Christmas

And so to time of festive cheer
sherry trifles, too much beer
party hats and smell of pine
brussel sprouts and pudding wine

presents, mountain of wrapping paper
broken baubles (feline caper)
Alastair Sim, A Christmas Carol
and down the pub for half (a barrel)

frosted windows open fire
all your stomach can desire
turkey sandwich, brandy butter
visit from the family nutter

the expectations, children frisky
daddy drinking santa’s whiskey
brand new socks, a knitted sweater
the face that hoped for something better

but think of the yuletide underbelly
as you sit swearing at the telly
the many who would gladly swap
their lot for scraps on your table top

two office parties and an in-laws visit
the worst you have to deal with is it?
their Christmas all the more laconic
the odd free soup not gin and tonic

in cold apartments, figures slumping
their pain not caused by joyous jumping
their friends who’d never had an inkling
that into the house was into the sinking

the elderly who’ve no son or daughter
and wait for paisley-patterned slaughter
their memories of long-gone years
can but elicit nostalgic tears

for homeless child in temporary shelter
Christmas is a different helter skelter
resource exhausted come January second
and back out to the streets they’re beckoned

walls closing in on mental cell
the tinsel-bedecked personal hells
for those who live their life in dark
the contrast today is ne’er more stark

so as you sit suffused with drink
perhaps you’d like to stop and think
of the many for whom this time of year
embodies solitude and/or fear

it’s not designed to deflate your mood
or put you off your Christmas food
but let’s try ensuring those on the street
get more than just a bite to eat.

Mediawatch – Stalin Is Back (and this time it’s personal)

I am not an apologist for the current Russian regime any more than I am for the previous Soviet regime, nor am I a holocaust denier or a anti-semite.  It is a pity that I should even have to preface any of my writing with that rather than people judge on content itself but there we go that’s the world and perhaps by me doing so I serve only to perpetuate it.

I saw John Sweeney’s ‘exposé’ on the BBC about the changes in Russian education that are softening the historical message on the Stalin era in schools.  I am not altogether a fan of the Putin regime, at the very least the ideology on which the Soviet Union was founded was theoretically sound, if never properly put into practice.  Putin’s agenda is a great deal shadier though he lacks none of the qualities his Soviet and KGB education and training would have prepared him for.  By the same token though in a Russia that is having to contend with a great many economic problems at a time when its economy is neither really state-nationalised nor free-market driven it is unsurprising that a Putin figure should be seen as necessary by a Russia that has always welcomed strong inwardly nationalistic leadership.  It is the very reason many still have secret admiration for Stalin, just as in other countries Hitler, Mussolini, Franco etc. are seen as having at least brought order to the chaos even if their methods might have been questionable.

Sweeney first approached the historian Igor Dolutsky whose book has been dropped from the syllabus, making him a subjective witness on one side of the story, and then bullied and berated Aleksandr Filippov, the historian responsible for the more revisionist view of history that seeks to downplay the attrocities of Stalin’s tenure and herald him more as a great leader from Russia’s past.  Filippov explains “It is wrong to write a textbook that will fill the children who learn from it with horror and disgust about their past and their people. A generally positive tone for the teaching of history will build optimism and self-assurance in the growing young generation and make them feel as if they are part of their country’s bright future. A history in which there is good and bad, things to be proud of and things that are regrettable. But the general tone for a school textbook should still be positive.” which will make a great many ears prick up as being an area that needed to be handled very carefully indeed, but would I have no doubt raise far fewer eyebrows were it either to be taken as applying to a book in the West about colonialism, slavery or a book about Christianity.

When looking at the Great Famine of 1933 where effectively the direct policies of Stalin led to deaths that are still unquantifiable but run without doubt into multiple millions, Sweeney describes how  the 2009 “positive history” textbook dedicates 83 pages to Stalin’s industrialisation whilst only one paragraph details the famine.  I wonder if Sweeney has read many general English history books since his schooldays where the Irish famine, also very much the result of central government policy, receives little more than a footnote within pages and pages of irrelevant English royalist pomp and ceremony.  This is not to excuse the lack of detail of the Soviet famine, the young must be educated in how something happened so as to see the dangers of things in the present and future but it is also quite easy to see how it might be argued that Stalin’s industrialisation and collectivisation has much more relevance now because it continues to exercise an influence on Russian infrastructure, especially agriculture where an event that happened over seventy years ago is more detached.  I wonder also whether Sweeney applied the same critical eye over Russian Tsarist history and the revisionism that has taken place there in the post-Soviet world.  If one takes the example of famines for direct comparison how much attention is paid to the 1899 famine in which over half a million died, at the same time as which Tsar Nicolas II was commissioning Fabergé eggs in a display of opulence emblematic of the Marie Antoinette school of regal diplomacy.

One must be careful not to criticise Sweeney’s documentary solely on the basis that he lacks the charisma of many hard-nosed investigative journalists.  Sweeney has built himself something of a reputation by virtue of his irascible temper as shown by the many links to his interviews with the Scientologists in which he is seen getting very angry indeed.  Whilst making for good television this does not necessarily constitute a style conducive to finding out things that people do not want to tell you.  He is highly adversarial in style and comes across, at least in this program and the clips I have seen of him as dogmatic.  This is not a crime, nor at times even a bad thing as a presenter, but it is something that needs to be labelled very carefully as comment and not necessarily as objective news.

Sweeney offers a number of what are supposed to be ’startling facts’ for example that Stalin was voted 3rd in an all-time list of greatest Russians in a recent poll, but one has to consider that Churchill remains top of a corresponding British list and whilst I would not like to draw direct parallels between the two there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Churchill was capable of a number of seriously questionable decisions, such as his home office white paper in 1911 calling for the sterilisation of the mentally ill.  Let us not forget also that Isambard Kingdom Brunel came second on the British all-time list in no small part to Jeremy Clarkson’s erudite and amusing portrayal of the engineer.  Such polls are frequently about entertainment, and often choose the cuddly or popular image of a person rather than the less palatable things that might have been going on behind the facade.

