Patrick Hayes

The left is crying wolf over the EDL

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 12:00:46 +0100

The fewer English Defence League supporters that can be mobilised for a demo, it seems, the more left-wing campaigners feel the need to go out and counter them. On Saturday, there were about 150 far-right EDL members marching in Walthamstow, London. But that didn’t stop a counter-protest 20 times this size taking place in an attempt to ‘crush’ the EDL.

One thing that never seems to cross anti-EDL campaigners’ minds is what it would be like if the EDL was simply allowed to march without obstruction. The EDL did little to no mobilisation in Waltham Forest, the borough in which Walthamstow sits – it was the ‘We Are Waltham Forest’ anti-EDL campaigners who spent almost two months fliering, putting up posters, holding meetings, getting people to sign petitions, knocking on doors and running stalls in Walthamstow town centre.

Without the efforts of We Are Waltham Forest, 150 EDL members would have turned up on the bleak crossroads by Blackhorse Road station, and trudged for a mile or two towards their planned rallying point at Walthamstow Town Hall, causing minimal disruption. Walking along the largely empty Forest Road, they would have appeared slightly daft and pathetic. Indeed, for much of the route, with their ‘Allah is a paedo’ banners and feamongering chants drawing the attention of only a handful of passersby, that is exactly how they came across. (They really only came snarling to life when spurred on by anti-fascist protesters and photographers who were following the protest from a safe distance on the other side of the road.)

Not much to dread: 150 EDL supporters march down Forest Road, Walthamstow.

But the idea that the EDL could march unchallenged would be anathema to anti-fascist campaigners who are convinced they are witnessing the birth of a neo-Nazi party, or an angry swarm of Anders Breiviks-in-the-making. Indeed, many wanted the march banned altogether, with local Labour MP Stella Creasy leading the call. At a special meeting last month, she said of the EDL: ‘When they talk about marching on any day, it’s a no go for me. That’s a point when our welcome draws a line in the sand and says no.’

‘When you come with those views’, she continued, ‘when you come with that vision of our local community, it’s not what we expect, it’s not representative, and it’s not what we will accept’. Evidently for Creasy, and the hundreds of people whose views she claimed to represent, only people with the ‘right’ views are welcome in Waltham Forest. Lib-Con home secretary Theresa May and the police ignored the request for a ban, however, and the EDL’s march went ahead.

Some anti-EDL campaigners saw fit to attack May as a result. One furious campaigner started screaming hysterically at the police, who were keeping him apart from the EDL march: ‘It’s Theresa May’s fault, it’s her fault, how could she let them come here?’ One seller of a left-wing newspaper was challenged by a photographer about why he wanted the EDL banned. Are you not in favour of free speech and democracy?, he was asked. ‘Fundamentally, I’m against fascism’, he responded.

The idea that the left can gain unity through being against the EDL – perceived to be the twenty-first century frontline of fascism – was pushed by speakers and protesters. One prominent left-wing blogger tweeted: ‘The stereotype that the British left are best at mobilising AGAINST things is truest… when it comes to resisting fascism.’

An anti-fascist campaigner gives a scientific account as to why the EDL should be banned.

For all the bravado about ‘smashing’ the EDL, and chants comparing it to the Nazis and ‘stringing them up like Mussolini’, when the anti-EDL protesters got a chance to take on the individuals who share the ‘same hatred’ as Anders Breivik, they did, erm, nothing. With the EDL march diverted down side streets due to a ‘sit down’ protest by anti-fascist groups, the EDL’s leaders – including founders Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll – found themselves surrounded by about 500 anti-EDL protesters. Robinson took the opportunity to mock the crowds through a loudspeaker system, asking questions along the lines of: ‘If the sun didn’t set during Ramadan, would you rather starve than eat?’

Despite the EDL leadership being outnumbered 100 to 1 by protesters, and buffered by just a handful of policemen, all the protesters did was chant, ‘if it wasn’t for the coppers, you’d be dead’ (to the tune of ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain’). Their failure to act rather gave the lie to the idea that they genuinely believe Robinson and his cronies to be the new Nazis. The Battle of Cable Street this wasn’t. The anti-fascist protest was exposed not as a groundswell of community members, willing to take to the streets to fight the fascist threat, but rather as an army of censors calling upon the state to ban the obnoxious, lager-swilling, working-class louts of the EDL.

If Tommy Robinson really was the same as Breivik, why did protesters just whine when they had him cornered?

Miffed that he wasn’t going to be able to address his supporters at the rally, Robinson bellowed down the loudspeaker, ‘What about our democratic rights? What about free speech?’ One voice in the crowd responded: ‘Fuck your free speech!’

Such an attitude sums up the censorious approach of the anti-Nazi left-wing campaigners. The EDL is cast as hate incarnate, needing to be banned for holding views that the likes of Stella Creasy MP deem unacceptable. The EDL can’t just be countered, it seems, it must be silenced.

The left has cried wolf over the rising threat of the EDL. Should it return soon – as it promises to – it’s unlikely such numbers will turn out from the community to protest against the EDL. Moreover, when faced with the perfect opportunity to ‘crush’ the ringleaders of the movement, these great anti-fascist protesters balked. Perhaps they realised that should the great fascist spectre of the EDL cease to exist, they would have to go through the effort of hyping up another threat instead.

A Capital offence against literature

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:08:26 +0100

Some people write novels because they have a burning truth to convey. Others just want to knock out a potboiler, or make money, or promote propaganda. Having made it through almost 600 pages of John Lanchester’s Capital, I still can’t work out what muse was at play for him to dedicate so much time to writing this novel. To be blunt: why did he bother?

Many critics have bigged up Capital, claiming it takes Britain’s pulse around the start of the financial crisis in 2008. That might be true if you see ‘Britain’ as consisting only of London, and you see London as just a collection of bourgeois individuals with a few tokenistic Muslims and Polish decorators thrown in for good measure. Lanchester’s microcosm of the nation is a fictional street in South London – Pepys Street – which was originally built in the 1800s for the lower middle classes but is now highly sought after by successful City types. ‘Britain had become a country of winners and losers, and all the people in the street, just by living there, had won’, he says. (Except those he doesn’t focus on very much, who could no longer afford to live in the street, and therefore moved out.)

In Lanchester’s view, the idea of what it means to have ‘won’ is a questionable one, especially in the run-up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of financial crisis. Through charting the fates of the characters on Pepys Street, Lanchester’s moral and political attitude towards their behaviours is laid bare. In fact, talking about the ‘behaviours’ of his characters would be wrong, since not a single character in Capital exhibits any subjectivity or goes beyond being a mere cipher, behaving in a way that Lanchester believes such a type should behave. Lanchester is either unwilling or unable to conjure up living, breathing subjects; instead he details the lives of symbolic individuals. He writes less as a novelist, more as a beat anthropologist.

While football managers, uppity doctors and insurance men get a rough ride, Lanchester reserves most of his bile for bankers. He gleefully constructs strawman bankers to bash. Take poor Roger, the middle-aged banker who, we are told, desires a million-pound bonus, ‘because he felt it was his due and it was a proof of his masculine worth’. Such jarring moments – and there are many – reveal just how little Lanchester has been able to empathise with the actors he has created, his creative waters continually being muddied by his own value judgements. The extent to which the reader might be able to empathise with the characters will be determined by his own imaginative efforts rather than by Lanchester having imbued the characters with any life.

Lanchester repeatedly invites us to sneer at money-obsessed, inept bankers. They have no taste in art, haven’t the faintest idea how to bring up their children, and when they try to attend to their children they end up covered in shit (literally). They spend their time plotting, scheming and gambling, and fantasising about taking young employees from behind. When one gets a smaller bonus than he expected, he is physically sick. And yet these grotesque bankers rail against the ‘tyranny of the mediocre’ and see themselves as supermen.

Lanchester is also a beater of bankers’ wives (in the literary sense, of course). He clearly despises the partners of evil bankers, depicting them as always acting on impulse, craving overpriced luxuries that are ‘so lovely that the expensiveness [becomes] part of the point’. In the end, there is no redemption for bankers’ wives: ‘No Plan B. [It’s] labels, logos and conspicuous consumption all the way.’

Through his more sympathetic depiction of other characters – the Poles, Hungarians and Muslim shopkeepers, who undertake ‘real work [that never leaves] you feeling worse’ – you get an insight into what Lanchester probably really believes. These characters are not the native working classes, we quickly note – they are above that layer of society and, like Lanchester, are capable of looking down on it. So in the eyes of one of the shopkeepers, the internet, for example, is ‘a giant collective conspiracy to waste time. Given infinite freedom of intellectual movement, it turned out that what people mainly want to do is look at pictures of Kelly Brook’s tits.’

A Polish decorator is disdainful of people who moan about public transport: ‘They should just shut up. Yes, the transport was shit, but lots of things about life were shit… They should live in a place where life really was hard for a while.’ Other characters make mocking comments about the ‘hilarious’ idea that Christmas is a religious festival when it has become so riddled with consumerism: ‘everyone running round shopping as if their lives depended on it.’ Through these ‘good’ characters, Lanchester is able to have a pop at the garish lower orders in Britain as well as at the super-rich banking classes. The people who come out best in Capital are those who realise that there is more to life than money and Kelly Brook’s tits.

One of the characters – an asylum-seeker who is a former Marxist – quotes Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: ‘Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing.’ This comes across as unintentionally ironic, since little history making takes place in Lanchester’s novel. The characters on Pepys Street are primarily victims of circumstance: one is wrongfully locked up because he is a Muslim; another suffers a nasty sporting accident; one is fired due to his (understandable) ignorance of the actions of a subordinate; another gets cancer and chooses not to have chemotherapy.

Where characters do act upon the world, it is to deceive (the young rogue trader in a London bank; the Polish builder who intentionally takes the wrong mobile phone). Motivations are base: desire for money, status, stuff, sex. And where there is salvation, it only comes when material aspirations are reined in and the characters realise that they must ‘change change change’ their values, appreciating family and the benefits of an ‘economically smaller life’. On Pepys Street, we’re told, it was as if the houses themselves ‘had come alive and had needs and wishes of their own… Amazon parcels, personal trainers, cleaners, plumbers, teachers, and all day long, all of them going up to the houses like supplicants and being swallowed up by them’.

Freedom from Pepys Street can be found by hopping – or, more likely, being thrown – off the hedonic treadmill and playing football in Senegal, dying, abandoning a suitcase of cash, or by walking in a field in Norfolk: that is, through pursuing a quiet, conservative family life where people never want to do ‘anything that cost[s] money’ (author’s italics).

This questionable morality could be forgiven if Capital had a plot to speak of, if there were a driving narrative that kept the reader gripped. But other than the red thread of a wannabe Banksy putting postcards through the doors of Pepys Street, which say ‘I want what you have’, there is no plot at all. As they are tossed about by circumstance, the characters barely interact, which may accurately reflect their alienation from one another, but it is deeply unsatisfying for the reader.

Some have compared Lanchester to Dickens. Yet where Dickens produced characters that had an inner life, who transcended the author and his time to speak to an aspect of the human condition, Lanchester’s characters exist merely as puppets – albeit well-crafted ones – for the purpose of expressing the author’s own prejudices. For demanding more, one suspects that Dickens’ Oliver, if reimagined by Lanchester, would have been depicted as greedy or brainwashed by consumerism.

There is scope for a great novel to be written about London in the late Noughties, which captures something about our lives and aspirations in this era of crisis and social fragmentation. Sadly, Capital is not it.

