November 13, 2010
Seconds Out, Round Two
My post In Praise of Riots attracted an undue amount of attention. Several people have asked me to clarify my position, and others have challenged me directly. This seems reasonable, as the original piece is indeed confusing. I’m thus taking this as an opportunity to expound some thoughts at length. PDF for the faithful; subsequent treatise not for the light of heart.
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Any adequate analysis of the use of non-peaceful direct action – i.e. the causing of physical damage to property, thus eliciting the potential of violent confrontation with the coercive power of the state (in the form of police or possibly even military) – must divide into at least two sub-components, which are, however, necessarily and intimately interconnected. I label these the “analytic” and “strategic”, and address them in turn, though division is necessarily somewhat artificial.
Analytic
Under this heading I consider the bare principle of whether citizens may damage property – and elicit potentially violent confrontation with the state’s forces – as part of a political protest against the policies of an incumbent government. I take the answer to be straightforwardly that at certain times, in certain circumstances, such action may be justified.
This is for the reasons broadly set-out in my original post, and which I stand by. Namely, that it is possible for a government to pursue policies which are so detrimental to the interests and well-being of citizens that those citizens are entitled to resist non-peacefully. I will broadly steer clear here of using the controversial and emotive label “violence”, both regarding acts of vandalism by protestors, and of what a government may do to (sections of) a citizenry via its policies, which may not however involve the (direct) use of jackboots and truncheons. Instead, I simply make the claim that if (sections of) a citizenry find that their interests are intolerably threatened by a government, then they may retaliate, with the aim and purpose of forcing the government to abandon – or at least ameliorate – its policies.
Importantly, I do not propose to (be able to) set a threshold for when citizens may non-peacefully protest. I take it that a) it is not possible to set such a threshold a priori, that b) it is pointless to attempt to set such a threshold a priori, as what matters is when citizens themselves judge things to have gotten so bad that they choose to act non-peacefully, and yet that it is c) nonetheless self-evident that at some point citizen-interests may be sufficiently threatened such that no reasonable person could deny an entitlement to non-peaceful protest in attempts to safeguard those interests.
Point c) needs clarifying. Although I cannot – and do not wish to attempt to – demarcate a threshold above which non-peaceful resistance is justified, I take it that 1) such points can be reached and 2) there is no inherent reason why governments in western democratic societies cannot reach those points (though they may be less likely to do so than other forms of regime). To expand: imagine a (fanciful) society in which the government of the day enacted a law which decreed that the first born of each family in a given sub-territory would be taken into slavery. The interests of families and of the first-born (as well, perhaps, of wider communities) would be dramatically threatened – and it seems obvious that they would accordingly be entitled to resist the government’s actions, and to resist them non-peacefully, especially if we also further assume, for argument’s sake, that no peaceful measures could possibly succeed. I take it that no reasonable person would disagree with this, because the only alternative to non-peaceful resistance in this (fanciful) thought experiment is for families to passively sit-by as their first-born are enslaved. (As for those – if they exist – who would continue to adhere to non-reasonableness as I have labelled it on my schema, I simply have nothing further to say to them as they do not fall within the level of political exchange that I can tolerate. This line of argument is not addressed to their views and concerns; they are outside the “discourse” of politics within which I conceive it possible to purposefully engage. I trust, however, that this will encompass relatively few readers, especially when any lingering worries about political process are addressed below).
This example is, of course, extremely fanciful. I use it only to make the point that some things that governments may do are so bad that forcible resistance can (obviously) be justified. I do not mean to say that this is some sort of minimum-threshold example. Government policies which are less (but still substantially) damaging to the interests of citizens may nonetheless still be considered as sufficiently threatening to the point of legitimating methods of non-peaceful resistance. Of course, deciding which cases do and do not qualify will be (inherently) controversial. This is a matter of political judgement, about whether or not the threshold of harms has indeed been reached, as well as of judgement for the individuals directly affected both in terms of harms-incurred, and of successful strategy worth pursuing (more on which below). Cases at the margin will be contested, and probably ferociously.
As for point 2), I again take this to be acceptable to all reasonable people, though I suspect it is likely to be more controversial. The most obvious – and oft-heard – objection to the use of non-peaceful protest in western nation states is that it goes against the norms and mechanisms of democracy. For example, it might be argued that non-peaceful protest is never justified in a democracy, because the social settlement in a democratic state provides explicitly for the non-use of violence, such that citizens have agreed to pursue politics at the ballot box, and at the ballot box only (or almost only; issue-campaigning, private lobbying, joining of parties and pressure groups etc. excepted, as being supplementary or constituent activities to the democratic process). The line of objections I am considering, however, claims that: the use of non-peaceful protest in a democracy is illegitimate ipso facto, just because of the fact it is a democracy being considered.
I take this argument to fail for two sets of reasons. However the first set rests on a controversial understanding of democracy; it can therefore be jettisoned by those possessing more “ideal” views of the processes and mechanisms of politics in Western democratic nation states. The second set of considerations I take to be nonetheless decisive, even if taken alone.
