Why I’d Rather Vote For A Mass-Murderer With An Ostensible Conscience, Than One Without…

This weekend a fantastic sequence of events occurred and, in their occurrence, I was reaffirmed in my self-hating decision to vote Labour in the General Election.

My decision to vote Labour in 2010, despite being disgusted by their nearly thirteen years of continuing the exact same foreign and economic policies as the Tories, and never before voting for them in my life (thus far it’s either been Lib Dem or Green all the way), is one I’ve discussed several times on this blog.  The basic motivation – to remind the long-term-memory-deficient – is to put up a strong front against the expected Conservative victory by voting tactically for their closest opposition because, though Labour are bad, the Tories are arguably worse, and I’d rather vote Labour and get Labour, the lesser of two evils, than vote with my heart and allow David Cameron to win by default.

Still, it makes me feel dirty to lend my support – if only strategically – to a party and government responsible for so much death and destruction during their time in power.  From Hawk Jets to Indonesia, to the ongoing horrors of Afghanistan and everything in between; from tuition fees and the private finance initiative to academies and the new deal; the Labour Party might well be the lesser of two evils in that, under an ostensibly left-wing government there are always superficial yet significant real-world improvements alongside the business-as-usual thrust of continuity capitalism, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that they’re not still an evil.  I do not support the Labour Party; I merely oppose the Conservatives. 

But when I read the paper on Saturday morning and re-lived Gordon Brown’s shameless and unapologetic defence of the Iraq war during the Chilcot Inquiry, there was a very real moment of despair.

I can’t vote for these blatant murderers, I thought.  I really can’t, in good conscience, place a cross in the box for a man who bankrolled the illegal and unjustified invasion of a sovereign nation and still cheerleads that decision today…

But then I read the story underneath the report on Chilcot.

The one about the Young Britons’ Foundation.

The Young Britons’ Foundation, according to the Guardian, are a right-wing group “whose leadership has described the NHS as ‘the biggest waste of money in the UK’, claimed global warming is ‘a scam’ and suggested that the waterboarding of prisoners can be justified.” They also have suggested that police should shoot down protesters. 

At least eleven prospective Conservative Party candidates running in the upcoming General Election have undergone training at the YBF, a group that it’s chief executive, Donal Blaney, calls a “Conservative madrasa”, designed to “radicalize” young Tories into extreme neo-conservativism, and at the recent annual YBF parliamentary rally at the House of Commons, shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox and Conservative Party chairman, Eric Pickles both spoke.  Former YBF speakers include David Cameron’s former chief of staff, Alex Deane, shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, shadow arts minister, Ed Vaizey, Andrew Rosindell, Conservative MP for Romford, and former Tory ministers, John Redwood and David Davis.  In other words, if you vote for the Tories this spring, then you will be getting graduates and supporters of this rather ugly neo-conservative boot camp, with close links to neo-con groups in the States, forming your next UK government.* 

That’s why I’ll be voting Labour – because as bad as Labour is, the Conservatives are still worse.  Gordon Brown might be a murderer, but at least he’s an accountable murderer. 

And just to punctuate the point that a right-leaning left-wing government is still better than a right-leaning right-wing government, lo and behold a leaflet for the BNP came through my door the very next day.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: the ideas expressed by racist and fascist groups like the BNP are so detestable that I always assume some level of sophistication in the way that they manipulate and recruit people to join them; so it always amazes me when I read some of their moronic campaign literature and realize that it is simply written by idiots, for idiots.

“Thousands of pensioners freeze to death every winter because Labour cares more about foreign aid than they do about our old folk.  The BNP would put British people first”

No.  Capitalism is what causes pensioners to freeze every winter, because utilities companies care more about profits than they do about human life.  The extortionate price of gas bills have nothing to do with foreign aid, and if you wanted to subsidize the elderly and give them free heat during the winter you could do that by taxing the rich, properly taxing businesses, decreasing the military budget, and a million other simple solutions that have nothing to do with decreasing the pitiful amount of money we give to countries like Haiti and Chile when they need help.  The real undertone here is clear: we hate giving foreigners money and think helping old people makes us sound caring.

“As a working family we know what it’s like to be taxed to death and what effect Labour’s mismanagement of the economy has had on our house price.  The BNP would ensure British jobs for British workers.”

Can you see the theme emerging?  Here it is even more blatant than in the last one, because giving British jobs to British workers really has nothing to do with the tax policy the BNP is ostensibly aggrieved about in the first passage of this promise.  A logically coherent second sentence would read something like: As a working family we know what it’s like to be taxed to death and what effect Labour’s mismanagement of the economy has had on our house price…therefore we promise a progressive new scheme of taxation whereby working people won’t be taxed so much and rich individuals and corporations will be taxed much more.  Even a traditionally racist BNP approach of …therefore we will increase the taxes paid by foreigners living in the UK by 2000% and lower the taxes for “indigenous whites” because we hate foreign people and have no meaningful sense of history or mathematics would have made more sense than what was actually written.  But the BNP weren’t looking for “sense” here, or coherency; they were just looking for invoking that now-familiar racist undertone: the needlessly proffered fear of “British” jobs being lost out to “foreigners”, and an even more insidious allusion to house prices falling – a common refrain for racists who believe their neighbourhoods to be “overrun” with ethnic minorities.

Speaking of which…

“The government prioritises immigrants when it comes to housing.  The BNP will house British families first – it’s only fair.”

Actually, it’s not “only fair” to house British families first over immigrants who may need the housing more desperately – it is prejudiced and discriminatory.  And as the leaflet provides no real information or statistics to prove that the claim the government prioritises “immigrants” over “British” families is true, then we have no real reason to believe that it is.  Also, it should be noted that for the government to have anything to do with an “immigrant” in an official capacity, then it must be presumed that the immigrant in question is a legal immigrant, working within the system and not outside of it, in which case, technically, they are now a British family too, and any housing they are given is therefore going to a British family.  The BNP do not really mean “immigrant” here though – they mean: people of colours other than white. 

“The NHS is in decline and many of our friends find it hard to get operations – yet we’ve fought for this country and paid in all our lives.  The BNP is the only party that listens.”

Considering that the NHS is mentioned by every political party during election time, the BNP are demonstrably not the only party that listens.  They are, however, the only party who randomly invoke the idea that “we’ve fought for this country” in the middle of an argument about underfunding of the NHS.  Because that is the cause of the NHS’s “decline”: underfunding.  A solution, and easy way of improving the service provided by the NHS (which, despite all its faults, is still a million times better than any private alternative) is – and now you might spot my recurring theme – more taxes on big businesses and the rich, and a change of priorities in the budget so that more is spent on healthcare and education, and less is spent on defence and corporate welfare.  The money is there if only it was spent correctly.  Parties like the BNP (and the Conservatives) are only too happy to harp on about the cost of benefit cheats on taxpayers, but when you consider that, in 2009, individual benefit fraud cost UK taxpayers just £900 million, whilst corporate tax evasion, tax avoidance, and tax “efficencies” cost us £18.5 billion each year, it is clear to say that the real criminals are getting away with defrauding our system, including the NHS, year after year after year.

The BNP’s statement about the NHS, however, is not a meaningful policy statement regarding our health services.  Nor is it intended to be.  Again, the undertone is clear: they do not point to the causes of NHS “decline” or offer any solutions.  They simply say: “we’ve fought for this country and paid in all our lives”, which is, again, code for the idea that those who haven’t fought for this country and those who haven’t paid in all their lives – read: bloody immigrants! – are somehow coming over here and taking away our emergency services, so now grandma can’t have her knee operation.  The ignorance is astounding, and it only gets worse:

“We have children and we want them to be brought up in a Christian country and taught about our religion, culture and traditions in school.  The BNP opposes the Islamification of Britain”

Well, firstly, let me just say that I went to a state school in the UK where the Christian religion, culture and traditions were first and foremost on the agenda (“Nothing without God” was our school’s motto).  We also learnt about other religions and cultures in RE lessons, but the primary spiritual concern was Christianity and the Christian faith.  Despite the school’s best efforts at indoctrination though, I came out the other end an atheist.  The reason being: we are a free society and not a fascist state, and despite all the best propaganda in the world, we are still free to choose what we believe.

This is the reason why the UK today is a very different place culturally, ethnically and spiritually than it was, say, fifty years ago.  Not because bloody immigrants have come over here and corrupted our children with their crazy foreign gods and cultures…but because, as life has gone on, society has evolved.  We’ve learnt more about other cultures, religions and traditions, we’ve re-assessed our own, we’ve integrated the bits that we liked and we’ve ejected the pieces that we didn’t.  We are in a constant conversation with each other and that conversation has allowed new ideas to flourish, old ideas to adapt and grow stronger, and a diversity of equally valid lifestyles, beliefs and value systems to blossom and evolve alongside each other for the common good. 

