(to Observer unless otherwise indicated. Some printed, some not)10.06.2011
Tale of Two Democracies (Weekly Guardian)
Pankaj Mishra's Tale of Two Democracies makes an important link between Israeli and Indian repression in Palestine and Kashmir respectively. He exposes a Western hypocrisy that talks up non-violent resistance while arming tyranny and colonial domination. While recognising the force of 'moral challenge,' he fears the worst as 'mountains of tyranny' bear down on further popular uprisings. .
But hypocrisy is a double edged weapon, democratic pretensions can be turned against those who are seen to abuse democracy. We didn't hear much about the Kashmiri summer of 2010, but the blitz on Gaza and more recent flotilla killings offshore could not be hidden (although - as in Syria today - the media were kept out). International opinion swung sharply against Israel and its US backers, often prompted by brave Jewish dissidents in Israel, Europe and the US.
In highlighting the Israel/India links, Pankaj Mishra contributes to this wider awareness and connection. This will serve to amplify the tragedy and contradiction if/when more faraway protests are gunned down, perhaps with weapons supplied by us.
Challenge and outrage may combine to turn political tides and change the course of events.
17.05.2011
Good capitalismWill Hutton still hopes for a 'good capitalism' to restore our economy and head off the racist right. But capitalism is not good, it's drive is not for a better world or even a sustainable economy. Capitaliism makes money out of money for the people with most. It exploits whatever aspect of human or non-human nature can most easily be turned to profit. In this cynical system, greed, stupidity and vice with cash to hand are a better investment than hunger, wisdom or virtue without.
09.05.2011
MeltdownWill Hutton looks to a 'good capitalism' to save us from economic meltdown, with a nudge from Keynesian good government. In this fairytale, the invisible hand of the market, judiciously regulated by elected authorites, will transform private greed into social wellbeing and sustainable development.
But capitalism is not good. The profit that drives it is found in the gap between buying cheap and selling dear. The marketplace is not a free and fair exchange but an unequal contest between rich and poor, big and small, organised and atomised.. Owners and employers, as individuals or shareholders, have legal control of production, pricing and reward. Workers and customers have none. Nor have the communities and the natural world that suffer the collateral damage.
This exploitive process may ratchet up total wealth and turnover, but only by extending inbuilt inequalities. A good employer or investor is quickly overtaken by others who go with the flow. Winners take all, and the losses are born by the rest of us and the natural world.
There is no invisible hand to redeem this cynical economy, only the hands, hearts and minds of people like ourselves. Salvation, if any, will be found in common humanity and the extension of social democracy into the business of everyday work and investment. The aim no longer an amassing and division of spoils between winners and losers, but a balance of mutual give and take.
Another fairy tale? Not quite, the models for reform are already here, in the political democracy of our public life, in the small but growing number of co-operatives and mutuals, and, above all, in the informal practice and aspirations of so-called private life among family and friends.
Good capitalism does not exist, social democracy must include a socialised economy or fail itself and us.
07.05.2011 (Guardian)
VengeanceWith the US killing of Osama Bin Laden, you say ‘Vengeance was theirs, but not theirs alone.’
Turning to ‘carnage’ in Sri Lanka, you opine that ‘One country’s ability to bury the evidence of war crimes endangers how civilians are treated in all other conflicts. A single failure of international justice is also a collective one.’
That must include the vengeance killing of an unarmed captive on orders from a US government that shuns the International Criminal Court.
If this vengeance is indeed partly ours, then we’re a party to the denial of international justice.
How much essential evidence on war crimes was buried at sea with bin Laden? And how does this singular killing chime with the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths that we and our allies have failed to properly log in Iraq, Afghanistan and more recently Pakistan?
03.05.2011 (Guardian)
No dignityNo dignity at Ground Zero, nor in the more restrained crowing of politicians nearer home. We dont have to approve of Osama Bin Laden to realise that what he stood for will not be lightly swept away by the 'Arab Spring,' nor dissolved by his death and burial at sea. He has been, and will be, followed less for his unlikely theology than for his uncompromising opposition to a western imperialism. (As a veteran US commentator, Mike Hedges, has noted, the al Qaeda repertoire draws heavily on the shock and awe violence of its adversaries, before and after 9/11)
Summary killing of killers is not justice. Eliminating terrorists does not eliminate the causes of terrorism, but raises the stakes. No good will come of the bin Laden killing unless the show of strength provides an opening for redress, with obvious starting points in withdrawal from Afghanistan and curbing of US-funded Israeli aggression in Palestine.