Retweeting: the new 999

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:04:43 +0100

‘Listen, I take racism a lot lighter than others and I do understand the banter that comes along with it to get under people’s skin, but…’

So tweeted West Ham footballer Carlton Cole on Saturday. His team had just lost 3-0 to Swansea, and he was receiving a lot of the flak for it on Twitter. One 22-year-old fan from Southend, Essex, using the Twitter username @owliehammer, had been particularly bilious.‘3-0? 3 fucking nil??’, he tweeted. ‘Get the fuck away from my club u fucking useless nigger cunt.’

Having received the message, Cole was evidently faced with a situation: should he report the tweet with the knowledge that the tweeter could face the criminal consequences, or should he ignore it? Cole chose the middle ground, retweeting the offensive message and saying, ‘whether I am crap or had a bad game has nothing to do with my race, creed or religion. Let’s just keep it FOOTBALL. Kapeesh?’

On the pitch, in the dressing room, or face-to-face, this reconciliatory approach may well have been effective – dealing with the situation reasonably, informally, man-to-man. But, as is evident from what happened next, such an approach is now simply impossible on Twitter.

While it seems Cole didn’t personally call the police himself, his retweet acted as a klaxon call for hundreds of Twitterers to begin to lobby the authorities for @owliehammer to be thrown off Twitter, banned from West Ham games and locked up. ‘Who is racially abusing you? Out them’, said one Twitter user. Others started tweeting: ‘I think that merits the Metropolitan Police’; and ‘report the idiot’. Soon people were boasting of the fact they had contacted the police - ‘looks like I’ve just called the old bill! How can you be racist to anyone! I hope the police take good care of u.’ Others, like Twitter-user Darren Oakley, encouraged others to report ‘the idiot’: ‘Everyone, please report @owliehammer to the police as I have done for his racist abuse of Carlton Cole. Let’s get this neanderthal locked up.’

Members of the Twitterati soon joined in, with Telegraph football correspondent Henry Wintertweeting: ‘I hope the police take action over the racist abuse aimed at @CarltonCole1 on Twitter tonight. #kickitout.’ This was retweeted 445 times with loyal followers tweeting Winter to say they had snitched to the cops. Winter responded to one of these tweeters with a virtual pat on the back: ‘Good move, Warren. Regards.’

To the delight of many in the Twittersphere, Twitter duly suspended @owliehammer’s account, it was reported that West Ham was ‘certain to ban the tweeter’, and Essex police announced they had responded to complaints by arresting @owliehammer. ‘God bless Essex police!!!’ tweeted one West Ham season ticket holder. Jacqueline Gold, the daughter of West Ham co-chairman David Gold, and the CEO of Ann Summers, tweeted to her 28,000 followers: ‘Glad to hear someone has been arrested for racist remarks sent to @CarltonCole1. Idiots like this need to know they cant hide behind Twitter.’ Carlton Cole retweeted a tweet from the Essex police about @owliehammer being arrested to his 55,365 followers, without further comment.

It is true that you would have to be an idiot (or very drunk) to think you could get away with tweeting such horrible racist abuse on Twitter. As one user, Josh Dale, tweeted to Cole: ‘People like that are actually so dumb… saying it on Twitter is like shouting it out a megaphone in front of a police station.’ That is an accurate characterisation.

There are currently 340million tweets everyday, a number that is rapidly increasing. Obnoxious tweets are a tiny drop in that massive ocean, and they are only of significance when attention is actively drawn to them either by ostentatious offence-taking or through the act of flagging them up. The twitch-hunts, which we have seen against @owliehammer and against many before him, serve as a way of amplifying offensive tweets, turning them from inaudible squeaking to shouting at a cop with a loud speaker.

While it may seem like a way of dealing with a situation informally, celebrities retweeting and drawing attention to things they find offensive is now almost akin to dialling 999 and calling the cops themselves. They must know that their legion of loyal Twitter followers will squeal en masseto the cops for you.

Responding to Telegraph writer Winter’s suggestion that people grass @owliehammer to the police, one person tweeted: ‘“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, a sentiment dead in UK.’ When more and more people are using Twitter to encourage the authorities to clamp down on free speech, it is beginning to look as if, on Twitter at least, that Voltarian sentiment is indeed long-deceased.

The fallen angel of the radical set

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:26:00 +0100

’We are all Julian Assange’, chanted campaigners outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London at the weekend, showing their solidarity with the Wikileaks founder taking refuge inside. Such is the diminished popularity of Assange that the number of cameramen and film crews outstripped the tiny coterie of protesters. But it was not so long ago that vast swathes of activists and journalists would have been queuing up to declare their support in a grand, I-am-Spartacus manner.

‘Assange was like a pied piper, gathering followers around him in region after region’, stated two former Wikileaks-worshipping Guardian journalists in a recent book. The extent to which Assange was fawned over is hard to overstate. Whenever Wikileaks published a new batch of revelations, newspapers would often run large pictures of Assange with his ‘lean frame and long silver hair [and]… boyishly enticing grin’, while excitedly discussing upcoming Hollywood biopics and who might play Assange. Neil Patrick Harris? Paul Bettany? Bill Hader? Perhaps Tilda Swinton? One New York Times columnist recounted a Wikileaks retrospective in Berkeley where Assange was beamed ‘like the mighty Oz’ on to a cinema screen to discuss how the Western media could do more to hold American imperialism to account. He recalls that ‘about half the audience seemed on the verge of tossing their underwear at the screen’.

Serious writers would pen pieces explaining ‘Why I love Wikileaks’; campaigning journalist John Pilger announced Assange was the ‘truth teller’; a writer for the New Yorker painted him as ‘a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth’. Assange could do no wrong in the eyes of liberal commentators, to such an extent that he became parodied as ‘St Julian of Assange’, passing down the gospel through liberal news outlets. He was runner-up inTime magazine’s Person of the Year Award in 2010 (and was the readers’ choice by a landslide). Award-winning Guardian reporter Nick Davies personally assured Assange that ‘we are going to put you on the moral high ground – so high that you’ll need an oxygen mask. You’ll be up there with Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa… They won’t be able to arrest you. Nor can they shut down your website.’

Yet having put Assange on such a pedestal, having hyped him up as a digital deity exposing the new clothes of imperialist emperors all over the world, the Western media then started to lose faith in him. Beginning to act like the messiah he had been made out to be, Assange had a spectacular falling out with the Guardian over what he deemed to be its libellous comments about his decision-making processes about what to publish. And accusations that Assange sexually assaulted two women in Sweden have led to a drawn-out extradition process. Initially the media – minus a handful of feminists who inflated the charges to be akin to rape – defended Assange, but now you’d be hard-pressed to find any mainstream journalist who would stick up for their former hero.

Assange is now being accused of having a messiah complex, by the very people who hyped him up to be a messiah in the first place. And, as he sits smarting in his windowless room, trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, he may be somewhat justified in wondering why journalist Heather Brook hasn’t yet turned up, Mary Magdalene-style, to bathe his feet - she recounted in a book that they had joked about doing something like that. The truth is that this once-friendless Australian computer nerd only became the irritating megalomaniac we see today due to the liberal media’s attempt to hoist him on to such a moral high ground that – to run with Nick Davies’s metaphor – he went giddy with oxygen deprivation.

Far more than an insight into the psyche of an over-hyped hacker, the fall from grace of Julian Assange reveals the flimsy, fickle nature of modern-day radical campaigning. In not facing up to his rape charges, Assange has now ‘tragically compromised’ the Wikileaks mission, says one columnist. His ‘halo has been tarnished’, declares an Independent editorial. Only last year, Assange spoke at Occupy London to rapturous applause, getting protesters robotically to repeat after him, ‘We are all individuals’. Now, even the remnants of the Occupy movement are deeply divided about whether to support one of their icons.

Previously, as those Guardian authors argued, ‘the media and public split between those who saw Assange as a new kind of cyber-messiah and those who regarded him as a James Bond villain’; now almost across the board, Assange is demonised as a cat-stroking baddie. While his celebrity status is still great – the Hollywood films, documentaries and HBO programme are still coming our way – it is far more down to a fascination about how this ‘third act’ will play out, rather than any popular desire to see Assange emerge victorious.

St Julian of Assange was never the messiah; many of his Earth-shattering leaks amounted to little more than tittle-tattle. But where once campaigners may have stuck by their leaders, seeing them as offering essential insight and direction, now they can be unceremoniously dumped at the slightest sniff of something unsavoury. The backstabbing and betrayal of this former pin-up by campaigners and the media speak to a fickle, Judas-like quality that is becoming ever-more commonplace in some campaigning circles.

Falling out over nothing at all

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 13:26:00 +0100

‘Lords reform and boundaries are two, separate parliamentary bills but they are both part of a package of overall political reform. Delivering one but not the other would create an imbalance – not just in the coalition agreement, but also in our political system.’

Could there be any greater insight into the warped, insular political mind of deputy prime minister Nick Clegg – or, indeed, Lib-Con coalition politics as a whole? After having officially to announce that House of Lords reform is dead in the water last week, Clegg took the tit-for-tat approach ofsinking the Tories’ plans for boundary reform in the name of restoring balance. (Does he think this is politics, or Star Wars?) Clegg justified his decision to instruct Lib Dems to vote against any boundary reforms by arguing that ‘an elected House of Lords was part of the coalition agreement… A contract not just to each other, but a set of commitments we have made, collectively, to the British people.’

Pull the other one, Clegg. The coalition agreement was never a ‘commitment to the British people’; rather, it was a fudge of a compromise thrown together behind closed doors following the hung parliament in May 2010. The public didn’t get to express their approval of the agreement; it was always a case of like it or lump it.

In making the failure of Lords reform a big issue, Clegg – and his Liberal Democrat party as a whole – seems to be desperately clinging to it as a way of signifying a big political divide between the two ruling parties. Yet, in truth, no such division exists between the ideology-free top tiers of the political classes. Indeed, as Clegg himself points out, both coalition partners had House of Lords reform in their election manifestos. Lords reform is no great ideological marker – and it is certainly not something that is seen to be a pressing public concern. Nor, of course, is the issue of boundary reform, which is being driven through merely to benefit the Tories’ re-election prospects, with little regard to whether such changes are in the public interest.

So the coalition currently lies in tatters over an issue that means little to anyone outside of the blinkered world of the political elite. Only seven per cent of the public believes Lords reform to be of pressing concern, and even 75 per cent of Lib Dem supporters told an Ipsos Mori poll that, ‘There are more important things that the government should be concentrating on’. These tit-for-tat exchanges appear to the wider world like petty, infantile squabbles. Not least because there are many serious issues of public concern where a genuine clash of ideas is much needed.

For example, last week, the Bank of England announced that it was cutting its growth forecast for 2012 from 0.8 per cent to zero growth, meaning the UK’s double-dip recession could last far longer than initially expected. But the coalition is not falling out over competing visions for growth; it is not being torn asunder by arguments over how to deal with the crisis. In fact, that’s an area where, like Lords reform, the coalition is also broadly in agreement – all its senior members have willingly signed up to a programme of austerity measures. As culture secretary Jeremy Hunt put it following the bickering over Lords reform: ‘There isn’t a cigarette paper between us on [economic policy].’ While Lib Dem business secretary Vince Cable has recently said he fancies himself as chancellor, what is far from evident is what he’d do differently should he inherit the purse strings.

The dreadful economic forecast is a perfect opportunity, one might think, for the Labour opposition to make political hay through a serious critique of the coalition’s economic and fiscal policies. Yet Labour’s existing tactic appears to amount to little more than gloating and harping about the coalition’s ‘spectacular failures’, as if all Labour needs to do is to wait for the coalition partners to become so unelectable that its no-mark leader Ed Miliband and his unimpressive coterie can replace them by default.

