Though Cowards Flinch

Paul Sagar has an article up at his place discussing whether or not climate change denialists are duplicitous or simply stupid. I share his continuing shock that so many people – who are, on the surface, well educated – are prepared to deny the reality of anthropogenic global warming. It is surprising to me as to many others that these people are not simply being controversialists but genuinely believe what they say.

Anyone familiar with the global warming ‘controversy’ will know the form. The science academies of every single industrialised nation have issued statements supporting the idea of AGW. Sixteen of them have issued further statements defending the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). All of the research was submitted to peer review, normal scientific practice, and has not been found wanting.

A very small minority of scientists disagree, though many of these have nothing to do with climate-change disciplines. Vociferous members of the commentariat also disagree – no one is unfamiliar with Melanie Phillips for whom “political correctness” is a dangerous project of the Left to throw back the Christian dominance of the UK (!) and for whom President Obama may as well be a Muslim insurgent.

Listening to the radio this morning, however, I was struck by the terms in which US Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) discussed man-made global warming. He called it a “Hollywood Hoax”. Science to one side, and Unity has done a sterling job of attempting to talk through that, the ideology inherent to Inhofe’s remarks should be starkly visible. It posits an image of the ‘average person’ versus the elite.

Inhofe uses such devices regularly:

“In short, it is a direct threat America’s way of life.  If we cannot fly to remote locations, and if few automobiles are capable of pulling boats, jet skies, and campers, and if RVs become a thing of the past as environmentalists would like, then minor climate fluctuations will have little impact on recreation because Americans will not have the means to recreate.”

Again, the image is conjured of a threat to the ‘way of life’ of normal Americans, while hated special interest groups run amok in Washington DC, depriving Americans of their god-given right to influence their representatives. The irony, of course, is that regardless of the rights or wrongs of the science, the sentiment that Inhofe taps each and every time he opens his mouth is probably justified.

Of course Inhofe expresses it in terms of conspiracy, rather than inequalities of power and access created by capitalism. Just listening to him on the US news circuit on the subject of the Copenhagen agreement, “conspiracy” just shrieks from every word. The idea of a shadowy “them” excuses the need to investigate further into the shape and processes of the system which we live in, contibute to and partake of.

This angle is lent weight by massive funding from corporate lobbies to many of its proponents, including Senator Inhofe. It is also lent weight because the average US citizen does feel disenfranchised from their ‘democratic’ government. Most obviously, there are those who connect most with their Christian cultural-religious identity and feel that ‘secularism’ aims to alienate this approach from the government.

Questions of morality are easily fitted in, with immorality becoming a property of “them”, e.g. liberals in favour of abortion rights or gender and sexual equality. This neatly links in to Inhofe’s claim that AGW is a “Hollywood hoax”. Hollywood, naturally, has absolutely nothing to do with climate science. Prominent scientists do not, as far as I have ever seen, patronize the clubs and malls of the Sunset Strip.

The link is the immorality of each. The Hollywood “them” who are corrupting your children through excessive violence and pornography. The activist, lobbyist and scientist “them” who are corrupting your democracy and removing your right to have a say. Americans have to fight hard in order to have a say and that makes this equation believable.

It is climate change activists who have been winning that fight honestly, since they don’t have corporate muscle on their side, but it’s the oldest rhetorical trick in the book to call black, white and white, black and build one’s pile of assumptions from there. This is what Inhofe has done.

It’s easy to retaliate with accusations of duplicity, but the tragedy is that Inhofe probably believes himself. One of the key ‘national’ narratives of the USA is industry and enterprise, pulling oneself up by your bootstraps. Senator Inhofe did just that, building up his own business and, as a businessman, resenting things like federal regulation, unions and the liberals who support them. Which segues nicely to his religious identity.

Similarly not all of these people attacking climate change can be stupid. Ill-informed, sure. The key, however, is in what people and institutions they have chosen to invest with authority and trust. I trust scientists to be honest with their findings, and the scientific system to be rigorous in pointing out problems with the theory and practical evidence, whether it’s on climate change or the rightful classification of illegal drugs.