The first (controversial) argument is that modern mass democracy in Western nation states is sufficiently non-ideal so as to defeat any claim that non-peaceful protest is ruled out ipso facto by the mere existence of democratic structures. For I take it that the systems of rule we currently experience are founded upon histories of class-privilege and exploitation that were ultimately established to safeguard the rich and privileged from the poor and destitute. Ours are societies founded upon violence, and maintained by the continued threat of violence by the agencies of the state. As Adam Smith remarked when reflecting on the historical foundations of society:
“some have great wealth and others have nothing, it is necessary that the arm of authority should be continually stretched forth, and permanent laws or regulations made which may ascertain the property of the rich from the inroads of the poor, who would otherwise continually make incroachments upon it, and settle in what the infringement of this property consists and in what cases they will be liable to punishment.” (Lectures on Jurisprudence: Feb 22, 1763)
Furthermore, the system of government we experience today is not one of the “people” ruling in any identifiable sense. It is a system of rotation between (usually extremely wealthy) political elites who vie for the balance of favour amidst a tiny number of crucial voters, in turn returning parties to government based on wildly general (and frequently broken) manifesto pledges representing programmes of government so eclectic and enormous it cannot be said that the “people” have seriously endorsed any such a thing. Given that I take what we call “democracy” to be in fact rule by rotated elites, I find the claim that non-peaceful resistance against the policies of such elites can never be justified to be bizarre, and due more to a romanticised and unrealistic understanding of “democracy” than to any rational analysis of the conditions of real-world government and politics.[1]
Yet this view is controversial, so I do not rest my case upon it. Instead I make the more straightforward point that just because a government is elected via democratic mechanisms, it does not follow either that it is somehow incapable of harming the interests of (some) citizens beyond a tolerable point, nor that those citizens lose any entitlement to resist non-peacefully simply because a government harming their interests was selected via a certain form of (electoral) mechanism. If a government – democratic or otherwise – enacts policies that are sufficiently damaging to the interests of (some) citizens, I take it to be obvious to reasonable people that those citizens are entitled to resist non-peacefully if necessary. What is not (always) obvious is when the threshold for non-peaceful resistance has been breached in any particular instance. And again, I admit that is a matter of judgement and therefore likely to be of (extreme) controversy in any particular instance. But to continue to claim regardless of the above that non-peaceful resistance is “never” justified in a democracy is in fact to miss a major point of why democratic government is usually desirable in the first place: that it leads to and secures (amongst other things) the respect and protection of citizens. When democratically-based governments fail in this crucial aspect, they lose a large component of their underpinning legitimacy, justification and the very grounds upon which they deny the entitlement of citizens to use force instead of the ordinary democratic channels of political communication and action alone. To fail to see this is to fall into a form of process- or system-worship, whereby the reasons for preferring democratic processes and systems are abandoned in favour of an infatuation with processes and systems themselves.
Thus far I take myself to have sketched the grounds for accepting the following (basic) claim as obvious to all reasonable people: that governments may harm the interests of citizens, and that citizens may resist that harm non-peacefully at certain times. Of course, the question of when that harm-threshold is crossed becomes paramount. But I repeat: that is a matter of case-specific judgement, and we cannot say in advance of any actual context and circumstance in which to judge. For what it is worth, I believe that the policies of the present Coalition government are in the process of crossing the line in terms of harm to (some) citizens, and thus non-peaceful action in retaliation, with the aim of halting or ameliorating the current Coalition policies, is likely to be justifiable in terms of a reaction to harm-inflicted. Others will disagree. I accept that it is reasonable for them to so disagree; because the core analytic point I am making here – that non-peaceful resistance can be justified – is not the same as saying that, on Wednesday, it necessarily was justified. Reasonable people may well say that the relevant harm thresholds have not yet been breached (or, further, that non-peaceful protest was likely to have worse consequences – though again more on that below).
However, before turning to the question of “strategy”, some final points in relation to and based upon the above need to be addressed. Many responses to my original piece complained that d) I would not support direct non-peaceful action against other targets or for other causes (e.g. against the Labour Party HQ, or in the name of racist bigotry), and that e) I was opening the door for mob rule.
Charge d) is misplaced. Whilst it is true that I may not support particular instances of the use of non-peaceful force – say against Labour HQ, or in the name of bigotry – this simply means precisely that in those instances I would oppose the use of direct non-peaceful action. This does nothing to undercut my general position that sometimes non-peaceful action is justified, nor my case-specific judgement that on Wednesday, in relation to the policies of this Government, non-peaceful direct action was indeed probably justified as a reaction to harm-about-to-be-incurred.
As for charge e), my response (in addition to the above) is that mob rule is a perennial danger in any political society. It is true that I would not like it – and no right-thinking person should – if government were dictated-to by pitch-fork wielding hordes. But I take one of the key functions of government to be to create circumstances in which pitch-fork-wielding hordes do not arise. The control of violence by the state is, after all, one of its basic functions. If such hordes are arising, then a political society is in serious trouble. But to suggest that a belief that citizen use of non-peaceful force can sometimes be justified in turn opens the flood-gates to mob rule, is to employ a somewhat implausible picture of how prone citizens are to demand direct power over decision-making at the point of a pitch-fork, and of the similarity between non-peaceful protest and the coercive position of an armed and angry rabble able to dictate terms to a (by implication, seriously weak) government. In short, the idea that endorsing some acts of non-peaceful protest either opens the flood-gates to mob rule, or is somehow synonymous with endorsing mob-rule, is simply implausible, and can be dismissed.
