The US election - a view from afar

I'm writing this as US voters go to the polls, with no idea of the outcome of the ballot, nor the potential outcome beyond the counting of the votes, whether the result will be accepted and we get a peaceful transfer of power if Biden wins. 

I have a few observations from this side of the pond, none of which add up to a thesis, but which I think have some resonance for the UK's and democracies across the globe.

If Trump loses, what has the last four years been about and what has it achieved? One can question Trump's initial motives to run for President, either an extension of his reality tv persona o the next level, an ego trip to become the most powerful man in the world, or the opportunity to milk the office for him and his family to make as much money as possible, but whatever they were, they don't seem very ideological. He has achieved very little in policy terms. The coal and steel industries have not returned as promised, though the economy seems to be doing better, but this is more due to where the US is in its economic cycle than anything contributed by Trump. For all his bluster, there is no wall excluding migrants from the South, trade with China is fractious but ongoing, while America First in global trade hasn't been delivered and he's only partially repealed Obama Care.

His foreign policy initiatives have been few and far between. He's favoured Russia (both in Syria and Ukraine) and Israel, but the position with North Korea is still unresolved, while he has not been able to get the rest of NATO to pay its fair share of running costs. It's quite common for oligarchies to distract their populations from the money they are raking into their own pockets with foreign policy initiatives, but Trump doesn't seem to have done that. Instead he's ridden on the wave of furious support versus opposition over issues such as Russian electoral interference, using state influence to manipulate private dealings (Ukraine), relations with porn stars, Black Lives Matter protests and COVID19 to keep people divided and off-balance. It's scrutiny, but not in the right places, or rather in so many different pockets that there was never any central laser focus to really damage Trump. And what could be more derisory than an impeachment vote that everyone knew could never get through both houses of Congress?

And this I think HAS been the point of Trump's 4 years. To sow chaos and division under the guise of draining the swamp, that brings the very fundamentals of democracy itself into question. Elections that can't be trusted, elections where the vote may not be respected out on the streets, the assault on the media despite the constitutional protection of free speech. And we have yet to see how the new Supreme Court shapes up. Trump has managed to completely warp reality so that we can't be sure of anything, not facts, not the report of our own senses. Trump can be shown in old footage to be shaking hands with someone and then 5 years later deny that he ever met that person and it's shrugged off as par for the course. Criticism is a witch hunt, evidence is fake news. In four years, his opponents have failed to land a knockout blow on Trump, despite the weight of steel available to lace their gloves with. 

Now Trump is the perfect person to sow disorder and chaos wherever he treads, but who gains by him doing so? As said, he's no ideologue, so this is not a precursor on his part to bringing in a whole raft of laws to establish some thought-through blueprint of a Trumpian democracy. However, the undermining of reality and being unable to rely on anything as true, has the hallmark of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Peter Pomerantsev has written extensively about this strategy. But the destabilising of US democracy and hallowed political institutions also has the grubby fingerprints of Steve Bannon all over it, even though he was kicked out of Trump's cabinet at an early stage. Seems like the seeds of chaos he laid down have sprouted in his absence. He hasn't so much as drained the swamp, as allowed the swamp to break its levees and cover the whole country in effluent. 

If Trump loses and even if there is no civil unrest in response, it is hard to see how Biden, a singularly unimpressive figure who once plagiarised speeches from Neil Kinnock remember, could ever heal and reunite the nation now so divided down, ironically enough, ideological lines. Anti-immigrant, America First, anti-Vaxxer, anti-lockdown, anti-science (and facts in general) are the rump of Trump's support. That is Trump's legacy, four years of no material progress for the fabric of society, only regression. Trump has had four years to make America great again, by his own boasting he shouldn't need caps proclaiming the need for four more years. One more hopeful legacy that may also arise, is that the Republican Party may be forced to embrace a greater diversity to reflect changing demographics and that it can no longer just get by largely on just the white male vote. Yet if power is peacefully transferred to Biden, then one can only celebrate the American people's mental acuity; they tried the Trump experiment, adjudged it a failure and moved to change the outcome by rejecting it and going in a different direction. Unlike us here in the UK, who after the disaster of Austerity, the looming disaster of Brexit, the cretinous mishandling of the pandemic, have continued to return Conservative government after Conservative government, with none of the litheness possibly demonstrated by the US electorate tonight. Britain has been punching itself in the face for over a decade now. I hope and pray the American public don't do the same. 

Other posts:

Letter To America - 10 days after inauguration, how to take on Trump

Fightback - cartoons for the threat of Donald J Trump 

Brexit - The Limits Of Democracy & Free Speech?

There are (at least) two sides to every argument. And that means there will always be adherents of both sides. How do you decide which is right, or at least the correct path to follow? Well science is usually a good way to go, we don't have all that many flat earthers around these days, though they do still exist. Same as those who believe as per the Old Testament that the Earth was created just a few millennia ago and in just seven days. Science suggests that there is actually a higher level of 'truth' and 'fact' and empirical evidence that ought to be able to be employed to convince hearts and minds. But not all issues are able to be proven by scientific fact. Slavery was (eventually) felt to be a morally reprehensible institution, but it still took the carnage of a civil war to see it abolished in the US, rather than Congressional voting. So, unfortunately, might is also a way of prevailing in argument.

Democracies have been pretty good at avoiding outcomes whereby questions are settled by force, (at least where internal issues are concerned, not so good where the decision is to go bomb another country). The nature of representational democracy being, in the main, the two sides debate, take a vote, the majority wins and the defeated accept the decision honourably. However, you might interject that the notion of honour is a class-based one, as tends to be the make up of most parliamentary memberships. You might also reasonably aver that those interest groups with the money to influence or buy professional lobbyists, also distort this notion of honourable and fair debate. But perhaps the notion of honourable acceptance of decisions is breaking down anyway.