Despite a recent poll that suggested only 16 per cent of the UK public think the coalition will last until 2015 – a finding that has given heart to Labour supporters and commentators – there is a will in both Lib Dem and Conservative camps to continue to muddle through. After all, with the Lib Dems facing electoral wipeout, and the Tories confronting another stint in opposition given current polls, neither party is likely to find an imminent election appealing. Before they both left for holiday, Cameron and Clegg met for a ‘clear-the-air dinner’ and agreed to work together to prioritise ‘the economy and fiscal policy’ upon their return.

With barely a ‘cigarette paper’ between them on the economy – and on many other issues – the coalition may well continue in the same vein as before: tactically wheeling and dealing when it comes to policies, but continuing to cling together for survival. And while it continues down this narrow road, it will become ever-more estranged from a public that never voted for it in the first place.

‘Well done, Twitter police’

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 14:23:00 +0100

Only last Thursday, the Twitterati was celebrating the fact that a judge finally realised a tweet about blowing up a UK airport was a joke. The offending tweeter, 28-year-old accountant Paul Chambers, was ‘completely vindicated’. But don’t be fooled. The Twitterati’s love of freedom of speech does not extend, it seems, to those whom its members dislike. People, that is, like the teenage ‘troll’ arrested yesterday for ‘malicious communications’.

‘You let your dad down, I hope you know that.’ This is not the first thought that will have popped into the minds of most people who saw diver and teen pin-up Tom Daley fail to win a medal in the synchronised diving in the London Olympics. Not least because Daley’s father sadly died of a brain tumour last year. It is pretty clear that 17-year-old who tweeted this message from the account @Rileyy_69 to Daley, is an unpleasant character. Alongside other nuggets of abuse, he tweeted: ‘I’m going to find you [Daley] and I’m going to drown you in the pool you cocky twat, you’re a nobody people like you make me sick.’

Unpleasant? Yes. Heartless? Yeah, that too. But far more unpalatable was the censorious reaction to James’ tweets, which Daley prompted by retweeting these ill wishes to his followers. This mouthy kid from Weymouth, who on Twitter gives his name as Reece Sonny James, was then subjected to a sudden worldwide torrent of abuse as Twitter mobs felt licensed to let rip. James was attacked for being ‘the definition of a chav’, a ‘skinny topless posing gimp’, a ‘worldwide wanker’ who should have ‘died instead’ of Daley’s dad. The hashtag #GetRileyy_69Banned began to trend worldwide – and hundreds of people reported him to the police. Riley’s account was duly blocked, and he was arrested by Dorset police yesterday morning. ‘Good good. Well done Twitter police’, tweeted one individual upon hearing the news. ‘You can catch @Rileyy_69’s public ridicule on tomorrow’s news, Daybreak and This Morning. What a day he will have’, tweeted another.

Such praise of the Twitter police puts paid to the idea that Twitter has become a freer, less censorious place following the acquittal of Chambers. Far from it. The twitch-hunt of James – coming just a couple of days after tweeters were calling for Conservative MP Aidan Burley’s scalp after he criticised the opening ceremony – is a classic example of the way twitch-hunts enforce a modern-day conformism. Yes, there was notionally a ‘death threat’ in one of Reece’s tweets, but does anyone seriously think that 17-year-old Reece was going to leave Weymouth, track down Daley and actually drown him in a pool? This ‘threat’ was evidently an expression of emotional angst and hatred, not a serious proposition. Such comments require context, as footballer Joey Barton rightly pointed out on Twitter in response to Reece’s arrest: ‘I’ve had loads of death threats! Still here aren’t I. I just laugh my head off when I get them… Surely, if u were gonna kill someone you wouldn’t give them a headups.’

The Twitter police single out individuals who do not, as John Stuart Mill would have put it, ‘bend a knee to custom’, and make such a collective noise that authorities see fit to take action. In On Liberty, Mill warned of the ‘despotism of custom’ which was contrasted with the love of liberty. Custom, observed Mill, ‘proscribes singularity, but it does not preclude change, provided all change together’.

Twitter has become a twenty-first-century tool to ringfence the boundaries of debate and enforce custom. Led by the Twitterati and increasingly influential upon every bit of the media, it teaches us what it is acceptable to think and say – and woe betide anyone who does not ‘change together’ or who goes against the grain of the Twittermob. At best, your words will be dismissed out of hand as ‘trolling’; at worst, you will be banged up.

Following the arrest of James, who has now been let off with a ‘harassment warning’, people took to Twitter and indulged in celebratory fantasies about what should happen to James next: ‘Glad the little prick got arrested. Rileyy_69 is now gonna get absolutely anal raped in prison.’ One lamented: ‘Wish we still had capital punishment, could get Rileyy_69 hung.’ Others threatened to ‘hunt him down’ and ‘knock the fuck [out of the] scrawny cunt!’.

As Mill argued, for the despots of custom, ‘justice and right mean conformity to custom’. And with right on these tweeters’ side, of course, it is unlikely they will face the wrath of the Twittersphere and be grassed up to the cops for making ‘malicious threats’. And nor should they be. These twitch-hunters and Twitter police should, of course, be free to say whatever they want, no matter how bilious their remarks. Such is the nature of free speech, which – given the number of people calling for James to be banned from tweeting and put in prison – seems an alien concept to many of those cheering his arrest (despite their celebration of Chambers’ exoneration).

Equally, however, the rest of us should be free to tell the twitch-hunters that they are part of a big, informal and deeply intolerant drive to shut people up. And, in doing so, they help to make public debate more controlled, more polite and less free. While the speech of the Twitter police should be tolerated, they can – and should – be criticised for their conformist and oft-censorious actions.

The ministers stopping Britain from taking off

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:35:00 +0100

Does anyone now remember Plane Stupid, or any of that gaggle of shrill UK climate protesters who opposed then prime minister Gordon Brown’s proposals to build a third runway at Heathrow airport? In fact, they opposed the existence of pretty much anyairport. A particular target was Stansted in Essex, where, in the eyes of the protesters, uncultured chavs and the working-class masses needlessly fly to Prague and Spain for stag dos and boozy holidays.

Such protests, always more contemptuous of public opinion than representative of it, now seem like a distant memory. Not even the most delusional of the remaining rump of climate-change activists could claim to have much of a purchase on the zeitgeist. Now the only groundswell of opposition to the building of new airports comes from NIMBY protesters concerned about the potential increase in noise caused by more flights.

What, then, is preventing the coalition government from tackling the UK’s terminal lack of airport capacity? (Such is the extent of the problem that the country faces losing its status as an international airport hub.) In fact, following last week’s announcement that a long-awaited consultation on airport expansion had once again been delayed, government ministers even seem reluctant to decide when to start making a decision. The best transport secretary Justine Greening could come up with is that before a consultation takes place, ‘stakeholders have to consider the “big picture”’, whatever that means.

‘Some argue that new capacity is needed immediately’, argues Greening, who attempts to play up the opposition by suggesting an equal weight of public opinion has it that there is ‘no need for additional capacity, either now or in the longer term’. While Greening’s active campaigning against the third runway at Heathrow revealed where she herself stood on the issue, it quickly turned out that the decision to put plans on ice came from the very top. According to the Financial Times, prime minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg decided that ‘the question of building new runways in the London area is too difficult for the coalition and final decisions should be delayed until after the 2015 election’. As Greening emphasises: ‘Any decisions on additional capacity would probably not deliver operational results before 2020.’

That such dithering and delaying is taking place is unsurprising given the coalition government’s hostility towards the expansion of airport capacity. Indeed, one of the government’s very first acts after taking power in 2010 was to scrap plans for the third runway at Heathrow – a bizarre move given the purported reason for the coalition was to tackle the economic crisis. While plans for a Norman Foster-designed ‘Boris Island’ airport in the less-populated Isle of Grain have been touted as a preferable alterative, this is currently still a pipe dream. It seems that Darren Caplan from the Airport Operator’s Association is on to something when he suggests, ‘the government is benefiting from a divide and rule approach’.

But, it should be asked, how exactly is the government actually benefiting from such a delay? Some estimate that should development of airport capacity not increase soon then, by 2021, the UK could be losing £8.5 billion a year, and up to £100 billion over the next 20 years. Business will instead go to France or Germany, both of which already have airports with four runways. Given such arguments, surely Greening can recognise that the argument could be won to gain, as she puts it, ‘sufficient support [for a third runway], particularly at a political level’.

The obstacles to airport expansion certainly aren’t technological. In an inspiring Evening Standardinterview recently, CK Ng, the director of operations at Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport, spoke of how the airport was built on a manmade island in six years, even though engineers had to reclaim 1,248 hectares of land from the sea and transfer a massive 360million cubic metres of material to complete the project. Elsewhere, work is currently beginning in Beijing on what will become the world’s largest airport. It will be the size of Bermuda and home to a total of nine runways – three times the number of an expanded Heathrow. This is due to be completed by 2017 (contrast that with the 25-year timetable for building Boris Island, should such a project ever get the green light). Referring to Britain’s airport expansion, Ng suggests that the only barrier is political: ‘You’ve been talking about a third runway for about 20 years already’, he points out.

No one can deny that Heathrow is currently full to bursting point, with the UK’s other airports unable to pick up the slack. To argue that there is ‘no additional need’ for airport capacity is to make a moral claim about the evils of the expansion of flying, rather than an empirical claim reflecting the reality faced by Britain’s airports. Whether Boris Island or a third and, indeed, fourth runway at Heathrow is desirable is an open question. But this is a question the coalition government appears afraid even to schedule a time to debate.

A pile-up of panic and fear on the M6

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 11:34:00 +0100

The evils of smoking and terrorists. Two things that obsessively play on the minds of the authorities in twenty-first-century Britain. Last week these two anxieties came crashing together in a bizarre pile-up of fear on the M6 motorway.

While smoking tobacco is banned in enclosed public spaces and workplaces in Britain, there is no such ban on smoking e-cigarettes (electronic cigarettes). However, such is the anti-smoking hysteria today that many people still smoke e-cigarettes discreetly, and slightly awkwardly. Such was the case on a Megabus coach travelling on the M6 toll road last Thursday. In fact, the e-smoker on that bus became so awkward that he ended up channelling the water vapour from his cigarette device into a plastic bag, so keen was he not to draw attention to what he was doing. His discretion – probably coupled with the fact that he was Asian-looking – backfired. A fellow passenger became so panicked that he called the cops.

That act in itself speaks volumes about the estranged nature of relationships between members of the public today. The informant didn’t think to ask the e-smoker what he was up to, or simply talk to the driver or his fellow passengers about what was going on. Instead, he seems simply to have assumed that the smoking man was doing something terrible, possibly preparing a bomb in plain sight on a bus on a motorway (something that terrorists often do, of course…); and so he obeyed ubiquitous police warnings to be ‘vigilant’ and phoned them from his mobile.

Despite, or maybe because of, the vagueness of the passenger’s report, paranoid Staffordshire police decided to take no chances. They reacted in what a police spokesperson has since described as a ‘swift and proportionate’ manner. This ‘proportionate’ response included sending 25 police cars and vans, 13 fire engines, four ambulances, bomb-disposal units, and actual members of the military. Even a decontamination unit was dispatched, in case a dirty nuke attack was unfolding on the M6.

The M6 toll road was closed for six hours while the Megabus’s 48 passengers were removed at gunpoint and searched. While some passengers have been sympathetic towards the police, others have said they feared that ‘if I made a wrong move, I could have been shot’.

Given the febrile climate that is often produced by officialdom’s overreaction to terror threats (consider the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station in London, post-7/7), such concerns seem justified. However, others have defended the police’s actions on the M6. They point out that we need to tighten up national security in the run-up to the Olympics and that it is better to be safe than sorry.

