September 2, 2010
The Woodlice of British Democracy
One of the great benefits of living in western democratic society is the presence of the rule of law. Rather than being governed unaccountably by powerful figures able to arbitrarily ruin lives, the rule of law guarantees that even those who enforce the will of the state are subject to binding regulations. As a result, the scope for abuse, corruption, domination and injustice are massively reduced.
At least, that’s how it works in theory – but not always in practice.
What’s striking about the New York Times revelations that Andy Coulson knew of extensive illegal phone hacking at the News of the World is just how deep the rot goes. It’s as though somebody has lifted up the big stone of British democracy, and all the woodlice and earwigs are now scuttling about in the daylight.
Most amazing is that Andy Coulson himself remains perhaps the most high-placed adviser to David Cameron, and by extension the British government. If the media strategist is implicated to the extent the NYT alleges, he is responsible for overseeing wide-spread and systematic illegality. That Coulson should now be in such a position of influence – without having been elected, nor being accountable to the British public – throws a stain on the British government. That he is apparently above the law – insofar as Scotland Yard are manifestly set against investigating him – indicates that there is a serious sickness in of our society, because the rule of law has ceased to apply to the powerful.
Which brings us to the case of Scotland Yard itself. For if the police cannot – or will not – enforce the rule of law, this is cause for grave concern indeed. Assuming the NYT allegations are true, Scotland Yard deliberately curtailed its investigations out of deference to The News of the World:
“Scotland Yard…had a symbiotic relationship with News of the World. The police sometimes built high-profile cases out of the paper’s exclusives, and News of the World reciprocated with fawning stories of arrests.”
Despite dozens of journalists – and hundreds of hacked celebrities – apparently being implicated, Scotland Yard has declined to investigate further than two implicated reporters, or to notify those who have been the victim of hacking “effectively shielding News of the World from a barrage of civil lawsuits.”
And although it is perhaps not surprising, it is nonetheless deeply troubling to see the sheer dearth of attention the NYT allegations have received in the British media. Of all the major media outlets, only The Guardian and the Financial Times appear to be covering the story. It’s no surprise that outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch are ignoring the scandal. And perhaps the BBC is too scared of retaliation to antagonise a Conservative Party already eager to placate a BBC-hating Murdoch – itself a damning indictment of media-government relations. But what of Britain’s other news organisations, whose job is supposedly to hold the government to account?
It is worth spelling this one out: what we have on our hands is a major scandal implicating people in the highest echelons of government as well as the police force itself. And yet the story risks passing as nothing into yesterday’s news, with no consequences or ramifications for those implicated.
Perhaps people will think I’m being naive kicking up such a fuss. Marxists and elite theorists, for example, have long argued that the rules of liberal democracy apply in theory to everyone but in practice never to the powerful. The case of Coulson appears to confirm this basic diagnosis.
But the point, surely, is to take steps and measures to curtail and moderate that reality. To clamour and protest that when the rule of law is not applied to those who hold power over us, it must be made to do so. It may be a hard, realist fact of life that our lords and masters do not live by the rules they impose on us. But equally, it is incumbent on us to whine, kick and scream to try and reverse that truth as far as possible and drag reality somewhere closer to the ideals we’re told we live under.
And it will have to be us that does the whining, kicking and screaming, because our glorious media has quite conspicuosly abandoned its post.
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.
June 29, 2010
Jeremy Hunt: The Importance of Class in Politics?
Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, recently revealed his vast ignorance of British footballing history whilst managing to insult thousands:
“[A]s a Minister I was incredibly encouraged by the example set by the England fans, I mean not a single arrest for a football related offensive and the terrible problems that we had in Heysel and Hillsborough in the 1980s seem now to be behind us and I think, you know, there is small grounds for encouragement there even though obviously we are very disappointed about the result.”
Anybody with even a basic knowledge of English football will know that what happened at Hillsborough had absolutely nothing to do with hooliganism. They will know that the disaster – which left 96 Liverpool fans dead – was the result of poor crowd management, as confirmed by the 1990 Taylor Report (PDF). Suspicions, however, have long lingered about the role of the police and its account of events following the disaster.