The fact is, the BNP may want their children to be brought up in a Christian country, but in 2010 the UK is simply not a Christian country.  And this is a good thing.  Christians can still be Christians here, but now also Hindus can be Hindus, Sikhs can be Sikhs, Jews can be Jews, Buddhists can be Buddhists, Atheists can be Atheists, and, yes, Muslims can be Muslim.  The existence and acceptance of other religions within our society has not diminished the Christian church at all, but it has freed up the spiritual life of British individuals and shown them a variety of different options of belief.

The biggest threat to the Christian church today is not Islam; indeed the same thing which threatens Christianity is equally a threat to Islam, and is taking believers away from the Qur’an as much as it is from the Bible: it is atheism.  It is the fact that we, as a culture, are slowly moving forward, out of the intellectual dark ages, and as people like myself grow up and re-think the superstitions of our elders, we begin to grow out of these silly and outdated religions and seek a non-religious spiritual and ethical alternative for ourselves.  Sadly for the BNP, this exodus away from religion and into the realm of the humanist and the rational is nothing to do with immigrants, Muslims, or any of the other usual scapegoats of the far-right, it is simply the result of free-thought and free-will: two innate human capacities fascist groups like the BNP seek to wipe out.

“We opposed the war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan.  British troops are losing their lives for a war which only serves out-of-touch politicians.  The BNP would bring our boys home NOW!” 

This final statement is seemingly meant to be the BNP’s big selling point in 2010.  Indeed, the cover of the leaflet says in big, bold writing: “PUTTING BRITISH PEOPLE FIRST! NO to Crime.  NO to Immigration.  NO to EU Rule.  NO to High Taxes.  YES to Bringing Our Troops Home!” all written over a patriotic backdrop of soldiers in the desert sands.  The back of the leaflet says: “BNP: THE ONLY PARTY COMMITTED TO BRINGING OUR TROOPS HOME…Our troops are being sent to their deaths in the Middle East for a political crusade which serves no British interest.”

Now, ignoring for a moment the historical ignorance here which shows the BNP clearly have no real idea why these wars are being fought (the “British interest” at stake here is what it always is in unnecessary foreign invasions: political power and economic gain.  It is not a war which “only serves out-of-touch politicians” – it is a massive albatross around most politicians’ necks and will probably cost Labour the election.  It is a war which, like all wars, serves their capitalist masters and the geo-political dominance of elites, and which we need a massive overhaul of the political and economic system to change); the first question one has to ask here is why exactly the BNP wants to bring our troops home?  One dreads to think what uses Nick Griffin would put our armed forces to at home if he were in power, nor should one be surprised that a fascist party wants to make sure a well-armed military is at their domestic disposal and not stranded overseas where they can’t be easily deployed.

Although the anti-war message is populist at the moment, the philosophy behind it from the BNP is severely hollow.  They are not opposed to the war because it was wrong, unjust, illegal, or immoral.  They are not opposed to it because we have destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan and murdered countless numbers of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.  They are not even opposed to it because they disagree with invading foreign countries so long as it is in the “British interest”.  No.  They are only opposed to it because “our boys” are being killed over there for what seems on the surface – if, like the BNP clearly do, you believe the propagandist lies of our government – a war to help out undeserving nations in the Middle East.  In other words, it’s the same old racist undertone that we found in all the other promises: why should we help those brown-skinned people over there?  Why should our troops be dying just to save a bunch of Arabs from themselves?

The BNP leaflet exposes the emptiness and the prejudice of their policies, all wrapped up in a Union Jack and garnished with creepy master-race-style pictures of smiling all-white families.  That people might actually read it, and choose to vote for these racist thugs on the basis of the ill-thought-out drivel inside, speaks more to the stupidity of our nation than it does to the skillful manipulation of the British National Party. 

Still though, again, it was a gentle reminder of why I must vote for the warmonger Brown on election day, despite opposing so much of what he stands for.

Though Labour might be despicable, they at least operate on a level where you can have a serious conversations about their actions, and they have a political base they must appease with social programmes, welfare, diplomacy, and all the other expectations of the left, even if it goes against their elite power-interests.  When you get Labour, you get disappointment, but at least you have a basic framework of shared social understanding – rights, duties, responsibilities, ethics – if only on the surface, by which you are to judge them. 

With these hooligans on the far-right, however, and their more respectable brethren in the official opposition, it is like undoing decades of social progress and starting again from square one.  It is championing ignorance, greed, selfishness, meanness, cruelty and stupidity.  It is voting for racists.  It is voting for homophobes.  It is voting for delusion and pig-headedness.  It is voting for oppression, intolerance, violence and brutality.

The Labour Party might well be a shell of their former selves, and they might even betray everything that they once stood for – but at least there is a shell and a sense of betrayal – with the Conservative Party, and especially with the BNP, you are simply getting exactly what you voted for. 

Voting for Labour might make us feel temporarily dirty, but a Conservative victory will never wash off.

*As I wrote this blog, Conservative Chairman, Eric Pickles, denounced the YBF and tried to sever Tory links with the group following the report in Saturday’s Guardian.  Though the move may be politically expedient now that the YBF have come under fire, it does not really explain why the Conservative politicians listed were happy talking and training with the YBF until it became politically damaging to do so.  I suspect here not a change in belief and policy, but a change in public perception that has necessitated a public distancing from the controversial organization, but not from the ideas which first brought these two groups together.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,General Election,Labour Party,BNP,Conservative Party,Gordon Brown,David Cameron,Nick Griffin,War on Terror,YBF,Young Britons' Foundation,Democracy

Throwin’ Out The Trash #4

Late Friday afternoons are traditionally the time that politicians, businesses, celebrities, etc, release bad news to the public in the hope that they won’t see it. Season 1, episode 13, of The West Wing calls this “Take Out The Trash Day”. Each week, there are so many fucked up stories and newsy bits and pieces that cross my path in this 24/7 media blitzkrieg that we’re living in, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to write a full-on commentary piece about all of them. Throwin’ Out The Trash is my chance each week to clear the decks of all these niggling odds and sods without ignoring them completely…

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First off I simply have to comment on the eye-opening horror with which I have recently been re-reading Howard Zinn’s amazing People’s History of the United States.

The first time I read this book, I was sixteen years old, and though I got its basic gist and was shocked by much of what I read (it never let me look at history the same way again), there was a certain youthful naivety that went into my reading of it. For one thing, having not been raised in America and thus not been taught the formal lessons of US history directly from the mouths of the victors, it presumed a basic knowledge of the standard version of events that, at the time, I just didn’t have. For another, there is a depth and scope of the argument that surrounds the historical accounts – the real philosophical meat of the book – that I was really too young to fully understand at the time. Or at least too ignorant of the wider political context to make it meaningful.

Since that first read, I have gone back to the book many times. But usually only for chapters on specific subjects which I was writing about at the time. I hadn’t read it chronologically – from start to finish – since I was a teenager, and when Zinn died a month ago, I decided it was high time to return to his magnum opus once again and check it out all these years later from beginning to end, with the eyes of an adult and the brain of a much more learned man.

As of last night, I had reached up to the First World War, and though – having read it before, and studied bits of it on and off throughout the last twelve years – I was well aware going in of all the terrible things about American history that it exposed, the most depressing thing about it reading it now, as an adult, is seeing how everything awful that is happening in the world today has been happening over and over again since 1492. Though the resistance remains permanent, and at all stages of history there has been uprisings and rebellion from the oppressed masses – just as there is now – the lie beneath the benevolence of our “democratic” system is lain out in stark black and white: laws that control and make obedient; wars for private profit; the rich getting richer via the exploitation of the poor; the intentional quelling of revolutionary rage through legislative bribery and misdirecting jingoism; people consistently being manipulated to work against their own interests for the benefit of their masters… Everything I hate about the world now, everything that is ingrained into our system; in A People’s History you see the entire foundation for our current oppression be built brick by brick by a minority of elites who treated nations as playthings for their own amusement and wealth.

If you haven’t read this book already: do. If you have read it before: read it again.

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As I write this, Gordon Brown is giving evidence at the Chilcot Inquiry.

Should I be watching it? Should I be concerned with what he says? After seeing Blair’s performance – and the pass he received from the media and his colleagues for expertly lying with a smile – I have no interest in what Brown has to say for himself. I don’t need a public inquiry to know the facts: an illegal and unjustified war was declared, and Brown, as Chancellor, willingly wrote the cheques and continued the war when he became Prime Minister.

What else is there left to say?

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It was nice to see the Armenian genocide finally called the Armenian genocide.

I really have no informed opinion on this matter except that when I was a kid listening to the first System of a Down album, I remember Serj (the band’s front-man) used to talk about the Armenian genocide (and it’s deletion from history) all the time. Serj was cool and his politics were sound: if Serj says it was genocide, then I decided it was genocide. Evidently, 95 years later, so too does the U.S., despite Hillary Clinton’s best protests.

