Obliged to Offend top posts of 2011

Rather than write up a list of the most popular posts of 2011, I've instead chosen 10 of my favourites from this year. Thanks for reading and a happy new year to you all. James.

Keeping your head above water in London

Diary of an unemployed person

Westfield’s brave new world of stuff

It’s banks, rather than citizens, who now shape a country’s destiny

Cuba: Change where nothing ever changes


Christopher Hitchens is no George Orwell

Libya and the peace movement

It’s not the Labour left that’s stuck in a time warp

Instead of celebrating when Thatcher dies, the left should reflect on a missed chance

Were the riots a working class uprising or inspired by rampant consumerism?

Some basic demands the left must start to make

Ever since the inception of New Labour, the left in Britain has been characterised by timidity when faced with an electorate ready to embrace change. The reluctance to break with a right-wing status quo has not been confined solely to the British labour movement either, but has become a commonplace right across the contemporary European left. This is at least partly why on the back of the biggest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s the left is in the doldrums almost everywhere, despite the fact that it was the failure of right-wing orthodoxy that got us into the mess we find ourselves in today.

The timidity of the left in espousing its principles has led to a widespread belief that all we do is oppose things, rather than present an alternative. Often, when someone of the left appears in the media, no-content progressivism fills the space where policy proposal might be, warm-sounding buzzwords standing in for anything that might possibly upset a vested interest or two.

Is this because, as Peter Mandelson once put it, we are “all Thatcherites now”? I don’t think so somehow. The super-rich lording it over those of us who have nothing to sell but our labour has not become palatable simply because a perma-tanned clich矇 around the ex-Prime Minister said it had – coincidently, at about the time their own bank balances began to disappear off into the stratosphere.

People’s lives are today more than ever dictated by forces completely outside of their control. There is widespread acknowledgment that we are being ripped-off by banks, transport companies, the energy industry, and a political class which parrots whatever it thinks a handful of voters in marginal constituencies wants to hear. If there was ever a time to let go of the timidity that has characterised the movement for so long and to start making a few basic demands, it's now; and in this vein I’ve compiled a short list of five practical things the left should start arguing for right away.

The list is by no means exhaustive, and I welcome further contributions. It has also been written based on where we are politically now, rather than where many of us would no doubt like us to be.

1. Higher taxes for the rich
Perhaps the most basic demand but one the left is far too hesitant to make. While combatting tax evasion and introducing “Robin Hood” taxes are all well and good, what about the white elephant in the room: making the rich pay more tax? I wholeheartedly support attempts to make the rich pay what they already owe; but I also want to close the gap between the rich and poor, as you probably also do, if like me you believe gross inequality leads to a dysfunctional society.

2. The public release of official records showing the annual income of every British taxpayer who earns over £100,000 a year
They do it in Sweden, and there is as yet no sign of George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia. As well as safeguarding transparency, this would also force employers and CEOs to justify their exorbitant wage packets to their employees. The Chief Executive of Tesco was paid £5 million in 2005. In the same year the average Tesco employee was paid £12,713. Is it credible to assert that the Chief Executive is 430 times more industrious and productive than the average Tesco employee? Let’s hear that argument, then.

3. The right to recall MPs who break manifesto pledges
How can something be called democracy in any way, shape or form when a person has little idea of what they are voting for? While it might be reasonable to grant politicians a degree of leeway based on the practicalities of government, it should be possible to recall any MP elected on a platform which they subsequently dump once in government. The prospect of a ministerial car and a pat on the back from a Lord should no longer be allowed to turn our politicians into pledge-breakers.

Not unrelated to this, but touching on a much bigger subject, one of the first tasks of a modern socialist movement should be to redefine the word “democracy” beyond the confines of 19th century liberalism. By that I do not mean less democracy, but more, much more.

4. Return the utilities to public ownership
The market engenders freedom, so it is said, and nowhere is this more apparent than the utilities, where consumers are “free” to pay as much as companies require them to for services they cannot do without. The alternative (there is always an alternative, because champions of the market despise coercion) is the freedom to go and live in a cardboard box in the forest.

Most people are angry about the price of electricity, gas and train fares, but the left does not at present make the connection in the public mind between huge price rises and the collections of sports cars the bosses of the utilities have in their driveways. None of us can do without these things, so how about we start to run them for the benefit of all of us, rather than a tiny elite.

It might also be useful if we let go of a fear of being labelled “left-wing”, and instead start making David Cameron afraid that his toleration of this racket will leave him out in the political cold.

5. Tackle the exploitative buy-to-let housing market
Again this relates to a modern distortion of the notion of freedom. We all need somewhere to live, but today the freedom to make a large amount of money out of this need seems to trump the need itself. As a first step, adequate social housing should be built with controlled and sensible rents which undercut the private sector. This in itself would bring down the price of rent substantially.