But should we really have such blind faith in the authorities? To the extent that we are unwilling even to criticise their shutting-down of a major artery in the English Midlands for six hours, which caused massive inconvenience to tens of thousands of people, all over an e-cigarette? What next – will entire Olympics events be stopped because someone in the audience has a sneaky e-cigarette, producing a bit of vapour?

Apparently, hidden e-cigarettes are only one of a vast number of potential threats to the safety of Britain and the London 2012 Games. Risk-averse authorities have been busily working on ‘worst-case scenario’ planning exercises in preparation for the Games. These range from concerns about a ‘Mumbai-style’ gun attack at sailing events in Dorset to a ‘possible air attack by fanatics who support al-Qaeda’. Members of the public will, of course, be encouraged to be vigilant for anythingthat looks or sounds like terrorism. Considering that the authorities are placing surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) in parts of London to tackle terror threats during the Games, it is frightening to think what might unfold in a future false-alarm scenario. Officialdom’s jittery finger, hovering over the trigger for SAMs and with the power to dispatch armed military units on a whim, would seem to be a bigger threat to the safety and atmosphere of the Olympics than any gang of fanatics.

The M6 incident confirms that the politics of fear is a larger threat to the social fabric today than tiny groups of violent-minded individuals ever could be. It is the fact that officialdom is frightened of its own shadow that life in part of Britain was thrown into disarray last Thursday, and it is the fact that our rulers are so consumed by a culture of panic that the Olympics are being bogged down by a welter of irrational fears. The worst-case scenario is that this debilitating culture of fear goes unchallenged in the coming weeks.

A Libyan election on NATO’s terms

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 16:11:27 +0100

This Saturday, Libyans will be able to vote for the first time in 47 years. Only the elderly will have a recollection of voting in the last national election under King Idris in May 1965, and even then political parties were outlawed. Following the Arab Spring last year, this new election should have been momentous – a testament to the Libyan people’s struggle for democracy against the Gaddafi regime. And perhaps it would have been, but for Western intervention.

Sadly, this is election that has been administered by the National Transitional Council (NTC), a body that has never been granted authority to rule by the Libyan people. At its head is Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi’s former chief of justice. Jalil’s deputy was human-rights lawyer Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, who was forced to resign due to public fury over his opportunism during last year’s uprising. Moreover, during the uprising last year, the NTC’s priority had been to gain approval from Western leaders, rather than from the Libyan people themselves.

No wonder, then, that rather than leading the Libyan people towards a strong democracy, the NTC has instead been largely impotent in controlling events in Libya. It has, for instance, struggled to control the disparate militias, which are greater in strength than the official police and army. It has also been unable to prevent tribal fighting in the south of Libya and clashes in the north-west. And it is facing increased pressure from protesters in the east, most notably in Libya’s second-largest city, Benghazi. Indeed, earlier in the year, Jalil even went so far as to threaten the people of Benghazi with force, should the eastern region of Cyrenaica press on with its plans to become semi-autonomous. Despite being a former Gaddafi crony himself, Jalil announced: ‘We are not prepared to divide Libya. [Cyrenaica] should know that there are infiltrators and remnants of Gaddafi’s regime.’

Such threats were a desperate response to the increasing fragmentation of post-Gaddafi Libya into autonomous city states rather than an indication that Jalil was following in the dictatorial path of ‘Mad Dog’ Gaddafi. The NTC’s lack of authority, poor communication and stalled reforms have meant that some Libyans have reverted to local tribal allegiances. It has also meant that Libya’s old federal regions, which evolved under Italian rule, have taken on an increased significance, and cities such as Benghazi and Misrata have staged council elections in defiance of NTC wishes.

But it would be a mistake to assume that a reversion to such divisions was inevitable following Gaddafi’s fall from power. Rather, this fragmented state reflects the vacuum that was left following the haphazard intervention by NATO countries last year. The naive assumption made by Western leaders was that once Gaddafi had departed, Libyans could begin to build, in the words of UK prime minister David Cameron, ‘a strong and democratic future’. What Western leaders failed to recognise is that, through their meddling, they had interrupted the struggle for democratic freedom and the clash of ideas necessary to develop a collective sense of what a post-Gaddafi Libya should look like. By simply attempting to oust Gaddafi and leave Libya in the hands of what it deemed to be the appropriate caretakers, Western interveners warped the popular struggle in Libya.

Given the post-Gaddafi instability and fragmentation, it is hardly surprising that what should have been groundbreaking, historic elections in Libya this Saturday have been mired in controversy, and beset by threats of violence and boycotts. A key area of contention has been the NTC’s allocation of seats to the 200-strong national assembly, with the east being allocated just 60 seats compared to 102 for Tripoli and Western Libya. This has sparked fears that the east would have minimal influence over the formation of a new constitution, which will be the initial priority of the elected assembly. Last Sunday, frustrations mounted when protesters - carrying signs saying ‘Jalil is a traitor of Cyrenaica’ and ‘No elections without a constitution’ - stormed an electoral office in Benghazi and burned election papers and computer equipment.

The lack of experience of democracy under Gaddafi, alongside the notable lack of prominent campaigning for the elections, has led some Western observers to dismiss the Libyans asunprepared for democracy and to be cynical about the election results. The predicted rise of the Islamist parties closest to the Muslim Brotherhood has also caused concern, ostensibly due to their inexperience in engaging in political matters.

While Western intervention has hindered the development of political leadership and ideas for a post-Gaddafi Libya, the paternalistic concerns that the Libyan people are unable to handle democracy are unfounded. Despite being conducted on the NTC’s terms, the election is at least a chance for the Libyan people to cast off the shackles of their Western-backed caretakers. The sooner Libyans are left to forge their own future, apart from external interference, the better.

Punished for supporting the EDL?

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 16:10:56 +0100

‘You hear the things the social workers say, and you just bang your head against a brick wall and think, “Am I actually hearing this? Is this real?”’

Toni McLeod is an eight-month pregnant 25-year-old mother-of-three based in Durham in the north-east of England. Her three existing children – one daughter and two sons – are currently in care and she can only see them under supervision. She now fears that her imminent fourth child will be taken away from her by Durham County Council’s social workers as soon as she gives birth. Why? Because, she believes, of her political beliefs, or, to be more specific, her association with the right-wing English Defence League (EDL). A report by a Durham social worker seen by spiked seems to corroborate McLeod’s claims. It states: ‘Toni needs to break away from the inappropriate friendships she has through the EDL… in order that she can model and display appropriate positive relationships to the baby as he/she develops.’

McLeod agreed to talk to spiked about her predicament. She first hit the headlines over the weekend when the Sunday Express reported on her plight. The Express said: ‘Social workers fear [her] child would become radicalised with EDL views and want it put up for adoption immediately.’ She confirms the Express story is pretty much true, although she did notice some minor mistakes. ‘I have never owned a pitbull’, she says. Her case has also been raised by Lib Dem MP John Hemming in the House of Commons.

Not a pitbull in sight: Toni McLeod with her four dogs.

She tells me that the day she was reported to social workers for being an EDL supporter, her life started to unravel. A social worker visited her home and was not exactly sympathetic. ‘I may as well have been Satan reincarnated’, says McLeod. She says she has never made any secret of her support for the EDL. ‘I’m honest enough that if you ask me an honest question, I’ll give you an honest answer. So [the social worker] asked me and I said “yeah, I am involved with the English Defence League”. I haven’t been since 2010, but previous to then I was.’

Although social workers now apparently accept that McLeod no longer supports the EDL, she says they still aren’t happy. Apparently they fear she might still have ‘the ethos of the EDL beliefs’. The Express said social workers are also worried about McLeod’s ‘previous alcohol and drug misuse, her ‘“aggressive behaviour” and her alleged “mental health issues”’. But McLeod insists that it is her support for the anti-Islamic EDL which has caused her to lose her kids, and the social worker document seen by spiked certainly suggests that it was at least a factor.

One of the things that bothers her most is that the decision to take her future child into care is based less on what McLeod has actually done than on what she might do in the future: ‘There doesn’t need to be any actual proof of anything. It can all be based on possible risk in the future… Like in my case, it’s the likelihood of emotional abuse through radicalisation. The baby’s not even born!’

She is determined to appeal her case and take it to the High Court. As a result of what she calls the ‘brilliant support’ of MP Hemming and the Justice for Families campaign group, she is now getting offers from legal professionals who are willing to take on her case. She is clearly determined not to take any of this lying down.

McLeod prides herself on having a near-photographic memory, and she is frank, articulate and not afraid to ask challenging questions. But she fears her forceful approach has done her no favours with social services. ‘I do genuinely think that if I had been quiet, if I’d bent over backwards for social services, I probably wouldn’t have this problem.’ Despite her toughness, she says the whole drama has been ‘emotionally, physically draining’.

‘It might not be this year, it might not be the year after, but even if I have to wait until all my children are 18 years old, they will, eventually, be coming home’, she says. She worries that other parents might end up going through the same thing as her, and is therefore keen to raise awareness of her case and what she sees as its injustice. ‘Where is it going to end?’, she asks. She wonders what will happen ‘if I get a social worker that happens to have a disliking of Labour, or the Lib Dems, or the Conservatives. It’s like, hold on a minute, please don’t say I’m going to have my kids taken away if I don’t agree with your political views?’

For legal reasons, it isn’t possible to reveal the judge’s reasons for reaching his decision about McLeod’s children. But given McLeod’s account, her defence by Hemming (who opposes the EDL), and most importantly the social-worker document which explicitly lists her involvement with the EDL as one of her ‘problems’, it seems she is justified to be concerned about state intervention into families on the basis of the parents’ political beliefs.

What if social workers decide that Marxists or libertarians don’t make good parents? Would those kinds of people start to lose their children, too? McLeod says the reason she cut her ties with the EDL is because she wanted to get her children back. If this is true, we must ask: should a mother have to forgo her democratic freedom to engage in politics for fear of losing her kids?

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter@p_hayes.

Beware the rise of EU anti-populists

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 12:07:39 +0100

Earlier this month, the sci-fi comedy Iron Sky was released in Britain, featuring the return to Earth of a band of vicious Nazis in flying saucers. ‘In 1945 the Nazis went to the moon’, goes the movie trailer, which shows a giant swastika-shaped base on the moon. ‘In 2018, they are coming back.’

You have to wonder, given his recent comments regarding the rise of the right across Europe, whether Britain’s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg thinks he is inhabiting the same fantasy world as Iron Sky. In an interview with Der Spiegel, where he reaffirmed the Lib-Con coalition’s commitment to the EU, Clegg claimed that there could be ‘a whole range of nationalist, xenophobic and extreme movements increasing across the European Union’. Warning of an imminent ‘disaster’, he implied that lessons need to be learnt from Europe’s history: ‘We know this much from our continent: the combination of economic insecurity and political paralysis is the ideal recipe for an increase in extremism and xenophobia.’

Clegg is just one of many members of the political elite across Europe issuing warnings about this dangerous recipe. The ‘white savages’ in Hungary are frequently frowned upon by scaremongering EU elites, and now there is an increasing clamour about savages across Europe. Dutch MEP Emine Bozkurt has declared that ‘we are at a crossroads in European history’. In five years’ time, she says, there could be an ‘increase in the forces of hatred and division in society, including ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism’.

In a recently published report, Jenö Kaltenbach, chairman of the Council of Europe’s European commission against racism and intolerance, warned that ‘xenophobic rhetoric is now part of mainstream debate’ due to the influence of far-right parties. Some academics and journalists echo this concern, with the Guardian talking about the ‘shock’ of the rise of far-right party Golden Dawn in Greece. Claiming conditions are ripe for the rise of the right, Nicolas Lebourg from the University of Perpignan recently declared that ‘Europe is a dry prairie waiting for someone to light a match’.