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The underlying philosophy of this Blog has always been that, though an avowed anarchist, and believer that all mainstream political parties represent elite interests and not the genuine interests of the population they claim to represent, until we see real political change we have to operate in the world that we’ve got. As such, there is an argument to support parties of “the left” over parties of “the right”, if only because – on a very minor scale; the only scale that we have – the propagated differences between the two main parties must at least be paid lip service to, in order to maintain the illusion of democracy. These superficial differences, to which parties are publically perceived to be bound, therefore create a genuine and distinct difference in the tone of our oppression under governments of the left and governments of the right. Though we are oppressed in all cases – and must continue striving to change the system entirely if we ever want that to change – our oppression is “better” under governments of the left because their ostensible guiding philosophy does not allow – in the public’s eye – for the same extreme transgressions as found in governments of the right.

I’ve always said that, when choosing between left and right, you just have to look at each side’s more extreme ends in order to assess which one is objectively better for society. On the left, the most extreme form of bomb-throwing terrorists are throwing those bombs because they want an end to tyrannical government who oppress and exploit the majority of their citizens, and wish to establish a world where the people are in control of their own lives, their days are not spent enslaved to bosses and banks, and a more humane and free society will evolve, based on mutual cooperation and freedom instead of competition and greed.

On the right, we have Nazis.

And in America at the moment, according to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, there has been a 250% rise in extremist right-wing “patriot” groups since the election of Barack Obama.

"Already there are signs of ... violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, right-wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."

The surge in such groups and their associated violence is, according to the SPLC, in part because their views are now aired nightly on places like Fox News and Conservative talk radio, with crack-pot conspiracy theories once considered extreme and discredited now forming part of the mainstream debate.

Weird huh? The conservatives who are coming after Obama claim that it’s nothing to do with his race (it’s to do with him being a communist – a bank-lovin’, war-expandin’, non-healthcare providin’ communist!), yet their arguments are helping to fuel this distinctly racist fire…

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Speaking of Obama not being the Communist the right believe him to be, who else is sick of the pantomime surrounding the ill-fated healthcare bill?

Now that any attempt at dialogue between the two parties have allegedly failed, the word is that the President shall be attempting to fast-track his bill through Congress.

What seems to be lost in all this irrelevant conversation about who’s won what – will the bill be a victory for Obama; or will concessions found within it be a victory for the Republicans? – is the fact that this is supposed to be about providing universal healthcare to American citizens, not about which political party is best at getting bills through Congress, and on that count the President’s bill – and every bill that came into either house – spectacularly fails.

The American people want single-payer, universal healthcare as is available in every other industrialized country in the world. Boasts that a new bill might cover 96% of the people or 98% of the people just aren’t good enough: 100% and it should be free. That’s what we have here in Britain, and it’s what America should have over there.

There is literally nothing complicated about this once you take away all the vested interests – you pay through it with taxes, and if you need more taxes you tax the rich, but even if you tax the people a little more than you currently do, without them having to pay for health insurance, they could not only afford it but it would be cheaper. Everyone is covered – no one dies unnecessarily; no one goes broke because they got cancer or had a baby. End of discussion.

Obama, Republicans, Democrats – their failings to get this done is, to them, not a failing. It is an expertly played piece of political theatre that makes it seem impossible for their citizens to have the thing they actually want and sells them a twisted form of compromise which they can then sell to voters as a victory.

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I was going to write something about the Californian guy who got eight years in jail for stealing a piece of cheese…but what more can be said about the stupid three strikes rule?

45000 people die in America per year because of lack of healthcare, yet is anyone being arrested about that?

What about those war criminals Bush and Cheney? And now Obama, Biden and Clinton?

Tough on crime: so long as it’s the right crime.

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Still no word from Councillor Dawkins regarding my reply to his last letter – I guess he’s realized I won’t be voting for him or his party so I’m probably not worth the email anymore (or he’s waiting for answers from head office).

If there’s one thing I learn from watching Question Time each week it’s that politicians don’t like being called up on their spin. Seriously – look at these people’s faces whenever they’re asked a follow-up question regarding a talking-point statement or statistic that they’ve dutifully churned out. It’s like a rabbit caught in the headlights. And then they give Dimbleby this headmaster’s look to a naughty schoolboy, the one that says – now you know you’re not allowed to do that David – before returning to avoiding the question and talking about something else instead.

How has it come to the point where we allow these people to do that? Talk show guests who are only there to sell their products, political guests who are only there to sell their policies. Whatever happened to journalism?

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Finally, Max and the Marginalized are a band I only found out about a few days ago and yet they are quickly becoming a huge favourite. Relevant, political, and putting their art and activism before their profits, here’s the video that set the ball in motion for me…

If you like their stuff, check out the website. You can download their songs for free or buy a sweet $5 zip file of all 62 tracks!

Technorati Tags: Throwin' Out The Trash,Max and the Marginalized,Chilcot Inquiry,Gordon Brown,Obama,Healthcare Bill,Three Strikes,Southern Poverty Law Center,UK Politics,US Politics,Politics

SCANNER REPRINT: Nov ‘09: The Science of Politics

For those who didn’t catch it on Scanner the past few months – here’s a reprint of my previous JWTMTR column.  For the latest, check out: http://www.scannerzine.com/danmckeefebruary2010.htm

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THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

In late October, 2009, Professor David Nutt was sacked from his position as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), following two major clashes between official government drugs policy and his "outspoken" personal views.
The first clash came from an academic paper Nutt published in January, 2009, entitled Equasy, an over-looked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms. In this paper, the well-respected expert in neuropsychopharmacology argued a very simple premise: the harm caused by illegal drugs is equal to harm caused in other, more socially acceptable, legal pastimes; yet it is only drug-based harm which is penalized and legislated against.

Nutt focused, in the paper, on the love of horse-riding, or "equasy", as he jokingly called it (a made up term to describe a condition he dubbed as "equine addiction syndrome"), comparing the harm caused to self and others by "equasy", to the level of harm to self and others stemming from the use of the illegal drug ecstasy. The conclusion was as compelling as it was simple: when ten deaths a year and over a hundred traffic accidents are caused by the perfectly legal pursuit of "equasy", why is it that horse-riding is considered any less dangerous than taking ecstasy? And if one form of similarly harmful behavior is deemed to be legal and socially acceptable, why then isn’t the other?

Although this was an academic paper, written in Professor Nutt’s professional capacity (and not an official government document, released under the auspices of the ACMD), the paper sparked a knee-jerk furore from those appalled by Nutt’s bold suggestion that the drug might not actually be the unequivocal poison it is traditionally depicted as being in the media. Indeed, he was forced to apologize by then-Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, and, when the ACMD later made the suggestion that the drug be downgraded from being a Class A substance to being a Class B, the advice was roundly ignored.

Recognizing that political prudence and real scientific fact were two very separate things (and that he was, first and foremost, a scientist, not a politician), Nutt did not ignore the science behind his position on drugs just because it was revealed to be politically unfavourable. Although a government minister, necessarily concerned with public opinion, might choose to ignore rational argument and empirical data if the conclusions they yield turn out to be a PR nightmare, a scientist dedicated to a factually supported and objectively researched understanding of truth does not have that luxury. Despite his official advice being ignored, Nutt remained committed to his well-supported position and, over the summer, gave a private academic lecture on the relative risks of a wide variety of drugs, in which he concluded that the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, were much more harmful than many illegal drugs currently criminalized in the UK, such as: cannabis, ecstasy, and even LSD. Further still, Nutt argued that Jacqui Smith’s proclaimed "precautionary principle" method of dealing with drug-laws was often counter-productive; targeting her move to reverse the decision to downgrade cannabis. By doing this, he argued, the drug not only gained a new notoriety and cachet on the streets, which made people who otherwise wouldn’t be interested more eager to seek it out, but it also served to confuse the public, who were now seeing a consistent clash between the supported scientific evidence about drugs, and the direction of government strategy.

"It starts to distort the value of evidence," said Nutt. And clearly he is right. If all the real and demonstrable scientific evidence points to, say, cannabis being an objectively less harmful drug than alcohol, yet the policies we have in place – in spite of all that evidence – continue to treat marijuana possession as a prisonable offence whilst keeping wine and beer flowing freely on the streets, it implicitly puts forward the message that verifiable scientific evidence is no better a tool for seeking truth than unsubstantiated, knee-jerk opinion. Yet it was for making these valid criticisms of current government drugs policy – a defence of hard science, logic and reason against inconsistent and baseless politics, with no justificatory intellectual foundation – that Smith’s successor, Alan Johnson, finally decided to fire Professor Nutt from his position on the ACMD. Nutt, according to Johnson, had over-stepped his remit, and undermined the government’s attempts to send out a clear message on drugs.

