the people who will make the real decisions about where Europe goes next.

Blair would be ideal for the EU non-job

There is much speculation about Tony Blair's chances of getting the EU presidency, though the tide seems to have turned against him in the last 24 hours.

Timothy Garton Ash doesn't think Blair would be right for the job either. At the moment, he argues, the role is without form and void:

The job description for the president of the European Council is vague, but it is certainly more like a consensus building chairman than anything we would seriously call a president in English, let alone in American.

Moreover, this chair, be it he or she, would have the tricky task of presenting a European foreign policy that does not yet exist.

To give Europe a stronger voice in the world also requires a machinery that does not yet exist.

So the new EU president will need to be a figurehead and cheerleader for something that is vague and without substance. Tony Blair did that for thirteen years as leader of New Labour. Surely that makes him the ideal candidate.

White City

No, not the home of the BBC and a long-forgotten dog track, but the exemplar of US urban cool.

As New Geography explains:

Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

The progressive paragon of Portland is the whitest on the list, with an African American population less than half the national average. It is America's ultimate White City. The contrast with other, supposedly less advanced cities is stark.

So what's happening?

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip?

Sounds vaguely familiar doesn't it?

Of course,  they will give any number of reasons for this.  A bigger house,  quieter roads,  better schools,  less crime. They will continue to protest their anti-racist credentials,  even as they abandon the inner city for the posh, white areas that they sneered at for so long.

But America's Bens and Chloes (or whatever their US equivalents are) have found an even better alternative. They don't have to move out to the hinterland, they can just migrate to their 'own' hip urban areas.

It gets better still, though, because if Ben and Chloe move to an area with lots of other Bens and Chloes, they can implement the sort of progressive policies that suit people like them, secure in the knowledge that other people with different values won't come along and mess it all up.

In fact, lack of ethnic diversity may have much to do with what allows these places to be “progressive”. It's easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics. Minneapolis-St. Paul, of course, is notable in its Scandinavian heritage; Seattle and Portland received much of their initial migrants from the northern tier of America, which has always been heavily Germanic and Scandinavian.

In comparison to the great cities of the Rust Belt, the Northeast, California and Texas, these cities have relatively homogenous populations. Lack of diversity in culture makes it far easier to implement “progressive” policies that cater to populations with similar values; much the same can be seen in such celebrated urban model cultures in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Their relative wealth also leads to a natural adoption of the default strategy of the upscale suburb: the nicest stuff for the people with the most money. It is much more difficult when you have more racially and economically diverse populations with different needs, interests, and desires to reconcile.

As the Economist said, five years ago:

[T]here is some evidence that diversity has costs. In a recent book, “The Size of Nations”, two economists show that managing ethnic diversity is expensive, as governments must deal with the demands of groups competing for scarce resources. In the United States, a study has shown that people are willing to pay more for services like education if they can live with people more like them in ethnicity and class. In other words, people place a value on being with others like them. Multi-ethnic nations have been breaking apart recently (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia); few countries have merged during the same period, and those that have were ethnic mates (East and West Germany, North and South Yemen).

A quick look at the Human Development Index (HDI), released each year in the report, seems to support the idea that diversity has its costs. In the bottom 35 countries ranked as having “low human development”, all but three are in vastly diverse Africa, where borders drawn by colonialists showed no respect for tribal, linguistic or religious identities. Meanwhile, while single-ethnicity states are rare (just 30 countries in the world do not have a religious or ethnic minority that constitutes at least 10% of the population), they are strongly represented at the top of the HDI: places like Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, Ireland and Austria.

America's hip young middle-class kids are, it seems, setting up their own little Swedens,where the lack of diversity enables them to create the progressive urban environment they want.

Welfare, fast and clean public transport, walkable communities, free education, free health-care, parks and open spaces; they all seem so work so much better when the people that use them are People Like Us.

Hat Tip for the article and the link: Laban Tall

It wasn't a grand plot; it was just a shabby little scheme

The admission by former Labour adviser Andrew Neather that the government deliberately set out to make Britain more multicultural, by relaxing immigration controls towards the end of 2000, stirred up a row over the weekend. "Conspiracy,"  shout the usual suspects.

