I never wrote the poem that I should have.
To explain the pain that I felt.
To justify the pain I caused.
To satisfy the blood running out of my body.
To hear the cries of my mother when she saw me cut open.
To discuss with my father over a beer.
To laugh about with my brothers.
Or to whisper to my sweetheart.
To say to myself ‘this is why I can’t go on’.
I never wrote that poem.
I have previously covered the ways in which the political right has responded to (and exploited) terrorist attacks and the reasons why we should all be less fearful of terrorism than, for example, air pollution or car accidents.
Honestly, I can’t say that I’m happy to be going over the subject again but here it is, another invaluable insight.
The attacks in Brussels on Monday were horrifying both because of the impact on the victims and their families and because they were successfully perpetrated in the face of much tighter security.
Sadly, an attack of this kind is carried out somewhere almost every day. Short of ridding the world of hatred and violence (which could be achieved by brutally murdering anyone hateful or violent…oh wait) there is no way to prevent this kind of tragedy from occurring. It is (and will remain for the foreseeable future) a fact of life.
Piers Morgan is an interesting dude and, somewhat unsurprisingly, he has a different take on events (full disclosure: punching him in the face is number one on my bucket list). I read his column in the Mail yesterday (no I didn’t have anything better to do, shut up) in which he praised Trump for his ‘firm proposals’ for dealing with the threat of Isis. I would describe them less as ‘proposals’ and more as a ‘final solution.’
He has variously said that he would “bomb the shit” out of Isis, “knock the hell” out of Isis, kill the families of terrorists and torture suspected terrorists with waterboarding and “more.” The logical conclusion to this would be dropping nukes all over Iraq and Syria until Isis were no more.
It might work. Committing genocide through the total annihilation of the entire region in a nuclear holocaust would probably hinder Isis operations (at least in the medium term).
This course of action, I’ll call it the ‘Holocaust Option’, is too unimaginably horrendous to comprehend fully and it is mercifully unlikely ever to happen. But the fact that anyone, especially a leading politician in the most powerful country on Earth, can entertain starting down this path for even a second is utterly terrifying, infinitely more so than the thought of Isis.
So how did we get to this dark and dangerous place?
We have overreacted time and time again to these tragedies, whether through the media’s blanket coverage or through the politicians’ defiant and angry speeches or through grief posted online by ordinary members of the public. We have allowed the terrorists to instil hatred and panic in our public debate. We have dehumanised terrorism and called it the embodiment of evil. Who wouldn’t want to bomb the shit out of the devil himself?
The overreaction, far more than the attacks themselves, is what makes terrorism successful. The public response, while completely understandable, is what the terrorists are really always aiming for; the killing is only a means to that end. It is more a publicity stunt and less an act of war.
So how exactly can we deny the terrorists their victory?
By treating terrorism the same as we would any other tragedy. Analyse the events in order to learn more about preventing future tragedies, find and prosecute the perpetrators as we would any other criminals, repair the damage and move on. As heartless as it sounds, grief should be left to the victims’ families and their communities because a massive public response only amplifies the pain and is exactly what the terrorists want.
Making terrorism exceptional, sensationalising it and glorifying it with our attention and fear is what makes it powerful and successful. Treat it as a tragic, criminal act and it is diminished.
It is very difficult to get angry watching George Osborne being interviewed. I went back and watched his interview with Andrew Marr from Sunday and was blown away by how much I agreed with everything he was saying. I might even vote Tory the next chance I get.
Ok, enough sarcasm I hear you say and you’d usually be right. That wasn’t actual sarcasm though, just me trying to get as far away from reality as Osborne seems permanently to be. In truth I couldn’t even finish watching the interview as it had me almost vomiting with angry sadness.
Osborne’s ability to rewrite history in real time is terrifying in its Orwellian genius. The clearest example is the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession. There is really no doubt as to its cause; the bursting of an enormous housing bubble that started in the US and was fuelled by cheap credit, sub-prime lending, mortgage securitization and enabled by deregulation of the entire financial sector. This led to a global economic crash.
But that’s not really what happened. Obviously a complex and multifaceted explanation of a once-in-a-generation global crisis taking account of decades of economic policy and political orthodoxy can’t be correct. How about the truth? (Ok seriously enough sarcasm).
What caused the economic crash? Labour spending. Labour spending. Labour spending.
The moment the Conservatives decided that all the country’s problems were to be blamed on Labour spending was the moment they decided to abandon reality for political expediency. With relentless message discipline Osborne has turned a lie into a historical fact in the eyes of his own party and much of the wider public (not to mention the sycophantic rightwing press).