As a leading expert on neuropsychopharmacology, however, (the effects of pharmaceuticals on the brain) who was hired to be the government’s chief adviser on drug’s policy; to me, it seems plain that any inconsistencies between what Professor Nutt and his office were saying, and what the government was actually doing, must be placed squarely at the feet of the government, and not with Professor Nutt. By not following the guidance of the scientific evidence on this complicated issue, and pursuing instead a policy based solely around how legislation would play in the tabloids this close to a general election, the British government have undermined the credibility of their own message on drugs all by themselves. Chasing favorable headlines – instead of what might actually be best for its citizens – two consecutive Home Secretaries have now ignored the empirically based conclusions of its senior scientific advisor on this particular issue because their practical ramifications were unpalatable. When the dissonance between the policies they were pursuing and the truth of the actual evidence became too threatening, they chose to shoot the messenger rather than confront his sound but inconvenient truths.

Now, before anyone reading this gets the misconception that I am some brainwashed and bitter stoner, angry that my precious drugs are being re-criminalized by my government, and frustrated that the holy grail of legalization has once more been taken away, let me lay my cards out on the table. Far from being a habitual user of recreational drugs, I am what people round these parts would call: "straightedge" (though it’s a title I personally eschewed for years because of the unpleasant cult-like mentality some of its advocates developed during the late-nineties). This straightedge lifestyle isn’t a recent development; I am not making up now for past abuses by going cold turkey on old habits and taking a crash-course in sobriety. In my near-three decades on this planet I have never once done a single non-prescription drug, never once smoked a cigarette, never once drank a beer, never even tasted spirits or hard liquor, and – apart from one glass of white wine at the age of twelve, and a couple of celebratory sips of champagne when I was even younger and didn’t know what I was doing – I have never willingly drunk alcohol in my life. I have never been "high", I have never been drunk, and, despite the usual moments of peer pressure in school toilets and ill-advised teenage gatherings, I have never felt the need to light up a burning stick of deadly carcinogen and inhale it into my lungs for pleasure.

I do not oppose the firing of Professor David Nutt because, like thousands of other pro-legalization supporters, I am sick of risking my freedom every time I want to smoke a joint. I oppose the firing of Professor David Nutt because my straightedge belief that all drugs are harmful, stupid and unnecessary distractions to a meaningful and fulfilling life, (used to keep populations docile and psychologically controlled via the quick-fix solution of ephemeral false-pleasures that make people too stoned and vacant to effectively fight the real causes of their anxiety and despair; thus sacrificing real and permanent change and happiness – possibly of the revolutionary variety – for hollow and artificial hallucinations that keep them compliant and enslaved) is, at its core, a belief in putting science, reason and fact before mindlessness, irrationality and false comfort. The cornerstone of my own personal rejection of drugs and alcohol is the idea that an authentic sense of happiness and wellbeing is a much better pursuit for each of us than its numbed and synthetic, narcotically-induced facsimile. By prioritizing that which is true and meaningful over a patchwork of easy, but empty, lies, the same commitment to truth and clarity over illusion and unthinking that makes me personally opposed to taking drugs, makes it impossible for me not to defend scientific evidence like that of Professor David Nutt’s over the unfounded and reactionary drug policies of a headline-pandering government. I may not personally like drugs, but I cannot deny the science and logic behind calls for their legalization.

As David Nutt made clear: alcohol and tobacco demonstrably kill thousands of people in the UK each year. According to the British government’s own Office of National Statistics, there were 8,724 deaths from alcohol in 2007 alone (with some sources claiming the real number to be even higher, once alcohol-related deaths are taken into account too). Tobacco, meanwhile, kills an estimated 100,000 people a year. As unnecessary and dangerous, non-essential items in our lives, there is no compelling reason for either of these drugs to be legalized, yet both of them are freely sold – and profitably taxed – by governments around the world. Once you have permitted these two confirmed killers to be sold without a problem though, you then have either one of two logically consistent options regarding the legal classification of any other drug that is demonstrably less dangerous: you must either legalize those other drugs too, on the same argument – whatever it is – that made you legalize alcohol and tobacco in the first place, or, you must concede that all drugs are dangerous and completely ban them all.

The history of prohibition has shown us what happens when governments try to ban things for which there is an insatiable market. Indeed, there is no better example of how prohibition doesn’t work, than the world’s thriving drugs market today: every banned substance on Earth can still be easily acquired by those with the money to pay for it. Even our prisons – right at the heart of our criminal justice system, right under our police officer’s noses – are swamped with an influx of easily accessible narcotics and home-brewed hooch: prohibition doesn’t solve the problem, it merely sweeps it underground.

This undeniable truism – that banning these substances doesn’t work – is the underlying argument used to validate the continued non-criminalization of alcohol and tobacco. It is an argument I agree with, and it is an argument which clearly applies to all other drugs too: whilst total prohibition simply doesn’t work, sufficient regulation of potentially harmful substances can demonstrably help temper some of their dangers and keep their usage under control.

Right now, there is a hugely lucrative black-market in illegal drugs – the people who want them are not denied their vice just because it is illegal; they just have to work harder to get it – and when the hard science continues to tell us that some of these currently banned substances are much less harmful to us than the two highly prized drugs we have arbitrarily decided to allow into our societies – alcohol and tobacco – there seems to be no good reason at all why we shouldn’t just throw up our hands and concede defeat at these ridiculous attempts to police people’s appetites: clearly, criminalization does not work.

Not only does it not work regarding the basic issue of keeping the drugs off our streets, it also doesn’t work because, by making drugs illegal, we create a whole host of brand new problems and dangers on top of any legitimate chemical concerns.

By forcing those who crave drugs to buy from criminal markets, we create those criminal markets. People become beholden to the exploitative extortionate prices of the mob, with no other choice of supplier; some even going on to commit other crimes, such as robbery or murder, to feed their growing addictions. This is not the fault of the drugs themselves, but the fault of legislation. With the drugs being illegal, most addiction remains untreated, and desperate users are led into taking drastic action once they can’t meet the asking price of their unregulated dealers. Fearing imprisonment should they "come out" and try to seek professional help for their dependency, users become victims, stuck in a cycle of uncontrollable cravings from which there is no easy escape.
Another corollary of criminalization is that it actually increases the levels of harm that taking these drugs exposes us to. Many of the deaths and medical complications that come from taking illegal drugs these days, stem from a mixture of nefarious criminal dealers cutting an expensive "pure" product with dangerous and unknown additives (bulking up their stash in order to double its potential profits), and the fact that, being illegal, there are no clear instructions or health warnings concerning what to do with your drugs once you’ve got them. Whilst we are constantly told each day about the acceptable number of "units" of alcohol that we should consume in any twenty-four hour period, how smoking will kill us, and even guided on the levels of nutrients, fats and sugars that we should be eating when buying our food, the average teenager buying an ecstasy pill at a nightclub remains completely unaware about what exactly the drug will be doing to their body, and how they should therefore respond to it. Should they drink lots of water, to stop their body from overheating? Or does too much water actually kill you on ecstasy, because the kidneys can shut down? With no instruction booklet to guide you when buying junk out on the streets – with no health and safety regulation, government oversight or industry standards with which to comply – the supposedly "protected" citizen does not know what the fuck they are buying, or how to take it without causing themselves harm.

This is why, despite being straightedge, I think that all drugs should be legalized. Not just the ones safer than cigarettes and alcohol, but everything.

That is not, of course, to say that I necessarily endorse a world where we sell cocaine and heroin in every neighbourhood chemist; but it is to suggest that even drugs such as these ones would be much better off supplied to addicts by professionally trained doctors who know what they’re doing, on prescription – with additional help and support offered to gradually wean them out of the habit, without sending them directly to jail – than by thugs on the street, simply looking to make some blood money off a terminally addicted clientele.

I still won’t buy them once they’re legal, but with all drugs on some level inherently deadly, dangerous, and detrimental (yet impossible to stamp out so long as the world we’ve created for ourselves remains ridiculously predisposed to inducing tedium, anxiety, trepidation and fear; the relief from which makes such drugs often seem like a necessity – hey, even a straightedge goody-two-shoes like me needs his coffee three times a day!) picking just two of them out, seemingly at random, as being somehow "better" for us than any of the other substances on offer (especially when the research tells us completely the opposite) simply makes no sense. What’s more, it makes our streets more dangerous, puts our drug-curious citizens more at risk, and it means that millions of extra pounds that could be generated in lucrative taxation and drug manufacturing jobs instead get pumped into the criminal underground, funding murderers, gangsters, and, yes, terrorism too.

If we legalized and taxed even a small selection of the drugs currently prohibited by law, there would be no economic crisis. Social security would be secure; hospitals and schools would no longer have to compete with "defence" budgets for money…hell, we might even be able to give public sector workers a pay-rise or two and, dare I say it, even raise people’s benefits?