Other people may not. An inadequate vocabulary and conceptual universe to get to the core of why it is permissible to distrust the scientific elite, or a class position that renders these things indigestible, results in conspiracy theories. We can combat this with proper argumentation, sure, but we also need to approach the issue from a class viewpoint. We need to restore trust and we can do that by winning people over through rebuilding the institutions that allow them to control government, and corporations.

Like taxes and unions.

But try selling that one to Jim Inhofe.

The High Court ruled today to stop the 12 day strike of BA workers from going ahead. The grounds for this decision were the irregularity of including in the ballot cabin crew members of the union who were set to leave BA anyway prior to the strike itself. However I think there are grounds for viewing the decision by Mrs Justice Laura Cox as a political one.

Firstly, the inclusion of the 800 workers who are leaving (the number provided by BA’s legal team) could not have altered the outcome of the ballot. Unite represents 12,500 staff. On an 80% turnout, with 92.5% voting to strike (figures from BBC), 9,250 workers voted to strike. Even if all 800 of those leaving voted and voted  yes to the strike, it would still not have been enough to sway the outcome.

Secondly there are some of the remarks made by Justice Cox herself:

“A strike of this kind over the 12 days of Christmas is fundamentally more damaging to BA and the wider public than a strike taking place at almost any other time of the year,” (BBC)

One wonders what business it is of Justice Cox to express her opinion on a matter that should have had no bearing on the ruling handed down. It was obviously at the forefront of her mind to the point where she felt quite happy to attack a democratically arrived-at decision in her summation.

Whilst not being of the legal professions myself, it strikes me as an outcome opposed to common sense where a judge can strike down the ballot on a technicality that had no bearing on the final outcome of the vote anyway. The judge also ignored the claim by the union that it could not have known who the 800 staff were. I’d be interested to know whether the judge ruled that Unite were lying in this claim or ignored it for some other reason.

What is perfectly clear is that, for all the people who are still attacking the notion of class struggle, the bosses themselves haven’t lost the knack:

“In recent days, we believe Unite has formed a better understanding of our position and of the ways in which we could move forward.

“It has also become very clear that our customers do not believe that old-style trade union militancy is relevant to our efforts to move British Airways back toward profitability.”

This wasn’t old-style trade union militancy. It was a limited strike directed against bosses who were attempting to completely bypass the trade union which the vast majority of their workers (12,500 out of 14,000) had chosen to represent them. Walsh and his PR goons can try and re-frame the debate all they like, but it comes down to the question of whether workers should get a say in decisions made by their employers that change their terms and conditions, or status of employment.

Of course they should. But it looks like the only possible way to achieve this end is through precisely the old-style trade union militancy that everyone seems so quick to attack.

ConservativeHome is reporting that the Unions have amassed a war chest of some £25 million to “unleash hell” on the incoming Tory government. I sincerely doubt this is true; it mistakes the character of the people at the top of the trades union movement in the UK, several of whom have not been slow to condemn the decision by cabin crew to go on strike.

Yet with Harriet Harman adding her voice to those ‘warning’ the workers, it wouldn’t be a bad idea, all told.

Labour is evidently not going to repeal the sort of ridiculous legislation that allows the various arms of the State to mess about with what amount to private members’ organisations. Which, even if Alistair Darling hadn’t effectively renounced the idea, rather puts paid to the notion that the Labour Party is likely to fight the next election on ‘class war’ rhetoric and makes more acute the need for an old-style militancy everyone fears.

Class struggle is being fought on the ground, waged by bosses against their employees, whether the Labour Party or the media wants to take cognisance of it or not. It is the duty of union leaders to defend the interests of their members, as determined by those members. Would that they were up to the task. A war chest to fight the interference of the State – regardless of which party is in government – would be a good start.

