March 12, 2010
A Welcome Return
The blog Peter’s Apology seems to have made a welcome return to (very) regular posting.
Good stuff.
If you like the kind of stuff you find around here, you’ll like the kind of stuff you’ll find around there.
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Peter is a member of the Cult of Rawls. But don’t let that put you off too much.
Why I Support the Boycott of Total Politics
Orginally published at Though Cowards Flinch. Comment from Sunder Katwala is worth reading. Tim Ireland makes the excellent point that Iain Dale refuses to link to opposing blogs on the grounds that he doesn’t want to legitimse them – so what’s different about Griffin?
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The question of whether to boycott Total Politics magazine’s top blogs poll if it runs an interview with Nick Griffin is proving divisive. Giles is sceptical. More surprisingly, so is Sunder.
I wanted to set out why I think bloggers of the left should support the boycott.
Firstly, let me say that I am not a uniform supporter of No Platform. The world is too messy and complicated to apply one position to every circumstance. Thus, I was not opposed to Griffin appearing on TV per se but (for reasons that turned out to be off-target) to his appearing on Question Time because of that particular show’s format. With hindsight, however, the QT appearance did Griffin more harm than good. His odious personality and his cringing attempts to be loveable showed him up. Badly.
Yet a printed interview aimed at nerdy political anoraks is different. Griffin’s weakest asset is his face and his personality. He’s not TV-genic, and he doesn’t know how to behave under public scrutiny. In a magazine interview, those things don’t matter. No matter how “tough” Iain Dale’s questions, Griffin can lie and squirm around them. The crucial thing that made the QT appearance a glorious disaster was that people could see him squirming, hear his lies automatically challenged. Not so with a published interview.
But what really matters is not whether Griffin flounders on Dale’s questions or not. It’s about the long-run effect of having Griffin feature in a mainstream publication. Long after the specific questions that Dale asks are forgotten, people will remember that Griffin was interviewed by an (allegedly) respectable, mainstream publication. It will help to normalise Griffin and his party. It will encourage him to be seen as a legitimate politician with legitimate views to be considered a reasonable political option by reasonable people.
At present, the BNP is held back in huge measure because it lacks popular legitimacy. Its leader is largely seen as unpleasant and devious, the party as fascist and suspect. The BNP are still stigmatised in the eyes of the vast majority of voters. What the BNP desperately want is to break out of that, and to be seen as a reasonable political choice. That’s the only way they can move beyond the (already considerable) million people who voted for them last June, and into the political mainstream.
Sure, the BNP thrive in deprived areas on their status as underdog outsiders. That’s something we should worry about. But the solution is not to normalise them by ending their status as outsiders, making them a legitimate political choice in the eyes of the electorate! Yet by interviewing Griffin, in the long run Total Politics can only serve to normalise the BNP as a part of Britain’s political mainstream.
Now let me be clear: one thing I am not advocating is state curtailment of Total Politics’ activities. As an independent organisation, they can invite Griffin if they want to. It’s Iain Dale’s professional decision. In a democracy with freedom of press, he can interview Griffin if he wants. By the same token, those of us who oppose the legitimation of the BNP as a political force can withdraw our support for Total Politics, and do so by boycotting their poll with the hope of making it redundant, and thus hurting Total Politics.
Yet there is one final question to ask: why does Total Politics want to interview Griffin? An obvious answer is that controversy attracts attention and shifts units. That may be all there is to it. But it’s worth noticing that the BNP are not presently a threat to the Tories – they are a threat to Labour. Traditional Labour areas – where the white working class feels abandoned, disempowered and angry – are what the BNP target. One does have to wonder if Dale would be quite so prepared to interview Griffin if the BNP leader was targeting Chelsea rather than Dagenham this spring.
Dillow, Dogs and Death
Chris Dillow thinks that forcible insurance for those who own dangerous dogs is an idea that represents all that is wrong with New Labour. One of his main complaints is that “The enforced transfer of cash from people of modest incomes to insurance companies represents another way whereby the state is used for the enrichment of capitalists.”
But the obvious reply is: why should the insurance have to be private?
Here’s an idea. Why not set up a scheme of insurance-for-dangerous-dogs provided by the state? The money raised by those who want to pay to keep dangerous dogs could be ear-marked for Sure Start centres, say.
Vulgar libertarians will cry that this represents the growth of the Overbearing State.*But the rest of us can see that dangerous dogs are a problem. It’s not just the growth in the numbers of such dogs (and the failure of past government schemes to control the numbers), and the correlate increased risk of people being harmed by them.