01.05.2011
Labour snubbed?Labour snubbed at fairy tale wedding? As in Sleeping Beauty, when the uninvited fairy avenged herself on the issue of the union?
Better for now, that once and future Labour voters take the non-invite as a compliment, assume that even former Labour leaders might have more important social commitments.
The 'Big Society' perhaps, since slogans like fairy tales are more easily turned round than laid to rest.
A Big Society worth the name would cut through not just royalist flummery but the folklore of ‘local community’ to the everyday obstinate reality of labour and capital, what we actually do with our lives, and what is done with the money we earn and save.
Volunteering and donating are no substitute for that basic social economy. Are we content - 'in this day and age' - that most of our work and savings should still be directed by unelected powers to making rich men richer?
If we believe in fairytales like social democracy and self-determination, it's time we rescued them from corporate greed and its courtiers.
28.03.2011
Drawing linesPeaceful protest, then violence - without which a march against cuts would not have won your two-page spread. And by Monday morning, BBC Today was talking to an anarchist about the meaning of the A-word.
But your big report, like most others, failed to distinguish between the different performances it lumped together under 'violence'. To occupy is not the same as to smash windows, attacks on property are not the same as attacks on people, and paint is not the same as ammonia or bits of iron.
Most of these distinctions are clear in law. They may be even more important in morality, politics and good reporting. In our conduct and judgement we have to draw these finer lines. Between 'property is sacred' and 'property is theft', 'respect for authority' and 'respect for human life/dignity.'
For my own part, I feel that property cannot forever trump fairness and equality: to tax the poor and let the rich off free is so clearly wrong that some counter-action is justified. To occupy a Top Shop or Fortnum's seems fair to me and to break the windows of a bonus-bank forgivable. Proviso: due care for safety and feelings of shop and bank workers who neither make the rules or bless themselves with bonuses.
15.03.2011
Incomprehensible stupidity?Your report on the knifing-to-death of an Israeli settlement family refers back to the killing of four adult settlers by Palestinians six months ago. Meanwhile, William Hague describes the latest killings as ‘incomprehensible cruelty.’
Cruel, unconscionable, but not quite incomprehensible in the light of some more balanced background figures. The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem lists more than 50 Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the two years to this January (that's excluding the hundreds killed in the Cast Lead attack on Gaza). According to B’tselem 19 of those killed since then were ‘minors’, or children.
In the week before the Sabbath killing in Itamar, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reported 42 Israeli incursions into Palestinian communities. Eleven Palestinians, including four children, were injured by soldiers and settlers. Ten civilians, including two children were arrested.
A couple of days before the Itamar killing, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu condemned rightwing settlers for harassment of Palestinians in protest at Israeli government curbs on settlements. Now, in response to the weekend attack, soldiers and settlers are trashing Palestinian villages and the Israeli government has promised 500 more homes in and round existing settlements.
04.03.2011 (Guardian)
Anti-anti-semitismGalliano's racist abuse (Freedland G2) is intolerable, vicious if not insane. Assange's remarks do no good to his cause. And yes anti-semitic 'conspiracy theory' is alive and well, a dangerous conflation of truth, half-truth, fantasy and lies.
But Freedland does not help to clear the air by himself conflating sense and nonsense, tumbling in more or less justified criticism of Israel and Zionism with Jew-spotting, dark excesses of 'blood libel' and a silly kosher crack in the New Statesman. Oddly, he draws a single thread through several sorts of real and imaginary children: Christian victims of 'blood libel', Jewish characters in a Churchill play and school children (he only mentions the Jewish ones) who now fear abuse or attack in Britain.
Both conspiracy-theory and counter-conspiracy thrive on this sort of free association. The knot that Freedland strains would be easier to untangle if Israel itself did not embody a confusion of race, religion, democracy and military excess.
As a European I have a part in the horrors of our common history. As an Englishman, I'm glad that my country does not - mostly - emphasise its archaic Anglo-Catholic credentials in the conduct of unconscionable wars.
13.02.2011
BIG SOCIETY If the Cameron coalition wants a Big Society, they should do what the top brass in Egypt are being asked to do: confront the structures that brought them to power.
The great black hole in our social democracy and personal freedom is not in local authorities or public services – however imperfect they may be - but in the unaccountable private sector on which Camerons and Cleggs depend for their fortunes and rely for economic recovery.