The trouble is that each country sees its leaders differently from those countries where this leader may have exercised malign influence, the internal association will often be for mundane daily things that people may seen as having been better than the present whilst externally that person is synonymous only with the most headline-grabbing events.  You cannot choose who you decide to hold responsible for war crimes, Stalin committed a great many, as many as Hitler and the Nazi regime and was in many ways personally responsible for more even than the Nazi machine due to his own paranoia and cult of personality.  However after the Second World War the allies chose the sides they were on and after the major known Nazis were put on trial at Nuremburg a huge number of war criminals simply faded into the background, as they were not seen as the enemy any more.  Since then Augusto Pinochet, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Francisco Franco, Tacho Somoza, Kim Jong-Il, the Interhamwe, George W Bush amongst a great many others have all carried out operations that should answer the charges of war crimes and/or genocide and all have had no censure and no trial, despite many attempts to bring them to justice.  Some, such as Robert Mugabe have been reprimanded as if treating them like an eight year old pupil might have an effect on a small-time megalomaniac, others such as Saddam Hussein have just pissed off the wrong people and ironically been handed over for trial by war criminals far worse than themselves.  Victor’s justice is everywhere in the present and the past, if one looks at the Bosnian War as an example, it cannot be denied that genocide took place however if one were to look through the standard media sources you would be hard pressed to see anyone other than the Serbs as responsible and this is by no means the whole story.  That is not to absolve the blame from the Serbs or any party in any way merely to point out that a justice system that functions on this premise makes it not about a prosecution for the actual crimes committed but a prosecution based on whose side you happened to be on at any given time.

Had this been a broad-reaching survey of many countries and condemnation of the Orwellian practice of changing history to shape the future it would have had a great deal more legitimacy, as it was it become an individual tirade against one country for a practice that has been widespread across the world for generations, that of airbrushing the less palatable actions of the past from the history books so as to give an undue preponderance to the events portraying the nation as a great, munificent and benign one.  Of course that may be because Sweeney himself has been educated in a nation that has become something of the master of this practice, how else could one explain swathes of people still hankering after the days of the “We rule it map of the world” of the ‘civilising British Empire’?

Song Of The Day ~ The Beatles – Back In The USSR

Climate Change – The Great Red Herring Of The Green Agenda

Now that grabbed your attention didn’t it?! I’m sure no-one would expect me to be a believer in the right-wing theory that it’s all bollocks and just a trojan horse for the environmentalist lobby. Bear with me, I have not suddenly had a Road to Damascus (Texas) conversion!

What is quite clear is that there are those from a scientific perspective who say that climate change is a real threat and is either caused by, or exacerbated by the emissions and profligacy of humans. There are also those who claim that climate change either does not exist or is merely a cyclical meteorological pattern that has existed for as long as the Earth has and will continue to change the base climate regardless of the actions of the beasts living on the planet. What I do not understand is how this can have been the prevailing argument for so long when it could be rendered easily redundant. What this has in fact done is given the neo-liberals and neo-capitalists a chance to fudge the issue and spend endless years comparing the science and statistics of various positions, which the politicians have then picked up on and postulated at the relevant summits in order to not actually do anything about it.

What remains an issue without contention is the fact that we are running out of the substances that currently form the backbone of our energy provision. There is no science to suggest that this has been a hoax, the debate is merely over just how long each substance will last until it is exhausted. For some of us it will be within our lifetime, for others it may be in the lifetime of our children.

There are many potential reasons for this obfuscation of the real problem. Firstly for the corporations that have a vested interest in the energy industries their agenda is to maximise their profit for as long as possible whilst at the same time allowing themselves time to put the feelers out into other markets that they may be able to control to the same extent as they do at present. If one believes in a capitalist system of business, profit and market economics one can hardly blame them for this, to do anything else would be not to be fulfilling their mandate to maximise the companies profits.

[Some might say that this is an over-simplification and that companies have a vested interest in making research and development key in order to continue their dominance of the market but this is, in my opinion, not to take account of the very basic facts that the heart of capitalist ethic is to take more out than you put in, this is profit. The less you can put in and the more correspondingly you can take out the better the profit and the higher the sense of success. In times when money and industry abound inward investment may be seen as a good idea but in times of economic downturn the demands of the shareholders do not decrease as their purses are stretched but the company's access to money will diminish. The pressures therefore to take higher risks are dramatically increased, as again can be seen from the example of the banks.]

In addition to the corporational involvement one must consider the governmental angle in this. For the United States the demise of oil will be something of an economic catastrophe and not simply because they run larger and less fuel-efficient cars than anyone else. The US economy is propped up by the very fact that oil is generally traded in dollars, this trade is one of the principle reasons why confidence has remained in the US economy and the US is more than a little keen to preserve this as can be seen by the measures they will go to in order to protect this trade. Already the US has declared oil fields legitimate military targets, it has engaged in war on Afghanistan on dubious premises in order to protect the Caspian oil and gas pipeline and then shored up control of the Iraqi oilfields by illegal regime change and the installation of a puppet state. It has declared as an ‘axis of evil’ those states that have attempted to switch their oil trading currency to Euros. It is true that much of the reason for the change in these countries policies is to be specifically antagonistic to the US but that in itself is not a crime, and neither is their choice of currency. However without the trade in oil there will be less investment in dollars, without that investment the US economy will no longer have sufficient confidence to hold the debts it is currently allowed to hold and loans will be called in. It is on a larger scale again the same situation as has happened to many of the banks over the last twelve months.