So yeah, I’m the straightedge guy who thinks all drugs should be legal because I believe in free-will and self-discipline over externally enforced baseless government-dictated moralities. But the sacking of Professor Nutt speaks to a much deeper problem in contemporary British politics than just the relatively innocuous question of what particular brand of mind-numbing narcotic we should be freely allowed to piss away our lives with. The real scandal here is not that David Nutt told us ecstasy was less dangerous than horse-riding, or that he dared tell his peers that alcohol and tobacco were bigger killers than LSD; it is that our government has once again let the compelling data of scientific fact fall on deaf ears, proceeding to take a position on drugs which flies in the face of all expert opinion; a legislative practice which has much bigger implications that the mere classification of cannabis or LSD.

How many times, for example, have we recently heard that same government talk about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons programme?

In September this year, after what is now known as the "Fordo" reactor site was discovered by the CIA, MI6 and the French DGSE Intelligence Agency, Iran admitted in a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency that they were building a secret uranium enrichment plant, causing huge stirs around the Western world. Considered "proof" of a wider nuclear weapons project, the admission of the development of a fledgling enrichment site saw the country roundly condemned by world leaders, and the Fordo reactor became cited as "evidence" that years’ worth of rumour and accusation about Iranian nuclear weaponry was now indisputably true.

Following the duplicitous way in which we were dragged into war with Iraq, the need for calm and rationale, objective, scientific fact here, in place of prejudice, propaganda and misinformation, is clear. Is the Fordo site proof that the Iranians can’t be trusted? Is it really the first menacing step towards our nuclear Armageddon, or is it what the Iranians say it is: an innocent uranium enrichment facility designed for a peaceful domestic programme of nuclear power? (That same "clean and safe" nuclear power that our own Western governments are so keen to constantly tell us is the environmentally friendly solution to our current carbon-dependency, and for which, here in Britain, there are plans already unveiled to build a whole new generation of reactors by as soon as 2018?)

Unless we start listening to scientists – people who actually know how these nuclear reactors work; the nuances of capability determined by centrifuge capacity; the qualitative differences between warhead enrichment and energy creation – then we are left only with the words of our governments to guide us. Those same deceitful politicians who we entrusted with the "evidence" of supposed Iraqi nuclear weapons programmes back in 2003.

As with David Nutt and our current foolhardy drugs policy, when it came to what was really happening in Iraq, the expert advice – though widely available – was ignored. At the time of this writing, according to the conservative estimates of Iraq Body Count, between 94,144 and 102,728 Iraq civilians have thus far been killed by that treacherous decision. 4,681 coalition soldiers have also been killed. That is, by even the lowest estimates, over thirty-three nine-elevens’ worth of death and destruction doled out, for those who are counting, and all because our war-hungry governments decided to ignore all the available factual evidence and go to war with unfounded and unsupported policies that played well in the tabloids and got the brain-dead patriots rallying blindly round the flag.

In terms of Iran, I am not saying that their Fordo reactor is not a viable concern – perhaps Tehran is, as our governments have been asserting for years, trying to build a nuclear bomb so that they can wipe Israel off the face of the planet and kick-start World War III? What I am saying though, is that I want the basis of any conclusions we ultimately make about what Iran is doing, and how we might respond to it, to come from experts, scientists, specialists – people who deal in solid, empirically-based facts – not agenda-blinded governments who shrug away the difficult truths that don’t fit in with their already predetermined worldview, and then sell lies to the public as reality, in order to turn fiction into a basis for policy.

We live in tumultuous times, and the verifiable and well-documented answers provided by science, and those hundreds of thousands of diligent researchers in all kinds of specialist fields not constricted by twenty-four hour news-cycles, fashionable search-trends and 140 characters or less – they should be the cornerstone of any relevant policy decisions our government makes, not the paranoid ranting and raving of unhinged tabloid readers.

This is a world that is quite literally in peril because of our collective scientific ignorance since the industrial revolution. A world where listening to what climate scientists are telling us might be our only key to survival after a century and change of our own fossil-fuelled self-destruction. Yet, like David Nutt, what these climate scientists are telling us is not always politically sensitive: an 80% reduction of our carbon emissions needed by 2050, or else the damage is irrevocable; an urgent need to radically change our everyday lifestyles and most basic cultural assumptions; an imminent peak-oil crisis; the end of air-travel as we know it; a rejection of the push for nuclear power that well-lobbied politicians are so currently keen on, and the proper funding and commitment for clean, renewable energies like wind and solar power, that don’t leave us with mountains of toxic waste, continued nuclear proliferation, and the ever-present threat of a catastrophic meltdown…

If our government can’t even bear to be told that perhaps smoking cannabis might be just as bad (if not better) than smoking a cigarette, then how the hell do we expect them to process the truly life-changing scientific data concerning what we must do about something as drastic as climate change?
The survival of the planet, our health, the lives of our soldiers and innocent civilians worldwide – these are just a few of the vital areas in which a need for fact over fantasy is crucial, yet time and time again our governments have eschewed logic, reason and awkward empirical data to push through an agenda of their own – usually one politically or financially motivated. An agenda drawn up by lobbyists and ideological think-tanks to boost opinion polls and private coffers, no matter what the damage and danger to the general population.

The firing of one scientific advisor on a tiny island nation might seem like quite an insignificant event in the global scheme of things, but with the sacking of David Nutt comes an important lesson for us all: as our elected leaders continue to ignore the weight of science and reason in favour of substanceless, crowd-pleasing untruths, they do so at our peril. We can only bury our heads in the sand for so long, before we find we are soon choking to death on the dirt.

DaN McKee, 19th November 2009

Technorati Tags: Scanner Zine,Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules,Drugs,David Nutt Sacking,David Nutt,UK Politics,Politics,Science

New Scanner “Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules” Article

My latest SCANNER ARTICLE is up on the Scanner-zine website.  Entitled “General Election 2010 – How Ignoring Minor Differences Can Lead to Major Disappointments”, it deals with my thoughts on the impending UK election…

 

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,General Election,Scanner Zine,Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules,Links,US Politics,Democracy,Politics

Dear Councillor Dawkins #2…

So I finally got a reply from Councillor Dawkins from the letter I sent a few weeks ago about the seeming contradictions in his public position on the Kraft takeover of Cadbury and the underlying economic policies of his party…

Dear Dr. McKee,  

You are perhaps being a little harsh on me.   I have been making similar points in various speeches over the last few years in public.  Either one can accept that or one can accuse me of being disingenuous. 

I have to disagree with your assertion regarding the Conservative Party. Like most parties we are a broad church with widely held views.  
I have said often is that we are all for free trade. However the free trade of goods does not necessarily have to translate into the free trade of companies. Selling off our priceless manufacturing and exporting companies to foreign companies in no ways makes us a better country.
There are already rules devised by the takeover panel to control the details of hostile takeovers, so it is not a complete free for all. What I have suggested is that we need to reconsider these rules and to determine if they are currently serving the national interest or should they be made harder. For instance instead of 51% of shareholders needing to agree to a hostile takeover it could be 75% needed (that in itself would have scuppered the Kraft takeover as they only managed a 71% agreement).
Another suggestion perhaps is that only shareholders which have held shares for more than 6 months could vote in such circumstances rather than a company falling prey to hedgefunds whose only interest is in making money.  
It may be that we would only  apply these more stringent rules to our exporting manufacturing companies.  It is these companies which have taken generations to build and are vital to this country's wealth building capacity. When they are taken over that wealth producing capacity invariably leeches away from this country.
There is also the issue of a level playing field. We are the most open economy for such takeovers far more so than our foreign competitors.
I seriously doubt that we would have been permitted to buy a company like Cadbury from the Japanese, the Chinese and even the French.
When people mention the Conservative party I always gently remind them that the first company I ever worked for when I left University was Rolls Royce in Derby; a company nationalised in 1971  by a Conservative government in the national interest rather than letting it go bankrupt. The government still has some golden shares in Rolls Royce which prevents it being taken into foreign ownership. Those golden shares have not prevented Rolls Royce becoming perhaps our greatest engineering company and our second largest exporter.
I hope this has been helpful.
Regards,
Nigel

Though it was nice that he had a go at defending himself, I had problems with his reply right away.  First off – yes, free-trade under the neo-liberal style of free-market economics promoted by the Tories since Thatcher does have to mean the free-trade of companies too if it is to remain a coherent theory.  And secondly – isn’t his Kraft-beating idea of a 75% majority just a little too convenient and arbitrary to hold any water?  Why not 69% or 70%?  With no sustaining argument behind it, any number higher than the 51% we have in the current system is basically just taken at random, and that the 75% mark proposed just so happens to be enough to thwart the takeover at Cadbury seems a little bit easy to me.

Anyway, I sent off the following reply and we’ll see how this thing goes.

Dear Councillor Dawkins,

Thank you for your reply to my previous email regarding your recent comments about Cadbury. Although I appreciate your efforts at explaining to me the perceived contradictions that I see in your public position on the Cabury takeover and your continuing membership in the pro-free-market Conservative Party, I am afraid that your argument remains unconvincing.