So were the BNP and their ilk right all along? Is the government part of some vast plot to control the world by destroying national identities?

Naah, come on, this is New Labour not SPECTRE. They're not that good.

In fact, their reasons were rather shabby.

They just thought it would be nice to make the place a bit more multi-cultural, that the immigrants would probably be more likely to vote Labour and that more immigration would get up the noses of right-wingers. As an added bonus, it would mean that their Ben and Chloe supporters wouldn't have to employ chavs as their domestic help; they'd have polite, willing and cheap east Europeans and Latin Americans to choose from instead. As Mr Neather explains:

The results in London, and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It's not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners - although frankly it's hard to see how the capital could function without them.

Yes, how did we manage for so long without them? Remember the chaos of the years before 2000? Houses left untidy, children uncared for, parks and gardens overgrown. It sends a shiver down your spine when you realise how close London came to complete collapse.

He goes on:

Their place certainly wouldn't be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley - fascist au pair, anyone?

So don't they have fascists in Belgrade and Bucharest then? Or in Brazilia and Bogota? Or is it just that those in Barking and Burnley are the wrong sort of fascists?

In today's Evening Standard Andrew Neather is trying to pour cold water on the story. Not that it will do him much good; he's let the cat out of the bag now.

He's right about this though:

The Right see plots everywhere and will hyperventilate at the drop of a chapati.

Dignifying this policy with terms like 'conspiracy' and 'plot' creates an impression that it was part of some grand plan. It wasn't; it was just another self-interested, short-term ruse from a bunch of politicians who are incapable of seeing further than the next general election.

Tundra Time

Pitch dark by 5 o'clock today.

I've said all I'm going to say about the annual stupidity of putting the clocks back to daylight wasting time. The case for keeping our clocks one hour ahead of the sun in winter is overwhelming. Our lives are different from those of our ancestors. We get up later and go to bed later.

As Sir Alistair Horne said, if the Scots want to have their own Tundra Time, let them go ahead. Just don't drag the rest of us into the dark too.

Blog review

There's a review of Pub Philosopher at politics.co.uk. It says:

Enjoyable and free-spirited, but not updated enough.

The opinion is interesting and perceptive and the topics covered are well chosen. But the lack of regular updates just isn't forgiveable. It loses two points for that.

Funny, these comments have a flavour of some of my old school reports. Typically, I would produce a piece of work for which I would get excellent marks, then I'd sit around and do sod all for the rest of the term, much to the frustration of my parents and teachers.

The point about the lack of posts is a fair cop but I was quite pleased with the other comments.

Nick Griffin's Question Time debacle doesn't mean he is wrong about everything

In what will probably be the most-watched episode in the programme's history, Nick Griffin finally appeared on Question Time last night. It was a controversial decision by the BBC. Only hours before the broadcast went out, many were still saying that QT was not an appropriate forum for scrutinising the BNP's policies. The programme, they argued, would be the ideal platform for a demagogue like Nick Griffin. NUJ leader Jeremy Dear's response was typical when he said that the BNP ought to be subject to "proper journalistic scrutiny" rather than the "knockabout soapbox" environment of Question Time. The implication of this argument was that a TV audience could not possibly deliver an incisive examination of the BNP and that such things were best left to professional interviewers.

Within the first few minutes of the programme, this somewhat elitist argument was proved wrong. David Dimbleby and the Question Time audience succeeded where most professional interviewers have failed.  They nailed Nick Griffin on the subjects where he and his party are most vulnerable. Mr Griffin's past association with white supremacists, his holocaust denial and his trip to Libya to ask Gaddafi for funding were all up for discussion, as were the BNP's pseudo-science, pseudo-history and conspiracy theories.

The panellists chose different strategies for dealing with Nick Griffin. Jack Straw was so angry that at one point he was shaking with rage. At the other extreme, the almost playful attacks by British Museum director Bonnie Greer were surprisingly effective. 

Ms Greer mentioned Nick Griffin's Cambridge degree a couple of times before demolishing some of the cod history and spurious attempts to define racial purity on the BNP's web-site. She knew he was far too intelligent and well-read to actually believe any of this stuff. And he knew that she knew. When she challenged him he was clearly embarrassed and didn't know what to do next. He seemed, briefly, to consider flirting with her, which wouldn't have gone down well with some of his his supporters, but in the end he resorted to a sheepish laugh, which made him look rather like a naughty boy who had been caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. Watch this clip from the show; it's priceless.