Arrest, seizure of property and funds, incarceration – there is nothing the State can inflict that can’t be beaten by workers who are determined. The intervention of the State in this particular dispute is just one more in a long line of reasons to fight back against the laws which infringe on the rights of trades unions. Just as our movement got Taff Vale repealed, so we can force the Trades Union Freedom Bill through even a Tory majority. The Prison Officers’ Association, that, er, bastion of trades union militancy (!?) is showing the way.

I wrote this short piece for the  CommentisFree at the Guardian, under the auspices of my surprise new membership of a top-secret group of leading world economists.

But CommentisFree couldn’t even be bothered to reply.  ‘Bugger this for a game of soldiers’ I said to myself.   ‘Though Cowards Flinch has got double the readership of CommentisFree* and it’s eight times as intelligent**, so why don’t I just post it there instead?’

So I did.  Read on.

Tory Story

The Tories really have a very easy story to tell about the UK economy: there is a big government debt; Labour has been in power for 13 years; therefore Labour must have caused the big government debt.

What could be simpler?  The fact that it’s not true is neither here nor there.  It sounds believable enough if you say it often enough in enough Tory-supporting papers.

 The Pre-Budget Report was an opportunity to give a different version, but it’s widely acknowledged in the media (though, interestingly, not at all in the post-PBR by-elections) that Labour mucked it up, and that now the game is up.

 But Labour has not yet lost.   The latest opinion polls show that.

 Every time the Tories are seen up close by the electorate, their lead softens and Labour hopes rise.  What Labour needs to do is ensure that they’re seen up close as much as possible.

 The best way to do this is not to try to rebut the Tories’ simple storyline of debt, because that will always look forced and defensive.

The best way is to tell Labour’s own simple story – the story of how the Tories are actively harming the UK economy, as their selfish route to what would be selfish power.

 The story goes like this: there is a big government debt caused by ‘the bankers’; the government needs to borrow money for the time being at as low an interest rate as possible and is doing that pretty well; the Tories are doing their damnedest to make the interest rates as high as possible so that the debt looks bigger, and so that they get power.

Yes, the story goes, while the government tries responsibly to close the deficit, the opposition is trying to widen it in its own narrow interest.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. It’s economics, and they’re hard.

But what Labour needs is a story about the Tories, with plenty of evidence to back it up.  The evidence is there; the Tories have consistently talked up the potential for a rating downgrade by the very credit rating agencies who were the cause of the financial crisis in the first place, to the extent that it may just become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

In contrast, a concerted international effort to tell these same agencies to stick their discredited ratings somewhere where the sun don’t shine might just become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and allow the markets to decide for themselves whether the traditional ‘safe havens’ in the UK and the US are worth backing. 

The market’s answer, unencumbered by the political calculations of the rating agencies, will be yes, just as was shown with the flight to US bonds in during the Dubai crisis.

While stimulus-free economies like New Zealand’s and Canada’s may be attractive for investors in bonds interested in spreading risk, the sheer size of the US economy means that there no sense in investors regarding the US, and by extension of such logic the UK, as anything other than a continued safe haven.

Indeed, as I set out yesterday, the whole premise set out by the mainstream financial press that continued fiscal stimulus leads to higher gilt yields is highly debatable; there is at least some recent evidence, both in general and specifically in the wake of the budgetary decision in the UK and Ireland last week, that the markets respond positively to determined reflationary policy, and that the initial negative reaction by the market to the PBR was a reaction to a lack of commitment by the government to continued stimulus measures, not to an insufficiently large cuts package.

But that’s all just the back story to the Tories.  The lead story must be as simple and direct as the story the Tories have about Labour.

 ‘Tories as traitors’ fits that bill.

* This is not true.

** or this.

Over my years as a top blogger, I’ve had occasion to report on many a blogsporting contest, and indeed I had intended to report on the recent Hadleigh Roberts vs Tom Miller bout, but never got round to it (summary: Roberts was disqualified late in the fifth for punching below the belt).

But no blog fight to date has measured up to this one over at Duncan’s place. 