Yes the Conservative Party is a “broad church” – but, like any church, there are still certain sacrosanct parameters at which that broadness ends (or else what would be the difference between parties?) and for the Conservative Party one of the core elements of its unifying philosophy, for at least the last thirty years, is a belief in the free-market system.

Though you may wish to pick and choose which bits and pieces of your party’s policy-guiding economic philosophy you as an individual subscribe to, the fact of the matter is that under the terms of the endorsed philosophy of free-market economics synonymous with the Tories since Thatcher (not specifically free-trade, but of the free-market ideal behind it), the Kraft takeover of Cadbury was a text-book case of legitimate free-market acquisition: an independent and profitable company was given an attractive offer to sell, its board recommended it, and its shareholders accepted it.

Now I, as someone who opposes this rapacious economic ideology that puts the profits of the few over the wellbeing of the many, agree with much of what you publically say: it is a disgrace that thousands of Bournville jobs might now be lost because lining the pockets of Cadbury shareholders was deemed of higher social value than the economic well-being of this community. But it is Conservative economic policy – and the continuation of that misguided policy under Labour – that got us here, and so long as you are affiliated with that party your words can only seem, at best, tainted, and, at worst, like shameless opportunism. As those words are so often also wrapped up in the hollow whiff of an ugly flag-waving nationalism, I sincerely have my doubts – the issue is not, as you seem to suggest, whether a company is British-owned or foreign-owned, but whether we have an economic system in place which secures well-paid British jobs regardless of the nationality of a particular company’s owners, and which ensures all businesses – British or otherwise – are properly taxed and incentivised to invest their successes back into the local community and not just into their own private pockets.

I would be much more likely to take your position seriously, Councillor Dawkins, if you were seen less on the front-pages of the local newspaper holding a Union Jack in your hand and blaming the Labour Party for not signing a letter, and more in the fine-print of that newspaper, presenting an intellectually honest and coherent opposition to the economic policies and practices that have guided your party for decades.

As far as I am aware, neither David Cameron nor George Osborne have publically renounced this historically Conservative position of economic theory, and though it strikes a populist chord to talk about saving British jobs and tightening the rules on hostile takeovers in the aftermath of what happened at Cadbury, as long as the framework for those rules remain an economic philosophy which puts the needs of businesses above the needs of people, the only real change you and your party can offer, despite your public posturing, is a slightly different shade of the same colour.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Daniel McKee

PS… Whilst I thank you for the wistful nostalgia invoked by reminding me of Edward Heath’s nationalization of Rolls Royce in ’71, may I in turn remind you that it was Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government which ultimately privatized the company again in 1987, and that Rolls Royce was one of the many companies over the past few years to cut hundreds of British jobs during the economic downturn, despite having an order-book worth over £35bn.

In other news, evidently I am not the only person not buying this for-the-people act…

Technorati Tags: Anti-Capitalism,Cadbury,Cadbury Buy-Out,Capitalism,Conservative Party,General Election,Kraft Food,Local Politics,Spin,UK Politics,Nigel Dawkins

Throwin’ Out The Trash #3

Late Friday afternoons are traditionally the time that politicians, businesses, celebrities, etc, release bad news to the public in the hope that they won’t see it.  Season 1, episode 13, of The West Wing calls this “Take Out The Trash Day”.  Each week, there are so many fucked up stories and newsy bits and pieces that cross my path in this 24/7 media blitzkrieg that we’re living in, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to write a full-on commentary piece about all of them.  Throwin’ Out The Trash is my chance each week to clear the decks of all these niggling odds and sods without ignoring them completely…

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First of all – I take it all back about how other countries can deal with snow and we can’t.  No sooner had Charlie Brooker jokingly called the UK’s cold-snap “Snowmageddon” this past January, then US President, Barack Obama, used the exact same word in relation to Washington’s recent snow-storm at a DNC meeting.

That said, the US “snowmageddon” actually looks pretty, you know, “snowmageddony”…not just like the local council didn’t properly grit the roads.

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The awfulness of the current academic scene continues, with announcements made this week that universities across the country are planning to slash jobs, close campuses and shut-down courses in a bid to deal with expected cuts in public funding.

Yes, as students themselves continue to pay higher and higher fees, the quality of their education and the service they are receiving from universities continues to get ever worse.  The more money they pay, the less choice they are getting, the bigger their class-sizes are, and the more unconcerned their lecturers are, as the major emphasis in a university lecturer’s professional life these days is not on teaching, but on “research”.  By “research”, I mean excessive publication and funding acquisition – the two major concerns of university philosophy departments looking to score well in their assessments.

By a bizarre twist of logic, already limited funding is dictated on performance, performance is dictated on how well departments do in assessment, assessment is determined by the amount of “impact” a department has, arrived at via analysis of the number of publications produced by the department, and amount of money brought into the department through funding, and nowhere in this is much concern for the quality of education received by the fee-paying students.  Indeed, as I still keep my eye on academic jobs in order to possibly one day put to use my cumbersome Ph.D., I have noticed an increasing tendency in academic job ads for the teaching component of the job to be literally the very last thing mentioned!  They want to make sure new staff have vast publication records, proof of having acquired independent grants and funding, the ability to contribute to the research life of the university…and then, at the bottom of the page, they will also be required to teach both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Meanwhile, right-wing think-tank, Policy Exchange, have decided that university tuition fees must be raised even further – to a rate of at least £5,000 a year – if university degree-schemes are to remain viable.

So to get this straight – universities have less money than ever before, but are getting more money in tuition fees than ever before.  In a bid to get more public funding, they are putting all of their efforts into gaining high marks in RAE/REF assessment exercises, which places little to no emphasis on quality of teaching, and thus are placing a primacy within their departments on research “impact” over quality of teaching, and yet the neglected students are paying much more money to the institutions than they ever have.  Indeed, one of the ways in which universities hope to cut costs and free up full-time academic staff for more important “research”, is to leave the majority of the teaching to post-graduates – so now our students are paying more money for less qualified teachers, to subsidize the career-driven, assessment-obsessed research of pressured academics, increasingly concerned with publication for publication’s sake, rather than because they have anything worthwhile to say.

And speaking as someone who has been a postgraduate tutor, there are two things that come to mind.

1) We were constantly told not to spend too much effort on teaching our classes because our real focus must be on our dissertations/theses; nor were we paid appropriately to compensate for much more than a few hour’s preparation time a week.  So postgraduate teachers are not only less qualified, they are less motivated to provide quality education.

2)We were cheap, and essentially exploited labour.  Wages continued to be tweaked downwards during my two years of teaching, with pennies pinched here and pennies pinched there, and when we tried to talk about fair compensation in the Research Committee Meetings, the Head of School essentially told us we were lucky to be being paid at all.  “The experience is so great,” he told us, “that many would be willing to do the work for free.” 

This was true – and I loved the teaching enough that I would have worked for free, and repeatedly worked many more hours at my seminars/essay marking/student’s concerns than I was paid for – but to rely on this exploitative system of internship as the primary mode of education for all fee-paying undergrads at the same time as we are raising their fees is a disgrace.

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For more proof that I am constantly out of step with the mainstream – it appears that I proposed to my girlfriend at a time when marriage was at its biggest low in Britain since 1895.  So for all you guys who thought my decision to get married was pretty conventional for a usually non-conformist anarchist like myself – well, now you know :-)

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Isn’t the bigger scandal here that the US government are paying BLACKWATER at all, rather than that, as part of their payments to these hired mercenary killers, they are also occasionally paying for prostitutes?

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It should be noted that, whilst Barack Obama did make a pledge to cut the US nuclear weapons arsenal and seek a nuclear-weapons free world, he also asked Congress to increase spending on US nuclear weapons by more than seven billion dollars in his last budget proposal.

 

Technorati Tags: Throwin' Out The Trash,Politics,UK Politics,US Politics,Academia,Universities,Higher Education,Blackwater,Nuclear Proliferation,Marriage,Snow

Dear Councillor Dawkins…

The following is an email I just sent to a local Tory councillor in my area who keeps trying to campaign for the upcoming election off the back of the Kraft Cadbury takeover…

Dear Councillor Dawkins,

I found your recent newsletter about your efforts to save Cadbury highly disingenuous. 

Whilst I have absolutely no doubt that you wrote your "important letter" to Lord Mandelson and delivered our petition to Downing Street, opposing the hostile takeover of Cadbury, there is no getting away from the fact that, as a member of the Conservative Party - where the ideology of free-market capitalism is sacrosanct - your words and deeds sound inherently hollow. 