Strategy
I take myself to have established that it is reasonable to hold that citizens may use non-peaceful means to resist – or attempt to influence or dissuade – governments that are harming their interests sufficiently. The question that now arises – intimately connected to the question of judgement repeatedly encountered above – is whether the use of non-peaceful protest can be justified in terms of a systematic policy, chosen and consistently pursued, in order to exert pressure upon a government.
In order to get an adequate grasp of this (very challenging) question, we need to delineate two possible circumstances, one of which does not apply to Britain at present and one which probably does. However, there is likely to be no firm point of demarcation between these two situations (and within the broad sketches I will draw there will in reality be enormous variation). And again, deciding when a country is in one or the other (or neither) of these rough situations is a matter of judgement, about which reasonable people may, again, disagree.
The first situation I wish to consider is one in which a government (democratic or otherwise) systematically attacks the fundamental interests of (a group of) citizens such that (some of) those citizens organise themselves in a concerted manner so as to resist that attack, and resist it consciously and with full meditation. Examples of this might include South Africa under apartheid, the situation of blacks in the American South in the 1950s, and (more controversially) the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by Israel, or (at the far less extreme end of the scale) mining communities in the Britain during Margaret Thatcher’s battle with the National Union of Mineworkers.[2]
In these situations, organised resistance is likely to be directed by leaders of the group(s) whose interests are being attacked (whether directly or indirectly, whether by commission or by continued omission of recognition) by the government. In such a stand-off situation – which may well begin to approach something more like civil war, or secessionist struggle, though this will not always be the case, as the Thatcher example indicates – a decision will fall to the leaders of the threatened groups as to whether or not to pursue non-peaceful (and perhaps even overtly-violent) methods.
In this context it makes sense to talk of “strategy”; it makes sense to discuss whether a group (or the representative or sections of a group) would do well to direct members and associates to pursue non-peaceful action. Whether the answer is in the affirmative will depend heavily on contingent context-sensitive factors, and ultimately be a case of judgement for the people choosing to resist (though often in practice, for the leaders of a resistance-organising group). In some cases peaceful action may be pursued, and pursued successfully (e.g. Ghandi’s policy of non-violence in India, and the non-violent strands of the Civil Rights Movement as when led by Martin Luther King). In others, non-peaceful (and even violent) options may be pursued, successfully or otherwise (the ANC in South Africa, and more controversially Hamas in Palestine).
Yet it seems to me clear that the situation faced by Britons today is not analogous to any of the above. At present, the harms inflicted by the Coalition are more anticipated than experienced. And there is no clear citizen-interest group(s) that is in a position to co-ordinate mass action against the government, opting to choose a policy of non-peaceful protest in resistance to government policy. Which is not to say that such a situation cannot arise. Indeed, it is arguable that such a situation precisely did arise in the Miners’ Strikes of 1984-5. And crucially, in such a context, whether or not it is strategically sound for government opponents to use non-violent measures will become a matter of judgement for those involved. Yet it is also important to note that it is only in something like that sort of context that it will make any sort of sense to talk about strategy at all.
At present, we are not in a situation where it is possible to meaningfully discuss whether or not to use a “strategy” of non-peaceful protest. This is because the outbreaks of non-peaceful action seen on Wednesday were spontaneous (and indeed, spontaneity tends to be more a feature of “riots” proper than co-ordinated, pre-planned programme of non-peaceful direct action – a distinction I failed to draw in my original piece, but which perhaps is not so important after all). They were the non-coordinated venting of anger by students seized by rage of the moment. Now, one may lament that those students so-acted; one may think that given the negative coverage in the media that resulted their non-peaceful actions did more harm than good, not least by being liable to alienate public opinion. Conversely, one may believe (as I actually do) that the images of rioting splashed across the national media would have sent a useful chill down the spine of Coalition ministers. (My sense is also that politicians happily ignore peaceful demos as utterly quaint and untroublesome, and hence just ignore them. Tumults are altogether more troubling). Furthermore, the non-peaceful protest in Millbank was pretty much the only reason the demo got anything like the serious media coverage it did (as the media simply didn’t bother to turn up until things were being smashed). However, this rapidly turns into an argument about consequences and likely outcomes, and nobody has final answers on that. Historians will have to decide.
But the point is that at present no group, or leader, is in a position to call for a co-ordinated use of non-peaceful measures against the coalition government. So in an important sense any talk of “strategy” is currently misguided. And I can now attempt to explain why I used the following sentence (which was pretty misleading, and in hindsight should not have been employed):
“British citizens should do it [non-violently protest] again and again, until our lords and masters understand.”
This gives the impression of advocating a concerted, thought-out use of non-peaceful action to resist the Coalition’s policies. In truth I do not think we are yet at the structural situation whereby this can be brought about by any organised group, or can yet be justified in terms of harm (definitely) done by this government to citizen interests (though I suspect both of those points may come sooner than many think – and I may well then decide, on balance, that non-peaceful methods are justified).
What I actually intended to convey (however misleadingly in practice) was the sentiment that if people are angry enough to riot then things are getting very bad, and that is something the government needs to have directly channelled back to it to ensure consideration of a policy change. More fundamentally: I take it that the vast majority of people prefer a quiet life. If significant numbers of them feel so angered as to destroy property and risk violent confrontations with the police, then that is indicative that lives are being seriously disrupted and interests seriously harmed. In such instances, the use of non-peaceful methods sends a vital communication to the government, and warns them that the policies being pursued are at the very least dangerous (in at least two senses), and in the eyes of the protestors, and those who support the protests, severely unjustified.