The evening went from bad to worse for Mr Griffin as he proved unable to defend either his own past or some of his party's more spurious assertions. He even claimed that a non-existent law on holocaust denial prevented him from explaining why he had changed his mind about holocaust denial. It made him look very silly.

But just because Nick Griffin and his party have dodgy pasts and crazy views doesn't mean that they are wrong about everything, and many in the audience clearly understood that distinction. The first and only applause Mr Griffin got was when he explained his description of  Islam as a wicked and vicious faith and questioned the religion's compatibility with British values . When the discussion turned to immigration it was the mainstream politicians who found themselves on the spot. One of the show's highlights was Jack Straw being harangued by a black man for his party's failure to control immigration.

David Dimbleby threw a quote from Frank Field at Jack Straw:

A fight-back against the BNP will only begin when the party leaders give a full pledge that our population will not breach the 65 million barrier. 

He should also have asked Tory representative Sayeeda Warsi about this quote from Conservative Home's Tim Montgomery (at 7: 23 here):

...the only thing that will undermine the BNP is a mainstream party which opposes unbridled immigration.

For all the attacks on Nick Griffin by the audience and the panel on last night's show, the issues which have made so many people turn to the BNP haven't gone away. Mainstream parties have failed to control immigration, made policies that ripped communities apart, allowed international financiers to wreck our economy and rob us blind, gone soft on crime and discipline in schools, pandered to unrepresentative puffed-up community leaders and introduced laws to stop us criticising religious lunacy.

The BBC's decision to invite Nick Griffin onto Question Time has been vindicated.  He did, indeed, get a rougher ride than any of the professional interviewers have given him and the wilder claims of his party were effectively demolished. That doesn't mean that people will stop voting for him though. As some audience members recognised last night, the fact that so many people are willing to put their cross against someone who peddles such rubbish is a continuing sign of the mainstream parties' failure.

The Labour, Liberal and Conservative representatives got off lightly last night because Nick Griffin drew most of the fire. But ultimately it is they and their colleagues in Parliament who are responsible for the mess we are now in, not the leader of a small party with two MEPs, a handful of councillors and lot of daft ideas.

You can watch the whole episode of Question Time here.

Heads they win, tails you lose

So big bonuses are back for the banks bailed out by the taxpayer. Goldman Sachs, rescued by the US government, and the British state-owned RBS are gearing up to pay out huge wedges of cash to their investment bankers at the end of this year.

So how come they have made such massive profits when they have cut back on lending to businesses and corporate transactions have slowed down? One key source of income, as Vince Cable explains, is the sale of bonds to finance the government debt caused by the financial crisis. The banks are being paid a hefty commission for helping governments borrow money. In other words, they are being paid to clear up the mess which they caused in the first place. This Christmas, bankers will be walking away with bonuses that have come directly from the taxpayer. 

In summary, then, the story of the financial crisis goes something like this. The bankers gamble on complex financial instruments with your savings. The resulting bank crisis means that your savings are almost completely wiped out. This triggers a recession during which you get made redundant or get put on short hours for lower pay. The government is left with no choice but to bail out the banks with your tax money. This leaves governments around the world broke so they have to borrow money through the banks, to whom they must then pay commission, which again comes out of your taxes.

I make that four different ways we have been screwed by the bankers in the space of one year. 

Minister calls Muslim-only press conference to deny Islamophobia charge

It's been a bad week for agriculture minister Jim Fitzpatrick. As if the damning report on England's uniquely complicated and expensive farm payments system wasn't bad enough, poor Jim also had to appear before a bizarre Muslim-only press conference to prove that he isn't an Islamophobe.

Trying to appease farmers' leaders goes with the minister's job but, in the same week, he had to hot-foot it over to his constituency to grovel before another group of aggrieved middle-aged men.

His crime, it appears, was to refuse to attend a segregated Muslim wedding because he objects to the segregation of men and women at marriage ceremonies. Mr Fitzpatrick claims that this practice is fairly recent in his constituency and that it has been imposed on local Muslims by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a predominantly Bangladeshi Islamist group based in Tower Hamlets.  