The Kraft Foods takeover of Cadbury, though it will likely be devastating for our area, was a direct result of free-market capitalism working absolutely as it should do: a money-making, independent business got an attractive offer from another company, the price was right, and so they decided to sell.  Not only is this loss of Cadbury to Kraft nothing to do with the Labour Party (other than the fact that, to their eternal shame, they have done nothing but continue to pursue Tory economic policies since the day they came to power), it is the underlying economic philosophy that specifically drives your party - the promotion and celebration of unfettered free-market capitalism - which encourages it.  Indeed, one of the central tenets of Conservative economic theory is that it is not the business of government to get involved in the natural functioning of markets, so how you can pretend to be upset that the Labour government did nothing to intervene in the Cadbury decision, when you know full well that it would be ideologically incoherent for a Conservative government to have acted any differently?  It just smacks of opportunistic electioneering and, to me, seems highly cynical.     

According to your newsletter, you said: "We know that the banks, the shareholders, the city whizz kids and Kraft will all make big money out of this takeover but it will be the ordinary residents of Birmingham who will eventually end up paying for this terrible loss."  Your sentiments are entirely right, but coming as they do out of the mouth of a party-member whose party has championed precisely this approach to doing business for over thirty years, you'll excuse me if I remain unconvinced.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Daniel McKee

I’ll report back if I get a spin-free reply…

Technorati Tags: Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Capitalism,Anti Capitalism,Conservative Party,General Election,UK Politics,Politics,Local Politics,Kraft Food,Spin

Tony Blair Made His Decision, Now It’s Time That We Made Ours

Whilst the weekend papers were filled with much repetition of Tony Blair’s slippery and well-crafted answers during last Friday’s “grilling” at the hands of the Chilcot inquiry, far too little analysis was made afterwards of how those soundbite-friendly responses actually stood up to scrutiny.

It was always highly unlikely that the former Prime Minister would sit there and admit to being a war-criminal, or to misleading the public and Parliament in order to start an illegal and unjustified invasion into a non-aggressing sovereign country. To do so would be suicide, and the media-savvy Blair, as we all know, is far too smart to do that. His deftness for dealing with interrogation, however, does not prevent us from studying the unrepentant explanations and rationale he did offer, and seeing if they actually hold water.

“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It is a decision”, said Blair early in the morning, as if decisions were a mutually exclusive breed of thought, separate from lies, conspiracies, deceits or deceptions. As the very issue in question here is whether or not Blair made a decision to go to war independent of the readily available evidence to legally and morally do so, we must never forget that it is entirely possible for a decision to be made for which lies, conspiracy, deceit and deception are the only available means to fulfil it. Every heinous, illegal and unjustified act in history has been someone’s decision. Decisions are what motivate the majority of human action. Our job now, in the face of this particular decision, is to determine why it was made, and whether that decision led to lies, conspiracy, deceit and deception in order to achieve its goals.

If Blair decided to go to war first, and then lied about WMDs in order to do it, we have a very serious problem. A problem which should be at the crux of the Chilcot Inquiry.

“Sometimes”, said Blair, “what is important is not to ask the March 2003 question but to ask the 2010 question.” But the decision to go to war with Iraq in March, 2003, prevents us from seriously answering the “2010 question” with anything other than speculation, and right now we are looking for answers, not more guesswork and baseless assumption, so it seems prudent to stick to the questions of March, 2003.

“I genuinely believe that if we had left Saddam in power,” said Blair, “even with what we know now, we would still have had to have dealt with him, possibly in circumstances where the threat was worse and possibly in circumstances where it was hard to mobilise any support for dealing with that threat.”

The question of legality and justification regarding the war in Iraq, however, does not ride on what the former Prime Minister might or might not “genuinely believe”. It rests on some very simple principles that were unquestionably relevant in March, 2003: if Iraq was a legitimate and immediate threat, and if all non-military options had been exhausted, then we would have a right to defend ourselves against their clear and present aggression. If there was no aggression, no threat, and no clear and indisputable evidence that all other diplomatic options had failed, then we had no right to go to war.

We cannot just attack any country that we feel like on the basis that, one day, they might become a threat. Our leaders are not psychics, and this is not Minority Report – we must err towards peace until we are truly given no other choice but to fight back. That is how international law works. It’s what distinguishes aggression from self-defence, and just as a police officer can’t arrest and jail a person they simply have a “bad feeling” about unless there is demonstrable evidence that a genuine crime is being planned or committed – even if a similar crime has been committed by this person before – a government cannot go to war in self-defence unless there is substantial evidence first that the crime of aggression is actually taking place.

Putting aside these legal and historical objections to the former Prime Minister’s defence, however, the argument Blair proffered still doesn’t make sense, even on its own terms. If he had not acted in 2003, and the alleged threat posed by Saddam had indeed become worse, why on earth would it have then become harder to mobilize support? If anything, that should have made it easier. Whilst it has certainly proven difficult to convince other sane countries into attacking a nation who has posed no real danger to anyone outside of its own borders, seldom has it been hard to find allies to fight a justifiable war against a legitimate enemy when the evidence of external aggression is clear.

“After September 11,” though, said Blair, “the calculus of risk changed”. We could not just sit back anymore, the way we once did, and give enemy nations the chance to strike first. We had to be more pro-active.

Whilst perhaps the 9/11 terrorist attacks might have opened our eyes to security risks on Western soil that, hitherto, we just hadn’t thought about, it did not suddenly give governments carte blanche to drop bombs on any country they now felt uneasy about. Though the “calculus of risk” may well have arguably changed, the basic tenets of international law had not. Yet for Blair, despite the fact that the events of 9/11 were in no way connected to Iraq and the regime of Saddam Hussein, and that the 9/11 hijackers had committed their atrocity not with nuclear bombs or chemical weapons, but with stolen airplanes and low-tech box-cutter knives, “the primary consideration for me was to send an absolutely powerful message after September 11 – if you were a regime engaged in WMD you had to stop.”

It seems a peculiar leap of logic, but maybe I can follow it: though the 9/11 hijackers did not use WMDs, perhaps future attackers might, and so it would behove us now to tackle that problem before it’s too late? In a way, it kind of makes sense. But though it is perhaps an admirable goal to want to bring about the end to deadly WMDs after seeing the destruction and devastation caused on September 11^th without them, the personal desire to send the world a strong message of disarmament does not exonerate Mr. Blair from observing the limits and procedures of international law. Whilst he had every freedom in the world to put pressure on countries about WMDs through organizations such as the UN or EU, to step up weapons inspections and sanctions in particularly tricky areas, to draw up multilateral disarmament treaties and lead by example by decommissioning the UK’s own nuclear, chemical and biological arsenal (and encouraging allied countries to do the same), he simply did not have the freedom to go to war against a non-aggressing country just to “send out a powerful message”.

Similarly, although Blair asserted on Friday that the issue of WMDs in Iraq and regime change were “conjoined”, and that “a regime that is brutal and oppressive - that for example has used weapons of mass destruction against its own people, as Saddam did, and had killed tens of thousands of people by the use of chemical weapons…is a bigger threat if it has weapons of mass destruction than one that is otherwise benign,” the fact still remains that, even if this is theoretically true, in practice, because of the existing rules of international law, just war, and non-aggression that separate “brutal and oppressive” regimes like Iraq from “benign” ones like us, we cannot be permitted to say, as Blair did: “we have to deal with his WMD ambitions. If that means regime change, so be it”. The two issues are not, as the former Prime Minister asserted, just “a different way of expressing the same proposition”, because one of the two propositions (curbing the development of WMDs) is a perfectly legal matter of enforcing nations into compliance with binding global agreements and commitments through inspection, enforcement and sanction, whereas the other (regime change) means – unless acting in legitimate self-defence following a genuine act of aggression – the illegal invasion and interference with the internal political affairs of a sovereign nation at great physical cost both to its people, and to our soldiers.

Astoundingly though, Blair concluded, of his decision to go to war with Iraq: “I do genuinely believe the world is safer as a result”.

Ignoring for a moment the over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians estimated to have been killed as a result of Blair’s invasion, the forty-plus sites across the country that are now contaminated with radiation and dioxins that will be toxic for generations to come, and the nearly two hundred British soldiers who have lost their life in the region since 2003, how the former Prime Minister can maintain this ludicrous assertion becomes even harder to fathom when one looks seriously at the post-Iraq world. Whilst the invasion of Iraq has still yet to bring its promised “liberation” to the Iraqi people, it has obliterated the country’s infrastructure and continued to serve as a rallying cry for terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda around the world. The perception of callous slaughter of Iraqi innocents by cruel Western aggressors remains a compelling reason for outraged Muslims to join the ever-growing ranks of jihad in all corners of the globe, and consecutive National Intelligence Estimates in the US have admitted that the war in Iraq has only “made the overall terrorism problem worse”. Closer to home, as the UK’s “terror threat” has once again moved up to “severe”, one only has to remember the home-grown horror of the 7/7 bomb attacks in London – committed by British terrorists in direct response to what they saw as an unprovoked assault by their government on the people of Iraq – to see that, far from making us safer, the war in Iraq has only made things much worse.