It’s now been going on for nearly a week, and started out as a bit of a scrap between Duncan and Daniel over some kind of bet, with a bit of fist waving from a few others then in attendance. 

Coming somewhat late upon the scene, JDC has decided he doesn’t like Daniel’s face, and they’ve now been going at it for a couple of days.  Meanwhile, everyone else has gone home for their tea, and Liam Murray’s even retired from blogging in disgust at what’s become of the sport.  I only came upon the ongoing scrap by mistake myself when I turned the wrong blog corner.

The fight tactics themselves bear an uncanny resemblance to the inept fighting scene in Bridget Jones’s diary (see handy Youtube clip to refresh memory) between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant (coincidentally called Daniel in the film), and involve occasional bursts of violence and name-calling interspersed with periods when they try to remember they are respectable members of society.

I feel strangely certain that Daniel and JDC will meet at a polite Christmas drinks do in the city this weekend, and will feel morally bound to invite each other outside into the massive atrium and wave their fists around at each other till they both fall in the fountain.  Well I hope so.

Anyway, please do over and get a ringside view.  An occasional ‘fight, fight, fight’ comment, after the fashion of Bridget’s male friend in the afore-mentioned film will, I’m sure, be greatly appreciated.

If the fight’s still going on in the New Year, I’ll report back.

Copied wholesale from A Very Public Sociologist – everyone should repost, as widely as possible in solidarity:

Following a call by Left Outside and Liberal Conspiracy for bloggers to thwart the gagging of the BBC by Trafigura over allegations of toxic waste dumping in the Ivory Coast, I thought “that’s one bandwagon I’m happy to be part of”. If you’ve got a blog this is what you have to do:

1) Embed this BBC report:

2) Link to this censored report of Trafigura’s activities.

On his blog, Don’t Get Fooled Again, Richard Wilson writes:

Late last week the BBC chose to delete from its website a damning Newsnight investigation into the Trafigura scandal, following legal threats from the company and its controversial lawyers, Carter-Ruck.

The mainstream UK media has so far assiduously avoided reporting on the BBC’s climbdown. Yet it’s an issue that raises serious questions about the state of press freedom in Britain, at a time of unprecedented attacks on the media.

This brings me to the third thing you can do: spread the word.

Credit rating agencies Moody’s as revolutionary socialists? 

Who’d have thought it?

But here they are, suggesting that the way in which they are trying to screw economies down to massive retrenchment packages in order to retain what they regard as ‘market credibility’ may lead to major social unrest:

Debt hang-hover will test social and political cohesiveness

In those countries whose debt has increased significantly – and especially those whose debt has become unaffordable – the need to rein in deficits will test social cohesiveness. The test will be starker as growth disappoints and interest rates rise.

In several countries – including some highly advanced ones like Iceland or Ireland, but also Latvia or Hungary, as well as in some much poorer countries like Jamaica – a great sacrifice is required from the respective populations. …………….

In 2010, the ongoing crisis will further test such fortitude. We are closely monitoring signs of economic rebound as well as of political and social tension as early indicators of the sustainability of fiscal efforts.

Am I missing something here, or are Moody’s really saying that they will measure the effectiveness of countries’ retrenchment efforts by the extent to which their populations start to riot on the streets?

So if the credit agencies are the new revolutionaries, intent on pushing capitalism to the extreme and provoking a working class fightback,  who are the moderates?

Interestingly, the moderates appear to be the very investors that the credit agencies are supposed to be serving.

Mainstream media (and blog) opinion may be that investors reacted badly to the UK PBR announcements on the basis that it didn’t give enough reassurance about managing the deficit.

Sadly for the mainstream media and blogs (and the Conservatives), the data doesn’t actually back that opinion.

Instead, the data suggests that investors react unfavourably to aggressive retrenchment measures, and favourably to more sensible continued stimulus measures that ‘lock in’ growth.