This is not a position about “strategy”; it is a position about the instrumental importance of spontaneous resort to non-peaceful methods – and how that is not necessarily a bad thing when recalling that such non-peaceful resistance may be a response to a real harming of people’s interests by the government, that in justifies the use of non-peaceful action (though, again, reasonable people may disagree about whether this is in fact the case).
Conclusion
I take it that citizens may resist governments when their interests are sufficiently harmed by that government, and no reasonable person can deny this. However, deciding when this is in fact so is a matter of judgement, and reasonable people may disagree on this (and in practice, almost certainly will). To talk of strategy in the use of non-peaceful methods presupposes an organised capacity to enact and co-ordinate such a strategy. Deciding whether to employ such a strategy will be a matter of judgement, both in terms of whether such a strategy of non-peaceful protest can be justified, and whether it is likely to succeed. Reasonable people can disagree about those things, too. However, there is another form of non-peaceful protest: the spontaneous form, as witnessed on Wednesday, and which is better characterised by the term “riot” than pre-planned non-peaceful direct action. It is ipso fact pointless to talk of “strategising” spontaneous non-peaceful protest. However, spontaneous non-peaceful protest also exhibits a relation to judgement, albeit judgement existing after the fact, i.e. relating to whether such a case of spontaneous non-peaceful action was justified in terms of a resistance to harms being suffered, and also from the perspective of whether that action was likely to succeed.
Clearly, one thing that emerges is that “judgment” is complex issue in these matters, and that its meaning and different application is going to impact not only how people decide, but what the nature of different options under consideration turn out to be, and how different people view them. Unfortunately, any attempt explore the concept of political judgement further is clearly far beyond the scope of this piece. Nonetheless, I hope that the above demarcation moves some way to mapping the terrain of the use and justification of non-peaceful protest. Or rather, what the terrain looks like to me, and where I take it people can have reasonable and unreasonable (or confused) differences about the use of non-peaceful protest.
[1] Which is not to say that I oppose modern mass democracy. I do not. It is quite clearly the best system of politics and government yet tried. But that is no reason not to see it for what it really is.
[2] I should point out that I do not think these cases are straightforward or posses anything like moral equivalence. The point I wish to make is that it is at least prima facie plausible that they may be considered as structurally similar.
November 11, 2010
In Praise of Riots
“I say that those who condemn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs, appear to me to blame those things that were the chief causes for keeping Rome free, and that they paid more attention to the noises and shouts that arose in those tumults than to the good effects they brought forth…And if the tumults were the cause of creation of Tribunes, they merit the highest praise, for in addition to giving the people a part in administration, they were established for guarding Roman liberty.”
So wrote Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discorsi, perhaps the first great work of modern political theory.
It would be misleading to extrapolate too much from Machiavelli’s concerns about the governing of a 16th century Italian city state. But regardless, like Machiavelli I have no inherent problem with “tumults” – or as we would now call them, riots.
Machiavelli’s core point is that rioting safe-guarded freedom. It was because the Roman plebs took arms against the nobles that the latter remembered not to push things too far. That made rioting a useful corrective, and a check against the abuses of the powerful.
It’s not clear that anything has changed today. If a party is elected to government on a series of manifesto pledges, and then reneges on them systematically, it may be no bad thing if the betrayed express their discontent via physical public unrest.
Indeed, Machiavelli also held a connected and crucially important view:
“If the object of the Nobles and the People is considered, it will be seen that the former have a great desire to dominate, and the latter a desire not to be dominated and consequently a greater desire to live free…so that the People placed in charge to guard the liberty of anyone, reasonably will take better care of it; for not being able to take it away themselves, they do not permit others to take it away”
Those in positions of power will seek to dominate the weaker. To defend freedom of the (city-)state, the ruled must possess the ability to strike back at the rulers.
You can see where this is going, even if it needs updating by 500 years.
If the NUS organises a 50,000-strong rally in London, and sections of the protest attack physical property owned by the powerful Conservative Party, then forcibly confront the police, this is not an inherently bad thing – and especially if nobody is seriously hurt.
Of course, the usual suspects sitting in their usual swamps have already spouted the tired old clichés about “a few troublemakers” and the importance of “peaceful protest”. But I disagree when the implication is that rioting can never be justified. There is no fail-safe reason why the populi cannot, at times of extreme discontent, employ physical force against the mechanisms of an authority which is committing violence against them.
And I do mean violence. Because when a government decides that (for example) the seriously diabetic are not “really” disabled, and can thus have their disability allowances halved over-night, rendering many unable to meet the rent – that is a form of violence.
When generations of young people suffer government policies rendering higher education more exclusive whilst reducing employment prospects for the millions already out of work – that is a form of violence.
When the unemployed are to be compelled into slave-like forced employment schemes (or rather, ultra-expensive hypocritical gimmicks aimed at a tiny minority of tabloid hate-figures) – that is a form of violence.
In short: if government systematically attacks the interests and well-being of citizens, this constitutes a form of violence. That such violence is achieved by bureaucratic mandate and the mechanisms of officialdom is irrelevant. The policies of the current Coalition Government are attacks of violence upon the fabric of British society, and the British people themselves.
Yesterday, tens of thousands of students gathered in London. Some of them fought the police, and attempted to damage the property of both the state and the Conservative party. Good. British citizens should do it again and again, until our lords and masters understand.