Contrary to Mr. Blair’s allegations, the world is not at all safer now here in the West, nor is it any safer in Iraq. Long after Saddam Hussein was killed and the regime in Iraq was changed, our soldier’s guns and bombs – and those of multiple warring insurgents set predictably free in regime change’s ugly wake – continue to kill civilians in their thousands. And though Saddam’s former atrocities in Halabja will forever disgust the world, they will soon pale in comparison to the shocking legacy of cancer and mutation our own chemical weapons have left behind.

Yet for Tony Blair, none of this appears to matter: that he believes a different story is true seems enough to make it so.

When asked if he had any regrets about his decision at the end of his time in the chair, Blair said he felt “responsibility but not regret for removing Saddam Hussein”. This was not surprising. The underlying message of the entire six-hour inquisition was that regime-change had always been the goal in Iraq, and that, in Tony Blair’s mind, going after WMDs was merely “a different way of expressing the same proposition”. As far as Blair was concerned, and for that matter, Bush, a decision had been made, regardless of any evidence there might be to the contrary: Saddam Hussein was a threat to world peace who needed to be taken out at any cost. Whether Saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction, and whether he actually posed a real threat became only a minor detail once the decision for war had been made, and in achieving that central objective toppling Hussein, the war was a huge success.

But decisions must have consequences. Especially when they so flagrantly break international law and are based entirely on a wilful fabrication.

That Tony Blair believes the decision he made on Iraq was right and that he tried to defend himself at the Chilcot inquiry was neither surprising nor important. Thankfully, these days, Blair’s opinion is no longer the opinion that counts: he is done making his decisions, and now it is our turn to decide.

Regardless of what Blair may have “believed” at the time, or what he “believes” right now, it is history that will ultimately judge him, and the facts of history remain unflinching: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was plenty of evidence from UN inspectors and other sources before March, 2003 that this was the case, and yet Blair chose to go to war anyway. Instead of giving Hans Blix and his team the time they had asked for to finish their job, Blair opted to invade instead. The war he chose to fight had no legal basis in UN resolution, nor was it a justified case of self-defence against an enemy aggressor: the majority of the British population were against it, and even members of his own Cabinet were forced to resign in protest. It was an illegal and unjustified war that was sold to the British public through a conspiracy of lies, deception and deceit, and as a result of that war, over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians were killed, nearly two hundred soldiers have died, terrorism has increased both within the region and around the globe, and we have lost billions of pounds of public money that, perhaps, might have saved us from recession.

Regarding his decision to take us into Iraq, Tony Blair can believe and say what he wants, but back here in the real world, the evidence against him is damning.

 

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,Tony Blair,Chilcot Inquiry,Iraq Inquiry,Iraq,War on Terror,9/11,Media,war

Cadbury and the Chicago School

Naomi Klein would be proud.

This morning, here in Birmingham, as we countdown the final twenty-four hours before we find out if the Cadbury shareholders are going to sell their business to Kraft, the local news gave us some calming advice about the takeover from Chicago Booth Business School Professor, Sanjay Dhar.

Dhar told us that everything would be ok under Kraft, and that nothing would really change. Anything that did change, he told us, would probably have changed under Cadbury ownership anyway, as it would be driven by market forces. Kraft ownership, the message was clear, would be a good thing for Cadbury.

Dhar, a professor of marketing at Booth (a central component of Milton Friedman’s infamous “Chicago School”) is currently head of the Kilts Center for Marketing. The Center is named after, and overseen by, James Kilts who, between 1994 and 1997, as Executive Vice President at Philip Morris was “responsible for integrating Kraft and General Foods worldwide and for shaping the group’s domestic and international strategy and plans”. Kilts also previously served as President of Kraft USA (where he consolidated Kraft and Oscar Meyer into one company), President of Kraft Limited in Canada, and Senior Vice President of Kraft International. He was also Senior Vice President of strategy and development at Kraft.

This year, in the Fall 2009 season at Kilts, under Sanjay Dhar’s headship, Mike Hsu, President of Kraft North America Grocery, has joined the Kilts Steering Committee.

For some reason the BBC News failed to point all this out, and simply referred to him as a business “expert”.

Technorati Tags: Politics,Business,UK Politics,Chicago School,Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Kraft Food,Sanjay Dhar,Media,Naomi Klein,Capitalism

Throwin’ Out The Trash #2

Late Friday afternoons are traditionally the time that politicians, businesses, celebrities, etc, release bad news to the public in the hope that they won’t see it.  Season 1, episode 13, of The West Wing calls this “Take Out The Trash Day”.  Each week, there are so many fucked up stories and newsy bits and pieces that cross my path in this 24/7 media blitzkrieg that we’re living in, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to write a full-on commentary piece about all of them.  Throwin’ Out The Trash is my chance each week to clear the decks of all these niggling odds and sods without ignoring them completely…

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So, today Tony Blair comes before the Chilcot Enquiry.  I am writing this at 11am, before the conclusion of events, but I expect nothing more from this than Blair sticking firmly to his position that he believed in what he did and thought it was the right thing to do for both Iraq and the security of the world.

What else is he going to do?  Admit that he lied; that he’s a war-criminal and a mass-murderer?  That he wilfully started a war that has killed hundreds of soldiers and thousands of civilians in full knowledge that the justification for it was bullshit?

Of course not.

Blair’s testimony is a red herring.  As I’ve said before and I’ll say again now: the evidence that Saddam was not a threat was available to anybody with an internet connection and a library card, and speaks to a much deeper problem within UK and US foreign policy than this one unjust war alone.

We need more than the Chilcot Enquiry – we need a radical change of course.

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Obama has announced a pay-freeze, just as, here in the UK, whoever wins the election later this year has promised to make cuts in public spending.  Anyone else troubled that we had billions for the banks, and billions to spend on slaughtering innocent Iraqis and Afghans, and yet no money to pay for schools, hospitals, civil servants or benefits?

Here’s a saving we could make on both sides of the Atlantic ocean immediately: withdraw, right now, without hesitation, from Afghanistan and Iraq, stop picking fights in Pakistan and Yemen, and put all that money you’re pissing away on genocide back into the public coffers.

Oh, and then tax the fucking rich already!

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If you think the new Apple iPad is a good idea then you’re an idiot, and probably think HDTV, Blu-Ray and 3D movies are good ideas too.  They’re not, and you’re a gullible mark.

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In the Good News Department: the BNP are still in trouble regarding their constitution.  Their ridiculous pseudo-amendments made a few months ago to try and appease the Equality and Human Rights Commission have been laughed out of court, and if they don’t sort it out properly by the end of next month, they’re legally fucked.  As spokesman, Simon Darby said, the ruling forces the party to “emasculate its constitution and drop its policies and principles…This is a deadly serious attempt to put us out of business.”  Good.  I watched This Is England the other night and can’t believe racist idiots like this still exist in 2010.

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In the Oh My God It’s Worse Than I Thought Department: A recent poll in America has shown that Fox News is the most trusted news network in the country.  This is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

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Revelations continue to come out about Haiti – how the US government sent soldiers instead of aid, and prioritized “securing” the area over giving people food.  Obama already got blood all over his hands by stepping up Bush’s war in Afghanistan and claiming it as his own; now it seems he has left Haitians to die in much the way Bush left the victims of Katrina.  “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, as The Who might sing.

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I wrote about the UK’s repressive Prevention of Terror Act of 2000 about ten years ago for Scanner fanzine.  This was in the heady days before 9/11, and the big concern at the time was that the UK government were using anti-terror legislation to target activists.  Well, now it’s 2010 and, according to The Guardian, the Ministry of Justice’s new “guidance on extremism” has included eco-activists on its terror list, alongside members of al-Qaeda and far-right extremists.

The Lib Dems have called it “a quite astonishing conflation of legitimate protest with terrorism”. 

Haven’t they been paying attention?  The entire war on terror has just been a concerted effort in manipulation designed to quell the anti-capitalism movement that was making such great progress between 1999 and 2001. 

The sad thing is: it has worked.

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George Clooney’s new film, Up in the Air, is rubbish.  Unless you enjoy watching a film about the assholes who go into downsizing corporations to professionally “let people go” that in no way deals with the subject of just how fucked up that is.

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Finally, I’m pretty sure that Obama’s momentary “tough talk” about banking regulation will die down pretty quickly.  Not only has “Mr Bank Bailout”, Ben Bernake, been given a second term at the Fed (so no change there), but Wall Street have been gearing up an army of lobbyists over the past twelve months (to the tune of $26m) and are planning of unleashing them in opposition to any plans for regulation.  When you combine that, the banking industry’s $78.2m in donations to well-greased federal candidates and party committees, and the recent Supreme Court decision to remove all limits on how much private corporations can spend on political influence, I think you’ll agree: banking regulation in 2010 just doesn’t have a chance.

 

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,US Politics,Throwin' Out The Trash,Chilcot Enquiry,Tony Blair,Obama,iPad,BNP,Haiti,Fox News,War on Terror,Banks,Up in the Air,Ben Bernake,Prevention of Terrorism Act 2000