The cost of not changing the methods by which we power our economies is that we will enter a period of drastic inflation of energy prices without the wherewithal for most ordinary people to be able to source their energy from elsewhere. This means that the energy shortage will hit the poorest the worst. As the debates continue so the time within which to do something about it diminishes and therefore the costs to actually make a wholescale change in time rise substantially. It is worth remembering that it is not merely individuals that will suffer from massively higher energy prices, so too the small business will become less and less viable as their smaller profits will be eaten up by larger overheads. We are likely to be left with the larger conglomerates that have, at least in the short-term, the profit margins to absorb some of these increases. Of course the conglomerates will have more of a monopoly at this point and will be able to pass on price rises to the customers, the lesser choice coupled with the likely rationing of fuel will make customers far more hamstrung than they are used to being now.

One of the critical things that illustrates graphically that people in power have not grasped the true nature of the problem is that the main governmental force for an energy replacement is nuclear power. It may well be that nuclear power is a lower-carbon method of power generation but this reduction comes at an extremely high price. The dangers of nuclear waste and potential for nuclear meltdown are well-known and in their worst case scenario quite catastrophic, one must add to this the security risks of nuclear weapons and also the fact that if using Uranium there is a finite resource, if Plutonium then the resource is less finite but the risks higher.

Why is it therefore that each new house is not being built with solar panels on its roof? Why are the larger rivers and estuaries not being looked at for tidal, and why critically are schemes such as large scale solar panel development in the Mediterranean or Atlantic which could power much of Europe not being given cross-national funding in order to be online as soon as possible. Instead people are being asked if they like windfarms and many communities have responded that they do not and do not wish such ‘eyesores’ to be in their vicinity. One does wonder how many of said communities would prefer a nuclear reactor blocking the skyline? Furthermore it is quite clear that these communities are being allowed to take a purely selfish view, or the smaller picture of the view through their window rather than looking at the bigger picture of whether a country’s economy survives and all the comforts they are used to alongside it. In my view communities that wish to ensure they are not in the target areas for sources of renewable energy should be allowed to remove themselves from the national grid and be responsible for sourcing their own power. If they produce a net surplus then they may choose to sell this back to the national grid thus not only creating a disincentive for disassociation but perhaps an incentive for very small areas that do wish to be progressive. Areas such as these would remove further pressures on the national grid itself and give impetus to communities looking at being ahead of the game. A community that is self-sufficinet in power terms is far more likely to be able to withstand the further pressures (should there be any) of global warming.

For industrial purposes it is not feasible solely for each community to generate power for its inhabitants and there needs to be a greater range of solutions to cater for the larger users. These should be looked at where possible in offshore solutions. Companies that pay money to research and development of renewable sources of energy provision should be given subsidised energy prices for any of such energy that is generated. Companies that do not can pay tax on the fossil fuel generated energy that can and should solely be used for further development and construction of renewable sources of energy.

In the case of transport infrastructure must be replaced and set up to ensure that those who do not wish to use cars should have a viable alternative both financially and logistically. Those using cars where such an alternative exists can be taxed and this revenue ring-fenced for transport spending to increase and improve the network. Transport must however come under the umbrella of local government, it must have as its primary function the service provision and not that of making a profit. Each town must have a railway station and each village at the very least a regular bus service to the nearest amenities including hospital, schools, shopping, railway station and industrial parks.

In the case of foodstuffs it is ridiculous for farmers in Africa to be growing cash crops that are transported by air to western countries whilst millions on the continent go hungry. this must be seen as a supra-national problem and not an “I’m all right jack” situation. The West must look after its own food needs and we should all get more used to eating the food that is seasonal and can be transported short distances easily. There are many methods by which such food can be saved throughout the year so as to vary diet.

You may be under the impression that renewable energy cannot sustain large economies and is therefore only feasible as a part of the solution, but this is information generally fed by an ill-informed media and those with an agenda, whether hidden or otherwise. Scientists have in fact calculated that a large solar panel development in the Western Med/Atlantic could generate most of the power for the whole of Europe. of course politically this would necessitate an interesting set of compromises but nevertheless it proves that such methods can be employed were the will and then the finance there to support them.

It is likely that at present we still have another fossil fuels left that we have the ability to make up the shortfall whilst we increase renewable energy to take over full capacity, there will however be a tipping point at which there will not be enough left to do this. I am at present at a loss to see just how a move to a renewable economy is in any way a bad idea, it completely transcends the climate change argument because it makes long-term social and economic sense, if therefore it could be implemented we would see the results of the climate change argument from the position of already having safeguarded our economies and development. Where is this not a win-win?

Song Of The Day ~ Nubla – Nada Se Olvida

Religion And Creativity

It is one of those age old arguments that as atheists we hear trotted out all the time by those of a more organised religious bent, “look at all the wonderful things that have been created as a result of religion” this is to refer to the architecture, art,  literature and music, on the face of it they certainly appear to have a point.  The things created by those inspired by faith are indeed often most marvellous and to be enjoyed by the religious and the secular.  However does the notion of this creativity only existing as a result of faith really stand up to scrutiny?

A sub-section of this argument is how much poorer we would be if all the things created with religious intent were to be removed from the world but this is only true if one takes this in isolation rather than imagining all the things that those creative people might have done had they not had ‘God’ as their inspiration.  it would be ludicrous to assume that there would be a creative vacuum if not for religion for there are many people that continue to create despite an absence of faith, or create in spite of their faith by which I mean that it does not seem to have a bearing on the content of what they do.

As well as the great works of art celebrating faith and “for the glory of God” there are a great many that celebrate an appreciation of nature from a secular standpoint.  Likewise many great artistic movements such as Art Deco are very much more anchored in an appreciation of an aesthetic ideal than they are in the attributing of that to any particular source.  The example of Art Deco celebrates a love of angles and cleanliness and stark contrast between blacks and whites, I cannot think of where one might shoehorn a religious influence onto this, feel free to correct me if I am overlooking something.  One of the most common themes that inspires creativity is love, whether the positive or the negative aspects of this and love affects humans regardless of their religious or spiritual beliefs.  Love and the capacity for love whether enjoyed or endured is something that exists innately in humans and would do so even were it to be proven there were no supreme being, for it is most frequently, though not exclusively, intertwined with the biological necessity to reproduce.