If rioting secured the liberty of Rome, perhaps it can salvage the welfare state of Britain. After all, who else is going to bring this radical and destructive juggernaut to a halt? Not Nick Clegg, that’s for sure.
August 29, 2010
Elsewhere
Recovering from a rather wonderful wedding yesterday, where I also picked up some rather less wonderful food poisoning. Nobody else seems to have got it, however, so I suspect conspiracy.
Yesterday I had a piece up at The Guardian appealing for people to donate to Prisoner Ben’s PhD appeal.
The comments over at CiF are a phenomenal display of the worst and best aspects of human behaviour. From compassion, forgiveness and generosity to hate, anger and the vindictive desire to hurt.
That, and bad grammar.
August 12, 2010
Stalin Syndrome
Peter Hennessy’s revised and re-issued The Secret State contains a particularly astonishing revelation.
In the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union was getting the best intelligence possible about British activities. This was because five top British agents – Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – were simultaneously working for the Russians, passing on mountains of top secret information.
When that information got to the USSR it went direct to Stalin, because he didn’t trust anybody else to prepare intelligence reports for him. Yet Stalin was a deeply deluded paranoid maniac. In particular, he was utterly convinced that Britain and the USA were planning a pre-emptive strike against the USSR before it could obtain nuclear weapons.
Yet the stolen information from Whitehall indicated that Britain was planning nothing of the sort. Devastated by conflict with Germany, Britain had zero intention of attacking Russia. Indeed, British intelligence lived in dread of a Red Army push westwards at a time when American resolve in Europe was waning.
However, Stalin had decided that Britain (and America) were preparing to attack. So he systematically ignored the best intelligence information he could have hoped for, and concluded that it was all a clever ruse by the British secret service.
Depending on perspective, we should either be deeply thankful or utterly chilled by Stalin’s delusions. We should be thankful if we decide that had Stalin treated the intelligence reports with the authority they deserved, he would have swept Westwards and conquered Europe. We should be chilled if we think that, on balance, information that should have made Stalin less paranoid – and thereby less likely to start World War III – was completely disregarded by him.
But then, doesn’t modern society exhibit a variation of this Stalin Syndrome? I refer to the special war which we’ve been fighting for 40 years; our war on drugs.
As the recent Channel 4 documentaries have been making clear, this is a war which we are losing and have no hope of winning. Let’s romp through some facts, already tedious to those who’ve thought about the madness of drug criminalisation for more than 5 minutes.
Britain spent £1.5 billion “fighting” the war on drugs last year. A recent estimate put the quantity of drugs prevented from reaching the market at 1%. But even if the authorities are doing 10 times better than that, they’re way off the 60-70% supply-prevention rate that the UN estimates is necessary to have any appreciable impact on the drug trade.
We spend further billions putting drug users and dealers in prison. Addicts are not rehabilitated, and leave prison only to fall back into cycles of crime and dependency. Dealers likewise pass through the permanently revolving door of criminal justice and drug supply. In the meanwhile, the drugs trade systematically corrupts law enforcement officers, customs officials, members of the judiciary and just about any section of society it comes into contact with.
British money spent on heroin makes its way to Afghanistan, where it is used to fund an insurgency in which British troops are being killed and mutilated. Although research shows that white and middle class citizens are as likely to use drugs as the poor and ethnic minorities, it is the latter that overwhelmingly make-up the prison population. In America it’s even more extreme, as Monday’s instalment at Channel 4 showed.
And that’s not even touching on the civil liberties question: why, exactly, should informed and consenting adults not be allowed to take certain substances in the privacy of their own homes, especially when this does no harm to others? Unlike alcohol, which kills thousands every year and lies behind most street violence and domestic abuse…but which is entirely legal.
The evidence is in: drug criminalisation does not work, and we need a change of approach.
But for whatever reason, the powers-that-be are exhibiting Stalin Syndrome. Refusing to accept the evidence because it does not fit the pre-determined conclusion: that drugs must continue to be criminalised. And because of Stalin Syndrome, the Channel 4 documentaries will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
In Uncle Joe himself, Stalin Syndrome risked the destruction of the entire planet. At least with the war on drugs it simply guarantees that we continue to collectively live-out the definition of insanity: to keep doing the same thing over and over, even when it’s failed.
Oh, that and the devastation of millions of lives across the globe. Hey, it’s your world. Try not to choke on it.
July 29, 2010
Abolishing ASBOs
The Coalition is abolishing ASBOs. This is a good thing. Not (necessarily) because ASBOs are frequently ignored, or allegedly worn as “badges of honour” by feral yoofs. But because they exemplified some of the worst aspects of New Labour.
As I’ve previously commented much of New Labour’s approach to society was rooted in American-style communitarian thinking, in part due to emulating Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy. This was clearest in Blair’s (then Brown’s) rhetoric of “rights and responsibilities”.
As previously argued the NewLab approach to society was deeply opposed to a philosophically liberal (and I’d say, preferable) view of citizen rights.
For (philosophical) liberals, citizens have rights just because they are citizens. These rights act as checks and constraints on state power. Rights certainly correlate to duties and responsibilities – but these duties and responsibilities fall incumbent upon other agents apart from the right-holder, including the state. So for example if I have a right to association, the responsibility is on you to not stop me freely associating.
