How the Tories dealt with riots in the past
Posted on Wednesday 10 August, 2011
Filed Under History |
2 Comments
If the people are turbulent and riotous, nothing is to be done for them on account of their evil dispositions. If they are obedient and loyal, nothing is to be done for them, because their being quiet and contented is a proof that they feel no grievance – Edmund Burke, 1797
THE trouble in Manchester all kicked off when bogus rumours spread that a mob was besieging parts of inner London. A section of the lower orders, clearly fuelled by drink, set out on a wrecking spree, expressing their solidarity by smashing windows.
I refer, of course, to the situation in 1816, in a Britain so different from the one in which we live today that it is impossible to imagine what things must have been like for the dispossessed.
London riots: initial reaction
Posted on Tuesday 9 August, 2011
Filed Under Immigration, Politics |
47 Comments
FRANKLY my head is still spinning from last night’s rioting in London and elsewhere, which I watched on BBC News 24, Sky, and live on the streets of Dalston. You can see a short clip I shot as things started to get heavy where I live here.
Once I collect my thoughts, I’ll try to write something more considered, including some reflections about the relationship between the unrest and the parallel crisis on the markets. But meanwhile, here are some bullet point reactions to kickstart the conversation.
First, what distinguished developments on my patch from those elsewhere was the decision of the dominant local ethnic minority to make a stand. By late evening, hundreds of Turkish men – not just the tasty geezers and the handy lads, but men of all ages – had gathered at the junction where their turf starts. A small number were armed with clubs.
I overheard negotiations between a hoodie ringleader and a Turkish representative, which went something like this:
Hoodie: ‘I know that you are just trying to defend your community. We all get the same shit.’ Turk: ‘Yeah, I know. Peace.’
Within minutes, there was some kind of ruckus and the youths fled en masse. I heard later that their departure was sparked when one of their number was caught shoplifting in a Turkish store and, shall we say, dealt with.
So, lefties: praiseworthy neighbourhood self-organisation or petit bourgeois vigilantism in defence of small property? Discuss.
Second, now that copycat riots are taking place elsewhere in Britain, what are the chances of this spreading internationally? Surely the kids in the banlieus have been watching this on satellite television? What about the inner cities in the US, where racial tension remains a constant presence?
Third, how is this going to pan out politically? Some more excitable comrades on Facebook are proclaiming the disturbances as a harbinger of an impending British revolution. But with the organised left marginalised to the extent that it is not an active factor in politics, the likelihood is that the initial beneficiaries will be the hard right.
With even local MP Diane Abbott calling for a curfew – not a measure introduced in any western European democracy in recent years, if I remember correctly – authoritarian Conservatives have been handed a trump card.
And let’s not mince words here. The reality is that the rioters have been in the majority, although by no means exclusively, black. While few reading this will need to be told why that is so, this is still a factor on which the British National Party is certain to capitalise.
Four, any predictions as to what will happen tonight?
Tottenham: bloody good hiding revisited
Posted on Sunday 7 August, 2011
Filed Under Politics |
59 Comments
THE last time Tottenham burned, the local Labour Party was quick to takes sides. ‘The police were to blame for what happened,’ announced council leader and later MP Bernie Grant. ‘And what they got was a bloody good hiding’.
By contrast, current Westminster representative David Lammy has been quick to distance himself not only from last night’s disturbances, but from the events of 1985 as well. The comparison between the two stances illustrates just how far Labour has travelled over the last 26 years.
Over the next few days, condemnation will be heard from across the mainstream political spectrum. So it is worth asking such basic questions as ‘why did this happen?’
On the ideology of Anders Breivik
Posted on Thursday 28 July, 2011
Filed Under International |
118 Comments
St Petersburg: IF MY experience of the time it takes to read a 1,500 page book is typical, not one of the myriad opinion pieces so far penned on the ideology of Anders Breivik can possibly be based on close textual study of the ideas advanced in his now notorious manifesto.
As the rush to blame Islamists for last Friday’s atrocities in Oslo underlines, it is always wise to regard instant punditry as at best preliminary judgement, offered only until a considered opinion can be reached.
With that qualifier out of the way, I have skimmed ‘2083: a European Declaration of Independence’, and my first impression is of a document lacking any intellectual concision whatsoever. Names – including those of eminent liberal and even leftist thinkers – are dropped widely, but in a way that suggests only cursory familiarity with their thought.
Some rightist commentators use Breivik’s nods to Locke, Burke, Mill, Gandhi and Orwell to insist that he could hardly have been influenced by any of the key themes of contemporary rightist discourse. Sorry, but that contention doesn’t quite stack up.
Lenin’s tomb
Posted on Wednesday 27 July, 2011
Filed Under International |
35 Comments
Hotel National, Moscow: WHEN I visited the USSR, the world’s second superpower was in such disarray that it could not manage to keep the Lenin mausoleum open to the public. In capitalist Russia, the shrine to the great revolutionary is just another tourist attraction.
Seeing that I staying am just over the road, I have decided to take up the opportunity of gawping at the world’s most famous embalmed corpse – or is it really just a waxwork? – this morning. Yet somehow I am in two minds about this one.
Nothing that I have read written by Lenin, or even written about him, suggests that this hardline atheist would have wanted his body preserved by way of a morbid parody of the veneration accorded to relics in Orthodox Christianity.
Historical assessments of the man vary widely, of course. I’d still be prepared to make the case that Leninism was something distinct from Stalinism. However, I’d also argue that while Leninism does not necessarily lead to Stalinism, at the historical conjuncture in which the Soviet Union was situated in the early 1920s, Leninism indisputably did lead to Stalinism. Accordingly, many of the lessons for the contemporary left from the experience of the Russian revolution are negative ones.