With the exception of Golden Dawn, whose leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos notoriously gave a Nazi salute when arriving into Athens city council last year, many recognise that the far-right parties which are apparently enjoying a resurgence have done much to ‘decontaminate’ their brands. These Nazis, it is suggested, are cunning wolves in sheep’s clothing. This led one reporter for Associated Press to confess her confusion: ‘Identifying the parties in question is itself confounding. Are they populist? Nationalist? Extreme right? That depends. They come in all shades.’

For some commentators, Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front - which gained 17.9 per cent of the vote in the first round of the recent presidential elections - has the best sheep’s clothing of them all. An analyst for the BBC remarked: ‘She is… very identifiably a modern French woman. With her two divorces, steely femininity and cigarette-roughened voice, she comes across as far more “normal” than most of her political rivals.’ (Indeed, Le Pen is evidently such a master of disguise that, as spiked has pointed out previously, if her rhetoric mirrored anything, it was the cultural paranoia of the far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with her railing against the ‘princes of finance and the banking world’ as well as globalisation’s ‘deadly effects’.)

Tellingly, it is these ‘normal’ Le Pen-types, rather than the likes of the black-shirted Golden Dawn, that strike the most fear into the hearts of many among the European political and media classes. They are seen as cynically playing the ‘populist’ card in an attempt to gain mainstream recognition, so that even if they can’t win power they might earn the role of ‘kingmaker’ and lead politicians desperate for votes to pander to their ideas, thus ‘poisoning politics’. (An oft-cited example is Nicolas Sarkozy’s pandering to anti-Islam sentiment to try to scrape a victory ahead of Francois Hollande earlier this month.)

There is little the EU elites fear more than so-called ‘populism’. According to one commentator, ‘in conferences and dinner parties from Brussels to Bratislava, the topic of populism dominates conversations’. As Corrado Passero, Italy’s minister of economic development, declared earlier this year, ‘our worst enemy right now is populism’. Clegg echoed such concerns in his interview with Der Spiegel. ‘Frankly’, he said, ‘questions about the British debate on EU membership will just be a small sideshow, compared to the rise of political populism’.

Leaving aside all the hype, it’s worth looking at some facts. Golden Dawn only managed seven per cent of the vote in the national elections in Greece earlier this month; Dutch right-winger Geert Wilders is now widely seen to have blown his ‘kingmaker’ role after the coalition government he played an influential role in collapsed; and despite her much-discussed attempts at modernisation, Marine Le Pen only won marginally more votes than her father did in 2002 (17.9 per cent compared to his 16.9 per cent).

In the UK, the so-called ‘street populists’ in the English Defence League always struggle to mobilise more than a few hundred people for their demonstrations, and the British National Party has been all but wiped out in recent elections. More often than not, support for such parties increases when the impact matters less, not when it counts. This strongly suggests that a vote for such parties is usually a two-fingered salute to the mainstream, rather than wholehearted support for the doctrine of these parties. As one Golden Dawn voter told IB Times, ‘I just wanted them to get into parliament but not to be so big. I just wanted them in to rock the system.’

The casual equation of ‘populism’ with xenophobia, racism and even Nazism reveals much about the EU elites, and not a great deal about the actual views of the public. After all, that word - ‘populism’ - is commonly defined along the lines of the Collins dictionary as, ‘a political strategy based on a calculated appeal to the interests or prejudices of ordinary people’. Which raises a question: do Clegg and the many other politicians and commentators fretting about populism see xenophobia, racism and nationalism as being the default political prejudices of the public? From the public discussion, it would seem that if the ignorant, feral masses are not kept in their place by a liberal elite which understands their genuine interests, then concentration camps are just around the corner. As a Guardian editorial put it: ‘When Brussels or Berlin loses sight of [democracy], voters reach for simpler and uglier solutions.’

The widespread concerns being voiced by the political classes about the dangers of populism speak to an elitist disdain for mass politics. Trying to represent the uncontrollable electorates is seen to be cynically pandering to their proto-fascistic whims. The fear of the rise of populism, then, comes not from a genuine concern that a Fourth Reich is imminent, but rather from a terror of the public. The only solution is seen to be greater consolidation and centralisation of power in Europe-wide institutions in Brussels. These can then insulate the enlightened elite from the barbarian hordes roaming across Europe, so they can continue in their attempt to keep civilisation alive. The worst xenophobes are in fact among the European political elite, petrified of the ignorant, bigoted Others that make up the rest of the European populace.

The real problem facing Europe today is not populism, but rather a profound crisis of European democracy. The likelihood of Nazism making a widespread comeback in Europe over the coming years is as much a fantasy as is the idea that a gang of Nazis has been living on the moon.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter@p_hayes.

What is education for?

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 12:09:00 +0100

Are educational standards in London rising, or are schools just getting better at ‘gaming’ the system? Should there be a centralised body coordinating London’s education system, or is a localised system preferable? What is the role, if any, of a ‘middle tier’ between schools and central government? Should schools be places where young people discuss what’s happening on the street, or where they engage with traditional subjects? What iseducation for?

Of the multitude of questions raised at a lively debate ‘Back to the future? ILEA, the Mayor and London’s schools’, hosted by the Standing Committee for the Education and Training of Teachers (SCETT) in London last week, this fundamental question - what is education for? - kept coming up.

When examining whether there should be a return to a pan-London educational organisation akin to the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA), which existed between 1965 and 1990, the question was never far from the surface. Panellist Sally Coates, principal of the Burlington Danes Academy, said there is ‘a lot of things ILEA had that we’ve now lost’, mentioning the subject centres she benefitted from as a young teacher. She recalled an English subject centre with ‘loads of resources, where English teachers got together, discussed plans and worked together. That’s been a huge loss.’

But was the existence of subject centres, as an audience member suggested, more due to the fact that during the time of ILEA, everyone broadly believed in the idea of subject-based education? If that is the case, then a return to a London-wide authority would not rectify today’s problems.

While some of the panellists and attendees saw a subject-centred education and the transmission of knowledge as being at the heart of what an education should be about, by no means was there a consensus. Peter Mortimer, professor at the University of Southern Denmark, argued that education should be about students being given a moral compass, inquisitiveness, a trained mind and lessons in ‘how to be happy’. For another speaker it was not about the ‘force-feeding of information’ to students, but rather understanding what they want, with the focus on education being ‘an overall life experience’. Professor Kathryn Riley of the Institute of Education said schools should also play an important role in discussing difficult issues from the streets. If such discussions don’t happen in schools, ‘they don’t happen anywhere else’.

In many ways this divergence of views on the role of education seemed to reflect what Shirley Lawes from the Institute of Education – speaking from the floor - characterised as a broader ‘fragmentation’ in education. It shows a common loss of meaning about what it is to be educated. For Lawes, education is too often seen in instrumental terms with an obsession with learning processes, rather than content. A solution to this fragmentation can’t be found through reorganising educational structures alone, she said.

Most of those present did agree that the instrumental target-based approach to education – with policymakers obsessed with measuring progress through numbers of A*-C GCSE grades gained - was woefully inadequate. Complaints abounded that the target-obsessed approach to education, the mainstay of two successive government administrations, led to schools ‘gaming’ the system, cynically entering students for vocational subjects over more traditional ones. As science teacher Kim Knappett put it, ‘we are constantly looking at targets and this has led to an over-surveillance of the education system. That is actually what throttles professional creativity.’

Some argued that such a focus on grades may mean that other marks of progress are overshadowed. Siôn Humphreys, chair of SCETT, highlighted the fact that a much higher proportion of disadvantaged London school students claiming free school meals attained five more A*-C grades than their counterparts nationally. Coates also emphasised the ‘enormously rich cultural diversity’ in London schools, which attract the ‘the most community-dynamic teachers’.

But could gripes about an excessive monitoring and measuring in schools sometimes be an excuse? Munira Mirza, deputy mayor of London for education and culture, argued that it is possible for schools to meet incredibly high standards without a target-obsessed culture taking hold: ‘The league tables and the pressure and targets would not have this effect on schools were it not for the fact that schools have lost the broader sense of their educational mission… I understand why teachers feel this incredible anxiety and pressure from the league tables, but I don’t think that justifies a race to the bottom.’

Whether a restructuring of London’s school system, or a different approach from government officials, would improve the situation was the source of much contention. Some called for policymakers to back out completely, citing the damage caused by meddling in the science curriculum and the teaching of modern foreign languages. However, Mirza retorted that, ‘To not have a policy is a policy… I think it’s not enough to say politicians should get out and let teachers get on with their jobs. What does that actually look like in practice?’

Mirza said, ‘the big debate that we should all be focusing on is the philosophy behind education and restoring a sense of vision and purpose to teaching and some pride in that’. But she argued that ‘having the right structure can also facilitate and allow that space to be creative’. She emphasised the importance of bringing teachers together to talk about such issues: ‘This is one example of that – it’s a small audience. If we had a global conference in London… then you can create a much bigger platform for discussion.’

Regardless of the size of the platform, judging from this debate it seems a far better mark of progress than attainment figures would be the extent to which a healthy culture of debate around the purpose of education has been fostered. Perhaps then, the question of the right organisational structure would then seem less problematic.

The SCETT debate ‘Back to the future? ILEA, the Mayor and London’s schools’, sponsored byspiked, took place on Thursday 14 June 2012.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter@p_hayes.

Privacy for me, but not for thee

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 12:09:00 +0100

There has rightly been outrage about the UK government’s plans to spy on everything we do online. The Communications Data Bill is indeed ‘incredibly intrusive’, as its critics argue. The bill is being referred to as a ‘Snooper’s Charter’, and it will undoubtedly, as one commentator said, turn us into a ‘nation of suspects’.

But how come no one bats an eyelid when the state puts forward plans to intrude into what it calls ‘chaotic’ families?

There is a great deal to get angry about in home secretary Theresa May’s ‘Snooper’s Charter’, unveiled last week. It will oblige internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, social-media sites and mobile-phone providers to store details of our communications so that state authorities can plough through them without a warrant. May’s suggestion that only terrorists, criminals and paedophiles have anything to fear from the new bill is lame; it comes straight from New Labour’s ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ textbook of authoritarian rhetoric. Her bill is also a massive volte face on the coalition government’s founding agreement, written just two years ago, which promised to be ‘strong in defence of freedom’ and to ‘end the storage of internet and email records without good reason’.

In condemning the bill, the pressure group Liberty pointed to the state abuse of earlier acts of intrusive legislation, such as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) of 2000. That was designed to combat terrorism but is now used to spy on people who drop litter and even to follow and photograph parents to make sure they live in the right catchment area for the school they want their children to attend.

Should the Communications Data Bill be passed, it, too, will be used to survey all sorts of people, not just the ‘evil’ ones listed by May. Indeed, while the actual content of our online communications will not be immediately accessible to the authorities under the new law – instead the authorities will ‘only’ have access to information about when our communications were sent and to whom – it seems likely that the infrastructure needed to monitor content will be built in to the new system. Why would that be the case if there weren’t plans to monitor content in the future?

Liberty rightly said of May’s new bill: ‘Just like the internet, any private home can be a crime scene, but should we install hidden cameras and microphones in every bedroom in the land?’ So why, then, have we heard nothing from Liberty about government plans actually to intrude into the family home, particularly into the private lives of so-called ‘troubled families’? These plans were announced by prime minister David Cameron at the end of last year and were revisited by communities secretary Eric Pickles just last week, as everyone was getting het up over the Data Communications Bill.