Depending on your point of view, Jim Fitzpatrick is either a brave man sticking to his principles or, given the number of Muslims in his constituency, a foolish man asking for trouble.

 And trouble is certainly what he got. Complaining about segregation at Muslim weddings is enough to get you branded as an Islamophobe in the Muslim areas of east London, regardless of how much you may have done to help Bangladeshi people in the past.

The press conference was the MP's attempt to regain favour with the Bangladeshi media in his constituency and refute the charge of Islamophobia. The journalists were shown photos of Mr Fitzpatrick and his wife working in Bangladesh at an HIV/AIDS centre and were given a list of all the mosques he has helped during his time as an MP. 

"I've been trying to learn Sylheti," protested the MP before going on to talk about all the times he has demonstrated against the horrid NF and BNP.

Why is he so worried? Because in about eight months time he will have to defend his seat against George Galloway, the main architect of the shameless alliance between elements of the hard left and reactionary Muslim groups. You'd never see George doing anything as stupid as challenging chauvinist behaviour among Muslims. Among anyone else, perhaps, but not among Muslims. There's no way Mr Galloway would let whatever socialist principles he might have left endanger his relationship with the Muslims who keep him in power. On Friday, he turned up the heat by challenging Jim Fitzpatrick to a live debate on Bengali TV.

With Labour's vote collapsing, if enough Muslim votes shift to Galloway's Respect party, Jim Fitzpatrick could find himself without a seat. Hence last week's farcical press conference.

Has he done enough to recover his position? He will find out soon enough. Jim Fitzpatrick is in for a tough fight. If the election in Poplar and Limehouse does come down to a game of dhimmitude-poker, I wouldn't want to bet against George Galloway. When it comes to appeasing Muslim fanatics, he was there way before anyone else.

  

The white working class - just another ingredient in the multicultural soup

Returning to this blog after a long absence I noticed that it has taken on a life of its own. Even when I don't post anything, readers continue to take lumps out of each other in the comments boxes. Good show folks; keep it coming.

In a month or so, when I've finished what I've been doing for the last half-year, I will be able to tell you where I've been but for now you'll just have to get used to the prolonged absences, if you haven't already.

Somewhat against the trend, Pub Philosopher's hit rate shot up yesterday after Laban Tall posted a link to my Ben and Chloe post from four years ago into the comments thread on this Guardian piece about the white working class. Judging from the subsequent comments, it still strikes a chord with people even now.

Symon Hill's piece starts well:

When mainstream politicians sit down next to the BNP's Nick Griffin on Question Time next week, they will be facing a monster of their own creation.

True enough. But he goes on:

The main parties' constant pandering to rightwing agendas, their failure to speak up for the benefits of immigration and their devotion to the interests of the wealthy have all contributed to the far right's electoral success.

The last bit of that is right, in that Labour has abandoned the working class in favour of cultivating rich elites, but if there has been any pandering it has been several decades of giving special treatment to ethnic and religious minorities at the expense of everyone else. The impact of the series of policies that became known as multi culturalism has fallen disproportionately on the working class.

The UK's peculiar brand of multiculturalism has its roots in this country's colonial past. The British establishment dealt with troublesome colonial minorities by doing deals with local leaders in which favours were dispensed in return for a degree of loyalty and help in keeping their followers in line. When large numbers of immigrants appeared in this country the establishment's response was to do the same by bigging up so-called community leaders. The instincts of the old establishment were reinforced by the new left-wing establishment that began to capture town halls in the 1970s. Inspired by a Marxist-influenced liberalism, the new establishment wanted to atone for the past crimes of imperialism by giving preferential treatment to the descendants of those who had suffered. The combination of the colonial policies of the old establishment and the ideologically-driven policies of the new gave us unelected community leaders, special grants for cultural minorities, housing policies giving preference to immigrants and laws preventing people from saying unpleasant things about ethnic or religious minorities.

The result of the economic and social engineering of the past four decades has been to wreck the once-cohesive working class communities leaving white working-class people feeling particularly aggrieved. With no community leaders, no grants, no special laws to protect them and no preferential treatment, they have been left exposed to the harsh realities of twenty-first century Britain with its casualised labour market and competition for jobs and resources. The community cohesion and working-class pride that sustained their ancestors through hard times in the past has been destroyed. To cap it all, where once they were the salt-of-the-earth, now they are demonised as chavs, or, as Michael Collins showed, airbrushed out of the picture altogether.