There’s also the very important fact of the fear that such dogs cause. I live in East London. I can’t leave my front door without seeing a pit-breed, a rottweiler or a bull terrier of some sort. It makes me feel uneasy. When my girlfriend and I go to the park for a walk, I don’t think it’s right that she should feel scared by the fact there are many large aggressive dogs roaming unmuzzled and off-lead. And most of them look to my eye (and I worked at a boarding kennel as a kid) like mongrel variations on dangerous dog breeds.
Yes, people have the right to keep pets. But other people surely have a right not to feel threatened by those pets – and in more extreme cases, not to be mauled or eaten by them. We need a solution.
Mr Dillow is ordinarily in favour of structuring incentives so that certain kinds of behaviour are encouraged or discouraged. Yet forcing people to pay extra for the privilege of keeping dangerous dogs looks very sensible on this world-view. If it’s predominantly poorer people who keep dangerous dogs – as a guess, I’d estimate that the middle classes go in for poodles and spaniels more than rotts and staffies – then it’s prima facie reasonable to expect there to be a high elasticity for dog-ownership amongst the poor. Paying for a dangerous dog is a luxury that poorer people can ill afford, so presumably increasing the cost of dangerous dogs will decrease their numbers quite effectively.
Secondly, if the money raised by those who do want to keep dangerous dogs goes not to megacorps, but to the state through its unique insurance mechanism, then the money raised can be redistributed back to the poor. Fewer dangerous dogs, more Sure Start centres.
Of course, what this really depends on is enforcement. Compulsory dangerous dog insurance only has bite – excuse the pun – if there is a signficant incentive to get the insurance, such that people feel they are compelled to do so. That means Po-leece enforcing the rules. But judging by the sheer number of illegally unmuzzled hounds on Victoria Park, and the abject failure of police to enforce the existing rules against dangerous dogs, this looks to me like the real problem with an insurance proposal: it can’t be enforced.
So what should we do? Personally, I’m in favour of killing them. The dogs, not the owners (though sometimes I wonder). You don’t need a bull-terrier cross originally bred for fighting when you can have a labradoodle. If you want a bull-terrier fighting dog, it’s (in most cases; people like Kate B excepted) because you’re a twat who likes to own a threatening dog. In which case fuck you, and fuck your dog. That nice people with nice dogs will lose out is the bullet I’m prepared to bite on this one. Life after all – and if you’ll excuse a final pun – is well known to be a bitch.
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*Non vulgar libertarians will also be appalled, but are likely to have better arguments. At least, one would hope.
March 11, 2010
Whoops Mr Kampfner
Yesterday I had a CiF piece arguing (amongst other things) that John Kampfner has probably made a mistake in thinking that the liberal left can find a home with the Liberal Democrats.
Police 1-0 Accountability and the MSM
Originally posted at Liberal Conspiracy. Re-posted here with an extension. This case makes me livid.
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When the Metropolitan Police shot the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes in the head, seven times, we didn’t get the truth. We got anonymous sources briefing the media that de Menezes had run away from police, that he’d leaped the barriers at Stockwell tube, that he’d been wearing a heavy coat thought to be concealing a suicide bomb. It was all spin – or as it used to be called, lies.
Luckily for the police it distracted the press for a long time – at least until an inquest was finally able to white-wash the case.
When a Met officer struck newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson with a baton and pushed him to the ground without provocation, we didn’t get the truth. After Tomlinson collapsed and died, the police briefed the media that Tomlinson was a rowdy protestor, that he suffered a heart attack, and that G20 protestors pelted an ambulance with bottles as it struggled to reach the dying man.
It was all lies – but almost all the MSM swallowed it, at least until The Guardian obtained damaging video evidence to the contrary.
So we know that the police lie when they mess up. By now, you’d hope the media would be alive to their tricks. Sadly not.
Take the tragic case of Ashleigh Hall, who was groomed by a convicted double-rapist via Facebook. The facts as we understand them are that Peter Chapman posed as a 19 year old, using fake photos, and over a period of months lulled Hall into trusting him, before convincing her to meet him. When she did, he raped and murdered her.
This story is a tragedy – but it’s also a scandal. It’s a scandal because Chapman was on the sex offenders register, a known dangerous criminal – but Merseyside Police lost track of him from January 2009, 9 months before he killed Hall, and only putting out a nation-wide alert for his person a month before he struck. After Chapman was sentenced to 35 years, Merseyside Police decided to refer itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The IPCC said they were “disappointed” the referral hadn’t come earlier.
And that’s when the police spin doctors came out to play. Anybody who’s been following this case will know that suddenly it’s the security of Facebook – not the failures of Merseyside Police – that have grabbed the headlines. This follows criticisms by the police that Facebook does not carry a Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) button – a link children can hit if they fear they are being groomed by a paedophile or otherwise threatened.