Hunt’s comments cannot be easily dismissed as a “slip of the tongue”. The controversy surrounding Hillsborough ensures that nobody with even a basic understanding of the disaster could now make the mistake of blaming hooliganism. That the Secretary of State is apparently more influenced by the outrageous lies of the Sun Newspaper than with what actually happened calls into question his competence to be a minister for sport. That Hunt was shadow secretary for the same office during last year’s 20th anniversary Hillsborough memorial services is an even greater indictment of his callous ignorance.
But could there be something more going on? Economists and psychologists frequently employ the concept of cognitive bias. It’s worth asking whether any are at work here. I can think of 3 possibilities:
1. Not only is Hunt ignorant about the history of English football, but he is predisposed to think of football as a yob sport where trouble is usually caused by yobs. Given that 44-year-old Hunt would have become socially aware in the 1970s and 80s (when English hooliganism was rife), this explanation is very plausible.
2. Hunt, as a conservative, is predisposed to trust figures of institutions and authority over the masses in need of control. This means he is more likely to assume that fault lay with yob crowds than with police authorities.
3. Hunt is extremely privileged and has grown up and worked amongst similarly privileged people, likely to have low interest in football and low interest in a disaster that affected working class Liverpool fans. Accordingly, he’s never been in a social situation whereby 1. and 2. above could be adjusted, or his ignorance about Hillsborough corrected.
Number 3 will, of course, set the cat amongst the pigeons. But I suspect there’s something to it. Having grown up lower-middle class and attended a normal state comprehensive with lots of working class kids, it is unimaginable to me that someone could not know the truth about Hillsborough. Yes, I grew up on Merseyside. But in Southport there were as many Manchester United as Liverpool fans. And for crying out loud, by Mum knows what happened at Hillsborough and she’s French and doesn’t like football.
Of course, we musn’t be deterministic. Plenty of people have privileged backgrounds and manage to care about those less fortunate than they. Harriet Harman, for all her faults, stands as a good example. Equally, sometimes people from working class backgrounds can’t wait to join the elites and dump on those they’ve left behind. Hello David Davis, hello Norman Tebbit.
And believe me, I know how irritating it can be to have your (perceived) class background used against you. Just ask Captain Swing. But all that having been said, does Jeremy Hunt offer proof of what I and many others were saying about Double Dip Dave and Boy George before the election? That class matters; that being a millionaire Bullingdon Boy will affect the way politicians see – and attempt to influence – the world around them.
April 17, 2010
The Problem of Percival
I was recently visiting my parents and took time to catch up with old friends in the area. In the process I bumped into somebody I was loosely acquainted with when growing up. He wasn’t by any means a friend, but I knew who he was – with an acute, and very British, awareness that because he lived on the nearby council estate there were important (but unspoken) divides between his sort and mine.
Let’s call this person Percival, a suitably unsuitable moniker.
Within five minutes of bumping into Percival he’d told me and a room of 8 others that he was facing prison time. His freely-confessed crime? Fraudulently deceiving pensioners into parting with their money. Indeed, whether Percival goes to jail or not largely depends upon whether the people he scammed can pick him out of a line-up. But as he nonchalantly put it “I’m not worried because they’re old so they won’t remember me.”
At this stage you’re probably thinking: what an evil little bastard. But believe it or not that would – in a subtle yet important way – be the wrong response. For Percival to be evil he’d have to exhibit some desire to rob or harm the vulnerable, or to take active pleasure in it, or at the very least to be callously uncaring about the fact he was defrauding the elderly and harming their well-being.
But as I was talking to Percival it became clear that he exhibited none of those traits or emotions. On the contrary, what struck me was that he was totally amoral. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about ripping off pensioners – or worse, actively enjoyed it. Those would be morally reprehensible attitudes indeed. Rather, Percival straightforwardly didn’t see that any moral issue arose whatsoever. It didn’t register for him that what he’d done was wrong, because he quite obviously lacked the basic sense of right and wrong that most people would take for granted. From his point of view he had needed money, old people had money, so he did some things to get that money. In his mind that’s all there was to it. Morality – as most readers of this blog will know it – simply didn’t (and doesn’t) enter his picture.*
It was a bizarre thing to witness. But it got me thinking about what we, “Society” (scare quotes intended), should do about Percival. Putting him in prison is simply not going to work in the long-term. The problem with Percival is not that he needs a good hard kicking to bring him around, because he lacks the basic mental hardware to orientated himself to what is and is not acceptable in our society. The ability to tell right from wrong on even a basic matter, like stealing from pensioners, simply eludes him at some deep level. Throwing him in jail will just make him even less employable (and thus drive him into subsequent crime), introduce him to fellow criminals, and probably brutalise him to boot (one thing in his favour at present is that he’s non-violent).