The troubled-families programme is about encouraging a raft of state officials to meddle in the private lives of 120,000 ‘anti-social’ families. Social-services staff, police, teachers, job-centre officials and specially appointed ‘family workers’ – all of these will be invited to peer into the lives and homes of those judged by the government to be ‘chaotic’. Without generating even a whiff of controversy, Cameron said: ‘When the front door opens and the worker goes in, they will see the family as a whole and get a plan of action together, agreed with the family.’

So, it’s not all right for the government to monitor private email communications, but it is all right for its officials to enter the private homes of families and tell them to sort their lives out? Far from being criticised, as the Digital Communications Bill has been, the drive to intervene in poor people’s lives is often welcomed. Indeed, even commentators who often talk about theimportance of privacy will jettison their principles when it comes to less well-off people, actively lobbying the state to ‘be less afraid of intervening in chaotic families’.

There is often a niggling discomfort with government plans to interfere with internet use or get Facebook to hand over private information. There is always concern when the government talks about introducing ID cards, more CCTV cameras, or telephone surveillance. Such blanket surveillance, which covers everyone, is seen as an unnecessary intrusion upon the lives of good people as well as dodgy people.

But when the state steps in to try to civilise unruly, less well-off citizens? When it monitors children’s lunchboxes, enters the homes of ‘chaotic’ families, forces everyone who works with children to undergo a criminal-records check? Apparently, these things are nothing to worry about. After all, you can’t trust just anyone to behave properly behind closed doors – kids might be smacked, allowed to play video games for too long, fed fast food and fizzy drinks.

The double standards in the privacy debate are striking. Less well-off people don’t deserve privacy, it seems, because they don’t know how to raise their children, create a family, or be responsible citizens. As Brendan O’Neill has pointed out, a magazine like the New Statesmanwill happily print actor Hugh Grant’s complaints about the ‘egregious abuses of privacy’ suffered by people like him, while at the same time one of its lead columnists argues: ‘I don’t think sovereignty in people’s own homes is something we should be striving for.’ Another commentator, who has championed a continental-style approach to public spaces rather than having too much CCTV, also complains that ‘early intervention’ policies in chaotic families’ livesdon’t go far enough. Increasingly, a two-tier system of privacy is emerging, where privileged, well-educated citizens believe they should have the right to a private life, whereas the more Big Brother can police the chaotic creatures on council estates, the better.

The message is clear: privacy for me, but not for thee. When people cherry-pick instances of privacy to defend and fail to make a principled argument for the right of everyone to a private life, is it any wonder May, Cameron et al feel they have carte blanche to poke their noses into our private affairs?

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter@p_hayes.

An Olympic-sized retirement home?

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:08:00 +0100

Where were you when you saw the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics? It’s a question many would likely be able to answer. The unforgettable booming drums. The thousands of martial artists. The astronauts. It was planned as China’s entrance on to the world’s stage and, boy, did they pull it off. The bar was raised so high, it would be an Olympian feat to top it. So how does Britain plan to rise to the occasion when the eyes of the world fall on London next month?

Erm, with three cows, three sheepdogs, 10 chickens, 10 ducks and 70 sheep wandering around a scale model of Glastonbury Tor. Alongside people playing cricket, picnicking and dancing round maypoles as fake rain falls on them. In announcing plans for the opening ceremony of London 2012, the artistic director, filmmaker Danny Boyle, doesn’t so much manage expectations as he does nuke them out of existence.

Sure, the exact details of the ceremony remain under wraps, so Boyle must be given a certain benefit of the doubt. But the omens are not good. At the heart of the opening ceremony in Beijing were a whopping 2,008 drummers, working in tight unison with tremendous skill, power and dexterity. At the heart of the London 2012 ceremony there will be a meadow. With mosh-pits to either side for members of the public to express themselves spontaneously, and various things emblematic of the British countryside (except Morris Men, which Boyle seems to take exception to). Bizarrely, a cohort of NHS nurses looks set to make an appearance at some point, too.

It seems we have China to blame. Speaking of Beijing, Boyle says: ‘I think it was the opening ceremony to end all opening ceremonies - of a certain kind.’ You simply can’t match the ambition and scale of Beijing apparently, and so Boyle plans what he calls a ‘fresh start’, symbolised by the meadow (you can imagine the brainstorming-by-committee exercise that came up with that). It may lack the spectacle, but apparently it will be ‘a bit warmer, and more inclusive and involving’.

In 2008, the Chinese celebrated their rise as an economic powerhouse, exhibiting their galactic ambition, but Britain will instead be showing they’ve gotten over all that stuff and nonsense. In showcasing Britain’s ‘green and pleasant’ lands, the ceremony will apparently be about a land ‘recovering from its industrial legacy’. Rather than being future-oriented and dynamic, Britain will look to the nostalgia of an idealised past before such terrible afflictions as the industrial revolution took place. In Beijing the opening ceremony said much about the escape from what Karl Marx dubbed the ‘idiocy of rural life’; Britain looks set to idealise such idiocy.

Brits have tried this before and failed miserably. During the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, countries were bending over backwards to showcase their ambition. People queued for hours to enter the grand structures of the US, German, Japanese and Chinese pavilions and be wowed by vast hi-tech exhibitions inside. Britain’s tiny pavilion, by contrast, contained a ‘seed cathedral’ and maps of British cities with the buildings removed because: ‘The best way to show how green British cities really are is to “erase” all the buildings and streets, leaving only the green spaces.’ The pavilion itself resembled a dandelion-seed head but, alas, wasn’t designed to be dispersed by the wind so as to save visiting Britons, myself included, the embarrassment of being associated with it.

Where there’s a dearth of ideas about how to explain what Britain represents to the wider world, it seems there is a tendency to play the nature card. Danny Boyle’s vision of a green and pleasant land seems more representative of Tolkien’s Middle Earth – or at least Midsomer Murders – than twenty-first-century Britain, where over 90 per cent of people live in urban areas. It’s an elitist, middle-class wet dream of what Britain should be like.

On 27 July, over a billion people across the world will tune in for the opening ceremony. It will be, as the London 2012 website states, ‘a celebration showcasing the best of the Host Nation’. All the signs suggest the event will show Britain as unable to compete with up-and-coming nations; celebrating nature and idiosyncrasies at the expense of the country’s industrial, scientific and artistic contributions to humanity; and looking wistfully towards the past, rather than being oriented to the future. With its opening ceremony, China showed it aspired to greatness - Britain’s aspiration seems to be the world’s greatest retirement home (complete with NHS nurses). Will Paul McCartney top it off by playing ‘When I’m 64’? Seriously, though, is this really the best we have to offer?

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter@p_hayes.

Sit back and enjoy the football

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:08:00 +0100

There was once a time when the job of a football referee was simply to uphold the rules of the game. No more. During Euro 2012, the ref will have to have one eye on the ball and the other on the racist savages from Poland and the Ukraine in the stands.

The debate about Euro 2012 has been less about how players can leave the pitch as victors, and more about how they can leave the pitch in disgust at the behaviour of fans from joint host nations Poland and, in particular, proto-fascist Ukraine. Manchester City forward Mario Balotelli has declared, ‘I cannot bear racism, it’s unacceptable for me… I would straight away leave the pitch and go home.’ He was quickly rebuked by UEFA president Michel Platini, who stressed it was the role of the referee to decide when to stop. ‘Referees can finish the game’, he told the BBC, ‘they have this power in case of racism’.

While the referee may not be able to fall back on goal-line technology to monitor the match, he will be assisted by an army of monitors trained to spot racist signs, chants and gestures that take place in what BBC’s Panorama last week dubbed Ukraine’s and Poland’s ‘Stadiums of Hate’. Thirty-one ‘independent international monitors’ have been trained to snoop on fans; their role will be ‘not to just look out for the obvious racism but the nuanced issues’. Polish anti-fascist group Never Again has trained ‘thousands’ of Euro 2012 stewards to learn how to deal with racism from fans. One estimate is that a total of 80,000 police and stewards have had ‘discrimination awareness training’. Even fans themselves are encouraged to be on the lookout, with a dedicated phone hotline being set up so they can report what one commentator calls the ‘racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism [that] are widespread and entrenched among certain supporter groups in these nations’.

Monitoring the behaviour of the ‘Nazi mob’ and ‘extremist yobs’ of Ukrainian football is not deemed to be enough, however. England fans are to be sheltered from the hordes in special ‘safe zones’ in the Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Donetsk, a move welcomed by groupsconcerned for the safety of ‘black and Asian England fans’. These will be for registered England supporters only, with no Poles or Ukrainians permitted. Erm, exactly who are the xenophobes here?

England fans may be protected from the savages in the stadiums but, according to many, supporters need to be afraid when they stray outside into the Eastern European badlands. As Nick Lowles, head of UK anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate, puts it, ‘My main concern is away from the stadiums, away from the mass ranks of the police and cameras, for small groups of England fans, particularly black and Asian fans’. Others share this concern. The UK Foreign Office has advised anyone of ‘Asian or Afro-Caribbean descent and anyone from a religious minority’ to ensure they ‘take extra care’ in Ukraine. The former England captain Sol Campbell has even warned fans to stay at home and watch the matches from the safety of their sofas instead, lest they ‘end up coming back in a coffin’.

Campbell goes further, saying UEFA was wrong to have awarded Euro 2012 to Poland and Ukraine. Apparently it should have told them, ‘if you want this tournament, you sort your problems out. Until we see a massive improvement… you do not deserve these prestigious tournaments in your country’.

A seemingly lone voice of reason comes from Mark Perryman of the London England Fans’ group, who has criticised the hysterical scaremongering about Ukraine as unhelpful. He said: ‘We refuse to believe that Ukrainians are all racist. We can remember exactly the same two weeks out from the World Cup in 2010 when we were told day after day “you’re going to be raped, car-jacked and murdered”. I think people are extremely suspicious of the way another country is being misrepresented.’

This may be the view among some England fans, but not in other quarters. Panic about Ukraine and Poland is widespread in the British media. As one commentator wrote in theGuardian, ‘a darkness still pervades both countries. On a recent visit to Poland and Ukraine, I couldn’t help but be struck by it.’

Indeed, the rationale that has been given by UEFA officials as to why they picked these host nations is that the championships will be, in Platini’s words, a ‘force for good’ that will ‘change the life for the people’. Since announcing the host nations, UEFA has taken the approach ofpatting the countries’ governments on the back for ‘targetting football-related racism’. Anti-racist campaigners have expressed their hope that their campaigns will endure long after the tournament. ‘We want fans to have that education’, says one, ‘to have that awareness of things that will stay with them long after all this over’. Another speaks of Euro 2012 as an‘historic event’ for Poland and Ukraine: ‘It is forcing people to have a positive confrontation with multiculturalism.’

However, François Hollande and the entire French government have declared they will boycott all matches in Ukraine, alongside officials from numerous other countries, due to disappointment with the way it is developing. Yesterday, the UK government announced it would also be boycotting all matches in Ukraine due to the treatment of jailed leader of the opposition, Yulia Tymoshenko. Pressure is also being heaped on German chancellor Angela Merkel to boycott Euro 2012 by groups such as gay campaigning outfit All Out. All Out, with the support of Germany’s first publicly gay elite footballer, is collecting signatures for a petition against Ukrainian government plans to make saying ‘gay’ illegal. It says: ‘If we can convince chancellor Angela Merkel to follow the trend and also boycott it, it will make headlines everywhere and pressure [Ukrainian president] Yanukovych to finally denounce the laws in his parliament that want to make saying “gay” illegal.’ All Out concludes: ‘This Euro 2012, let’s celebrate more than sport.’