The trend was perhaps symbolised by the statement during the Brexit referendum campaign by Leave campaigner Michael Gove MP when he said that the public have had enough of experts. He was tapping into an emotional seam; there are so many people feeling disenfranchised and economically lagging behind others, who felt that the status quo and all the old, established arguments had delivered nothing to them. Gove just gave them a mandate to dispense with belief and trust in experts, because experts hadn't got it right in their case and made their lives better. So science, statistics, economic forecasts, none of this is going to wash with them. Hence when the referendum comes along, it gets (perfectly understandably) hijacked as a means to express the disenfranchisement and misery swathes of people feel, and very little to do with the EU itself. The EU is swept up as the villain, hosting many other grievances which actually it bears minimal responsibility for causing: migrants, sovereignty, detached political elites, are historical and cyclical targets for blame, only here they are all pinned to the mast of the EU for causing them. 

This is not a UK/Brexit only phenomena. Climate change science is denied, especially in the US, with powerful pre-existing economic interests in the oil industry funding lobbying and advertising to blur the scientific narrative by blowing enough (hydrocarbon) smoke. Currently they have the ear of the President, which means they also have the support of his electorate who probably don't care all that much about the fate of the planet's future, they have more pressing economic and identity issues. So science is taking a hit. And the role of force to settle arguments rather than debate is on the rise, witness the 'Gilets Jaunes' taking to the streets in Paris, again a cohort of the populace who feel utterly disenfranchised by the ruling class and damn well want to let them know. And not politely either (again, a class division over what is 'proper', polite behaviour.  

You can make an argument about anything and you will find supporters taking to social media to air their particular side. Compromise seems impossible, while these days an honourable acceptance of defeat in debate is far less tolerated; you have your view, it's perfectly legitimate to hold such a view, therefore it must be recognised and legislated for, is now the prevailing assumption. Because this is no longer a debate about ideas, but has become heavily invested with emotion, with identity, people will not simply admit that they lost the argument. To do so is perceived as denying their existence, their identity and their rights. Democracy may just have hit its limits, because our societies are so divided between the two or more sides of any argument you care to raise. 

What Did The Ancient Greeks Ever Do For Us?

I mean apart from democracy, philosophy, architecture, statuary and theatre, what did the Greeks ever give us? They always come off favourably in comparison with the supposedly more barbarian and plagiarist Romans, but for 'democracy' you also had 'despotism' (read Plato's "The Republic" which shows the way democracy can very easily slide into tyranny through its own lack of true awareness of important values). However it's the philosophy and the theatre which I really want to challenge for the supreme value of their heritage as it has passed down to us. 

I'm not going to say too much about the philosophy, except where it has resonance in art. Plato's phenomenalism is a crucial concept to how we perceive reality, with his famous example of slaves in a cave viewing the shadows thrown on the cave walls by their fire, equating to perceptive reality for these slaves who have never seen the world outside of the cave. He derives this example through his belief that the whole world of appearances which we take for reality, is but a degraded version of true reality and (aesthetic/mathematical) beauty.

For the highest existence of any object is its ideal form and in our world, actual objects never attain such an ideal form. Now this represents an important way of thinking & perceiving even in our modern world. Of course there are no 'ideal' forms of objects, but what there are is linguistic nouns which categorise all sorts of various 'non-ideal' forms of similar things; all breeds of dogs are 'Dogs' is the simplest representation of this. But consider something more debatable - is a flatpack table in Ikea's warehouse still a table before it gets sold and erected? Is a slave or hired prostitute at an orgy, who is ordered to bend over so that food can be served from their naked back, are they a table? Is the ammo box that the soldier utilises while on patrol to quickly scoff down his rations, a table, or is it still only an ammo box containing rocket propelled grenades? 

Phenomenalism and particularly Nominal Phenomenalism, means that the supposed evidence of our senses and particularly the dominant one of sight, actually goes through a pre-filter of language, grouping similar things together as a shorthand that may not in fact do justice to the complexity of 'reality'. And this filter of language is of course the mainstay and dominant tool of us writers. We can use it to not only describe reality, but to challenge its consensus by really examining its linguistic short-cuts. So we could and possibly should be challenging accepted reality and showing how it has been constructed. Those writers and philosophers who study signs and symbols (semiologists) do this on one level, but writers can bring it to the linguistic realm. 

Now let's come to Greek Theatre. It is absolutely entwined with politics in Ancient Greece, that politics being in the main direct participatory democracy (the military oligarchy of Sparta didn't produce much in the way of playwrights). Plays in Athens were performed during religious festivals, the rest of the time the theatres in the small administrative demes were used for political meetings of the whole community entitled to vote. Plays in these festivals were in competition and accordingly were sponsored by patrons, most of whom were professional politicians, else citizens who wanted to wield influence. Many plays debated the issues of recent or contemporary events, while comedies lambasted real prominent citizens to their faces sat there in the audience, to remind them of their place to serve the Polis rather than their own interests. The ancient Greek word for playwright has as its root 'teacher' or trainer, while the word 'Praxis' which Aristotle coined for the dramatic action, also stands for a body of practical political action.  

So Greek plays were not politically neutral and for all their show at having both sides of the debate (much like Plato's dialectic philosophical style), actually there was really only one message either the playwright, or his patron wanted to impart (just like Plato's "Republic", though his other dialectic works were more ambiguous and even handed in their conclusions). Plays were always geared to preaching to their audience and that audience were those with the vote in the democracy (so not women or slaves who were excluded from voting). The plays preached reasoned debate, when in fact they were tilting for a single point of view, with their own constructed democracy as the highest value (not an 'ideal' one in Plato's eyes, far from it as above). Those individualist citizens who weren't team players, or those with a tendency towards demagoguery, were constantly being defeated on stage.