The communitarian Blair-Brown view was different. It held that you only had rights if you proved you were “responsible” enough to deserve them. With “responsible” defined by the state. Rights were things only good boys and girls had; naughty boys and girls refusing to play nicely alienated or failed to achieve their rights. New Labour’s much-commented-upon authoritarianism and distrust of the individual arguably stemmed from this basic picture of the state-citizen relationship.
This all fit extremely well with media-management and centre-ground squatting designed to steal Daily Mail and Sun votes from under the Tories’ noses. Implying that pikeys, chavs, gypos and other undesirables shouldn’t get any rights until they behaved nicely was certainly a vote winner. That a mentality which made citizens dependent upon the state quickly led to the mass erosion of civil liberties didn’t particularly bother the New Labour leadership. Which was unsurprising, given that their dominant philosophy implied that they were personally doing ordinary people a favour by allowing them to have any rights at all.
Into all this ASBOs fitted perfectly. For a start, look at the name: anti-social behaviour order. Under New Labour you no longer needed to commit a full-blown crime to attract the attention and chastisement of the state, your behaviour simply had to be anti-social. Anti-social, defined by who? By “the community”, or rather its dominant power-wielding individuals and their dominant prejudices, wherever it was you happened to be acting “anti-socially”.
There’s no denying that ASBOs were often meted out to particularly unpleasant and problematic individuals. But their creation signalled the institution of a new form of quasi-crime that could be usefully applied against (typically) the working class poor. In sum: a Daily Mail crowd-pleaser that exemplified New Labour’s worst communitarian attitudes towards the status of the individual in society and his or her relationship to the wielders of organised power.
Commentators have been arguing that something needs to fill the gap between “a stern telling off from the local bobby” and a criminal conviction, which ASBOs allegedly achieved. Apart from pointing out that the police can already administer cautions, I’m really not sure I agree.
As a squealing leftie, I reckon a more effective long-term solution than slapping people with resentment-inducing punishments is to remove the poverty, desperation and boredom that underlie the vast majority of low-level crime and nuisance-making. You know, “Tough on the Causes of Crime”. That second part of their clever slogan which New Labour so quickly forgot when scraping the bottom of the barrel for votes.
July 26, 2010
Liberté, égalité, fraternité?
If I were to assume the mantle of the perennially dim, I might urge British civil liberties campaigners to get some perspective and calm down.
They squealed about proposed 90 day detention for terror suspects, and now moan about the removal of the democracy village outside Parliament. But (the dim-witted might continue) campaigners should appreciate that Britain is one of the most liberal nations in the world. Streets ahead of a regime which, for example, imprisons suspects without trial, denies them access to legal support, and does it all irrespective of numerous condemnations from the European Court of Human Rights.
I’m talking, of course, about France. Across the channel French lawyers are currently battling to gain the right to accompany suspects in police interviews, a basic legal right that the ECHR has affirmed repeatedly.
At present if you are arrested in France under suspicion of normal crimes you can expect to be held for 24-48 hours. If you are suspected of involvement in organised crime (which in effect is assumed for any drug-related offence, even just personal-use possession) or terrorist activity, it will by 96 hours. You can expect to see your lawyer once. For 30 minutes. Before your interrogation begins.
Your lawyer will not have access to any police documents on your case. They will probably not know you, or why you’ve been arrested. Much of the 30 minutes will be spent explaining your situation, and receiving the most basic general advice in return. You will then be left in the company of police officers trained to manipulate you into admitting your guilt – whether you’re innocent or not.
If you are unfortunate enough to be charged, especially for a drug-related offence, don’t expect bail. Reforms spearheaded by President Nicolas Sarkozy have introduced a tougher-than-tough approach. French citizens charged with petty offences are now currently held in prison cells whilst they await court dates. Yet because of backlogs in the French legal system the wait can be literally months.
A distant relative of mine was arrested on a minor drugs charge (what we’d call possession for personal use). He spent 6 months in jail, waiting for his trial. Let’s repeat: 6 months, in prison, without having been tried. In France, the idea that you are innocent until proven guilty is something of a bad practical joke. My distant relative eventually went to court and was given a slap on the wrist. A slap, of course, without any recognition that he’d lost half a year of his life in jail, unsurprisingly costing him his job and his home.
Which brings me back to the perspective of the dim-witted boor I began with. Britain’s civil liberties campaigners are quite right to kick and scream whenever the government proposes new measures designed to clamp down on individual liberty whilst increasing police power. Being a western European democracy is no guarantee that the relationship between state and citizen must remain a healthy one. Our French cousins offer proof positive of that.
July 24, 2010
The CPS and the Liberalism of Fear
In his later political writings Bernard Williams advocated an approach to political thinking that he called – following Judith Shklar – “The Liberalism of Fear”. At its root this approach prioritises an issue which is taken to be the fundamental problem of politics: that of controlling, limiting and ordering violence between individuals and groups so as to allow peaceful relations to exist, and human achievement to flourish.
For Williams the modern liberal western state is a particularly successful – though by no means unproblematic – solution to this basic problem. The modern state, via army, police and other controlled institutions successfully monopolises legitimate violence within a given territory (to borrow Max Weber’s famous definition).
By establishing these controlled agencies as the sole permitted users of coercive force, the modern state creates a realm of space within which other human agencies, institutions and individuals can interact in heightened security to pursue projects, goals and endeavours. Often these will conflict, but this is permitted so long as force is refrained from and legal channels are maintained. Should violence be employed, the state steps-in to assert its dominance and restore its preferred order to a situation.