“They don’t mention us English,” says the old man, “You wouldn’t think we’d ever existed would ya?”

It's no wonder some of them are angry enough to vote BNP.

So should we welcome the latest initiative to help white working class communities with extra government money and community initiatives? At one level this is a welcome development; poor white communities have long been neglected and it's good to see them getting some of what other groups have been getting for years, even if it is a piffling amount.

But step back for a minute; look at the broader implications. This whole programme is taking place within the framework of multiculturalism. Specialist treatment is being given to a community seen to be disadvantaged and a potential source of trouble for the colonial administrators.

Until recently, the white working class were the majority in Britain. For a few brief moments during the twentieth century they even looked as if they might take over the running of the country completely. Now, they are just another cultural group competing for the largesse and patronage of the liberal state. No white working-class community leaders have emerged yet but it is surely only a matter of time.

Far from being a recognition that multiculturalism has failed, this government initiative represents the latest stage in multiculturalsm's onward march. The white working class is to be treated as just one of many religious, cultural and ethnic groups that make up multicultural Britain.

Who was doing the rioting in Harrow?

Yesterday, John Denham, the secretary of state for communities and local government, warned of 1930s-style fascists on Britain's streets. This is part of his justification for diverting resources away from the fight against Islamic extremism and towards combating militant far-right groups.

The pretext for this is the recent appearance of the English Defence League which has organised protests against mosques and sharia courts during the summer. The Guardian produced a profile of the organisation which is, apparently, hell-bent on bringing mayhem to our streets. The print version helpfully carried a picture of a Sieg-Heiling skinhead, just to show what we're up against.

John Denham's Oswald Mosley comparison was prompted by the trouble in the north-west London suburb of Harrow on Friday. According to various newspaper reports, the English Defence League and another group, Stop Islamification of Europe, commemorated the 9/11 attacks with a protest outside a mosque. Muslim groups turned up to defend their mosque and  a riot ensued, as rightwing and anti-fascist protesters fought each other.

But wait a minute. This BBC report has a slightly different take.

Stop Islamification of Europe (SIOE) said they planned a "peaceful protest" against the building of a five-storey mosque next to the Harrow Central Mosque.

But in a message on their website SIOE said the protest had been called off and organiser Stephen Gash had been arrested.

Police also stopped a number of people, who they believed were heading for the anti-Islamist protest, from getting to the protest area.

"If the SIOE demonstration started it would have resulted in serious disorder," a statement from police said.

So did the 'fascist' demo happen or what? As usual in these circumstances it is best to go to the local papers who tend to have a more accurate account of what happened. Here's the Harrow Times:

A DEMONSTRATION against fascism outside Harrow Central Mosque descend into violence and ugly scenes as groups of young Asian men ran amok through Wealdstone.

Despite earlier calls for calm and peace from community and mosque leaders, hundreds chased people through the streets around the mosque and got into scuffles with police.

On The Bridge, close to Harrow and Wealdstone station, the baying crowd of predominantly Asian young men pelted officers in riot gear with rocks, sticks, glass bottles and in some cases, fireworks.

After being forced down from the bridge, the men chased people through the streets and tried to storm Harrow Civic Centre.

So where were the horrid fascists while all this was going on?

However, the right-wing group failed to materialise....

It appears that the EDL didn't turn up but a gang of Muslim youths went on the rampage anyway.

Friday's violence, which most newspaper headlines imply was perpetrated by the far-right, actually took place when there wasn't a fascist in sight. Realising that they had the numbers, a group of Muslim youths decided to declare that part of Harrow their own for a few hours and it was God help anyone who got in their way.

So, Mr Denham, what should worry us more, a group of people protesting against mosques and sharia law, among whom is a handful of idiots who throw the occasional Nazi salute, or a 1,000 strong mob of armed Muslim thugs running amok on a suburban high-street?