For such men displayed 'hubris', that is the excess of pride in imagining yourself above your station within the society. Any individual citizen who wasn't a team player, was regarded as having hubris and all Tragic dramas in the Greek canon had men brought low by their hubris. Indeed even the word 'hero' which reverberates so powerfully in our own society, initially emerged from Greek theatre, not existing outside of that context beforehand. The dramatic hero is a demiurge, that is a man who sees himself superior to his fellow man, halfway to being a god and of course, such tragic heroes are felled by their hubris. The stage actors had to play both heroes and gods, an act and an appropriation involving of hubris in itself just in case any of them got ideas above their station. Hubris implicitly reinforces a 'know your place' attitude, for to flout it inevitably means personal destruction. 

The clinching point about this propagandist theatre comes from a word the Greek's themselves coined, 'catharsis'. Catharsis means a purging, initially a purification in the religious sense. But when applied to the theatre by Aristotle in "Poetics" it has a more manipulative meaning. Theatre, in line with praxis, is vicarious, the audience experience the play as brought to them by the actors. We don't know whether they were passive in the amphitheatres, or like Shakespeare's 'Pit' rowdy & interactive with the stage. But by the end of a tragedy, having seen Orestes put out his own eyes, or the abasement and cruelty visited upon "The Trojan Women", or the double suicide of the lovers to conclude "Antigone", the audience are purged of their passions through the very extremity of the emotions wrought in them by the action on stage. That is, the playwright has taken them on such a journey, they are useless for anything at the end of the play. Certainly no call to action, only the playwright's sly reinforcement of whatever particular message he was putting across and the audience too played out to resist that message. Wrung out and spent, they go home marvelling at the stagecraft, story and spectacle, confirmed in the moral teaching the playwright conveyed. 

I could go on about how the heritage from the Greeks has further hamstrung us in our modern age. That Greek philosophy's main thrust was seeking to answer the question 'what constitutes a good life?', which for Plato, in the context of a city, was living a 'Just' life. For Aristotle it was living a balanced life, avoiding excess at either end of the spectrum of behaviour. Now this may or may not be a reasonable philosophical question to consider (I would say there are more pressing ones along the line of what is man, why is he here on earth, what is he supposed to achieve in his short life?) But - and you can't necessarily blame the Greeks for this, their inquiry into goodness was hijacked and taken on by the Christian theologian-cum-philosophers, whose answer was of course faith in God and following a set of moral and behavioural commandments. Again, a rigid moral unilateralism that is today in tatters and has led to the evils of slavery, colonialism, subjection of women and our own bodies, which have only furthered the crippling issues we face today. 

So yes, I do declare, what have the Ancient Greeks done for us, except to set up the parameters by which we have navigated to our very troubling modern age? 

Writers Resist London - Only 30 Years Too Late

Today, Sunday 15th January 2017, writers and authors in London finally raised their heads above the parapet. They joined the 'Writers Resist' movement based in America but taking in many cities outside the US in holding an event to protest the imminent presidency of Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, rights and civilised values. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the event, having a previous reading commitment in London, notwithstanding that I only found out about the event yesterday via Twitter and some detective work on my part (what writers call 'research'). Humble writers like myself aren't on the BCC lists, we didn't get the memo because it wasn't sent out to us.

But that is not the source of my frustration. Without coming over like some sort of contradiction in terms as some sort of putative member of the UKIP Metropolitan Elite, what about the threat to democracy in the UK? After the election result and Cameron being returned, a small group of us writers commiserated on twitter and all pledged to write political fiction - something I have always done, from Khmer Rouge Cambodia to beheading videos, Syrian migrants to Latin American death squads - but nada. After Brexit there was the same level of wailing and gnashing of teeth and calls for some sort of protest fiction - again I have penned an 11,000 word short story, but not too aware of similar works. This is hardly surprising to me as there has been a dearth of political fiction in this country because politics is seen as a dirty word when allied to the term 'literature'.

Of course it wasn't ever thus, go back to "Gulliver's Travels" for when Brits did write politically and satirically. Where poets get put in a revolutionary Sandanista government and author André Malraux was minister for culture in France, we get chicklit write Louise Mensch as an MP and MPs like Douglas Hurd and now Nadine Dorries permeating their own boredom in the service of state by penning works of fiction. Where Camus, Sartre & De Beauvoir led every march going in 1968 Paris, with the honourable exception of the late Harold Pinter, where are our authors marching under banners? Nowhere that's where. I marched with cartoonists and graphic artists in opposition to Section 28.

Is our democracy indeed under the same threat as Trump represents to that of America? Well where have you been for the last 30 years if you have to ask that? Ever since the 1980s there has been a systematic ideological assault on the rights and values held dear in the UK, under the guise of Britain needs to get its economic housekeeping in good order. Social spaces of social and public subsidised art, local government being cut back to the bone, libraries and youth clubs being starved of funding, trade unions and associations being diminished, council housing being sold off without being replaced, clampdowns on public marches and protest, all meant a reduction in the public's ability to gather together and discourse. The arts had to demonstrate a profit line ahead of artistic ideas and exploration. Ever since then there is a distinct lack of public discourse within Britain. The British sense of justice and fair play has been undermined by the rigorous assault on the Welfare State, targeting the poor and needy (ATOS, bedroom tax), rather than bringing bad employers to book over working conditions/low pay and an unrepresentative level of corporation tax. The divide between rich and poor has got wider and these fault lines were revealed by the Brexit referendum, which should have come to no surprise to keen-eyed watchers, which is why it seems to have come as such a seismic shock to most. Brexit has unleashed hate crimes and will signal the UK withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, something PM Theresa May has been itching to do long before the referendum delivered its vote. Where was the artistic protest on any of this? In the 1970s the British theatre stage was dominated by Marxist and Left-Wing playwrights like Hare, Brenton, Edgar, but they were unable to counter the 1980s ideology of Thatcherism and that seemed to signal a retreat in political art. Our rights have since been further stripped by the anti-terrorism legislation and our decency threatened by the increase of hate crime in the wake of the Brexit vote. 