And so to tomorrows adventures in economic fantasy (aka the Budget). Osborne will claim to be following his long-term economic plan despite going back on much of what he said on November 25th. He will continue to force people into poverty and call it ‘incentivising work.’ He will re-instate infrastructure funding that he previously cut and call it ‘new investment.’ He will reduce the taxes of those on above-average incomes and call it ‘supporting hardworking families.’ He will reduce payments for disabled people and call it ‘protecting the most vulnerable.’
He will piss in your pocket and tell you it’s raining.
New analysis released today by the Press Association has revealed that last year the government brought in £26.5billion through its judicious use of an Ebay account.
Hilarious jokes aside, last year the government sold the last 30% of Royal Mail we all still owned, 11billion shares in Lloyds Bank, a 40% stake in Eurostar, about 5% of RBS and a whole bunch of other garbage we needed to get rid of, like some land and £13billion worth of mortgages from what remains of Northern Rock.
Leaving for now the fact that ministers consistently undervalue state assets to the benefit of their friends in the financial sector, I want to explain why these sales are a really, really bad idea for the public (or anyone who doesn’t know a cabinet minister personally at least).
Publicly owned services and assets can be run in the public interest with democratic oversight and accountability, whatever profits are made (Royal Mail made £400milion the year before it was sold) can be reinvested or used in a similar way to general taxation and the service or asset is protected for future generations.
Private companies have none of these advantages.
Obviously, before I start screaming in Russian and wearing furry hats (more than I do already) I should say that I don’t believe that private property is fundamentally a problem.
But that key services and assets should not be sold off at a cut price to hedge fund managers and overseas investors (like the Chinese government) simply because the government wants to improve the look of this year’s balance sheet should not be controversial.
The truth is that, whatever the merits of a particular service or company being in private hands rather than public, the mass sale of public assets is part of a wider strategy to weaken the state, leaving private interests omnipotent. It is part of a broader attempt both in Britain and elsewhere to eliminate any and all barriers to the accumulation of wealth, to destroy the principle of collectivism and to ensure that nothing can challenge our grossly unjust economic system.
This week saw the publication of two important reviews of the general election; the Beckett Report on why Labour lost and the University of Southampton on why the pollsters got it so wrong led to yet more discussion of why Labour lost and why Labour ‘can never win again.’
Leaving aside why Labour lost (because it bores me to tears), the discussion on why Labour can’t win in 2020 has two main strands; Corbyn has made Labour a leftwing cult and the Conservative plans for constituency boundaries (among other things) will take at least 30 seats off Labour. The reality is that, while it is difficult to predict the result of an election a month away (just ask the pollsters) let alone 4 years away, I can confidently say that Labour (or a coalition in which Labour is the largest party) will win in 2020.
Here’s why:
Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 500 points before lunch, the FTSE 100 fell 3.4% by the close and the oil price continued to tumble to $27.7 (Brent Crude). Pretty much anywhere you look you can see the potential for another massive economic crisis; the US, Europe, Russia and China could all be the catalyst as each has huge problems.
Whether I am quite right to be expecting a global recession before 2020 is really irrelevant; the next crisis will come, sooner or later. My analysis is not based on a depth of knowledge of any individual economies, but based on the fact that our economic system of global capitalism, requiring infinite growth and infinite consumption of resources, cannot and therefore will not continue.
The challenge for Labour, and everyone on the Left, is to adopt the crisis-management techniques of the Right. Remember how the Right took the 2008 financial crisis and turned into a crisis of government profligacy? We need to use the techniques that allowed them to be successful, but to tell the truth rather than create a myth.
They were ready with a clear narrative that they pushed relentlessly in the media and in parliament. By constantly repeating the same lines, the Conservatives and their supporters were able to persuade a large proportion of the public and deflect public outrage at the bankers towards benefit recipients and immigrants. They had a few simple solutions that, while they were not really solutions, pretty much everyone could understand. The Left must be ready to the same when the next crisis strikes.
The global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes. The richest 1% now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Power and privilege is being used to skew the economic system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest. A global network of tax havens further enables the richest individuals to hide $7.6 trillion. The fight against poverty will not be won until the inequality crisis is tackled.
~ Oxfam
62 people have as much wealth as half of the world’s population.
~0.073 billion people (~1%) have as much as the other ~7.227 billion people put together.
This much was revealed today by Oxfam in its yearly pre-Davos report into global inequality.