Local authorities, unlike the boards of private companies, are elected by a cross section of the public that includes most of those who work for them, pay for them and benefit from their services. (And top public sector pay, though occasionally higher than the prime ministers, is dwarfed by the salaries and bonuses of bankers and CEOs)
Public services, even quangos, are also subject to elected authorities: how else could coalition axe-men break them up and cut them down while banks escape unscathed?
In the private armies of ‘free enterprise,’ we routinely sacrifice personal autonomy, along with any claim to a democratic voice, the moment we set foot on employers’ premises. Big of us, or stupid?
12.02.2011 (Weekly Guardian)
Inequality and racismIf state 'multiculturalism' is dead, so is state 'integration': what we want is neither to be separated by our differences nor united in sameness. Uniformity is neither possible nor desirable and 'separate but equal' never works: equality requires an overlap in which we meet and mix. Without mutual understanding, mutual respect is polite hypocrisy. We all benefit, in life as in Ms Bunting's street market, from the freedom to pick and choose between our stalls.
As Madeleine also suggests, the obstacles to free interchange have as much to do with economic inequality as with racism. The more unequal a society, the further apart the rungs on the social-economic ladder, the harder it becomes to move between them. And the less chance we have to transcend stereotypes of race, religion and class, the more divided and mutually mistrustful we become, and the less at home among ourselves.
16.01.2011
Community woodsThe Observer opposes privatisation of British forests and Andy Wightman calls for community ownership. As a joint owner of a community woodland in Wales, I agree.
But it is not, in our experience, a simple case of state vs private vs community. Half a century ago, our 80-acre paradise of wood and stream was acquired and replanted by the Forestry Commission on what had previously been privately-owned ancient woodland. In the 90's it was sold to a private consortium in England which agreed to open permissive footpaths
In 2006, this Troserch Wood, was put up for sale again. A group of neighbours and local residents organised a buy-back campaign to keep the woods open to all and secure the riverside paths. The money for our community buy-back came from the Forestry Commission, or its Welsh arm Cyd Coed.
Having bought the wood from the body that had planted it and sold it off, we went back to Cyd Coed for operating costs, and in particular a heavy-duty bridge. We already had our own footbridge, but DEFRA would no longer allow us to move plant and timber across a rocky streambed. Nor would it allow the sort of improvised log bridge that previous contractors had used.
We depended on state funding to meet state conservation regulations. We also depended on both public and private expertise. Our elected committee includes local landowners, a senior county councillor, a Forestry Commission ranger and a private woodland-owner who acts, unpaid, as clerk of the works.
Our first commitment is to free public access, wildlife conservation and restoration of mainly broadleaved woodland. Some of us dream of an extended riverside pathway from sea to source, some of a more integrated economic set up: in an area of high unemployment, it would make sense to link forest management to felling, sawing and local wood-working. But our 80 acres would not support full-time foresters, sawmill or timber works. To make that viable, we would need to combine with other woods, in either a co-operative or decentralised state enterprise.
The important thing is not to set private, community and state enterprise at odds with each other, but to see how all can be combined for a common good. And that demands some radical reform in all three sectors.
09.01.2011
PolarisationAs Imran Khan says in his despairing commentary, the murderous polarisation of religious and political life in Pakistan would not have arisen without our ‘war on terrorism.’ This goes both for the murder of a liberal politician and the calls by Muslim villagers for the hanging of a Christian woman accused of blasphemy.
The polarisation that Khan laments is not confined to Pakistan but sweeps across much of the Muslim world as one response to serial military adventures by western powers, from crusades through colonial wars and the imposition of Israel to current interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and ‘tribal areas’ of Pakistan.
Oddly, another report in the same Observer features another Muslim village, Bil’in in West Bank Palestine. Here, as a Muslim mother mourns the death of her daughter in a protest at the Israeli ‘separation fence’ the polarisation follows different lines.
The Muslim villagers who defy lethal gas-shells and liquid filth are joined by Jews and Christians. People of several religions or none are united by a commitment to human rights and international law. In this naive view, a wall that cuts a village from its land is unacceptable, as is the use of armed force against unarmed protesters.
At her daughter’s funeral, the bereaved mother quoted by your reporter also said she did not seek revenge. That was a matter for God, but she called on ‘the people of Israel to take a firm stand against the occupation ...because only together will we be able to put an end to the tragedy of our two peoples.’