However, Williams was acutely aware that the state, although in successful cases the solution to the fundamental problem, can and often does become part of the fundamental problem – with disastrous consequences. Some modern examples can be plucked from thousands to illustrate: Mugabe’s reign of terror in Zimbabwe; the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia; Pinochet’s neo-fascist thuggery and murder in Chile.
We in the democratic post-war West are generally very lucky. Our states broadly desist from becoming part of the fundamental problem, and out of the liberalism of fear great social and cultural achievements are made possible. But sometimes things go wrong.
When a police officer struck Ian Tomlinson with a baton from behind, before pushing him to the ground at last year’s G20 protests, things went badly wrong. Recall that a police officer is literally a personification of the state’s monopoly of legitimate coercive force, charged with using violence to control other human beings. In this case, the human being in question died very suddenly after what can fairly be described as an unprovoked assault.
A year later, the Crown Prosecution Service has ruled-out the possibility of bringing any charges to bear on PC Simon Harwood. I’m willing to be more lenient than I actually feel, and concede that because of the complexity of the law a charge for manslaughter may not have been likely to succeed after the early bungling of the Met’s tame pathologist.
The first autopsy of Tomlinson’s body performed by Freddy Patel returned a verdict of coronary heart failure. It’s worth noting, however, that Patel is currently before a serious disciplinary hearing at the General Medical Council on charges of giving questionable verdict on four causes of death (not including Tomlinson’s). Two further autopsies on Tomlinson’s body, however, found that the cause of death was internal bleeding.
Yet because only Patel saw Tomlinson’s body in tact – and did not keep crucial blood samples – a legal ambiguity hovers over the case. This might have prevented a successful prosecution for manslaughter, on the grounds that it cannot be proved that the assault on Tomlinson caused his death. One might, of course, still be inclined to believe that this should have been decided in an open court of law, not behind closed doors.
Yet that Harwood is not to be charged precisely with assault is little short of the CPS and Police spitting into the face of the British public. Anybody who watches the video of the attack on Tomlinson can see instantly that this is a case of unprovoked assault, by a police officer, on an innocent man who later died. The CPS excuse that there is a 6-month window of prosecution for offence is at this stage a cruel joke adding insult to injury.
Most of the justifiably outraged comment on this matter is focusing on the insult and injury to Tomlinson’s family, the manifest injustice, and (the evident lack of) police accountability. I’ve no intention of undermining any of that. I simply want to draw attention to what might be termed the underlying political philosophy of what’s gone wrong.
The CPS was faced with a choice over charging Harwood. Given the extent of media attention this case was always going to receive, that choice went to the heart of the relationship between the police and the general public in this country. The CPS could have decided that police in riot gear attacking innocent people is a manifest instance of the state becoming part of, rather than the solution to, politics’ basic problem.
Accordingly, the CPS could have moved to atone for the attack on Tomlinson by seeking to hold Harwood to account in a way which would show that the British state does not license hostility against its citizens, and that the attack on Tomlinson was a regrettable rogue incident. Similarly, by seeking the prosecution of Harwood, a meaningful attempt to (re)build a relationship of trust and respect between state and citizens could have been attempted. Instead, the CPS coolly and in retrospect decided to effectively support Harwood’s actions, and retroactively license them and have the state claim them as its own.
Of course we must not lose perspective. It is obvious that Britain is still a vastly safer and more desirable place to live than all those times and territores where the state has wholesale become the fundamental problem of politics. But here’s the rub: although it is a cliché, one of the hallmarks of civilisation and advanced desirable society is that the state does not attack innocent citizens. Yet in cases where such attacks do take place, they must be retrospectively disowned, apologised for, and meaningfully regretted. Measures must be taken to prevent their repeat occurrence, and justice must be delivered to victims and survivors.
By refusing to prosecute, the CPS has effectively degraded the relationship between the British state and its citizens, and done so by official mandate. And to end with suitable hyperbole – suitable because it is in an important sense true – thanks to the CPS’ decision, Britons should consider themselves living in a land that is less civilised and desirable than they might otherwise have thought. Not, however, that all this should come as any surprise. Britain already possesses a long and ignoble history of unaccountable violence and murder of citizens at the hands of the state’s agents. The liberalism of fear, indeed.
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.
February 21, 2010
Sunday Reading
My torture piece from the other day has been receiving a bit of attention, so I thought I’d pursue it.
I wanted to jump into the “are Amnesty International a bunch of relativists who abandoned a true commitment to human rights in order to suck up to Osama bin Laden and rag on America?” debate, but thankfully I don’t need to. Flying Rodent has covered it here.
Then I was going to say something more about torture and philosophy. But there’s probably no point as thanks to James I can link you to this superb article by Jeremy Waldron. Waldron is a master of the art, so read what he has to say.
Finally for anyone with a continued taste for torture as it ends up being applied in the real world, two more articles suggested by Jimmy Hill and Peter in previous comments are worth a read: here and here.
I’ll try and have something to say for myself later today, or tomorrow. Until then, happy clicking.
February 18, 2010
How To Think About Torture
On Sunday Nick Cohen – self-style heir to George Orwell and self-appointed last left-winger in Britain – proved his off-the-deep-end credentials by claiming that opposing state torture of terrorist suspects would cost the security services dearly, and that only namby-pamby faux-left relativists could think otherwise.