Most people below the age of about 30 will never own property, let alone a “portfolio” to exploit. It’s time the left spoke up for these people, rather than parasitic accumulators masquerading as respectable businesspeople.

A word of thanks to the BBC at a difficult time

Almost all of us will at some point receive the phone call to say that an older member of the family has been taken ill. The nagging and perpetual worry about the sheer inevitability of it seems for some reason to occupy the mind more at this time of year.

The fact that death has been in the news a lot recently - as interesting historical figures and simply interesting figures have passed away (perhaps purposefully timing their departures for the writers of jokes about men walking into bars) - has not helped matters, and has led many of us to look around in anticipation of who might be next: Fidel Castro, Mrs T, next door’s cat?

We do know one thing, however. It’s not going to be Prince Philip. Not yet, anyway.

For this we have the BBC to thank, for telling us everything from the exact details of the hospital procedures carried out on the Duke to the fact that he apparently ‘smiled and waved to reporters’ on leaving hospital.

The more perceptive among us are also probably now able to pick out the exact colour used on the outside walls of the Cambridgeshire hospital he was staying in on a Homebase paint chart.

For all of this I wanted to thank the corporation. The nice thing about monarchy is that it means you don’t need to think anymore. It’s like dictatorship or monotheism – the decision of how unreservedly and uniformly delighted you are is left to others.

It is the holidays, after all. So thank you.

Instead of celebrating when Thatcher dies, the left should reflect on what a pig's ear it’s made of the past 30 years

Ever since Margaret Thatcher stopped appearing in public due to poor health, the fit and proper reaction to her eventual exit from the earthly realm has been discussed with increasing regularity by the left.

That rolling news will gloss over her legacy with the empty platitudes of the obsequious is entirely predictable. Nor will it surprise many to see the leading lights of the Labour Party queuing up to shower the former Prime Minister with praise.

There are, however, plenty of us who haven’t forgotten the lives she destroyed, the dictators she championed or the unmitigated social disaster set in motion by her particular brand of finance capitalism. We do not feel the need to do what many formerly of the left now do, and parrot the dictum that we are ‘all Thatcherites now’ (just a hint, but when a person says neo-liberal capitalism is ‘inevitable’ what they really mean is that it is desirable). Many of us are not, and never will be Thatcherites, and we will continue to feel no shame in believing that there is more to life than the winner-takes-all capitalism she so unapologetically championed during her lifetime.

There are of course also those, on the other side of the fence, who view Thatcher’s eventual demise as an opportunity to get one over on her family, her friends, and her supporters in a way that was not possible in an era when her ideas triumphed so emphatically. In this regard, Margaret Thatcher’s death is not only to be greeted with sullen contempt, but is to be actively celebrated.

The idea of getting back at this almost mythical figure for the numerous defeats she inflicted on the left is strong motivation for those planning to crack open the Champers on learning of her passing. Considering that during her reign she trounced us at every opportunity, revelled in her victories, and then did it again, the desire to see the back of the woman is perhaps understandable, even if the outright celebration of her passing is, to my mind at least, taking things a bit far.

What we on the left would do well to remember, however, is that the ideas embodied by Mrs Thatcher are not going to be dented, let alone killed-off by the departure of their most famous living embodiment. ‘All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come,’ Victor Hugo once said, and if the left is to recover from the tremendous setbacks it has suffered during the past 30 years, it is the ideas embodied by Mrs Thatcher that must be replaced, not the worn-out figure of an elderly lady.

Rather than celebrating the death of a human being, even a not particularly endearing one, the left should instead examine with clear-sightedness where it has gone wrong, how it has behaved and how it can do better – and boy, can it do better. Considering the complete failure to make any political inroads since the 2008 banking crash, this should be clearer today than ever.

Time and energy spent celebrating the deaths of those who popularise ideas we dislike is time that would be better spent popularising our own ideas. With this in mind, morbid celebrations are better left to the psychologically unhinged. The media already does an effective job in portraying us as morally detached from the values of the average person; they certainly don’t need us serving up ammunition on a plate for them.

It’s banks, rather than citizens, who now shape a country’s destiny

In the novel Catch 22, one of the central characters is an entrepreneurial war profiteer by the name of Milo Minderbinder. Caught red-handed in the act of plundering his fellow countrymen, Milo enjoys evoking “the historic right of free men to pay as much as they have to for the things they need in order to survive”. When the price of food in the army mess hall climbs so high due to Milo’s profiteering that enlisted men can no longer afford to eat, Milo valiantly cites the alternative; and since he despises coercion and is a champion of the free-market, the alternative is the freedom of the enlisted men to starve.

Britain today is increasingly dominated by Milo Minderbinders. Rather than enjoying the flowering of freedom we were told the market would inevitably bring with it, people’s lives are more than ever dictated by forces completely outside of their control. Trapped in an endless cycle of longer working hours and greater debt; and with a political class demanding that services are mercilessly rolled back to pay for a crisis of the banks, ordinary people find themselves in a situation not unlike that prevailing in Catch 22 – that is, one in which a powerful establishment has the right to “do anything we can't stop them from doing".