I understand that the current Writers Resist movement is keen on being seen as non-aligned politically. Labour in the 1990s did nothing to underpin  any of our depleted rights and values from and are just as culpable. But the current UK government will seek to push through radical policies that 1980's Thatcherism only dreamed of, not least the assault on out most precious value that of the National Health Service and social care for the elderly which feeds into the current crisis. As heinous as I regarded Ronald Reagan's presidency, America has one protection we in the UK do not; the First Amendment enshrining the right to free expression, therefore not even Reagan was able to dismantle the arts community as happened in the UK. However, even that protection is now under threat as Trump will start with press freedom as he looks to hobble his opponents there and after that artistic expression would be vulnerable starting with liberal Hollywood - I suspect that the realisation of this is part what has sparked the Writers Resist movement to spring up in the US. Of course other fears are the roll back of civil rights either by law, or de facto as racism is more overt and less clamped down on by the forces of law and order. But the fact remains that the USA may be facing what we experienced in the UK in the 1980s and which we've never recovered from. 

So Writers Resist London, first you need to open up your invite lists because there are some grass roots writers who have consistently been producing political work of resistance. At present you risk just talking to yourselves ( I see the same network of writer names as all work together anyway) and we had all that nonsense with UK Occupy, a talking shop which fizzled out quick enough once the housing and jobs market perked up. Believe me, I may have a modicum of the readers you have, but with all due respect you ain't at the level of Harold Pinter and so the people you need to be reaching are no more likely to be aware of you and your voice than they are of mine and the likes of me. If we're going to do this thing let's do it properly. There are so many challenges not just politically, but in terms of language and fake versus truth versus fiction. 

Why Referenda are Bad For Britain's Democracy

What could be more democratic than asking the adult population to vote on an issue rather than entrust our delegated representatives to come to a decision?

Whilst there has been several referenda on devolution and sovereignty issues in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and those asking metropolitan areas whether they wanted an elected mayor of not, the upcoming EU referendum on June 23rd will only be the third UK-wide vote. The first concerned Britain's membership of the European Economic Community as it was called back then in 1975, but I was only 11 so not entitled to vote. Then we didn't have one until 2011 on the issue of a version of proportional representation called AV (Alternative Vote) replacing our first past the post system. Now I consider myself a political animal, yet such was the level of disengagement with the way AV was presented, that I can't even remember if I bothered to cast my vote. I wasn't the only one, turnout was a poor 42% (compared with 60-65% on average for a general election). This was generally felt to have been the result of AV being an inadequate voting system compared with all the proportional representation systems on offer and that even then no one really understood how it worked because the campaign to promote it was so lacklustre.

And now we come to the major referendum currently on the table, continued membership of the EU or to withdraw. I credit that whatever the outcome, the whole thing has been a disaster and weakened the credibility of british democracy. here's why:

1) The campaign isn't about the issue of EU membership at all:
Whatever the merits of In or Out has been partly sideswiped and colonised by the internal politics of the two major political parties. For the Tories, with David Cameron announcing he would not run for another term as Prime Minister after this one, there has been a power struggle to see who is in the best position to replace him when he goes. It's worth noting that if the vote is to leave, Cameron might have to go sooner than expected as he has nailed his colours so firmly to the Stay mast. That would only bring the whole succession battle forward and probably overshadow the mechanics of negotiating our way out of the EU as the country is paralysed without a leader and the bloody struggle to appoint one. So senior Tories have been positioning themselves in the referendum campaign with their eye firmly on the main prize beyond. The will he/won't he bated breath of which side Boris Johnson would side with went on for an age as Johnson made his calculations of support. Tory cabinet ministers in favour of Brexit screamed and shouted for their right to break cabinet unanimity and campaign for what they believed in, and having been granted that right have helped ratchet up the hysteria with attacks on their colleagues in the Remain camp and vice versa. If David Cameron imagined this vote to once and for all heal Tory divisions over the principle of Europe that first holed John Major's government back in the 1990s, he has been seriously mistaken. It's widened those enmities further and at a cost of degrading the quality of the debate. It's all got very personal and very stupid with appeals to an imagined Tory lineage stretching back to Winston Churchill. In other words, the debate has not really been about the EU at all.

Labour have performed no more credibly. The last referendum saw solid Labour support in Scotland wiped out by the simple fact Labour had joined with the Tories to oppose independence. Whatever the Scots thought of the merits or demerits of going it alone, they could not abide the sight of Labour and the hated Tories sharing platforms and singing off the same hymn sheet. "Red Tories" they called the Labour Party and duly annihilated them at the general election by returning just 1 Labour MP in Scotland. So Labour have been very careful not to make the same mistake again and alienate their support in England and Wales by being seen to be in close cahoots with the Tory government. Entirely understandable for a tactical point of view, but doing a huge disservice to the issue under debate, to go or stay in the EU. Labour as a party are contributing virtually nothing to the debate or the issue, beyond the efforts locally of individual MPs. A shameful dereliction of the democratic process by simply distancing themselves from the referendum.

2) Both sides of the debate are based on lies:
I am an avid 'Remain' voter, yet even I, along with every other pro-EU supporter I suspect, knows that the current EU is massively flawed. Just consider the EU's lamentable failure over the migration crisis, its impotency over Ukraine, its mutterings of admitting Turkey into the community despite it failing any standard of liberties and rights of free press and expression, etc etc. So we are voting to keep us in an imagined entity that doesn't in fact exist as it is currently constituted. We are voting for an ideal. On the other hand, since no country ever has left the EU, let alone an economically significant one as the UK is, nobody can have the first inkling as to what that means and how it will play out. For both the UK and the EU itself (it is not impossible that it could signal the break up of the whole Union). We just don't know, so every argument that avers that X will be a benefit of leaving and we will be better off regarding Y by going our own way has no basis in evidence. They are predictions and forecasts at best and entirely coloured by the ends they are seeking to secure.

This begs a question about all referenda; if the choice is between changing to something that has never been done before, (or to leave something as an exit which has never been tried before), is it even possible to posit and empirically back up arguments at all? In which case, how can you properly have a referendum on the issue?