The establishment's liberal consensus

Martin Kettle, writing about the Liberal Democrats' electoral prospects in yesterday's Guardian, concluded that not enough people in Britain are liberals. He may well be right but that certainly hasn't stopped the spread of liberalism. The British people may not be liberal but the political establishment is. Perhaps more accurately, the establishment embraces two versions of liberalism; the social liberalism of the left and the economic liberalism of the right.

In the Conservative Party, economic liberalism triumphed over the traditional Queen-and-Country values that most voters associated with the Tories.  On the left, social liberalism eclipsed the working-class trade unionist politics of the old Labour party.

The Conservatives were happy to sell off the country's arms manufacturers, opening the way for the British Army's weapons and equipment to be made abroad, and privatise the UK's energy, leaving us dependent on foreign gas supplies. The Labour Party became "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", concentrating instead on enacting legislation to promote minority group rights and to prevent criticism of Islam.

The liberal consensus is characterised by a tacit agreement not to challenge each other's version of liberalism. So, when in government, the Conservatives did not try to undo Labour's social liberalism. If anything, the liberal tide became even stronger. During the 1980s and 90s political correctness took root in schools, local authorities and government departments. Words and opinions which had been commonplace in the 1970s were considered unacceptable by the end of the 1980s as many found out to their cost. The Conservatives even gave social liberalism the odd nudge by banning corporal punishment in schools and enacting child protection legislation that removed what little power teachers had left.

Likewise, the Labour Party, when it returned to government, did not undo the Tories' economic liberalism. The City's casino capitalism was, if anything, encouraged and, just as social liberalism continued apace under the Tories, economic liberalism forged ahead under Labour. While Blair and Brown brought in equality legislation and continued the left's ongoing assault on free speech, trade unions remained weak and working-class jobs continued to be casualised, outsourced and offshored. The Labour government didn't care what the investment banks and outsourcing companies did provided that they had Equality and Diversity departments and a good sprinkling of gay, black and Muslim employees.

As I said earlier this year, it's almost as if a tacit deal had been done.

"You can have political correctness, multiculturalism, gay rights and the abolition of corporal punishment in schools if we can have deregulation, tax loopholes, offshoring and outsourcing."

That is the nature of the liberal consensus in British politics. The difference between the parties is that the Conservatives are more interested in pushing economic liberalism while Labour's mission is to advance the social liberalism. The consensus is that neither tries to undo the other's liberalism.

So a Labour government won't implement measures to curb the excesses of investment bankers or to stop venture capitalists ripping the heart out of the UK's last car manufacturer. And don't expect the Tories to repeal Labour's innumerable equality measures or its pernicious Religious Hatred Act.

Martin Kettle is probably right about the British; most of them don't like liberalism or at least, they don't like the versions of it that dominate our main political parties. Not that the opinions of ordinary people count for much.

The establishment's liberal consensus has been built up over decades. Whatever the result of the next election, of one thing we can be sure of is that the next government will be liberal.

British Defence League claims Sikh support for Harrow protest

Apologies once again for the lack of posts. Busy with work and all sorts of other stuff. It never ceases to amaze me that this blog continues to get a steady stream of visitors even when I haven't posted anything for weeks. Thank you all for keeping the faith.

It looks as though the bank holiday weekend, two weeks from now, will be a lively time. The self-styled British Defence League, which organised the anti-Islam demo in Birmingham last week, is planning to return to the city on the Sunday. The day before, the group is organising a demo against a Sharia court in Harrow. Perhaps feeling the need to bolster its non-racist credentials and its manpower, the League claims to have the support of some Sikhs for the latter event. If this is true, things could get very nasty. Harrow is but a short hop from Southall, which has a large Sikh community and Slough, which has a large Muslim one. Anyone who wants to settle a few religious scores, or who just fancies a Saturday afternoon punch-up and a bit of robbing, will jump on the tube to Harrow.

The evidence from last weekend's protest in Birmingham seems to indicate that many youths turned up not to protest but to use the general chaos as cover for street robberies. The police, it seems, were taken by surprise and there have been claims that their numbers in the city centre were depleted because of the over-policing of the Hells Angels' festival, also held last weekend  just outside Birmingham.