Well, I better get going, as I hear it can be a long wait. Then again, I’ve read that it is sometimes possible to jump the queue if you pay cash. I wonder if Lenin would have seen the irony in that.
Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Posted on Monday 25 July, 2011
Filed Under International |
68 Comments
Hotel National, Moscow: LAST time I was in Russia, it was still the USSR, and even the tourists could see that Actually Existing Socialism was falling to pieces. The shops had little to sell, and you couldn’t get a beer anywhere. On the streets, you got constant hassle from people trying to sell you a fur hat or change money at black market rates.
Things have clearly changed. While I haven’t been in the country long enough yet to come to a considered judgement, first impressions suggest that this is now a very different place. Central Moscow is now dominated by an obviously prosperous middle class – around 20-25% of the population, from what I read – that forms a social base for the Medvedev/Putin ‘tandem’ government. What life is like in the housing projects I saw from the train on the way in is another matter, I guess.
I have lined up a series of meetings with business people, bankers and politicians as research for an extended report I am writing. Although the conversations will only be with a narrow stratum of society, I hope it will be enough for me to get some idea of what is going on, and will be sharing my observations over the course of the week.
Incidentally, I am staying in the hotel in which Lenin lived and worked in March 1918. The room in which he stayed can be slept in for R59,000 (£1,300) a night, which is perhaps a little big more than my boss would sign off on my expenses. I made do with a quick tour instead. Some of the furniture, including the desk, is still reputedly original.
Right. I’ve got to do some interview prep. More later.
Catholic Herald: still defending General Franco
Posted on Friday 22 July, 2011
Filed Under Religion, The right |
59 Comments
AROUND 114,000 people ‘disappeared’ in the fifteen years after General Franco overthrew the elected government of Spain, which he proceeded to rule as a one party state for almost four decades. While his memory is still revered by sections of the Spanish far right, he nowadays finds few defenders in this country.
Yet Britain’s most upmarket Catholic periodical is providing a platform its contributors to assert that the Generalissimo wasn’t such a bad guy after all. And why not? That’s what it did when the conflict was actually taking place, after all.
Catholic Herald book reviewer Francis Phillips freely confesses to being ‘ignorant’ about modern Spanish history. But she does have a mate who lived in pre-1975 Spain, who tells her that Franco was simply a nationalist rather than a fascist. So that’s alright, then.
Hackgate: notes on political crises
Posted on Monday 18 July, 2011
Filed Under Politics |
71 Comments
WESTLAND didn’t bring down Thatcher, Major took on the Maastricht Bastards and lived. Not even the combination of illegal war against Iraq, the Kelly suicide and cash for peerages was enough to force Blair to quit. Prime ministers, it seems, invariably ride out a little local difficulty.
I do not see anything in either the extent or the seriousness of Hackgate that leads inexorably to the conclusion that the Coalition is on the point of imminent collapse. Blog posts and newspaper columns from both the more impressionable variety of younger leftist and diehard Tory rightwingers who never had much time for Cameron anyway should probably be disregarded.
The British electorate repeatedly demonstrates a surprising willingness to forgive and forget. Remember the MPs’ expenses scandal, when it was widely suggested that the next parliament would be chock-a-block with the likes of Esther Rantzen and Simon Heffer, elected on independent tickets? It never happened, of course.
Governments don’t just topple. Sometimes in the past they have been pushed, not least by organised labour, as Heath and Callaghan found out. But given the current weakness of British trade unions, there is neither a conscious strategy to achieve that, or even much prospect of blundering into such a scenario by accident.
Why hedge funds do better than bent bookies
Posted on Wednesday 13 July, 2011
Filed Under Economics |
15 Comments
HEDGE funds have got one major advantage over bent bookies. In their case, race fixing is entirely above board. Let me expand on this point, by way of an analogy for what has been happening in the Irish, Greek, Portuguese and Italian economies of late.
Let’s say you take a bet on a horse to lose the Grand National, something that those of us who do the gees gees know as a ‘lay bet’. But in this case, you get access to the paddock, and have every opportunity to bribe the jockey or dope the nag. You can even throw ball bearings, or perhaps the odd suffragette, under its hooves once it is on the track.
What’s more, the Jockey Club – a bunch of bleedin’ useless aristos who are never particularly assiduous in these matters, anyway – can’t see any harm in all this, and doesn’t even make a pretence of trying to stop it.
Easy money? Of course. And the City Boys get to do something very like this, through a combination of using Credit Default Swaps and a tactic called short selling.
OrangeFest 2011: it’s still about hating Taigs
Posted on Tuesday 12 July, 2011
Filed Under Ireland |
15 Comments
SUPPOSE the Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging decided to organise a comeback gig in the shape of a white supremacist rally in Soweto. Naturally, the South African government would be concerned about the potential for public disorder. So would the best solution be to market the event as a touchy-feely, all-inclusive, fun day out for all the family?
This analogy offers something of the flavour of attempts to rebrand the Loyalist marching season in Northern Ireland as OrangeFest, with the local nationalist community invited to stand quietly on the pavement and cheer on as the massed ranks of parading Proddie flute bands walk on by.
Concepts of that degree of genius can only be the work of men and women with a background in public relations, some of them presumably working on the Titanic centenary bash even as I write. The rest of us could see that it was never going to work.
And indeed, it has not worked. For the second year running, the night before the shindig has been marked with rioting on the streets of West Belfast. Petrol bombs, stones and bricks were thrown, and nationalist youth hijacked a bus and drove it at a police cordon. The cops replied with plastic bullets and water cannon.