Yet it seems overwhelmingly obvious that in this case, a CEOP button would have made zero difference. If Hall had thought that she was in danger she wouldn’t have gone to meet Chapman. She’d never have hit a CEOP button, because she didn’t think she was in danger.
But if you look at the main news reporting on the issue, the row over whether Facebook is not taking the safety of its users seriously dominates. No surprises that the gutter press is running with the scare-story about Facebook (Fbookphobia is a favourite of the Mail, because it gives you cancer after all).
Yet the so-called “quality” press in most cases is no better. Here’s the BBC, The Guardian (twice), The Independent and The Telegraph (briefly) all reporting the story of the police criticising Facebook for the lack of a CEOP button. None of these stories bothers to point out the elementary point that a CEOP button would not have saved Hall.
Yet now a silly debate has sprung up about whether Facebook is protecting its users. Lib Dem Chris Huhne and Home Secretary Alan Johnson are trying to out-platitude each other by demanding that Facebook install a CEOP button. In turn the media are reporting on that. All the while, the big question – how did Merseyside Police fuck up so badly that a child ended up being raped and murdered by a man they should have had tabs on, and why have they only just referred themselves to the (admittedly useless) IPCC – is moving further from the spotlight.
1-0 to Merseyside Police. Another indictment of the pathetic state of our mainstream media.
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I did find one article making the sensible point that a CEOP button wouldn’t have helped, tucked away in The Times’ online crime section, in an Op Ed by Murad Ahmed:
“But the main problem is that it would seem as though no button could have prevented what happen to Ashleigh Hall. Both the police and Facebook stress that people should be wary of talking to strangers on these sites, and particularly of meeting them. Ashleigh did not know that she was walking into a dangerous trap – and there will always be those trying to set them.”
But that this is only in a comment piece is precisely the problem. The MSM’s pusillanimous, slavish desperation to offer “balance” in all cases – even when one side is talking evident crap – has allowed the police to shunt the uncomfortable question about their incompetence off the main report pages. But that’s exactly where the question needs to be. In the news sections, where everyone can see it.
Online Solidarity (Against the Fascists)
Dave and Paul at Though Cowards Flinch have announced that if Iain Dale’s Total Politics magazine publishes an interview with Nick Griffin, they will boycott Total Politics’ “top blogs” feature next time around.
Paul sets out his reasons in the main post, and it’s debated in the comments. I think I especially agree with Dave here (yes, my views on no-platform are different when it’s a magazine interview for politicos; Total Politics would be helping to legitimse Griffin in the eyes of the political classes, a very bad thing indeed).
So I’m adding my insignificant weight.
If Total Politics runs a Griffin interview, Bad Conscience will boycott its next poll. I urge all bloggers to join the boycott. If enough of us do, then the Total Politics poll becomes pointless. And that’ll maybe incentivise them not to touch Griffin with a barge poll.
Solidarity Forever (and the Union Makes Us Strong), as Jerry Cohen once had me sing.
March 10, 2010
Probably a bad idea
I’ve got a piece up at Comment is Free, trying to sketch a helpful way to think about what the term “liberal left” might mean, why New Labour doesn’t qualify, why a lot of “left liberals” are pissed off with New Labour, and why they’re nonetheless unlikely to find a home with the Lib Dems.
Yesterday I was all enthusiastic about taking political philosophy to the masses. Today I’m thinking it was probably not a great idea. Admittedly, I have to move fast on a couple of points (word limits are a pain), and so I do invite a bit of confusion. For which, apologies. But judging by the comments I’ve failed in my aim to get people to think about a few things carefully. Apparently I’m either a Tory, or an idiot who doesn’t understand anything.
Perhaps this is just a reflection of the nature of people who leave comments at CiF. (Though Tim ought really to know better than to throw such cheap snarks). But perhaps it shows that the Ivory Tower doesn’t mix well with the Real World.
Ah well.
March 9, 2010
In Praise of Steve Bell
Is this the best political cartoon of the past 10 years?
I think it might well be.
Hats off to Steve Bell.
I hope The Guardian don’t mind me copying this (then again, I’ve given them enough free articles, so…). I just want as many people as possible to see it.
Pernicious Officialdom
It’ll probably be a bit quiet round here for a day or two. Got things on, and anyway I should be spending more time reading books.
In the meantime why not get an edukashun, and find out about that Weber bloke I’m always bleating on about?
To adopt a David Humism, I flatter myself that I hereby give you a solid introduction to some of the important and interesting things Weber had to say about leadership, democracy and bureaucracy. Over here, with the other nerd posts.
March 8, 2010
CiF-ing It
Over here.
Can’t decide whether to look at the comments. I’m probably a nob, or something.