It is also vital to remember that many of those in ancient times educated to a standard to be able to write literature and music were very often monks, subsequently the church retained a strong influence on the content of this education when it was widened out to more people and one only has to look at the primary education in most countries in the developing world to see how this continues to be the case.  This however serves only to give direction frequently to people’s urges it does not create the urge from nothing.  Humans are inherently creative and the desire for self- and circumstantial improvement and advancement has and will continue to drive us for as long as we exist as a species.  Sometimes people create in a desire to be accepted, to have their legitimacy in society underlined and this is a clear example of where in any inherently religious society their creativity may be channeled into this area.

One must also be careful to differentiate religion with spirituality, the one sucks in the products of people’s creativity whilst the other inspires them to create.  Were people intent on building great wonders to house the homeless or educate the children with all the verve and flair that many ancient architects did for religious purposes then perhaps we would have created a society a great deal more civilised.  This would not mean we were building to worship ourselves, merely that whilst a building should not be seen and created to be merely functional it does lose some of its raison d’etre if it does not function as anything.  Sometimes the sheer beauty of a thing has its aesthetic quality authenticated  by its functionality when this can be something that alleviates the depressing effect of the mundane of other things that function in this area.  The Hoover building in West London is a piece of architectural beauty to lovers of Art Deco and would be were it merely a monolith which served no purpose but it stands head and shoulders above many office buildings of previous and subsequent precisely because it is simply an office building, that someone should design with both beauty and function in mind is indeed a great thing.  Literature is a collection of words and we can appreciate words sometimes for their own aesthetic, but they are more powerful when used by an accomplished wordsmith to convey meaning within context.  This is not to strip things down to mere functionalism where the structure of something should only be considered with reference to its eventual purpose neither is it to say that things can be rendered beautiful only in spite of their purpose but that the combination of good function and aesthetic value can itself ascend to a different plane.

Humans need to be inspired, hence we have concepts like muses etc.  and in this state can create wonderful things, religion has hitherto been but one of the methods by which they can be inspired by not the only one and in my opinion it must be weighed against the many negatives it has also come  to typify.  One could say that a great many wrongs have been done in the name of love as well but love cannot be detached from the human mind whilst religion clearly can, and, to some of us perhaps, should be.

Song Of The Day ~ Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bad Moon Rising

Executing Justice

 

I watched Channel 4’s parallel Britain drama The Execution Of Gary Glitter because I felt kind of compelled to as something that is likely to ignite debate about a very emotive subject.

What I think the program did well was keep out of much of the subjective judgement of the pros and cons of the death penalty in the sense that it did not overtly seem to favour one side or the other, it was after all a drama.  However it did venture partially into that area by providing the arguments in the characters represented within the drama and by the closing credits which cited a Harris Poll that stated 54% of the British public supported the reintroduction of the death penalty.

Unlike some people criticising the drama I think the example of Gary Glitter was a good one because it is high profile enough for most people to have some opinion on it.  There is likely to be very little debate as to any miscarriage of justice in Glitter’s case as it is widely presumed that he is guilty.  Therefore, putting the judicial situation to one side for a moment, the arguments in his case come very much down to whether or not one supports the execution of people who have been proven categorically to be guilty of the most heinous crimes.

The drama focused on a couple of points that are perhaps fanciful (maybe designed to be) in the main case namely that (a) sentence should be carried out within 30 days of it’s being passed and (b) that the decision to implement the death sentence itself lay with the jury and not with the presiding judge.  Both of these points I would have thought are complete non-starters in legal terms.  In the model the drama described the only appeal process possible was to the Home Secretary hence the ability to keep the timeframe to 30 days.  The judiciary are not likely to cede their sovereignty in such matters nor should they.  To place elected politicians in the situation of having the last say in the serving of judgement would be catastrophic as it would mean the likelihood of judgement served based on public opinion and not necessarily on jurisprudence.

I was not impressed with the dealing of the counter-arguments to the death penalty which I think were restricted very much to a bourgeois middle-class liberalism that only serves to inflame the supporters of capital punishment and does nothing to further the case to prevent its reintroduction.  Not everyone who stands against the death penalty is a wooly-minded liberal and neither are the most cogent arguments against it.

Looking at the arguments in favour of the death penalty which were certainly voiced in the program a lot, these press all the populist, self-righteous and vengeful buttons and, allowed to go unchecked, are as persuasive as the idea of immigration controls.

The most common view is that the death penalty is a deterrent to the most severe of crimes, though I believe most of the people who cite this could not if pressed come up with any statistics that would in any way back this up.  Certainly my impression is that you are not less likely to be murdered in the states of America where the death penalty is enforced than you are in those where it is not.  With very little research it appears that the FBI statistics support my position and not that of those thinking it is a deterrent.

The second idea is that there are certain people who are just evil.  This rather depends therefore on whether you accept evil as a value, or a concept that exists.  If so it certainly packages things into the more black and white, which humans tend to prefer, rather than successions of greys which are a great deal more ambiguous.  It would be very nice and easy to say ‘well that person murders people because they are just evil’ but the debate should not actually end there, though most of the proponents of the evil hypothesis would prefer it to.  If such a thing as evil exists how does it manifest itself?  Are some people born evil?  Is it something that people can become later on?  If the former then there must be some form of genetic predisposition and therefore is it not a good idea to study such a thing in order to ascertain whether or not it can be identified?  If in fact ‘evil’ is something that comes about through nurture then there must be identifiable factors at certain points of a person’s upbringing that could be studied to determine which of these changed a person’s intrinsic moral value.  What if evil were to exist but be a combination of both of these factors?  Therein surely still lies the basis for scientific research to determine whether there are common triggers that may make people in certain circumstances or at certain times more disposed to acts that the majority would consider evil.  Furthermore once a person is ‘evil’ is that it, is there no turning back?  If this were to be true are there different grades of evil, can you just become a bit nasty or is it a case of once turned you have the dark lord as your master?  If there remains hope (and surely the Christians amongst you must believe this to be the case for it is written thus) then would it not be verging on sinful to deny someone the chance to realise their wrongs and repent?  Apparently God rejoices far more when a sinner repents than ‘he’ does over someone who’s always righteous.  Possibly because the always righteous are either sickeningly sanctimonious and therefore very boring company, or they are merely non-existent.  How does God feel if you decide for ‘him’ and put someone to death?