So what do we, “Society”, do about Percival? If we had a Magic Leftwing Time Machine maybe we could go back and try to ensure he was brought up so that he acquired the basic moral orientation most of us take for granted. How would we do that? There’s no easy answer. But glaring obstacles to the early development of a functioning moral sense must involve sharing a 3-bedroom council house with (and thereby competing for attention, clothes and money) 12 brothers and sisters, having no stable father figure, and growing up on a very poor council estate where delinquency, anti-social behaviour and crime were the norm for many.** In other words, yes I do think that poverty is a very important factor. And yes I do think that money spent improving the lives of the poorest would go a lot further, in the long-run, than building more prisons and putting more Bobbies on the Beat.
But in a way that’s all bye-the-bye. Because we don’t have a time machine. So what are we going to do with Percival? Certainly elderly people need protecting. But how do we go about rehabilitating somebody who simply lacks the basic moral hardware to differentiate right from wrong? Prison certainly looks attractive as a short-term holding pen – until you recall that when the hold is released, the beast tends to have gotten even more dangerous.
Percival, and those like him, are a real problem. My guess is that they make up the majority of petty criminals who flit in and out of prison all their lives. The problem they pose cuts very deep, across a wide range of social, political and philosophical issues. What scares me is that I see very little in the way of solutions to these problems, precisely because they cut so deep.
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* This is the only explanation I can give for how somebody could quite calmly – without bravado or bluster – tell a room full of near-strangers that he was facing prison for defrauding grannies. In a way, it would be much easier to deal with the problem of Percival if he were just evil, and not spookily amoral.
** These are the things you hear about other people as a kid, of course. Invariably deployed as covertly class-based insults, at least coming from my side of the tracks.
March 24, 2010
Because Pigs Are Only Human, After All
Confession time: I really don’t like going on demonstrations. It’s not so much the standing around for hours, bored, whilst the police stare at me in a menacing fashion (though that is unpleasant). It’s more because I’m a thoroughgoing misanthropist with a low tolerance for twits. As a result, I find demonstrations irritating because of the people I find myself alongside.
Whilst almost everyone at a leftie demo is well intentioned, there’s a lot of muppets. Take the greasy-haired snivelling students trying to flog you the Socialist Worker Party rag. Looking snooty when you turn them down, it’s highly tempting to shout: “excuse me, but as a member of the Socialist Worker Party when was the last time you actually did a day’s work?” Then there’s the self-righteous preachers who always manage to magic-up a microphone in order to shout idiocies such as (and I quote from Saturday) “what is happening today is exactly like Italy in the 1920s!”
There’s the usual black-flag waving anarchists, screaming about how they hate authority – even when (pace subsequent lies and distortion) the authority of the police is presently preventing their weedy little bodies being kicked to pieces by a gang of drunk football hooligans. There’s the mandatory contingent of hemp-wearing vegetarian environmentalists, handing out leaflets about how we need to cycle everywhere and eat nothing but lettuce to save the planet. About how we need a “green new deal” that can rescue the planet and create jobs…with no actual economics printed anywhere on their recycled-paper dross. Then there’s the hard-line wingnuts, such as the lady I bumped into on Saturday. Selling copies of her magazine “1917”, she was part of the International Bolshevik Tendency (total worldwide membership: 100), which advocates universal gun ownership and the right of North Korea to have nuclear weapons to defend itself from capitalist imperialism.
Finally there’s the awful, insufferable, toneless, out-of-time chants and songs, most of which are manifestly idiotic. “Black and white, together we are dynamite”? That’s right. At an anti-racist protest, why not sing about how race-mixing leads to explosion? Genius.
The above all combine to make protesting a fairly irritating experience. So why do I go? Usually because I think a cause is sufficiently worth throwing my weight behind; suffering packs of twits for a day is a relatively small price to endure. It’s also made more bearable if I go with friends so we can bitch and moan together.