I am not, as it happens, talking about the political establishment here. While the formal trappings of democracy continue to function and reassure, it is becoming increasingly clear that the political class is beholden to a much greater power than that of the ballot box alone. And yet, while there may at times be a quiet acknowledgment of this dynamic in public, we are still at a stage where the subject is hastily changed when the full consequences of the discovery are grasped. The idea that life has been sucked out of democracy by the very philosophy that was supposed to engender it is still unpalatable to a large proportion of people. To put it bluntly, during the last 30 years or so politics has been gradually reduced to a question of what is or is not acceptable to “the markets”; and to get a clearer picture of what this means, it is perhaps best to substitute mention of “the markets” for the words “the bankers”.

Of late, the growth in the unaccountable power of bankers has led increasingly to political absurdities that few people are yet ready to recognise as absurd. Only last week the Prime Minister returned from Europe to be feted for standing up for democratic accountability by the very people who most strongly believe in the unaccountable rule of bankers. Perversely, the treaty Cameron was berated so thoroughly by the Labour Party and the Lib Dems for rejecting was itself a project designed to impose continent-wide Friedmanite economics by force of state decree. What Cameron vetoed was, in other words, a treaty designed almost wholly to placate Europe’s Milo Minderbinders.

A common rebuttal used against people of the left in the past was that there was “no alternative” to the rampant free-market. This glib remark was usually framed in terms of there being no practical economic system that could equal capitalism in terms of maintaining both prosperity and freedom without explicitly compromising either. And undeniably the words did have a certain power until recently - things did not look particularly good for the left during the 1990s, however pleased many of were to see the back of the Eastern Bloc.

The autopilot no alternative response is still tossed around in the face of protest and dissent today, despite the almighty crash the “only practical” system produced in 2008. What has changed, however, is the meaning behind the words. Today when a person evokes the clause what they are actually implying is that should government implement policy change that strays too far from the interests of one group in particular all economic hell will be unleashed. In other words, there is no alternative today because no alternative will be permitted.

In Catch 22, whenever objections are raised to a state of affairs that results in ever greater hardship for the majority but increased profits for himself, Milo parrots the dictat that what is good for the company is good for all. When this leads to his own squadron being bombed and left without food, his solution is to call for an even greater marketisation of the army. “Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry,” he says.

Sound familiar?

While Catch 22 may be just a novel, and Milo Minderbinder a character dreamt up in the imagination of Joseph Heller, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the situation we find ourselves in today. In our own case, until we at least acknowledge where real power lies in our democracy there is no way the rule of the bankers can be repealed, undone, denounced or overthrown.

So long, Hitch

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)



I have no desire at present to write a long, drawn-out essay about Christopher Hitchens. There will appear plenty of those in the coming days - from the tedious and the jealous to the slavishly uncritical.

What Hitchens represented to me was a political journey many have made during the last 40 years - the accounting for which will not occur in a flurry of hastily written obituaries.

What I will say about Hitchens, though, is that more than anyone else it was he who inspired me as I was growing up to read, to write and to despise the totalitarian mindset.

Even when I disagreed with him, I always, always thoroughly enjoyed him.

That is why, while not writing about him, yet, I will do something else I hope he would have appreciated. I will raise a glass of Johnny Walker Black to him over the weekend and say, with a heavy heart, so long, Hitch, and thank you.

Underneath Clarkson’s bluster is a frightened little boy

Yesterday was not the first time Jeremy Clarkson has chosen to air his unique brand of politically incorrect views in public. It almost certainly won’t be the last.

Despite the anger from well-meaning types over his latest outburst, Clarkson’s fan base will undoubtedly have found it hilarious. His trademark has long been the rejection of thought and sensitivity in favour of boorishness, and his brand, if you wish to call it that, already taps into a ready market of men (and it is mostly men) who feel the same way about the world as he does.

In other words, nothing Clarkson said on Wednesday's episode of The One Show will be too far outside anything fans of the presenter aren't already familiar with.

Personally, I’ve always found Clarkson’s rants about ‘political correctness gone mad’ to resemble a grown man tipping his food off the plate because Mummy won’t give him his favourite toy. But then, I quite like political correctness; and women, the disabled and people born in different countries don’t generally upset me or send me into a rage. Nor am I bragging when I say that I don’t feel any particular need to have a phallic symbol in my driveway.

In this respect, railing against Clarkson the individual is almost certainly pointless. Clarkson and his followers represent a more universal frustration – that of the 21st century failed adult male: uncouth, bitter and festooned with the outdated trappings of machismo.

Behind all the boorishness, if you look closely, you can at times glimpse in Clarkson and his disciples something which is actually quite interesting: a deep sense of fear and insecurity in the face of the modern world.

Understanding this is worth more than any amount of 'outrage'.