This is of course leaving aside the idea that evil is an arbitrary subjective concept that has been invented in order to brush things under the carpet that disturb us but we do not understand.  After all a great many humans retain a naive belief that there is an innate moral justice in the world, that there will, that there must be, be some balance.  The God theories are but one manifestation of this.  Taking the God theory into the debate though, the bible may say an eye for an eye (better refuted by Ghandi) but it also says “judge not lest ye be judged” and Jesus says that one must forgive ones neighbour 77 times 7, he does not go on to list a hold load of caveats such as unless your neighbour is just evil or has committed certain things.  Ah but the bible has commandments and ‘thou shalt not kill’ is one of them so does this not therefore show a clear transgression of the most basic moral code?  Yet there is no commandment that thou shalt not rape, or interfere with children but we still know this to be wrong and it is enshrined in law.  Are some laws therefore more important than others?  Or is it the adherence to a code of laws that is key?  If the state kills how does it square this with the thou shalt not kill commandment?  Are there a group of people for whom the commandments do not apply?  If so who is to say who is in these groups?  Is it simply a majority thing, that if you’re in the biggest group you can decide that they don’t apply to you today?  The evil and religious argument in general is riddled with holes and fraught with moral subjectivism and frankly to make a code of laws on these premises is going against all forms of logic.

A lot of supporters of the death penalty ask what one should do if you know categorically that someone is guilty.  This of course depends on one’s view of categorically, it reminds me of the case of Nick Ingram who was executed in Georgia on the 8th of April 1995.  For Americans Ingram’s case was no different to so many others and it only came to light in the UK because he was of joint British-American nationality.  In April 1995 a retrial was called for because it emerged Ingram had been given anti-psychotic drugs during his trial which made him appear cold and emotionless and had potentially a detrimental effect on how he was seen in court and by the jury.  In Ingram’s case there was no refuting that he appeared to have carried out the crime, Ingram’s defence hinged on the claim that he had blacked out after a drunken binge and remembered nothing of the bungled robbery and subsequent murder.  This might be seen as an easy defence, but what if it were true?  Are we really prepared to stake people’s lives on the fact that we think this is provable one way or another?  Ingram served 12 years on Death Row and was granted last minute reprieves more than once including the last one one hour before his scheduled execution.  Despite pleas of clemancy by the then Archbishop of Canterbury and numerous backbench MPs Prime Minister John Major who claimed to be against capital punishment refused to intervene and plead for clemency.  American pro-death penalty supporters cheered the hearse that drove to the prison on the night he was put to death by electric chair.  He was 31.

I am also often asked what I would do were I in the situation of the victim, ie were someone in my family killed – well this is a non-starter, the law is not made by people who are involved in a case for they cannot be anything other than subjective, the law has to take a dispassionate view as to what is right and just.  You hear a great many people wronged by people who do not play the vengence card for as they rightly say “it will not bring x back.”

Another argument I have heard mentioned is cost – that it must surely cost less to put someone to death than to keep them alive at the taxpayer’s expense for their life’s incarceration.  Are there any figures to support this?  My gut instinct is that the legal framework that must be gone through for a death penalty case and the appeals processes etc. are probably vastly more expensive than the cost of keeping someone locked up.  According to statistics in California the additional cost of an inmate on Death Row is $90,000 a year more than an inmate who is serving life with no prospect of parole in a maximum security prison.

The case of Gary Glitter is interesting because it highlights another potential problem, the fact that the media hugely influences and manipulates our opinion about people and circumstances.  Frequently we are told that other countries standards are not up to our own, the mistrust of foreigners and foreign governments is rife, and yet in the Gary Glitter case one is expected to take all the evidence of a Vietnamese court as red.  Now it may very well be the case that the allegations are completely well-founded and Glitter is indeed guilty, he certainly does not come across as a likeable man nor full of remorse.  However were he to be innocent of the crimes this would very likely be his behaviour, it certainly does not prove guilt one way or another.  There is nothing that precludes innocent people from being bastards, you don’t have to be likeable to be law-abiding.

Finally though I have to come back to the case of the Guildford Four where in 1975 Mr Justice Donaldson, who also presided over the Maguire Seven trial, expressed regret that the Four had not been charged with treason, which then still had a mandatory death penalty.  In 1977 the IRA made the British aware that the Guildford Four were innocent of the bombings but the convictions were only quashed in 1989 when the appeal judge declared that the police had lied and fabricated notes and documents in order to fit the case they wished to present.  The overturning of the convictions came too late for Guiseppe Conlan, had Judge Donaldson had his way it would have come too late for ten other innocent individuals.

Song Of The Day ~ Idlewild – Love Steals Us From Loneliness

 

A Face Of Fascism And A Whiff Of Sulphur

I was one of those not happy about the notion of seeing BNP leader Nick Griffin on the BBC’s flagship Question Time but knowing that it was something that had to be done in order to face up to a growing trend towards the extreme-right in this country.  My principle concern was that Griffin would be given a soft option, an apathetic audience with relatively soft questions and toothless politicians. Whilst I do not believe my worst fears were realised I have nonetheless some serious concerns regarding how the debate and Griffin himself were handled.