But why am I telling you this? Because personal emotive reactions matter to how one views a situation and a group of people, and how that influences one’s action. And everybody has such emotive reactions – including especially the police.
Following my blog about the Bolton anti-EDL protest, several people have quizzed me about what the police motives for misrepresenting the UAF/anti-EDL protest could possibly be. Am I just being paranoid? Why would the boys in blue play silly buggers? Here’s some thoughts.
The first thing to remember is that the UAF initially attempted to disrupt the police’s plans for two separate demonstrations. As a result, police officials may well have sought to teach the UAF a lesson. Mess with our plans and we’ll arrest a lot of you (perhaps also to gather information). Then we’ll tell the media that you were a trouble-causing minority, which will hurt your cause.
I think that’s very plausible, but there’s something deeper to consider. Something more worrying for those whose default attitude is to view the police as neutral enforcers of the fair rule of law.
When I recently blogged about police spin regarding the tragic death of Ashleigh Hall, “Yurrzem” made the following insightful comment:
“Those of us who remember the miners’ strike have a naturally sceptical attitude to the media and the police. It’s notable that a lot of the today’s senior coppers must have cut their teeth at the time.”
This was followed-up by John Q. Publican:
“…the generation of top coppers who have led, planned, directed and then lied about the litany of over-reactions, brutality and political violence were learning how to behave as policemen in the 1970s and 1980s.
There are forces which have gotten past this, because some of the honest coppers from back then got promoted; but in the Met, Sir Paul Condon drove out progressive and liberal senior officers and actively pursued an agenda of social authoritarianism and the suppression of protest. His protégés, fast-tracked by him because they were his type of copper, are now running the Met and in charge of the various high-profile anti-protest operations; Stephenson, Blair and company.”
I’m not qualified to comment on John Q’s specific assessments of individual police officers – but the overall picture looks convincing. Top coppers in charge today cut their teeth when the police was crushing organised labour at the behest of the Thatcher government.
Left wing demos are still characterised by considerable numbers of union activists, usually with branch banners proudly on display. The police in charge of contemporary operations must surely view left-wing activism and organised labour events with enormous suspicion and hostility. Why wouldn’t they, given their past experiences? No doubt most police are contemptuous of the EDL, many of whom are probably known as petty criminals and football hooligans already. But it’s entirely reasonable to suppose that the police top brass has a particular antipathy towards, and suspicion of, organised left-wing protest. If you’d made your name and rank cracking miner’s skulls in the mid-1980s, wouldn’t this be your attitude too?
We’d all like to live in a world where the police are apolitical, neutral enforcers of fair laws. But the police – and this includes its commanders – are just people. They too have prejudices, allegiances and suspicions, built-up over a lifetime of experience. I don’t go on as many demos as I could because I find many of my own “side” irritating in the extreme. It’s reasonable to suppose that top police officers are highly suspicious of leftist protests, for the same basic reasons of antipathy rooted in personal prejudice and animosity. Accordingly, they will be happy to do left-wing protests down, be it through arrests on the day or in the press afterwards. Pigs, after all, are only human.
Yet once that fact is recognised, it should be up to our elected politicians to introduce measures safe-guarding against, and correcting for, police prejudice.
I am not, however, holding my breath.
March 21, 2010
EDL, Police Misrepresentation and Future Tactics
The mainstream media reporting on Saturday’s English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism demonstrations in Bolton has proved worryingly misleading. It indicates that important lessons must be learned by UAF and all those who oppose the growth of the far-right EDL.
Frustratingly I was stuck in a 2-hour tailback on the M6 on Saturday morning, so missed the first stages of the counter-demo. However, I’ve been able to piece together the following from speaking to people in the afternoon and from media reports (though more on whether to trust those later).
Essentially, the EDL and UAF demos were scheduled to begin around 1pm. Greater Manchester Police had established two distinct protest areas for each group, separated by barriers (and later by police with dogs standing between the barriers). However, UAF protestors attempted to occupy the entire protest area in the morning, in a bid to deny the EDL the ability to protest at all. The police response was one of zero-tolerance: riot police and horses were sent in, and the area cleared. The majority of UAF arrests – that have been so publicised in the media – were therefore made in the morning before the EDL had arrived. Certainly, I only saw one arrest in the entire course of the afternoon, and nothing like the 55 reported.