3) Our politicians are not sophisticated enough to do justice to the arguments involved in the issue:
The inherent contradiction at the heart of any referendum question that threatens to tread new ground, makes it really tough for the public to grasp the issue. However, we are not being well served by our politicians and key society movers and shakers in helping us understand the issue any better. The level of debate has been risible. We've had spurious anachronistic reference to Hitler's likely sympathies with a European super-state. We have statements that the EU prohibit more than 3 bananas being bound together to constitute a bunch. We've had the appeal to UK house prices dropping significantly with an Out vote, or the price of your summer holiday increasing if we leave. Like that's the most important thing under consideration here. Politicians demean us the voters when they imagine they can appeal to us through such base and simplistic impulses. We're too ignorant to appreciate what will happen the Balance of payments, VAT revenue and the City of London's golden egg, so let's restrict it to the level of summer holidays since the public can understand that. We've had different sections of the military and security forces opine that our security will either be improved or degraded by the result of the vote. Each side of the campaign wheels out these expert witnesses that support their case and they just end up cancelling one another out and leaving us the voters contemptuous of them all.  If you've ever watched a US real crime programme and the court case where the two sides bring out their pet forensics expert and of course the two radically disagree on what the evidence tells them, so the jury are thrown back on their own instincts as to how to weight the two expert testimonies against one another. Well then you might as well not bother with specialist insight if we end up falling back on what our gut tells us. It's pretty much the same in this debate. I can't help feeling that while these talking heads have a right to hold a personal opinion informed by their professional experience, it probably shouldn't be offered as chapter and verse to us the public. That they do so is not their fault, they are called upon to do so by the politicians.

The upshot of all this? I am predicting a low turnout of similar magnitude to that of the AV vote. And that will be a terrible indictment not on public apathy, but on the performance of our politicians selling us the importance of this vote and the usefulness of referenda themselves, given their innate contradictions.

An undoubted fan of the European superstate 

 A non-compliant bunch of EU bananas

Quids in for car number plate manufacturers if we vote 'Leave'

Homegrown Suicide Bomber- Sample

From my book "Not In My name" published 2011 - part 2, the new politics is being waged online where it is far more vicious and bloody...

"Blog: 17th May 2006 / 27th Rabia Awal 1427

Another- the last- fitting for my nuptial dress. Has me more than a little nervous. Only natural of course. My fingers are trembling and I can’t do up a single clasp. The seamstress clicks her tongue in sharp disapproval and says such conduct would be unbecoming on the big day itself. The girdle feels tight, even though I have barely eaten this last week, despite cautioning from those around me to maintain my strength. I have even surrendered up my beloved gelatis. But today I feel I can treat myself to a bombe glacée. A last trifling indulgence, before the most profound change occurs in my life. And if I spread a couple of inches under its calorific assault, then I’ll just have to suck in my stomach, which with the likely state of my breathing tomorrow, shouldn’t be too hard a task. I force myself to think pure thoughts by envisioning my betrothed before me, as the seamstress gingerly packs up my raiment. And in conjuring such happy thoughts, a smile breaks out to envelop the worry lines around my pensive brow. Now my lips quiver only with joy. Such a remedy never fails. Tomorrow we shall be conjoined for ever. I leave the premises to search out my ice cream, once I have safely stored the vestments. Now it is just a question of killing time.

*

With all the trepidation, it’s been a very long and sleepless night. As the light faded, my thoughts flared around me, projected into the formless shadows moving on the wall. Car headlights seared their way through my shutters and churned and roiled my ceiling, making me dizzy and disoriented. Shutting my eyes did nothing, as they managed to prise through the membranes of my eyelids. How thin and insubstantial all of my body feels at this time. My flesh a flimsy curtain, partitioning the unknown chambers ahead.

I rose from bed and am now carving this for the want of something to do. Of course they left me no means of communicating with the outside world. But they did leave me a knife for self-protection and when I had blunted that, I used the flints sheared off from the stone walls of the room itself. Had other brides and grooms to be, been put up here before me? Then the building will tell its tale as well as my own.

My overriding thought right now, would to please be permitted some sleep, so I am not too befuddled for tomorr- or later today as it now is. I’m going back to bed, doubtless to joust some more with my ceiling-borne demons overhead. Whence death seemingly always comes, in our insignificant part of the world. Where the sky is forever falling in.

*

A pealing siren outside woke me, even though it was far away in the distance. A presentiment of ill-fortune? But again I just marinade my mind with thoughts of my beloved opening his arms in welcome and all such anxieties melt away and me with it back into my furtive dreams. Wherein my Mother soon intercedes. Bustling and barging the angelic bystanders as she cuts a direct path to me. Standing now right in my face, eclipsing even the joy of my light, for she would not approve of such an espousal. This is not exactly an elopement, yet still she cannot know till after the event. I have recorded her a message to explain the matter. But her forceful image has demanded an explanation of me before she is even in the know. A lingering last vestige of guilt.

Mother, the sole message is I love you. Even as I seemingly repudiate you by this act. I am not propelling myself away from you. This you must understand. How I love you more than anything else on this earth and I am beaming this message to you, with greater force than all the generative force soon to adorn my belly, that will pull us apart merely on this plane. In my absence, you will receive only greater honour. Till we are ultimately reconciled in Paradise. My Mother and I hug, seemingly unconditionally as she did when I was a baby. And finally I fall into a dreamless sleep.