A few days later, The Independent’s resident neo-con Bruce Anderson decided that despite torture being “revolting”, torturing a suspect’s wife and children would be OK under certain circumstances. (Weirdly, Anderson seems to think that finding torture “revolting” is simply an aesthetic judgement, as though the problem is that torture is nasty to look at because of the blood. Most normal people think torture is wrong because it’s morally revolting. But I digress).
Sunny pointed out some of the blatant idiocies of both Cohen and Anderson’s pieces, and Flying Rodent’s comments are a masterclass in how to deal with torture apologists.
I can’t be as funny as Flying Rodent (so read his blog), but I think it’s worth going over the basics on how to think about torture, seen as the issue is on the agenda (and Nick is again on his high horse about the lost left).
Both Anderson explicitly – and Cohen more implicitly – appear to be motivated by the “ticking bomb” scenario. This is a philosophers’ thought experiment. It usually goes something like this:
There is a bomb about to go off. It will kill hundreds of thousands. The man in your custody knows where it is, and how to stop it. However, he will only tell you if you torture him. If you torture him, he will definitely give you the right answer in time. There is no other way to stop the bomb going off.
Is it wrong to torture him?
The first thing to notice about this philosopher’s fantasy is that it is just that: a fantasy. We are never in the ticking bomb scenario. Partly, that’s an empirical fact about how fantastically unlikely it is that you’ll ever get your hands on one terrorist who definitely knows where the bomb is and torturing him is the only way to stop it. Those sorts of situations happen in hit TV series 24, not real life.
But partly it’s also a logically impossible scenario: how can you ever know completely that the man definitely knows where it is, and will only tell you if you torture him? How do you know he won’t lie, aided by his jihadi powers of restraint? How do you know for sure that no other way of stopping the bomb exists? Etc.
The ticking bomb scenario is a fantasy dreamed up by philosophers to test-out our intuitive and/or reasoned responses to a bizarre situation, to tease out exactly where our moral sensibilities lie. It is certainly not supposed to be the basis for legislative policy decisions, for example.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of philosophy, that we are in the (impossible) ticking bomb scenario. Is it wrong to torture our suspect? Yes. Because torture is a morally horrific thing to do to another human being, regardless of the well-intentioned motives that may (but usually don’t) lie behind it.
So, should we therefore not torture the suspect? No. Because in this situation torturing one man is the lesser of two evils: letting the bomb go off and hundreds of thousands dying is morally more repugnant and unacceptable than torturing one man. But the point is precisely that this is a situation of choosing the lesser of two evils. Just because in this situation preventing the bomb going off is morally more important than not torturing our suspect, it doesn’t follow that the torture therefore becomes OK. It’s still a terrible thing to do. It is still morally wrong.
That’s a very important point to recognise: even when – under highly idealised, utterly abstracted non-real world conditions – we concede torture may be required, it’s still wrong. And that’s the tragedy of ethical existence: sometimes one simply has to do wrong things. “Here I stand, I can do no other”.
But as I said, the ticking bomb scenario is a thought experiment. It never actually happens. And for that reason alone, it’s a very bad idea to make legislative policy off the back of such an idealised situation.
To think about how legislative policy on torture ought to be made, we do much better to think about how torture operates in the real world. The story goes something like this:
We have a man in our custody. We think he’s probably a member of a terrorist cell. We don’t think there’s any bombs planted at the minute, but we think he is in conspiracy with other terrorists to plant bombs at some stage. We believe he is part – perhaps only a very small, very far-removed, part (we’re not sure) – of a vast network of terrorists and potential terrorists and terrorist sympathisers. He won’t speak to us – or at any rate, we don’t trust what he says. So why don’t we torture him?
OK. But the problem with torture is that people tend to say whatever they think their torturer wants to hear, and furthermore under the immense strain of repeated interrogation and torture they will tend to lose their grip on reality, thus making any testimony inherently unreliable. In order to get any worth out of torture-extracted information, it needs to be cross-referenced against other information so that the lies and the fantasy can be filtered out and the truth (if there is any) distilled. But the only way to do that is to collect a great deal of testimony, against which to compare individual cases, thus extracting common strands of truth. The only way to achieve that is to systematically torture a great many people. For torture to be effective and to yield information that is at all reliable to the security services, the practice needs to be systematised and applied to a great many suspects – many of whom will actually turn out to be innocent, know nothing, or possess no useful information.
That’s how torture works in the real world if it’s used to extract reliable information (as oppose to being an instrument of state repression and intimidation, as it is in many brutal authoritarian regimes). And indeed as Flying Rodent pointed out, this is precisely what the Americans have been doing with their system of shadow prison and holding facilities, and which Britain has been colluding in.
The systematic torture of hundreds – possibly thousands – of people as a way of distilling information is simply not a price any civilised society ought to accept. Yes, terrorists may threaten our safety. But the institutionalisation of torture is not the response of a civilised society. The judges were right to rule as they did on the Binyam Mohammed case, both because torture is illegal in Britain but also because there are overwhelming moral grounds for resisting the institutionalisation of torture by the state.
Forget philosopher’s fantasies. Torture in the real world is a monstrosity of such unacceptable proportions that anybody still inclined to think it’s an acceptable state policy suffers such defects of ethical sensibility that I would be extremely concerned about their ability to function as morally responsive members of normal society. Frankly.