I must therefore say that it was a tactical mistake by the UAF organisers to attempt to take over the entire protest area. Police spokesmen had already been bragging about how the day would test their resolve, and that they were going to show zero-tolerance. By attempting to subvert the police’s plans for two controlled demonstrations, UAF invited the police firstly to initiate arrests, and secondly – as we shall see – to spin the day against the anti-fascist protest and in favour of the EDL. Let me be clear: I have no problem in principle with taking measures to prevent the EDL from being able to demonstrate at all. Yet tactics must be picked carefully, and yesterday they weren’t.
However, this does not excuse – though perhaps it helps to explain – the shockingly misleading reporting that has subsequently been carried in virtually all of the mainstream media.
Let’s start with the figures for participation. By late Saturday evening a uniform figure of 2,000 EDL and 1,500 UAF was being carried by most outlets. Yet this figure cannot possibly be correct. By my reckoning, the anti-EDL protest outnumbered its rival by at least 3-1. Indeed, the UAF and affiliates were contained in two separate “kettles”, versus the EDL’s one. Furthermore, the UAF “kettle” facing that of the EDL was manifestly and considerably larger in size, as anybody present could have seen. There is simply no way that the official figures being presented are correct.
Yet by carrying these figures – and by emphasising the greater number of arrests on the UAF side due to the morning attempt at taking over the entire protest area – a very disturbing thing has occurred: the anti-EDL/UAF protest has been represented as a minority of troublemakers. The EDL is now being portrayed as the bigger (i.e. more popular) group, and that causing the least trouble.
Yet, again, this is highly misleading. The anti-EDL/UAF-side of the protest was characterised by your normal myriad of leftist protestors. Old men in flat caps, girls in punk gear, trades unions representatives, middle-aged women with prams. Standard fare for anyone who has ever been on a leftwing demo. The EDL side, however, was difficult to distinguish from what most of its members are – a gathering of angry, drunk, football hooligans. Indeed, this assessment was backed up by more than just appearances. At about 2.30pm, missiles started to be launched from the EDL side of the barriers. Starting with cigarette lighters, those on the UAF side soon found themselves under a rain of coins, half-filled plastic bottles, crushed beer cans and, eventually, glass bottles. In the end I counted at least 5 glass bottles smashing to the ground, narrowly avoiding the heads of people on the anti-EDL side. This continued for over an hour, until the police finally responded to calls of “do your job!” and cleared the EDL out of the protest area.
It’s worth repeating: although some UAF protesters picked up the missiles thrown at them and returned the favour to the other side, the vast majority of missiles were being thrown by the EDL. Indeed, the situation started to become so dangerous that the police had to clear the EDL away. Not the UAF/anti-EDL protesters. And it’s worth noting that this also gives good indication of the relative size of each group: the police cleared out the thugs first, because there were fewer of them.
Yet you will search high and low to find reports of how the protest ended in the mainstream news reporting. Some stories state that two UAF protesters suffered minor head injuries – but where are the accompanying clarifications regarding how those head injuries were (likely) received, and why this resulted in the protest being cleared? I don’t know if the girl I saw take a lucozade bottle in the face was one of the reported injured, but she was lucky not to lose an eye.
What appears to have happened is that the mainstream media has taken its news reports – which show a suspicious uniformity given how few journalists were present – from wire agencies, and from (surprise surprise) police statements. Certainly, the police must be issuing the (manifestly wrong) participation figures.
The result is that an incredibly skewed image of the protests has emerged. This is made worse by the media focusing especially on dramatic images such as this. To the unsuspecting eye, that looks photo like a raving, snarling, out-of-control rioter. Of course, if the context was that the woman had been snatched at random (as happens at protests) and was having her arms twisted behind her back, that could simply be a look of pain and outrage. Without the context, we don’t know. But using that image and similarly confrontational depictions of the anti-EDL/UAF protest, along with reports of anti-fascist demonstrators being arrested, re-enforces the impression that the anti-EDL protest constituted a minority of troublemakers.
Yet as those of us who were actually there will tell you, the exact opposite was the case.