Indeed, for many anti-racist campaigners, Brussels bureaucrats and even footballers, sport appears a mere sideshow to the opportunity to lecture Ukraine and Poland about their backward, un-European redneck-style behaviour. What you end up with is the worst of both worlds: a cynical attempt to undermine the sovereignty of the two host countries by politicians and campaigners on a civilising mission, and the ruining of the football that, after all, is what Euro 2012 should be about. Rather than trying to make it ‘more than sport’ and hector the hosts, let’s celebrate Euro 2012 for one thing only: the football.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter@p_hayes.

Scrap this anti-social meddling in our lives

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:08:00 +0100

Britain’s anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) have long been considered a bad joke. Kids boast that having one is a‘badge of honour’, market stalls sell ASBO t-shirts, and the acronym is used to christen dangerous dogs and evenvicious swans. Little wonder few people take them seriously – 57 per cent of ASBOs have been breached, rising to up to 100 per cent in some towns. They should rightly be scrapped. But in announcing a souped-up successor, the UK coalition government is making things worse, exacerbating the inability of communities to deal with anti-social behaviour themselves.

The Lib-Con coalition just can’t help themselves. When announcing the imminent dumping of the ASBO this week, home secretary Theresa May declared: ‘It’s clear the old top-down approach to the problem [of anti-social behaviour] hasn’t worked.’ So far, so good. However, in announcing new criminal-behaviour orders – which have quickly been dubbed‘Crimbos’ - and crime-prevention injunctions, she demonstrates that no lessons have been learned. These replacements are designed to be more efficient and cut bureaucracy, but they remain as intrusive as the old ASBOs. Indeed, new gimmicks, such as the ‘community trigger’, look to be more insidious. So under this new initiative, if three or more households complain about a neighbour having noisy sex, singing Meatloaf too loudly or whatever, the complaint gets fast-tracked by authorities. It’s meant to encourage civic participation; it’s more likely, however, to cultivate a community of snitches. Encouraging neighbours to collaborate with each other to get the state to step in will weaken, not strengthen, communities – and it won’t tackle anti-social behaviour, either.

Given its ubiquity today, it is often hard to imagine there was a time when the term ‘anti-social behaviour’ did not exist. Yet it only really emerged a couple of decades ago when it was adopted as a pet phrase of Rudolph Giuliani during his ‘zero tolerance’ crackdown while mayor of New York in the mid-1990s. New Labour, then vying for power, was only too happy to jump on the bandwagon in the UK, declaring in its 1997 election manifesto: ‘We will be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime… We will tackle the unacceptable level of anti-social behaviour and crime on our streets. Our “zero tolerance” approach will ensure that petty criminality among young offenders is seriously addressed.’ Shortly after the 1997 election, the ASBO was introduced in England, Scotland and Wales under section 1 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. It was intended to deal with behaviour that did not come under the remit of the criminal-justice system, like vandalism or nasty neighbours.

Between 2000 and 2010, over 20,000 ASBOs were issued. Authorities meddled in an unprecedented and often ludicrous and petty array of social issues, ranging from bans on wearingskimpy nightwear and being sarcastic to drinking alcohol in public, attending protests and, in the case of one 14-year-old boy, using the word ‘grass’ after neighbours complained he was calling them police informers. But that’s not to say that the introduction of ASBOs, and the resulting much-hyped ‘ASBO culture’, was solely a result of opportunistic politicians creating a problem that hitherto did not really exist. Driving politicians’ reactions to ‘anti-social behaviour’ was an instinctive recognition that increasingly alienated people and communities were no longer collectively setting standards of behaviour. In a period of social and communal disarray, communities were not self-correcting each other’s behaviour in the way they once would have done.

There are a number of reasons for this. The perception that there is more ‘anti-social behaviour’ is in part a result of the corrosion of long-standing communities, which historically developed social bonds through shared activities, interests and common places of work. In many areas, this problem has been exacerbated by attempts to put communities which have hit hard times, which previously might have moved on and regenerated elsewhere, on life support through the welfare state.

This corrosion of communities has gone hand-in-hand with a wholesale devaluation of the wisdom of older generations by the modern elite. No longer are parents and elders seen to know best, able to assume authority when it comes to setting community norms and standards. Instead, the idea of adults ‘knowing best’ has been problematised, eroded by a rise of relativism with regards to behaviour and attitudes. Adults are encouraged not to deal with community affairs except through formal channels, lest they make matters worse. Even when it comes to what were previously innocuous social activities, like coaching a kids’ football team, adults have to prove they are not a problem by getting a CRB check as a state-sanctioned stamp of approval. Young people and elders alike are encouraged to accept the idea that ‘the state knows best’, with officials, rather than the community, playing the role of arbiters of ‘social’ and ‘anti-social’ behaviour.

This leads to a situation where it is accepted that communities are unable to sort out anti-social behaviour informally and locally. Logically, initiatives like ASBOs follow, as the state takes on what was once an old important social role of moderating behaviour in a community. The upshot of this is that our social and moral resources for handling certain situations informally are drained. No longer is knocking on the door of a neighbour to tell him to turn his music down seen to be the done thing. Instead, an official intermediary is considered necessary to ensure things don’t get out of hand. No longer can good neighbours assume, as the soap theme goes, that with a ‘little understanding’, they can ‘find the perfect blend’. Understanding can now only be reached with a little help from the state.

So when Theresa May points to ‘three million incidents of anti-social behaviour… still being reported to the police each and every year’, it isn’t that there is more anti-social behaviour than before. Rather it is that our perceived capability for dealing with it ourselves has been diminished, and so we are invited to turn to the state.

Crucially, what has bypassed May, and all the other politicians lining up to talk tough on tackling anti-social behaviour, is that ASBOs and their proposed successors will intensify an already bad situation. By further formalising and juridifying informal areas of life, ASBOs and ‘Crimbos’ encourage people to bow to external authorities, becoming ever more reliant on outside actors to fix local, social problems. That is not to say that these problems do not exist, and that solutions don’t need to be found. But while people are encouraged to ditch their own nous and forgo their authority in favour of saying ‘let’s call the ASBO police’, community divisions will only be exacerbated further. One thing is for certain: only when we sweep away the whole arsenal of ASBOs, Crimbos, community triggers and whatever new initiatives the state concocts to regulate our behaviour will good neighbours stand any chance of becoming good friends.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.

A blockbuster that’s just too good

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:09:00 +0100

Midway through Avengers Assemble, one of the few good guys to actually snuff it faces Loki, the god Thor’s estranged half-brother, and tells him why his plan for world domination is certain to fail: ‘You lack conviction’, he declares. Rarely has a film so neatly captured its Achilles heel.

Granted, none of the millions of people attending the movie will have gone with their popcorn and 3D glasses expecting the dark forces of evil to triumph. And if box-office receipts are anything to go by – the film has taken $1 billion worldwide in just over two weeks, making it the highest-grossing debut of all time – the audience has not been deterred. This remains high-quality escapism on a scale that hasn’t been seen since Lord of the Rings.

But for much of the film, Loki’s key strategy is to play the assembling Avengers off against one another. He sits back and waits, while Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man takes on Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, before their scuffle is broken up by holier-than-thou Captain America (Chris Evans). For a good part of the rest of the film he remains locked in a Hulk-proof glass vault waiting for Tony Stark (the ‘genius billionaire playboy philanthropist’ inside Iron Man) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to quit the banter, and for Banner’s anger to get the better of him and for the big green superhuman wrecking ball to emerge in his place.

This baddy-waiting-in-the-wings approach is doubtless as much director Joss Whedon’s strategy as it is Loki’s. After all, one of the key challenges he faced was to introduce and do justice to all of the Avengers, many of whom had been given their own movies and franchises beforehand. And given the force of personality of wise-cracking Robert Downey Jr, the film could easily have become Iron Man 3. But while it’s doubtless been many a teenager’s – and kidult’s - wet dream to see whether Iron Man’s ingenious weaponry can outmatch Thor’s hammer, there is never any question that they will all end up on the same side. Even when, like Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), they’ve been brainwashed by a god.

As the Hulk puts it dismissively, Loki is a particularly puny god. While the Hulk takes full advantage of this, tossing him about like a ragdoll in what is one of the film’s funniest scenes, Loki’s inadequacies ultimately make the film feel lacking. The Avengers are left with nothing but a bland CGI clone army to smash. The entertainment comes more from the ingenious methods used to smash the bad guys – like watching top tennis players practice their swings – than any sense that the world is being saved from impending doom. Indeed the greatest threat comes not from the alien baddies, but from the human officials who tire of waiting for the Avengers to succeed and try to nuke Manhattan and be done with it (a sentiment which, given the film’s length, you almost, but not quite, start to sympathise with. Although the explosion could have looked pretty cool in 3D.)

Here, there is no Darth Vader to counter the rebel forces, no Magneto to take on the X-Men, not even a Sauron to give hobbits nightmares. In overindulging the clash between the collective egos of the Avengers team, Whedon leaves no space for a convincing antagonist whose intelligence and agency could thwart their ambitions - and therefore leaves very little space for any real tension. You enter a film like Avengers fully aware you need to suspend disbelief, but with such lame bad guys, it’s hard to believe that any other outcome other than the triumph of the Avengers is possible.

But as has long been the case with Marvel comics, and is now the case with the movies, a single offering such as Avengers Assemble has to be located within the broader context of the ever-expanding Marvel universe. A sequel was not simply a possibility, but was evidently built into the core plot of the movie (and, given its box-office success, it would take far more than an attack from the deadly army of the Chitauri to prevent it from happening). Which is why Whedon’s introduction of the shadowy puppet-masters Thanos and The Other at the end appears almost as an acknowledgement that now the Avengers have assembled, it’s time for them to face a more worthy foe.

Viewed simply on its own terms, however, Avengers Assemble doesn’t quite satisfy, even on the level of escapism. While much fun can be had watching the Hulk ‘smash’, with 3D pieces of debris scattering all over the cinema, this is a film that needs more bad in it to be really good.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.

Homeland: fear and self-loathing in America

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:07:00 +0100

Much of the debate surrounding the final episodes of the first season of US drama series Homeland focuses on whether actress Claire Danes has done justice to sufferers of bipolar disorder in her performance as CIA agent Carrie Anderson. But it’s important another portrayal doesn’t go unacknowledged - that of war-hero-turned-terrorist, Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis). That’s because the shared sentiments between Islamic terrorists and self-loathing Westerners have never been better portrayed on television.

(Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the show and you are planning to, you might want to stop reading now.)

‘People will say I was broken. I was brainwashed. People will say I was turned into a terrorist, taught to hate my country. I love my country… As a marine I swore an oath to defend the United States of America against enemies both foreign and domestic. My action this day is against such domestic enemies.’

So says Brody in a self-filmed terrorist suicide video that justifies his intended plan to blow himself up alongside the vice president and assorted White House staff, who are ‘liars and war criminals, responsible for atrocities they were never held accountable for’. In the eyes of Brody, his suicide mission is about ‘justice’ for the unacknowledged bombing of 82 children in Iraq – including the young son of bin Laden-esque Abu Nazir, with whom Brody developed a strong bond while in captivity. Their deaths, according to Brody, are ‘a stain on the soul of this nation’.

In its predecessor, 24 – which key members of the Homelandproduction team worked on, before seemingly having a liberal conversion – it was all so black and white. The terrorists were almost always unsympathetic, inhuman, murderous creatures brainwashed by radical Islam and fully deserving of a gruesome interrogation and bullet in the head from US agent Jack Bauer. Even as the seasons progressed and double agents were found in the government, you always knew who was Good and who was Evil.