18th May 2006 / 28th Rabia Awal 1427

I imagine hearing another siren, but as I groggily come round, I realise it is my beeping alarm clock. An adhan summoning me to my calling. My salvation. I shut it off. I’ll be present at my union soon enough. Lying here, I try and evoke an image of the light of my life in the future, but nothing comes. It’s as if my thoughts are like birds, flying in confusion and without navigation during an eclipse, as my rapidly beating heart has blotted out the sun. So I do what I’ve been steeled to do and I use it to my advantage. I am to enter the core of this black sun, and ball it up in my hand. Driving the fingers till they seal my palm. Thereby readmitting the light to embrace me once again. Ha, already the quickened pulse recedes. Resumes its orderly place in the background. But do not be fooled. That faint tick, tick, ticking, is the sound of my seething heart, walled up behind the thorns and briars of my sin. How they dam up my heart from God. Now is the time to purge them like an infernal machine, back whence they came. Return my pure being back to the bosom of God. For He cannot be contained. My heart is fit to irrupt, its furious palpitations cannot be accommodated a moment longer.

I swing my legs out of bed. My bare feet meet the cold stone of the flags. All the more felicitous then, since a grave will be yet colder. I wash myself from a bowl of water, letting the precious liquid trickle back down to its source. Our adversaries would deny us even this most basic of elements. As I bathe them, I devote each one of the two hundred bones in my body to you my Love. And by my actions, I imagine we will share them in turn with five times that amount of suitors, dispersed like passing out wedges of wedding cake. Spearing into their trespassing hearts, as we entwine and are yoked together into death. Then there is the added confetti of nails and ball bearings, only this time it will be the bride showering the congregation. Even my virginal veil of modesty shall be aflame and sail through the air combusting all it brushes against. My flying blood will baste their foreheads with the indelible sign of their guilt. The liquid in the bowl is still once again.

I hope my laving is suitably thorough, but I am without any mirror for inspection. One isn’t to wake on the morn of one’s self-appointed expiration and glimpse dread in the eyes. No photos to kiss either, no earthly tugs at all to corrode the will. To blunt my whetted mind. Instead I picture weaving my own carpet. I who have nothing, can still donate this wedding gift. As they deny us the wool because we have no land to breed sheep and we have no looms to spin it within our flimsy, cramped houses, so then will I fashion mine from blood and bone. I aim to weave the largest rug that is humanly possible from my frame, to drape the entire tarmac between two bus stops. And my signature, will be my essence mingled in with theirs. They who are so precious about collecting and burying every last drop of their blood spilt, will not be able to determine if it is mine or theirs. Blotting me up with their paper as they do with their own. How they will waste such resources in taking precise, forensic care of my remains, it will almost be like they are forced to yield me the same worth as their own burnt offerings. But for all this, I will yield them no insights. Other than reinforcing that which they choose to remain wilfully blind to.

I’m ready. This time I rig myself with barely a faltering in my fingers. The clasps all snap home. The girdle still feels tight, but now hangs heavy, arrayed with the wedding gifts lavished last night by my escort. What a most generous gift he has seen fit to bestow upon me. The needles to unstitch with. The pattern in my mind. At last, for the first time in our despoiled land, my belly feels fecund.

19th May 2006

20th May 2006

21st May 2006

Gone

The requested resource

/

is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource."

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Homegrown Bombers - Sunday Sample

From my book "Not In My name" published 2011 - part 2, the new politics is being waged online where it is far more vicious and bloody...

"Joe Bloggs’ Blog, London, July 8th 2006

The view from the top of the Clapham Omnibus

A year to the day. Plus one. In order to honour the memorial ceremonies passing off with due dignity.

But I can hold my peace no longer. Today I can ask the question, was that it??? A one-hit wonder? Is that the sum total, one atrocity?

Admittedly well-planned and co-ordinated, but where’s the sustained follow-up campaign? Apart from the four stooges who couldn’t even make a chapati, much less a bomb. And didn’t one of them, possessed with the courage of a lion, make his bolt by draping himself head to foot in a burka? How double-edged does the veil seem now?

It’s a bit of a well-worn tradition apparently. For I’m told as much as protecting female modesty, the veil can also help a vulpine lover secure access, to his off-limits but willing love in the harem.

Still, how we were all gripped by the thrill of the chase for a couple of weeks. CCTV footage of them plastered everywhere, rivalling a bad taste Benetton campaign. Blanket media coverage, till they were being led away under blankets. Extradited, locked up and forgotten about. News blackout.

About time they were coming to trial I’d say. How much more evidence do we need to gather? Caught red handed on camera. Up in the dock, so we can all see you for the pathetic specimens you really are! You’re nothing! We can’t even recall your names. Your prolix, unBritish sounding names, more verbose than any meaningful ideology you care to spout.

And, undaunted we’re still using the Underground aren’t we? Our wheels of commerce grind on. The fear and anxiety have diminished, cos you haven’t been able to repeat your heinous deed. Of course not, your top boys took themselves out in their one act. Your second top boys...are just languishing in our prison cells. I think you're done don't you?

So it showed that you could. Big deal. The Met Commissioner had been warning us for three years, with his mantra that it was a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’. Well, ‘when’ has come to pass. And past. In theory the threat must still persist. But London has shrugged its broad shoulders and got on with life. We’re battle hardened, first from the Blitz, then the spud-munchers throwing blazing fertilizer at us. Such outrages only firm up our sense of community and togetherness. A sense of belonging you can’t possibly penetrate.

When all’s said and done, ultimately you were no more than a mosquito or a gnat bite. A knee-jerk into the groin. Enough to make our eyes water, but no need for an overreaction of the body politic.

Since there’s been no lasting terror beyond the one-off incident, therefore it had to have been an act of vengeful spite. A token. A hate token to the country of your birth. Not even your adoptive or foster country, but where you were born, brought up and educated. A single act of bloody bloodymindedness.

Rather than play out your destructive oedipal fantasies on our bodies, you would have been better off blubbering on a shrink’s couch, except that is rooted in the other bunch of Semite cousins you claim to abhor. Hatred is always non-negotiable. Like prejudice.

One of you only ended up on that bus cos you neglected to charge the battery. Still, how redolent was that image, with its roof ripped off like a sardine tin? Powerfully symbolic, but symptomatic of not very much at all. Except your lack of understanding of our way of life, both marooned up there in Yorkshire and holed up in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.