Those who oppose the rise of the EDL must learn important lessons from this. Although the UAF/anti-EDL demonstration won the protest on the day (it was the EDL that was forcibly cleared for its violent behaviour) it looks like the EDL have won the battle nonetheless. The news reporting – helped by misleading police figures and emphasis on the early UAF attempt to occupy the entire protest area – has, if anything, allowed the EDL to come off best. Given the now clear bias of the police against the UAF, and the media’s supplicant willingness to uphold that interpretation, we must all trend incredibly carefully from now on. This is not an even battlefield we find ourselves upon.
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Daily Heil Extra
It’s worth casting a quick eye over the Daily Heil’s reporting of the demo. The text of the article is predictable, and for the most part churns out the wire agency dogrell with the standard right-wing twist.
But what’s really interesting is to note the pictures. Observe how all the pictures of the anti-EDL/UAF protest show protesters in direct confrontation with police, with people snarling and shouting and apparently causing trouble. Interesting that the two EDL photos paint a different picture entirely. The first could be mistaken for an England international pre-match crowd shot. The second is clearly just a good-natured lady having a bit of a joke.
From shots like these, you’d never guess which side was throwing the bottles and the coins at people’s heads. They say a picture paints a thousand words, and indeed the Daily Heil appears to know full-well that it can imply its leanings and allegiances via its photos and not its words.
They also say that leopards don’t change their spots. So that’s two clichés that the paper of Oswald Mosley and support for Hitler has endeavoured to prove.
March 11, 2010
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.
December 20, 2009
Vigilante
Why can’t people take the law into their own hands?
When sentencing Munir Hussein – who chased-down a burglar and beat him so hard with a cricket it shattered in three places, leaving Walid Salem brain-damaged for life – the judge said:
“Sadly, I have no doubt that my public duty requires me to impose immediate prison sentences of some length upon you. This is in order to reflect the serious consequences of your violent acts and intent and to make it absolutely clear that, whatever the circumstances, persons cannot take the law into their own hands, or carry out revenge attacks upon a person who has offended them.”
He added:
“It may be that some members of the public, or media commentators, will assert that Salem deserved what happened to him at the hands of you and the two others involved, and that you should not have been prosecuted and need not be punished,” the judge added.”However, if persons were permitted to … inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting justice take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are the hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.”
And indeed there’s been the typical apoplexy on the right about criminals now having more rights than law abiding citizens, Hussein being a hero, and the rest.
My own tribe normally takes the other route, typically assumed to lead to The Moral High Ground. That it would be barbaric if individuals could take the law into their own violent hands, result in an end to the rule of law before which we are all equal, effectively licensing murder, and the rest. Catherine Bennett puts a powerful case forward for the High Grounders.
Now, being of High Ground persuasion I tend to think there’s a lot to these arguments. But it would be naive and dishonest of me not to acknowledge something lurking in the conceptual background: the intimate relationship between violence and the modern state.
Max Weber gave the classic account:
“What is a ‘state’? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to those associations which are designated as political ones: today the state, or historically, those associations which have been the predecessors of the modern state. Ultimately one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force
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Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions – beginning with the slib – have known the use of force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”
And Weber is right. Crucial to the State’s authority and capacity to maintain order, control and power over the disparate actors is the (successful) monopolisation of violence, delegated officially through army, police forces and maybe even Community Support Officers.
Furthermore, the state’s having a monopolisation of violence is something that, in general, we ought to be damn grateful for. I’ve just finished reading Simon Schama’s Citizens, a chronology of the French Revolution. Schama claims that the revolution began when insurrectionary rhetoric about the people’s power was actually put into practice, and the King’s forces lost control over the use of force. But Schama also contends that from 1789-94 the revolutionary government simply could not put the genie of violence back in the bottle, and it was this lack of state monopoly of force that led to The Terror and the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
Dark as Weber’s diagnosis may strike us, there are reasons to be grateful when it obtains.
Which brings us back to the sentencing of Mr Hussein. We on the High Ground may be right in our usual arguments about barbarism, the rule of law, and all the rest. But lurking behind that is a basic truth: we don’t allow vigilantes in this society because violence is the preseve of the state and its specially licensed agents.
And that, ultimately, is about power, control and domination. It just happens to be power, control and domination that we are in favour of.