During the first question on whether the BNP should be allowed to adopt Churchill as one of their own, Jack Straw was afforded nearly five minutes, unheard of certainly in my experience of the program.  Straw used the time to give the usual speech about tolerance and fighting the war against fascism etc etc.  it came across, at least to me as pretty easy pickings really, there was little of genuine interest or personal stamp on it.  It was the same sort of asinine bollocks that condensed down to its minimal is the “I’m not a racist but…”

Griffin himself declared that Churchill would have found the BNP his natural home as fighting against its own foreign invasion.  Bonnie Greer pointed out that of course having an American mother with Mowhawk ethnicity meant that Churchill might not even have been allowed in the party but Griffin was undeterred.  Churchill he said spent much of his early political career fighting mass immigration and warning of the dangers of Islam.  Churchill has very much enjoyed the same sort of approach to criticism as immigration does now, I found it interesting that none of the panel mentioned that Churchill in his early political life was an ardent eugenicist and advocated the sterilisation of the mentally ill in a Home Office paper he tabled in 1911.

According to the 2001 census the population of Britain still consists of 92% of people who classify themselves as white, according to the CIA factbook 77% of the United Kingdom as a whole are English with a further 15% made up by Scottish, Welsh and Irish.  Griffin’s stated view to return to a Britain that is 99% White British is therefore clearly incitement to ethnic cleansing.  Bearing in mind London accounts for a huge amount of the modern immigrant population with, according to The Guardian an estimated 30% or 2.2 million claiming in 2005 to have been born outside the UK that leaves very little to spread around the rest of the country.

However according to Griffin 84% of the total population support the BNP’s policy on immigration.  Hang on, run that by me again – 84%, which represents 50 million people in the United Kingdom as a whole, or if you like, the entire White English population and then some.  Griffin further asserts that two thirds of the immigrant population support the policy too.  Is this an example of them pulling the rope up behind them?  We will never know for when asked where this statistic had come from Griffin could not come up with an answer.  Which is code for, I made it up and hoped I could just float it out there without justification.

Griffin’s true colours do occasionally show, he is simply not slick enough to keep himself entirely behind the mask.  Interesting though that whilst he chooses to identify the “indigenous” Britons as those who arrived 17000 years ago he chooses to say that “Britain must remain a fundamentally British and Christian country.”  Interesting because for nearly 16000 of those years Britain was not a Christian country at all.  Clearly Griffin is happy to pick and choose what he likes and offer a very subjective revisionist view of history.  This was shown up by Bonnie Greer again who criticised the lack of mention of the Romans in the BNP’s take on British history, not merely for the fact that they were foreign invaders (not that the Celts or the tribes who came before them were really any different since much of Britain had only become inhabitable after the end of the Ice Age.  People did not suddenly come out of cryogenic suspension on the land they had to come from abroad.

It was also quite evident that Griffin is not a lover of homosexual men, he claims to be speaking for many people when he says the sight of two men kissing makes him feel deeply uncomfortable.  I wonder if he finds two women kissing equally unpleasant.  None of the politicians on the panel made a particularly big play against this point either.

The program, in general, was in a way reminiscent of George Galloway in Big Brother, a man who claimed to be in it for the ideals and yet shown to be quite clearly out of their depth due to the arrogance of their own self-belief.  Griffin wrought his hands and tried to smarm and obfuscate the direct questions wherever he could.  It was compere David Dimbleby though who brought up many of the cogent points that showed Griffin up for the rank amateur he really is.  ”If you look at the things I’m quoted to have said…” Griffin protested, to which Dimbleby asked immediately which quotes had been attributed to him that were not true.  ”Too many to mention” Griffin replied.  This was not however a BNP broadcast, or a short radio interview, or standing outside court being questioned by journalists, this was a serious political program compared by a presenter of considerable experience.  Dimbleby did not let Griffin off the hook and queried if Griffin had therefore never denied the holocaust.  Griffin’s answer spoke volumes for its lack of substance.  ”I’ve not got a conviction for holocaust denial.”

I think all but the most rabid fascist party supporters knew quite clearly what this meant.

Suffice to say I believe the only two people who came out of the affair with any dignity were Bonnie Greer and David Dimbleby.  What worries me very much about such an event is that there still seems to be this naive consensus amongst the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives that no-one really supports the BNP they’re just doing it out of protest.  As such they drastically underestimate the lack of education about serious issues of our time and by refusing to engage on proper policy debates and publicly shoot down the odious characters of the far-right they allow a continued perception that these people are somehow swashbuckling political mavericks who say what everyone is thinking but no mainstream politician dares say.  This has happened before on numerous occasions and is generally a clear road to fuel fascism in society at large and at the very least an acquiescence of policies that one might expect educated people to be appalled by.  The three politicians on the QT panel were considered to be relative heavyweights at yet their arguments were sufficiently dilute as to almost be tacit acquiescence.  They have for too long hidden behind the notion that there is no place for extremism whilst the political hegemony has become more and more right-wing, such that some things considered mainstream now would in days gone by have been seen as very much on the path to fundamentalism.

In truth Griffin came across for what he was, an arrogant man with fascist-leanings who is not especially erudite but has been ostracised and vilified to the point of having become practically a living martyr and regarded as a dangerous intellectual only amongst his party cronies, themselves perhaps the lowest common denominator of cerebral evolution.  I expect to hear him come out and say Enoch Powell was right in his “rivers of blood” speech but I do not expect to hear people allow him to get away with that unchallenged.  When are the rivers of blood coming?  There are now enough immigrants in Britain that would have made Powell’s eyes pop out but there is still no rivers of blood.  Tension, yes, there is plenty of that, caused in no small part by the polarisation of communities into immigrant and non-immigrant by the right-wing anti-immigration agenda.

What Griffin is not is out of touch, and herein lies the chilling postscript of the piece for he has, like the failed Austrian painter he would so dearly love to imitate, managed to exploit public malaise and disenfranchisement and stir up division and hatred against easy target sections of the populations.  Those even more disenfranchised than the “indigenous.”  He has used the classic tactics of inaccurate hyperbole and erroneous statistics and the mainstream politicians have consistently allowed him and his party to dictate the agenda due to their own failure, or inability, to address the central issues on the table.  Make no mistake this is not the end of the story and if we are to avoid the examples of Germany and Italy of the 1930s a great deal of work is to be done.