Only a tired old strategy of economic dislocation, targets the transport system. But every Londoner knows any three Tube lines are out of commission on a daily basis. Signal trouble usually. The bus ought to have been your cue, seeing as it’s our culture you’re at war with anyway.

For our part, we may not be able to win a war on a word called ‘terror’. But you can triumph even less through war against a culture. Does Grozny or Gaza feel any more liberated by your act of derring-do? No, thought not.

So it remains a stifled howl. The yelp from kicking a three-legged dog. A petulant display from infantile minds. No matter how downright angry I may be after what you’ve done, I’m still civilised enough not  to be coming after your kith and kin. An eye for an eye? My eye more like. And I’ve got it trained on you."

Comments:

"I heartily concur with the sentiments expressed from the top of the Clapham Omnibus. Though I believe there is a little more behind the motivations of such men, other than petty vindictiveness. I would refer you to the dedicated network, small as it is but dispersed worldwide, as represented by a myriad of sites on the Web. Where exist hundreds of webpage bomb-making cookbooks and footage of IED (improvised explosive device) attacks from the Middle East, shot from the vantage of those pressing the remote control for the bomb. There was even, in English, a Powerpoint step-by-step presentation of how to construct a homemade device, till the URL was spiked.

So, in similar vein, I thought it about time the arsenal ranged against this network was laid out in turn. To wit, the eyes and ears of entire nations. If the requisite information can be got out, to you the public, then there stands more chance of thwarting the bombers. The Authorities want the populace to keep eyes and ears open to help in the fight against terrorism, but they don’t want you to open your mouths and question what lies behind such actions in the first place. So as with your Blog host, I can hold my peace no longer. I will furnish you with all the information you need to know. To hell with the Official Secrets Act. If they haul me over the coals for whistle blowing, so be it. At least what I have to offer will already be out in the public domain. This is what you truly call a civil service. Below are my credentials.

I am and have been for over thirty years, part of the Intelligence Services of this country. In the past, we have been all that lay between you and periodic bloody carnage throughout our sceptred isle. It started with tracking down the Angry Brigade in the 1970’s. Then outflanking both Irish Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries (in the interest of balance). Welsh Nationalist firebombers (remember them? I know, hard to credit Pembroke and Monmouth ever being more desirable for holiday homes than Tuscany and Provence). Animal liberationists, (never averse to serving up some slabs of well done human steak). Extortioners. Arsonists with delusions of grandeur and an accelerant career ladder. Those mail bombers and nail bombers, letter bombers bearing grudges and misanthrope purveyors of hate crimes. Oh and Libyans. Most were embarked on prolonged campaigns of repeated outrages, that it was our duty to stop dead in their tracks.

We operated from the painstaking reconstruction of each and every device, plus a consideration of the psychological cues contained in the targets, to catch our perpetrators. I could tell you about the fertilizer based bombs favoured by the Boys from the Bogside, prior to their roaring trade in Czech semtex. Or the respectable middle class Angry Brigades, who would only blow up property and institutional symbols rather than target people. Even as government scientists were simultaneously devising neutron bombs that killed people, but left buildings standing. However all of this has gone out the blast shattered window here and now. Our manuals have been ripped up and used for kindling.

For the current crop of antinomian bombers are radically different. They are not pursuing a prolonged campaign. Just the one abomination is ample for their purposes. Lighting the touchpaper but not standing back, seems sufficient to pass on a flaming baton to the next disciples. Now we have to interdict them before they ever carry out the dark deed. That is made especially hard, since my superiors have not seen fit over the years, to establish much in the way of a network of contacts within these communities. To my lords and masters, most of these beardy blokes are 'clean faces'.

Made tougher still by the annealing of the present antagonists. In the past, a bomber, no matter how adept, would normally only set a device after several practice runs. And an explosion is the type of ultramundane sound, that prompts people’s recall, once it has been suggested to them that it bears a greater magnitude than a car backfiring. However, this lot either have done their training abroad and out of sight, or they just go for it hell for leather, the first and only time of asking. I believe that’s what caught out the second quartet of would be Tube bombers. They’d read their Blue Peter bomb primers, but for the want of any stickyback plastique, hadn’t been able to put it into any practice. Thank God.

Nor is their psychology the same. Most bombers bear a signature hallmark in their make up, as to why they have particularly embraced the destructive power of explosives. Some may revel in the intricacies of their constructions, the timers, trip switches and detonators. They may even want their bombs to be discovered rather than detonate, so they can pit their fiendish wits with our expert disposalists. Others may get their charge, if you’ll excuse the pun, from enchaining the elemental force of the big bang itself. The red hot wind that for a brief moment, expels and purges the very air itself. Before the devastation comes cascading back to earth. Collapse of stout party. The bomber as Hephaestus at his forge. Perhaps Zeus himself hurling his thunderclaps and leaving huge craters in the earth. Though obviously such association is beyond the majority of most bomb throwers. For they remain forever, third spear chucker in a lame production of a modern-day revenge tragedy.

But this clump are not interested in the finesse of their design, nor the temporary divine power it may vest them. For they willingly sacrifice themselves immediately upon such divinity and are consumed by it. They are not around to relive their handiwork in their mind’s eye, or even congratulate themselves grimly on a job well done. Ergo no signature handiwork, because it is an act never to be recreated. For them, the bomb is a means to a singular, solitary end, pure and simple. Same difference ricin, anthrax or nuclear waste. Ordination by ordnance. Unlike most bombers who have long-since skedaddled from the proposed locus of their perniciousness, these men probably do look their victims in the eyes shortly before triggering their devices. Indiscriminate, but somehow intimate. This is coffin calculus, at its simplest, most stripped down algorithm.