August 25, 2009
Why Tories Should Bother to Watch The Wire
Liberal Conspiracy today reported that Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling claimed that parts of Britain are now akin to sublime American drama series The Wire’s depiction of Baltimore. He said:
“The Wire used to be just a work of fiction for British viewers. But under this government, in many parts of British cities, The Wire has become a part of real life in this country too. Far too many of those features of what we have always seen as a US phenomenon are now to be found on the streets of Britain as well.”
As Sunny Hundal at LibCon and Sunder Katwala at Next Left have already pointed out, Michael White at the Guardian politics blog has exposed Grayling’s claims as complete nonsense:
“Now down to the stats. The city of Baltimore, where The Wire was set by local reporter David Simon, has a population of around 640,000 and a murder rate – falling, I am happy to note – of 234 in 2008, down from 282 in 2007 after rows about fiddled figures – a detail which echoes the TV series.
Is that around 40 murders per 100,000? That’s around six times the New York rate of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2008 (523 murders, slightly up on 2007) and a lot, lot higher than the UK – where the murder rate per 100,000 is around 1.4, slightly higher than France, lower than Scotland (2.56), a lot lower than South Africa (49.6). The overall US murder rate is 5.5 – a quarter of post-Soviet Russia’s.”
Yet Grayling’s claims are to be lamented and criticised on a number of levels. As Sunder Katwala points out, this is indicative of the Conservative’s tactic of pounding out the mantra of “Broken Britain” which deliberately perpetuates a myth and lie about our society, in a cynical bid to gain votes through fear.
This cynicism is only made more tasteless by the fact that Grayling has clearly never watched The Wire. As Sunny Hundal reported, Grayling squirmed when questioned on BBC Breakfast:
Interviewer: Have you really seen any more than that first episode?
Grayling: Yes I’ve seen a number of … I’ve seen most of the first series. I have seen a number of the other episodes yes. I have.
But then, as Sunder points out, “Grayling won’t mind demonstrating his ignorance of The Wire – and he probably wanted a row about the state of our cities.”
Which is a real shame, because Grayling – and the rest of the Tories – could learn a thing or two from watching possibly the greatest television show ever created. To this end, there’s the more obvious points which have already been well-made in the LibCon comments thread:
“If Grayling had watched The Wire he’d have realised that it portrays the ‘tough approach’ to drugs to be an abject failure, and that the key lies in education and decriminalisation.”
“The final series also explored the role of the media in turning complex social and political problems into simple narratives of goodies vs baddies. You have to wonder if Grayling saw any of it at all.”
- Shatterface
“I would say it also demonstrates how good our relatively restrained policy on drugs is in comparison to the shit that Americans have to put up with.”
-Nick
Yet I want to focus on something specific about what The Wire achieves amidst those more general assesments. Namely, a sublime exposition of the importance of uncontrolled arbitrariness in life. The Tories would do well to pay attention.
Arbitrariness – and more generally, luck – have preoccupied a lot of the best philosophers of the last 60 years. John Rawls, for example, devised an entire political conception of justice around the idea that people could not be held responsible for arbitrary factors of their birth, and that social and material inequalities that result from such arbitrary factors can only be justified if they serve to make the worst-off better-off than they would otherwise have been. Ronald Dworkin and the late, lamented G.A. Cohen battled for decades about the role of luck in which socio-economic inequalities society ought to tolerate. Bernard Williams, probably the greatest moral philosopher of his century, spent many a paper exploring the impacts and effects of “moral luck”; the way arbitrary uncontrollable factors influence our conceptions of, and responses to, ethical situations.
The Wire is engaged in the same exploration of issues of arbitrariness and luck in determining socioeconomic distributions, and the attitudes we attach to them. In particular, it brings out beautifully the way in which one’s birth – over which one has no control – determines so much.
Take, for example, the character of D’Angelo in Series 1 and 2. Most viewers probably start out disliking D’Angelo: he is a murder, a drug dealer, and a man who conducts a long-running affair behind the back of the mother of his child. As clear a cut case of a conventional “bad guy” as you could ask for? Not at all. For one of the best aspects of the first two series of The Wire is the manner in which the D’Angelo is gradually humanised to the audience: he turns out to be a man of great integrity, loyalty, intelligence and honour.