Not so in Homeland. The series turns all of 24’s certainties on their head, and does so with an evident relish. The all-American-hero Brody, who delivers passionate speeches to his kids about American values at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, sees more justice in blowing up the US administration than serving it. And so obsessed is Anderson with understanding the motivations of terrorist Nazir that her dogged pursuit leads to her having a breakdown, losing her job and having to undergo electroshock therapy. Indeed, it is far easier to empathise with the suffering terrorists than it is with the senior US administration officials, who are two-dimensional, heartless political players by comparison.

The motivations of the terrorists are revealing. The role of Islam in Homeland is slight. Brody himself seems to have mainly been converted to it for therapeutic purposes – and primarily because it was the only option available in captivity. Instead, the main driving force of the terrorists appears to be anti-imperialism, their attacks being acts of revenge for humanitarian atrocities committed by the Evil American Empire in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which is one of the reasons why Homeland seems so convincing by comparison to 24. Much of the rhetoric spouted by terrorists post-9/11 has consisted of regurgitated ideas that were formulated by Westerners. As Brendan O’Neillobserved in 2005, it was Western commentators who provided the ideas-free bin Laden with ‘the cloak of rationality and political reasoning’. Bin Laden’s script was always ‘ghost written in the West’ and, as a result, generated a degree of sympathy among certain sections of the anti-war left. As sociologist Michael Mann put it in a Verso collection of bin Laden’s writings: ‘Bin Laden is a rational man. There is a simple reason why he attacked the US: American imperialism. As long as America seeks to control the Middle East, he and people like him will be its enemy.’

Given this, it’s no wonder this liberal retelling of 24 seems uncannily accurate. But Homeland looks set to take this merger of the ideas of self-loathing Westerners and terrorists to a whole other level in season two. In the final episode of season one, Brody and Nazir agree a change of tack. Rather than blowing up the future president, Brody will build upon his ever-closer relationship with him in order to ‘influence policy at the highest levels’. As Nazir said, ‘why kill a man. When you can kill an idea?’.

Exactly what the idea is that is to be killed is not really revealed – but my bet is that it is the warmongering ideology of the neo-liberal hawks in the US administration. In season two, Homeland may present us with a fictional vision of what would have happened had bin Laden been able to steer the actions of the US government rather than being shot by Navy SEALs in Abbottabad. It should come as a surprise to no one if his goals resemble more those of the anti-war left than the establishment of a global Caliphate.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.

Beware the celebrity troll-hunters

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:07:00 +0100

Earlier this year, Twitter announced it had over 140million users firing out one billion tweets every three days. Rather than just shouting at the telly, many thousands of people are now tweeting their thoughts about every aspect of it to the world.

For the first time, public figures can get a massive amount of public feedback on their performances in real time. Their thousands, sometimes millions, of followers tweet their thoughts to them. And they can easily do a search for their name and read about what the twitterverse makes of them to a degree that would sate the vanity of even the most narcissistic of ‘slebs. Some of it, doubtless, is very flattering. Some of it is probably food for thought. And some of it - shock horror! - can be pretty rude.

This has led to a phenomenon that has been dubbed the rise of the celebrity ‘Twitter Quitter’, where increasing numbers of public figures sign off for good because they dislike what’s being said about them by so-called ‘trolls’. There is no denying some of it is nasty. Little Britain star Matt Lucas quit after a teenager tweeted a horrible joke about the death of his former partner. Football pundit Stan Collymore is said to be thinking of leaving after claiming to receive between 150 to 200 abusive messages a day. And Richard Bacon, a BBC presenter, has recently made a documentary about the experiences that led him to close down his account.

Alongside the Twitter Quitters, however, some of the Twitterati have recently started taking another approach: witness the rise of the celebrity troll-hunters. Not dissimilar to the recent cult Norwegian film The Troll Hunter, where ultraviolet lights are shone on trolls to turn them to stone, this new breed of Billy Goats Gruff has decided to try to fight back by putting the Twitter trolls under the media spotlight and exposing them.

Leading the herd is Conservative MP Louise Mensch. Last week, she became the Sun’s hero of the week for shaming trolls who tweeted ‘the most vile, misogynistic abuse’ at her following her performance as part of the select committee inquiry into phone hacking. Mensch ‘favourited’ the abusive tweets, and used BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, alongside other media outlets, to discuss the abuse she’d experienced.

At the weekend, a finalist for BBC talent show The Voice, Ruth Brown, also spoke out about the abuse she’d received on Twitter. Alongside being called an ‘ugly fat cow’ and a ‘fat wasp’, she has also complained about ‘jibes of a racial nature’. Brown said in an interview that she had at first ‘cried’ about the comments but decided to speak out to ‘to encourage other people to fight out against the bullies’.

A forerunner of these Twitter troll-hunters is the presenter of Channel 4 gameshow Deal or No Deal, Noel Edmonds, who was alerted by a company that monitors his reputation online to a ‘Just for fun’ Facebook page encouraging users to kill him. He decided, however, not to snitch to the police, but instead to track down this ‘troll’, who turned out to be a PhD student living in Kent. As Edmonds put it in a widely reported interview: ‘I could see there was someone young behind this and I didn’t want to see that person’s life ruined with a criminal record and I thought there had to be a more positive way to get a resolution than going to the police. I wanted to resolve this face-to-face.’

But even if celebrities themselves don’t call the cops on their trolls, then there are often many willing to do so on their behalf. While Mensch thought her abusers had done nothing illegal, it has been announced that police will be taking her Twitter trolls to court. And police are also looking into the ‘racist jibes’ about Brown, after having been alerted to them by BBC executives who deemed the tweets to be ‘much more serious and potentially illegal’.

That the police are looking into such cases is hardly surprising given recent clampdowns on speech online. Most notable was the 21-year-old student, Liam Stacey, who was imprisoned for 56 days earlier in the year for writing abusive comments about Bolton footballer Fabrice Muamba who fell ill during an FA Cup match. This followed 19-year-old Azhar Ahmed beingarrested and charged for a ‘racially aggravated public-order offence’ after posting an angry rant about six British soldiers killed while on duty in Afghanistan. And last year, a number of young people were given harsh sentences simply for suggesting on Facebook that their ‘friends’ should take part in the riots that took place across England last August.

While they may not be snitching to the police themselves, in the current censorious climate, celebrities who expose trolls are often unwittingly inviting the authorities to intervene. Some of the abuse that celebrities, and others, experience online is undeniably horrid. And it is not to say it should go unchallenged or always be ignored (although in many cases, depriving trolls of attention and just getting a thicker skin is likely to be the best approach). But there are more important issues at stake than thin-skinned celebrities feeling bullied by anonymous teenagers online.

The right to be offensive needs to hold for even the most obnoxious internet trolls. Because either we all have free speech, or none of us do. If we permit the state to decide what people can or cannot say – and, in doing so, what we the public can or cannot hear – then this fundamental democratic freedom is eroded. The state’s attack on freedom of speech online is immeasurably more harmful than the abuse from internet trolls, sat on their sofas, tweeting nasty things about people on the telly.

Any celebrity who really wanted to be heroic would quit the troll hunting and make a stand for free speech instead.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.

Why Occupy and the church cling together

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:06:00 +0100

It began with a chance meeting, and blossomed into a lengthy affair. Could wedding bells be round the corner?

When the authorities prevented Occupy protesters from occupying the London Stock Exchange, the occupiers set up camp in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral instead. But far from condemning what rapidly became a smelly, middle-class shantytown and, later, what has been aptly described as a holding camp for the mentally ill, many in the church chose to embrace the protesters. One of the most prominent clergymen to join the love-in was Reverend Giles Fraser, who resigned from his post at St Paul’s rather than take action to move the campers on. In a front page Guardian article, he gushed: ‘I could imagine Jesus being born in the [Occupy] camp.’

Occupy protesters, not known for their modesty, also ran with the Biblical imagery. One protester dressed up as Jesus, with a banner declaring, ‘I threw the moneylenders out for a reason’. Another wrote poetry about how Jesus was a protester (‘He wasn’t always popular / He’d help a stranger / I think Jesus was a protester’). A prominent banner displayed at Occupy London asked: ‘What would Jesus do?’ The same question was also written on tents with marker pens.

One Occupy protester took
the Jesus comparisons to
a whole other level.

This bizarre alliance between the remnants of the left that formed Occupy and the church has proven to be one of the most remarkable things about the fleeting UK Occupy movement. Utterly cut off from their historical constituencies, and bereft of ideas, both Occupy and the church tried to cling to each other in desperation, like two sailors trying to ride out a storm.

But as became very clear last week at a meeting entitled ‘After Occupy, what next?’, held in the main hall of St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street, London, there was more uniting this rag-bag of lefties and aging church-types than the fact their movements were in their death throes. The event was intended, as the reverend at St Bride’s wrote in the Daily Mail, for the church to begin to ‘re-engage with its role to be a healing ground between those who suffer and those with the power and means to provide economic solutions’. What the event revealed was that the church and Occupy actually shared much the same values.

So contributor after contributor agreed with panellist Giles Fraser’s alternative vision for economics, one where growth isn’t paramount and where much could be learnt from the Old Testament story of manna in the desert. In Fraser’s words, we live on a finite planet and there’s finite resources, so we must accept ‘there has to be such a thing as having enough’. We should heed Moses’ advice and try not to horde more manna than we need, lest it go rotten.

Such an attitude was echoed in performance poet Catherine Brogan’s recital of her poem Occupy, which begins ‘I buy therefore I am is the corporate psalm, our democracy – consumerism, we’re caught in a prism, of shiny colours, sparkle, so we can all marvel at Kate Middleton’s shoes pretending we choose. But it leaves you empty, this pursuit of plenty…’

The debate at St Bride’s Church revealed that both Occupy and the church shared much the same values.

The pious idea that the 99 per cent was caught in a mindless ‘pursuit of plenty’ was echoed by Occupy spokesperson Naomi Colvin, who spoke of the destructive impact of consumerism and how it ‘makes people passive’. Another protester ranted about how people’s hearts and minds were becoming disoriented as they attempted to ‘fill the unfillable hole’. Similar rationalisations for the failure of Occupy to attain any longstanding traction with the public were discussed (alongside a humourous digression from a wacky feminist who claimed that Occupy’s downfall was because it had internalised masculine values from society at large, intimidating too many women).

If there’s one thing more embarrassing than a vicar dancing at a disco, it’s over-keen clergymen attempting ‘jazz hands’ to signify their agreement with scruffy Occupy protesters. But their rationale for doing so is clear. What many in the church must have thought it had found with Occupy was a readymade youthful congregation, one which could start to breathe life into the rapidly aging and declining church-going public.

Except that Occupy London, as was more than evident during the meeting, is now little more than a few grubby individuals trying to keep the dwindling memory of the ‘movement’ alive. Assertions that Occupy is ‘part of a global workers’ strategy’ sounded more than a little mad. And it’s a safe bet that planned stunts to ‘Occupy the Tube’ during rush hour won’t ingratiate protesters with the 99 per cent. Even Colvin, who has become Occupy London’s most prominent spokesperson, seemed to admit the game is up when she claimed ‘it doesn’t matter if [future protests are] called Occupy’. The movement that took pride in never having any recognisable demands now looks set to dismiss the importance of a recognisable name, too.

What appeared to be an unlikely alliance between church and Occupy proved, in fact, to be a neat fit. Both groups lack any purchase in wider society, share the same disdain for the consumerist masses and just love to preach about being meek, grateful for your lot and not committing the terrible sin of aspiring for more. Far from revitalising one another, this union marks the funeral rites for two desperate groups.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.