According to this letter from an anti-fascist demonstrator, Unite Against Fascism activists agitated the crowd but then completely lost control of the resulting mayhem. This comment quoted on Laban Tall's blog is telling:

The majority of the people who were attacked were random passers by. The “fash” as you call them had long gone by then. If you were a White male passing by the crowd you were going to get a kicking. There was even a foreign White guy who made the mistake of taking pictures of what was going on and he was attacked in front of his young baby who was left unprotected in its pram. Granted the majority of the attacks were not as brutal as the pictures on the Daily Mail Website but i still don’t think it should have happened. Ironically the UAF scarpered when they saw what was beginning to happen with the ethnic minority youths attacking innocent White passers by.....

It brings to mind the demonstrations in Paris a few years ago. There were the French leftie students, out protesting against their horrid fascist government for suggesting that people should perhaps work a bit harder, when a large number of Muslim youths turned up. But, to the surprise and shock of the lefties, who had assumed that the immigrants were on their side, the youths did not want to join their protest at all. They just wanted to beat up the students and nick their phones and iPods.

As I said at the time:

This must all be very confusing for the French dribbling liberal-lefties (yes, they have them over there too).  Haven't they always campaigned for the rights of the Arab and African immigrants?  Aren't they all on the same side against the imperialist bourgeoisie?  It appears not.  It seems that a lot of them were just out to thump a few 'little whites' and to steal a few phones. 

I wonder if similar thoughts were going through the heads of the boys and girls from the UAF as they high-tailed it out of Brum last Saturday afternoon.

Harry Patch, the Last Tommy, has died

After just one week as Britain's oldest man, Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier of the Great War, has died.

Much will be written about Harry's remarkable life this weekend but, as the last survivor of the Western Front, he came to represent all the British Tommies of the First World War. Through him, we still had a living connection to those who fought and died during those four years.

As I have said before, the shock of that war has echoed through the generations; the folk memory of the sadness and sense of loss having been passed on to children and grandchildren. Through people like Harry Patch and Henry Allingham, those feelings found some sort of focus. We could never make it right for the men who gave so much but we could make damned sure that our children and grandchildren learned something from it and kept the memories alive. Both men spent time speaking to school children and Harry inspired some of them so much that they sent him fan mail.

There is now no-one left alive who can remember the horror of the trenches; no-one who can convey the hardship and the sheer terror with quite the same immediacy as a man who was there at the time. I am glad that I heard Harry Patch's stories and had the privilege to witness his tribute to his comrades on the 90th anniversary of the war's end last year.

Because he has come to represent the soldiers of the Great War, there has been talk of giving him a state funeral. This would be a tribute not just to Harry but to his entire generation and way for the nation to acknowledge its debt to them. But, before he died, Harry said that he would prefer a funeral in the Somerset village of Monkton Coombe, where his parents and brothers are buried.

Wherever his funeral is held, the Last Post will be sounded for the Last Tommy. The soldiers of the Great War have now all gone. A whole episode in our history has just passed beyond living memory.

Henry Allingham has died

Henry Allingham, the world's oldest man and the oldest survivor of the First World War, died earlier today.

The BBC is asking people who met him to write in with their memories. I never met him but I saw him a couple of times at the Cenotaph. The first was on the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War and the second was on the 90th anniversary of its end. Both times I felt humbled in the presence of Henry and his former comrades; men who had been through the sort of horrors that I will never know and who gave the best years of their lives for their country.

When I wrote this post on Henry's birthday last year, there were still five British WWI veterans still alive. Now there are only two; the last of that brave generation of men.

In recent years, Henry Allingham did much to teach a new generation about the First World War, visiting schools and often addressing groups of children more than 100 years his junior. He played no small part in the recent revival of interest in that terrible war.

The best tribute we can pay to Henry Allingham and all those of his generation is to keep that memory alive. The bravery, the hardship, the self-sacrifice and the sheer bloody stupidity of Europeans murdering each other on an industrial scale should never be forgotten.

When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.

Yes sir, Chairman Murdoch

Watch what happened when a Fox Business reporter tried to question Chairman Murdoch about phone message theft, hush money and gagging orders.

As soon as Murdoch cuts him off, the interviewer realises he has crossed the line. His fearful Uriah Heep response removes any lingering doubt about the independence of Rupert Murdoch's news outlets.

Hat Tip: 1800 Blogger