I somehow surprised myself with my own reaction to the news; neither anger, sadness nor despair. It barely registered; a slight mental shrug, nothing more.
Like so much news, the seemingly endless revelations about air pollution
for example, this story really should have the power to shock and disgust me. That 62 people have been elevated almost to the status of gods while so many hundreds of millions of people suffer in dire poverty should be nothing short of sickening. And yet it barely raises an eyebrow.
So why did my eyebrow remain resolutely unraised? Because this story is as predictable as it horrifying, as expected as it is shameful. My reaction was probably pretty standard.
No-one will be surprised. Very few people will even care, or really think about why the world is this way before moving on with their lives.
Not until the next crisis will the global capitalist system itself be the subject of scrutiny or debate. Until the next crisis the world will continue as it is, with rampant poverty, war and environmental destruction the inevitable consequences.
Trump is enjoying a Farage moment. His supporters love him, he can do and say whatever he likes without taking a hit and everyone interested in politics (including, reluctantly, me) is talking or writing about him.
Farage had his moment when everything he said or did made him more popular. But it couldn’t go on, so it didn’t.
Old Nigel’s main problem was that once he had momentum he had to capitalise electorally. He couldn’t achieve that using the same strategy that saw him emerge as a key figure but his ‘authenticity’ meant that he couldn’t change course. Ultimately the FPTP system was too much to overcome.
Once lost momentum has proven impossible to regain.
I am fairly optimistically predicting that the Trump phenomenon will suffer the same fate; an explosive and unforeseen arrival at the party of mainstream politics, the gaining of sustained momentum and consolidation in the public consciousness and ultimately electoral failure.
The shining sun that is Donald Trump will set whether he wins the Republican nomination or not; the only question is the scale of the damage done to the GOP brand along the way. Trump’s extreme rhetoric will surely stain every Republican candidate standing in 2016 the way that a foul smell seems to dirty everything it touches.
It’s conceivable that Trump wins the nomination and the Democrats sweep the House, Senate and White House as a reaction against Trump’s fascism. Or that Trump loses to Ted Cruz and runs as a third party candidate, splitting the rightwing vote and allowing an even bigger Democratic win.
Or that Trump give energy to the rightwing base and media to such an extent that despite losing the presidency the GOP carries momentum into tight Senate and House races, maintaining control of Congress.
One thing we can be sure of is that there will be no President Trump.
(But please don’t quote me on that).
David Cameron has described the Islamic State as an existential threat to the UK. Despite its absurdity, this claim is symptomatic of the current level of debate surrounding terrorism in the UK and abroad.
Let’s be clear, violent jihadists have not managed a serious attack in the past decade. Since 2005 Lee Rigby has been the only Briton killed by Islamic terrorists on British soil, taking the total to 53. In comparison there were 21,304 deaths on British roads from 2005-13. There are an estimated 30,000 preventable deaths a year due to air pollution.
Are we to say that cars pose ‘an existential threat to the UK?’ No? So we agree that the rhetoric surrounding terrorism is wildly, tragi-comically exaggerated.
Those in the government know that terrorism in the UK is not really that serious a problem, so why do they want to talk about it so much and have everyone worried about it?
The main reason the Conservative government and right-wing press wants to make terrorism a huge issue is political. Making the threat of terrorism seem much larger than it really is benefits the Conservatives in two ways. Firstly, exaggerating the threat of terrorism convinces the public that something must be done about it and the government gets credit for dealing with a problem it essentially invented. (58% of Brits are ‘personally worried about terrorism,’ second only to the NHS in terms of concern.)
Secondly, it drives terrorism up the political agenda, distracting the public and the opposition from the far more serious issues affecting far more people. The Conservatives are on the wrong side of public opinion on issues from climate change to the dismantling of public services to further social security cuts. They would much prefer to be debating ‘national security’ than social security after the catastrophe of tax credit cuts; from the conservative point of view the longer we all spend talking about ‘British values’ the better.
This feeds directly into the perhaps the most important, most insidious reason for the drawn out debate about terrorism; the Conservative party’s attempts, in tandem with the conservative press to present the Corbyn Labour party as ‘a threat to national security’ and a ‘terrorist sympathiser.’ The debate on terrorism has become a shameless excuse for the conservatives to make repeated slurs against Jeremy Corbyn, his supporters and affiliates (especially the Stop the War Coalition) and the wider Labour party. This, perhaps more than anything else, has poisoned the political debate in this country.
Defend the Indefensible 