Having said that, like I say there are underlying factors behind the atrocities. Though I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say they constitute a body of coherent ideology. You probably all know the mantras of incitement: Palestine/ Iraq. American/ Crusader imperialism. Other hotspots around the world and corrupt, unIslamic Arab regimes. There’s a critique of Western materialism and sexual mores, with which I have a modicum of sympathy, but their solution for which I find yet more repellent. What this hodgepodge of ideas actually means, is that the diffuse network that is Al Qaeda, can inspire any local sparkplug to tap into his own motives. Like a sort of pick and mix of malcontentment. In the 1960’s Buddhist monks protested American Foreign Policy by setting themselves on fire. Something about Islam insinuates they have to make sure we combust along with them. Again, Clapham Omnibus has it about right with his positing that as a one off, they did it because they could. It has a lot in common with the goalless death dealing of Russian Nihilism of the Nineteenth Century. Just witness the current bloody insurgency in Iraq. For Shi’a and Sunni, you could almost read Hutu and Tutsi.

However, don’t for one moment believe that it has subsided on our Isles with this one isolated act. Just as a poisoner ought to arouse suspicion with the chemicals he purchases, we should all be on the lookout for bulk purchases, whether we are pharmacies, garden centres, catering suppliers or even hair salons. I don’t think it’s faintly possible to prejudice the case against the second cohort of Tube bombers, the ones who lived to face up to justice, but I can tell you that the constituents of their bombs were humble household products; hair bleach, nail polish remover and chapati flour. All the more terrible for being so mundane in their genesis. Things we utilise in our lifestyles, repackaged and spat back poisonously in our faces."

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Why I'm Not Pre-occupied with the Occupy Protest

A protest against the iniquities of capitalism? Count me in ...

Only I hate camping, come out in hives when near religious institutions and well UK Occupy have got their tactics wrong haven't they?

The biggest problem is there is little they can offer up about their protest other than an ill-defined disgruntlement. Though they have garnered lots of media coverage, little of it engages with their purpose and few media outlets seem that interested in trying.

Already the counter-reformation has led to media obsessions with tents being revealed as uninhabited at night, through the use of (battlefield?) infra-red cameras and questioning whether office commuters are being tripped up on the way to work in the City in the morning. The agenda is being shunted into obscure sidings. Also, if you propound the lack of leaders and spokespersons as an organisational and political strength, it does make it hard to convey your viewpoint on serious TV news programmes.

The assembly of people under canvas say that they are debating and discussing ideas. Now this strikes me as a generational thing, because I have all my arguments against capitalism long marshalled over the years. (I've written fictional books to prove it!)But it's true that pace Thatcher and merrily continued by Blair and Brown, there has been a decreasing public space for debate among the demos, as collective and social institutions are eroded (libraries anyone?) and the Executive agglomerates more and more power to itself so that Prime Ministers can take the country into openly unpopular wars.

There really is nothing new under the sun, either about capitalism's opprobrium, or the lack of any credible economic system of organisation to replace it. There has been no new political or economic thought since John Maynard Keynes. Even the radical free marketers espousing Milton Friedman in the 1980s, were only rehashing John Bright And William Cobden's nineteenth century credo. Movements like UK Uncut and Occupy display wonderful creative organisational energy in the nature of their protest, but are completely stumped for offering up alternative systems to replace that which they're protesting.

If you were going to be both rigorous and spectacular with your approach to protest, then maybe rather than occupy a cathedral's walkup space and hit the concessions kiosk takings, maybe construct a simulacrum of the Houses Of Parliament and hold a genuine discussion of politics and constitution, which in the British case is actually to figure out what our 'invisible' constitution actually is and set it down and make it accessible for all. Symbolic and practical resistance and protest all in one. So far the only casualties of the protest have been some clergymen, as the Anglican Church is further rent down the middle by the spasming twitch of its radical rump suddenly getting a jolt. This from an institution beset by strife over gender and sexuality among its own priesthood.

But in fact we don't even need this symbolic form of protest I believe, since the means for change have already been laid, somewhat unwittingly by government themselves. Before I go on to suggest what this might be, I do commend the sentiment behind Occupy of talking and debating those areas of politics and finance that the worlds of Politics and Finance don't want us to discuss and have effectively kept us in the dark about these past 30 years. For me, a crucial precursor involves a politicisation and an education of the electorate and such debates and discussions, if there is an upswell, can only help contribute to such a process. (Hence Occupy can only be termed successful if people are inspired to go and raise these issues in their Parish councils and WI meetings and the like).

I think the government have opened up a whole can of worms with their online petitions and plebiscites. We've already had the disclosure of the details behind the Hillsborough disaster finally after 22 years of suppression of information, because the public managed to get sufficient numbers of signatures online to force the issue. There ought to come a time when people realise that rather than sign up in order to have the Parliamentary talking shop discuss a particular issue, we the people are perfectly capable of discussing it for ourselves and voting online, without recourse to craven representatives doing it on our behalf and defanging anything remotely threatening to the status quo. The will of the people directly transmitted to the Civil Service who would then expedite our actual needs.

Of course the politicians may look to withdraw online democracy if it proves too menacing to their livelihoods, but the genie is out the bottle on that one and any attempt to deny us service will make them appear as craven as Mubarek's attempts to hold on to power. And yes not every household has access to online technology (didn't Gordon Brown promise every household would be digitised by 2012 and not just its television services?). And no doubt there can be fraud and technological jerrymandering, but hey there are enough rotten boroughs up and down the realm already extant.

The two greatest barriers to this bloodless revolution, are our own will, (not grasping the nettle out of timidity or deference) AND our paucity of political education and awareness of the issues and a lack of commitment to take responsibility and get to understand the affairs of government - self-government in this case. So I do salute the faint stirrings of public debate offered by Occupy, even if they seem to be starting from a very low base. But only if such a will to debate and discuss and exchange ideas grows countrywide, can it possibly lead anywhere. But oh my, how radical a destination could it take us to?

with thanks to Alex Butterworth,Bibi van der Zee, Ted Vallance and Dan Hind for panel discussion hosted by Little Atoms that helped me order my thoughts above