Song Of The Day ~ Fleetwood Mac – Dragonfly

Reasons To Feel Bollocks Part 3

With sincere and heartfelt apologies to the late great Ian Dury

Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed
Why did you get up out the bed

Reasons to feel bollocks, part three

1 2 3

Cold North wind in Winter, sexing of a sprinter,
taking out a splinter and rain
US War on terror, measles mumps rubella,
chicken salmonella and period pain

Articulated lorries, landfill in the quarries
a politician’s sorries plus expenses
Ryanair union-busting, Would-be leaders husting
bankers fiscal lusting – nuclear defences

Channel 4 Big Brother, my bloody children’s Mother
voting for the other – Pussycat dolls
All of Dan Brown’s books, too many TV cooks
the boss’s dirty looks – gangsta’s molls

swine flu epidemic, conservative polemic
redundant academic – the BNP
plague of fecking wasps, fundamental mosques
Yeltsin from Sverdlovsk – herbal tea

Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three

1 2 3

Health Service cuts,
being kicked in the nuts,
clothes from sweatshop labour

Sarkozy in Paris,
Living next door to Alice,
death of Richard Harris

no sex for a while, Jeremy Kyle
a dose of Johnny Giles

High School Musical 3, get nothing for free
Nintendo Wiinjury
taramasalata, markets that won’t barter
we don’t need no modern Magna Carta

nothing left to study, blocking online buddy
30-something fuddy duddy
extraordinary renditions, ignoring of petitions
freeze of pay and conditions

lack of any silence, domestic violence
no social conscience

Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three

1 2 3

No, no dear dear
Perhaps next year
or maybe even never

in which case

Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three

1 2 3

Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three

1 2 3
Reasons to feel bollocks, part three

Song Of The Day ~ Ian Dury And The Blockheads – Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3

Better Start Packing

It is rare I listen to a political speech these days, even rarer that it should be one of a Conservative politician but I am in the unique position of staring down the barrel of a gun I pointed at myself some years ago when I promised that “if that fucker Osborne ever gets any real power I’m leaving the country.”  There is now the very real possibility that my time may come in less than nine months when this objectionable twerp who was in the year above me at school becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer following what can only be called the foregone conclusion of the next election.

According to Gideon “Call me George” Osborne there is going to be some belt-tightening and apparently “we are all in it together.”  Well we are unless we are earning less than £18k or stand to inherit anywhere between £300k to £999,999.  The first figure is fair enough, it is wholeheartedly wrong for those at the lower end of the spectrum to be targeted, though any of them with any memory will be cautious about believing that the Tories will always give them exemption from any cost-cutting measures.  The inheritance tax issue is rather more baffling.  Firstly those for whom it will benefit are highly unlikely to be swing voters in the norm, this is something for the most wealthy alone, but secondly it is a glimpse into a clear sign that this is not a new Conservative party but the same old ‘nasty party’ in younger clothing, however much wool it may contain.  The rise in the threshold of inheritance tax will cost £3.1bn, which when you consider that the saving attributed to the entire public sector pay freeze will net only £7bn puts this crass policy into some perspective.  We in the public sector will run at a loss getting progressively worse off in real terms for the duration of the next parliament in order that Lord and Lady Ponsonby-Smythe can use the full whack of Daddy, the 13th Earl of Ffarquar’s estate to pay for the refurbishment of the East Wing at Chateau Chinless.

Osborne’s speech would have you believe that it is the Tories who will safeguard 100,000 frontline public sector jobs as a result of the pay freeze, and by inference that the Labour policies will put these jobs in jeopardy.  However if you read closer, he is not saying that, he is saying that the saving gained by freezing the pay of public sector workers is in effect equivalent to 100,000 workers, ie their salaries.  This is an important distinction, for were Osborne to become the next chancellor he would have the wherewithal to control the budget for the public sector but he would not have any say-so in how this budget is spent in individual institutions and neither would his ministerial colleagues.  Therefore any change in budgets could still mean exactly the same number of redundancies if institutions choose not to see their staff as their primary asset, as has already been seen across large sections of the education sector.  Even Howard Davies the director of the LSE who was relatively effusive about Osborne’s speech said that the saving of public sector jobs was “unachievable”.

Another example of the Tories lupine rather than ovine qualities comes in the form of the “married or bust” proposals that they wish to introduce.  We are to believe that if you are married you are far more likely to stay together than if you are not and that therefore ‘for the children’ these measures must be brought in.  Since around 49% of co-habiting couples are not married it is clear there will be a great deal of losers from this, many of whom will have less Conservative or conservative ideals.  Would that another party might turn this into a vote winner for themselves but such is the C(c)onservative hegemony there will be little capital made of it.  Again there was little flesh on the bone as to how much this would cost, one presumes the money saved by drastically reducing the benefits of the single families would be sunk into propping up the couples.  If you could prove that your chosen sexual preference gender found you utterly repugnant would you be able to take the government to the European Court of Human Rights for discrimination against the ugly?

When it comes to pensions we are all going to have to work longer, this does not I’m sure come as much of a surprise to most people and the raising of the age to 66 is merely a hastening of a policy already brought in by Labour.  What is not addressed is the great deal of difficulty faced by many people in finding employment in later life.  Courts have recently stated that companies do have a right to refuse to let someone work past 60 in the public sector though they should be encouraged to allow them to work on.  If it is mandatory that people wait until 66 to be able to claim their state pension then it is in fact merely shifting the burden from pension to state benefit for a large number of these people at the lower end of the scale.  Those for whom it has less effect are likely those who can afford to do without the state pension anyway.  Interestingly the savings from raising retirement age are apparently in fact to reintroduce the earnings link to pensions, which will raise pensions and therefore cost more.  All very laudable one may think but you cannot use your one-shot pistol twice, either this measure is to pay for an increase in expenditure or it is designed to save expenditure it cannot be both, except in the eyes of vote-avaricious politicians.  One must also take into consideration the pledge on not levying national insurance on new businesses for the first 100 employees.  This is a further erosion of the pension tributary and since these 100 employees will not be ‘opting out’ of the state pension this money will have to be subsidised by the government at some stage.