19.12.2010
Correct remunerationCBI ‘president in waiting’ Roger Carr does no service to Country or Company by his standard definition of company rights, duties and responsibilities. It is not enough for companies to ‘ensure that shareholders are correctly remunerated and act in the right way for the organisation.’
If ‘correct remuneration’ for shareholders means maximising profit at the expense of jobs and customers, if ‘tax efficiency’ means leaving others to pay your share, then correctness and efficiency are worse than useless (the language itself rings warning bells).
When, as now, our social economy and physical environment is under threat, with a lot of people facing cuts and losing jobs, it is not right or responsible for companies to reward bosses and shareholders regardless of consequences or comparisons.
It’s time for companies to up their game, to gear their private working definitions to fairness and public interest. Self-respecting workers don’t work mainly to enrich their bosses, and responsible investors don’t invest only for self-enrichment.
Without a broader social commitment, a limited company is too limited for its own good, its ‘rights, duties and responsibilities’ ring hollow. It is time to write social objectives and a measure of fairness into Company Law, before the word ‘company’ becomes a dirty word (again?)
21.11.2010
On its headA.C.Grayling unearths secular roots of religion and Samia Rahman talks of constantly re-intepreting religious texts (presumably in the light of contemporary human observation and experience.)
Good, but what nobody in your discussion quite makes clear is that religion is no more nor less than human aspiration stood on its head. We, men and women, have created gods, not vice versa, in the light of our lives on earth.
Once we recognise this, religion – or religions – can be wonderfully helpful, as long as we are free to move, and pick and choose between them. But children sent to faith school risk being trapped. Confusion of a Church and State, as in British public life and media, obscures other possibilities and common ground.
And yet some of us send children to faith school because almost any liberal religion seems preferable to ‘standards’ that grade and degrade for marks and cash.
We need the best out of religion - flights of imagination, depths of emotion and commonsense - to humanise a global market that does justice to none of us.
07.11.2010
Work-shy shocktroops for Big Society If the unemployed are made to do community work for less than the minimum wage, this will tend to drive down wages and/or deter the creation of new jobs in the community.
If the government’s Big Society is to be fair and inclusive – and not a two-faced diversion - it must bear equally on Big Business, employers and employees.
Why should the unemployed not be greedy – maximising income for minimum outlay – while this remains the guiding principle of a market economy, and a government that relies on it to replace state services?
Why should those with least work for the community, while those with most make as much as they can for themselves? In either case, the rest of us must pay.
24.10.2010
COME ON, EDEd Milliband wants fewer, fairer cuts as part of a plan for economic growth and accuses the government of crying Bankruptcy to mask their project for a smaller state.
The Tories are pessimists, he says, and not about to build a good, green, childfriendly economy. But then, instead saying how that might be done - outlining some more optimistic project of his own - he falls back on defensive rhetoric about 'protecting values and ideals..the basics of our social and economic fabric.'
If Tories have a project, Labour must match it. Instead of rolling back the democratic state, why not roll back unaccountable corporate greed? If that sounds Old Labour, put some sense into that free-floating thought-balloon, the Big Society.
The goal? To root the remote representative structures of national and local government in a more direct and face-to-face democracy, beginning wherever we live and WORK. The project, a Red and Green New Deal, sound social basis of Ed's 'good economy'.
19.09.2010
Cut from the topA couple of weeks ago your editorial backed David Miliband as a middle-ground Labour leader while Will Hutton called for action on Murdoch. Now you are calling for action on Murdoch while Hutton backs David Miliband – for fear a rightwing press writes off ‘Red Ed.’
Murdoch wins without a shot. To face up to economic crisis, climate chaos and a rightwing press, we need a braver, more honest approach, a common sense less bound by an imposed concensus that serves to keep things as they are, or worse.
It is NOT commonsense for the wealth of nations to be highjacked by a few rich men making global fortunes. It is not commonsense for our savings to serve as gambling chips - money making money - while public service jobs are cut, people lack homes, productive industry is starved of investment and infrastructure rots.
It IS commonsense to redirect public and private funds into a ‘Green New Deal’ that would regenerate industry and create jobs in a more sustainable economy.
If we entrust production and services to private enterprise, it’s sensible to require that companies, including banks, commit themselves to social objectives as well as profit. Social democracy makes no sense if it stops short at employment, where most of our effective time and energy is spent, and the proceeds are so unevenly shared.
If cut we must, then - in an increasingly unequal society - common sense says ‘cut from the top’ (and make up in quality of life what we lack in quantity).