How to reconcile these apparently contradictory characters? There’s no quick answer – in part because the beauty of The Wire is that it doesn’t deal in quick answers – but in large measures the contradiction is resolved as one comes to see that D’Angelo is who he is because he was born a member of the Barksdale crime family. He was born into a life of crime, raised to be a drug dealer from day one. Thus the extent to which he is a man of integrity, honour and loyalty is forever reflected through the prism of the arbitrary fact that he is a Barksdale.
What The Wire shows is how powerfully that arbitrary fact of his birth controls D’Angelo’s destiny – and how different it could all have been. For if D’Angelo had been born on the other side of the tracks, if his mother had not been the sister of a drug lord, he could just as easily have grown up to be a cop as a criminal. It’s the arbitrary fact of his birth – the sheer luck of the matter, for which he did nothing to deserve – that dictates his future.
The Wire not only explodes the conventional myths that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” by presenting every character as multi-faceted and complex, it goes further and shows that if there are such things as clear-cut bad guys, understanding why they are bad is no easy task. What it certainly shows is that in many cases bad guys no more choose to be bad than good guys choose to be good; that arbitrary factors of birth play a far greater role in determining fates than choices individuals make. And it is the brutal, unflinching realism of The Wire’s character depictions which make this lesson so compelling and hard to refute.
It is against this backdrop that the Tory’s attempt to co-opt The Wire as part of its rhetoric about “Broken Britain” is so misguided, and why the Tories would do well to actually bother to watch the programme from start to finish. For a key component in Tory rhetoric about “Broken Britain” is the notion that society is disintegrating because people do not take personal ‘responsibility’ for their actions, choosing to blame external factors instead. Accordingly, the way to “mend” Britain – we are told – is to increase the focus upon ‘personal responsibility’, reflected in an emphasis on retributionist punishment of the individual as oppose to society-wide attempts to deal with situational causes. Indeed, just last Thursday David Cameron managed to include such rhetoric in his speech about the NHS:
“I stuck my neck out on this before when I said that instead of blaming external factors for everything, it’s time we recognised that there is a moral choice…that personal responsibility cannot be shirked.”
Presumably when he spoke of “sticking his neck out”, Cameron is referring to his speech of July 2008:
“society…is in danger of losing its sense of personal responsibility, social responsibility, common decency and, yes, even public morality.”
Yet these are messages about society which are completely antithetical to the lessons of The Wire: that life and society is complex, that much is determined before one is even born, that judgements about good and evil cannot be reduced to simple, convenient narratives about “personal responsibility”. Because such a notion is worse than meaningless in the real world: it is positively dangerous because it leads politicians to advocate simple solutions to complex problems, with disastrous results.
Which is not to say that The Wire removes all questions about personal responsibility and reduces everything to simple determinism. It doesn’t. But what it does do is show that it is wholly inadequate to just emphasise personal responsiblity at the expense of situational factors and determinants over which one has no control.*
That’s why the Conservatives should bother to watch The Wire. Without leaving the comfort of the Westminster Village they could learn more about the real world than they have ever yet managed to grasp. All they need are some DVDs.
There is, however, a final and considerable irony to Grayling’s attempt to appropriate The Wire to promote social policies which are completely contradictory to the programme’s message. And I’m not thinking of the quote from Wire creator David Simon that’s already been remarked upon:
“It is possible that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: “You are hopelessly full of shit.”
Rather, I draw your attention to the following:
“Why is it that it’s so hard for everyone to focus on these problems? What are we paying attention to? What gets our focus, and what doesn’t? And why? The Wire spends a lot of time pointing its finger at this institution and that institution, and deconstructing a lot of the dysfunction slice by slice. But the last finger to point is at our selves. So to quote the great line from Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s kind of where we’re going with the last season. If this is really what ails us, and if this is really what needs to be addressed, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?”
That final question remains unanswered. Grayling and the Tories, by pumping out their tired, simplistic rhetoric about “personal responsibility” can only cause such a question to remain unsanswered. That’s the biggest – and most egregious – irony of it all, because I want to know, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?
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* This paragraph is an edit made in response to a comment from John Meredith at the Liberal Conspiracy shortened version of this piece.