Osborne also looked to show that Westminster was tightening its belt by saying MPs pay would be cut by 5% – which is all very well when you consider that the average MP is on vastly more than most of the population.  It is the other plans though that merit further investigation, the Tories plan to cut the number of MPs by 10% though he did not give details as to how this reduction would be achieved.  In an age already of a democratic deficit the idea of making more people electorally redundant seems a typically regressive move.  Traditionally Tory strongholds have been in areas large in land mass and low in population, it is unlikely that the 10% will be drawn from these areas but more likely that the constituency boundaries will be redrawn to pull together smaller metropolitan constituencies together, thus marginalising the Labour and Liberal electorate.

Osborne, or rather his advisers, have been quite clever, they have made a rather odious conservative man look like he is being prudent and fiscally aware without actually giving a great deal of substance and depth to the proposals.  It has been described as a “bookkeeper’s speech and not a policy speech.”  Many ideas were floated that were designed to catch the headlines and obtain applause from the party faithful but there was scant framework as to how any of these ideas would be funded.

Economic experts reacted cautiously to Osborne’s speech Irwin Stelzer pointed out the anomaly of the Tories not wanting interest rates to go up and further but retaining the contradictory point of wanting people to save more.  It is also clear that there is a further paradox in claiming that public sector pensions would be capped at £50k whilst at the same time assuring that previously made commitments will be honoured.  Since we have bailed out the banks would the directors of financial institutions be subject to the same caps, as they are effectively now no more than civil servants?

The Conservative hegemony has gone so far that now all parties are vying for who can be the greatest public spending butchers.  So for me the question I would most like answered is why is public spending such a bad thing?  After all even those with the most basic knowledge of economics such as myself see that it is not expenditure that leads to bankruptcy it is the discrepancy between expenditure and income that does so.  What is not being asked is what are we spending our money on that may be seen as unnecessary, or if nothing be forthcoming in that column, which is highly unlikely since any such thing is rather subjective, how can we raise income to account for what we must spend?  Have we got to a stage now where even the Fourth Estate have given up questioning the actual validity of the policies and are merely scratching around for the methods by which the parties intend to pay for them.  One presumes were any of them to be honest and actually have the money they like to claim they do that the current media would feel it had nothing to do.

In a time when the banks are being financed by the public purse with no indication of what the public may expect in return, whilst top level bankers accrue massive pension pots and bonuses and banks record profits the like of which seem to be in line with the total income of small countries; in a world where Britain tags along with illegal American warmongering committing vast sums of public money and people to countries in which we have no business save for the financial powers of the few; in a world where natural resources such as gas, electricity and oil are being provided at exorbitant rates despite the wholesale cost having dropped exponentially and the companies in question post profits that are rivaled perhaps only by the banks; in a world where company directors can expect huge payouts when sacked due to lack of competency and golden parachute pension provisions regardless of the efficacy of their work it is surely time to revisit this capitalist model and realise that something is very wrong at the very root of it and the only method of stopping this boom and bust roller coaster is not to eat a little less before you get on, or just hold tighter but to get off the ride entirely.

Song Of The Day ~ Bombay Bicycle Club – The Hill

Rise Up

Do not dream your life away

do not sit at home waiting

in self-imposed purgatory

the dungeon of mundaneity

tomorrow will never come

and break the tedium of today

today must be fixed first

for tomorrow to seem worth making it to

the television like a visual rusk

all content broken down for toothless digestion

the world ticks on oblivious

you are supposed to conform

don’t,

make a difference, get up and start

today can be the first day of the rest of your life

if you choose to let it be

speak to people, you are not alone

others feel the same and are as frightened

needing some sense of benign coaxing

to make them believe it is safe to come out.

and then there are ‘the great unknowing’

the mass of those too blinkered to see it

or too selfish to care

mental drones carrying the yoke of indifference

some are perhaps already lost,

their souls harvested by the Gods of consumerism

believing they have ever had a choice

others long to believe in an alternative

but the message of uniformity is too pervasive

and they are cowed and numb

too tired to struggle, too resigned to care

but only for now

they are waiting, waiting for you to rise

then lines will be drawn

sides will be taken, and all will feel alive

some for the first time, others for the last

some will fight for freedom and justice

others are too scared of those concepts

no matter the outcome

right prevails for having, at that moment, an army to defend it

Song Of The Day ~ U2 – Unknown Caller

Dedicated Follower Of Fascism

They seek him here, they seek him there

Doncaster’s new, elected mayor

he wants to hide the nasty bits of his party beliefs

cos he’s a dedicated follower of fascism

And when he does his little rounds

of council offices in Doncaster town

telling people randomly he’ll cut out all their jobs

cos he’s a dedicated follower of fascism

Oh yes he is (oh yes he is), oh yes he is (oh yes he is)

He thinks he is a paragon of virtue

and when he’s interviewed and shown to be a proper twat

he feels a dedicated follower of fascism

Oh yes he is (oh yes he is), oh yes he is (oh yes he is)

He plans to half his mayoral salary

but the rest of all his policies are all against the law

cos he’s a dedicated follower of fascism

They seek him here, they seek him there

the BNP and Tony Blair

everywhere the blazered brown shirt army marches on

each one a dedicated follower of fascism

Oh yes he is (oh yes he is), oh yes he is (oh yes he is)

There’s one thing that he hates and that is foreigners

But one week it’s immigration and the next it’s ban Gay Pride

cos he’s a dedicated follower of fascism

Oh yes he is (oh yes he is), oh yes he is (oh yes he is)

He likes to come across as Mr Rational

but when confronted with the facts the toys are all thrown out the pram

cos he’s a dedicated follower of fascism

he’s a dedicated follower of fascism

(Profuse apologies to Ray Davies)

Song Of The Day ~ The Kinks – Dedicated Follower Of Fashion