02.09.2010 (Weekly Guardian)
ODA own goal
If British development aid is to be geared towards British security (as Nicholas Watt reports), then those in most need of it had better pose a real threat.
01.08.2010
Docile labour and other natural resourcesScorched earth as peatbogs burn around Moscow (McKie’s ‘dark ideology’), thousands swept away by floods in a NW Pakistan still ravaged by military surge against the Taliban (pace, Cameron).
In Greece , with strikers cutting off fuel supplies, a new ‘revolutionary sect’ picks targets among police, politicians and journalists, threatens tourist trade.
What – I wonder on a blue-sky Sunday afternoon in Wales – if climate chaos and incipient class war are NOT coincidental? In a globalised market, committed to growth but not social justice or sustainable ecology, it seems likely that docile labour and other natural resources will run out more or less in parallel.
And if, for the first time in history, the customary beneficiaries of an exploitive economy have nowhere clean and safe to escape to?
What if business-as-usual is, literally, a dead end: an unsustainable system set to shut down in a vice of its own making?
17.05.10
Employment may be bad for usMind and the European Heart Journal (Fear of Mondays, Binge Working) remind us of the obvious: overwork’s not good for us. The researchers cite overtime and pressure of recession, but the root-cause goes deeper.
Employment as we know it is not mainly concerned with workers’ health, or consumer welfare or common good. Capitalist companies are committed in law and practice to a cash return for their owners. When the going gets tough, other considerations fall away.
Current demand for financial redress ignore toxic anomalies in ‘normal’ working life: rights or expectations of democracy and self-determination stop short of employer’s premises.
If we want we want a satisfactory working life, or sustainable world, we must rebalance Company Law that limits democracy to shareholders, freeing owners and executives to exploit the rest of us.
06.05.2010 (Guardian Weekly)
Black holeMadeleine Bunting (Financial Deluge) predicts ‘the savage dismantling of social democracy’ but overlooks the black hole at the heart of our present social fabric: self-determination and democratic accountability stop short where organised work begins. In public services as in private finance and industry, we drop any claim to personal autonomy or collective responsibility as we enter employers’ premises.
It shouldn’t require a savage dismantling to fill this obvious gap and reclaim our social sovereignty at work. But I fear it may, as old Capital does its worst to prevent the sort of reform New Labour should have been about.
22.01.10 (Guardian Weekly)
AbhorrentGordon Brown (News in brief) finds it abhorrent and offensive that a Muslim tearaway should plan a counter-demonstration in Wootton Basset where British soldiers are mourned and honoured on their return from Afghanistan. Of course we can all feel for the bereaved and it is natural enough for them to resent any distraction or challenge at what is becoming an all-too-familiar routine.
But because we can share in the grief of families and comrades we can also feel for the much greater number of bereaved on the other side.
'Islam4UK' sounds like rubbish to me, and you only gave the story a paragraph. But I'm bothered by the unanimous, unquestioning condemnation by British commentators when a dubious character threatens to confront us with the truth: we send our sons, brothers, and husbands to kill as well as die, in what is at best a dubious cause.
17.01.2010
International emergency forceNo more the Caste Lead' and 'Shock and Awe' of Gaza and Baghdad! What we need now is an international concentration of forces for effective intervention in natural and/or man-made disasters. For emergency relief, reconstruction and longer-term prevention.
In Haiti we've watched precious days wasted as emergency aid efforts stalled on the brink of chaos. It's impossible not to compare this with the speed and directness of recent military strikes.
We need a truly international emergency force that can act fast, far and wide, with an eye also to disasters-in-the-making.
This will require many of the skills and logistics now tied up in national armed forces. But, as military commanders have come to realise in Afghanistan, co-operation is vital, as civil and social objectives take precedence over bombing and shooting.
More than 55 years ago I refused military service in favour of several years in an optimistically-entitled Service Civil International (International Voluntary Service). Even then, on our various relief and reconstruction projects, we realised how inefficient, under-trained and under-resourced we were (though it still did us a power of good!)
What matters now is not the voluntary or antimilitary, but the urgency of pulling together human and technical resources worldwide. For peacekeeping, as ever, but more importantly to match the impending horrors of famine and flood, earthquake and drought.
This will be just as costly as military arrangements but less likely to be wasted in mutual destruction or disuse. Geared to building hope out of misery, the future force will serve to unite not divide the millions who serve and benefit. It may also help secure the survival of the rest of us.