As Michael Burke of Socialist Economic Bulletin says:

The Financial Times was in no doubt, the culprit for the sell-off was Chancellor Darling’s failure to make sufficiently savage cuts in public spending to reassure bond investors. ‘Investors took fright at the perceived timidity of the government’s plans to balance the books with one of the biggest sell-offs of British gilts this year.’

But that verdict is simply and demonstrably untrue. SEB has previously shown, by analysing European government bond markets, that there is a preference for lending to economies where there is a reflationary policy. This is simply because, from the perspective of the bond market, government spending to boost the economy, especially investment, improves the chances of getting your money back.

Read the whole thing for the evidence form last week, including the following evidence:

The day following the PBR the Irish government enacted its own Budget. Budget cuts there of €4bn were described by the FT as “brutal” and even “masochistic” and included public sector pay, jobseeker’s allowance, even disability benefits. The British Tory Party and their supporters in the media have lauded the ‘resolute action’ of the Irish Finance Minister Lenihan. George Osborne is preparing to emulate him. But yields on Irish 10-year government are now even higher than those on British government debt at 4.87%, and now stand at 187bps over German bunds, compared to 66bps for Britain, even though the two have similar of government deficits, close to 12% of GDP.

But what of the European benchmark, surely German yields are low because they are pursuing a policy of fiscal retrenchment, as recommended by virtually all the commentators? German debt yields remain the benchmark low in Europe, all the while the new German government continues to reflate the economy through increased government spending, which of course is financed in the first instance by increased borrowing.

This is not simply a case of investors flocking to the traditional German safe-haven bond market, although that is often a factor. Other bond markets have avoided a sell off, and maintain tight spreads to Germany, notably France and Belgium. What all three economies have in common is that they have been engaged in fiscal expansion to lift their economies.

The commentary from the Financial Times and most bond analysts can be discounted as it does not conform to reality. The actions of bond investors illuminate the real picture; inactivity is better than fiscal contraction, but reflation is better than both.

(This, of course, explains the ‘as Darling spoke graph provided last week by Duncan, but which information was conveniently ignored in the ensuing days as commentators rushed to incorrect judgment.)

This crisis and recession has thrown into stark relief some of the strange contortions of modern capitalism, but this must be one of the strangest.  

Here we have a credit rating agency – a powerful institution set up and legislatively enabled to create stability in the market place – advocating measures that they prophecy may lead to a major anti-capitalist fightback – and indeed appearing to revel in the consequences of they advocate. 

Meanwhile, the investment community, that the credit agencies were set up to inform and protect, prefer to act moderately, seeking a long term compromise between their need for fiscal stability and the social needs of embattled and embittered populations.

It’s a strange world.

BA Cabin Crews have voted to go on strike over the Christmas period against the threat of reducing staffing levels through imposed redundancies and changes to staff contracts. 90% of the crews, on an 80% turnout, voted for the action. There’s some fantastic rhetoric flying about this morning on Radio 4. BA Chief Executive Willie Walsh was reported to have said that the union shouldn’t bother going on strike, it should concentrate on helping the company reduce costs.

Of course the union might well have been in the mood to do that, but it wasn’t asked to help out. It was simply bypassed. And now, though Walsh claims to be available for talks at any time, he has said that the central issue is not up for negotiation. So the union is absolutely correct to go on strike; this is not a case of simple costs it is now an attempt to de-recognize the whole union. I was pleased to hear that Unite has offered the cabin crews strike pay for as long as they are out.

In their honour, I decided to subtly amend the lyrics to “The 12 Days of Christmas”. No doubt, being a completely untalented lyricist, someone will come up with better words to fit into the correct spaces, then the Unite workers can print it out and have their very own union-Christmas themed pickets. For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, I also recommend this.

On the first day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the second day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the third day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the fourth day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the fifth day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Five pilots wings
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the sixth day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Six staff a-staying
Five pilots wings
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the seventh day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Seven chiefs’ wages’ trimmings
Six staff a-staying
Five pilots wings
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the eighth day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Eight red flags waving
Seven chiefs’ wages’ trimmings
Six staff a-staying
Five pilots wings
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the ninth day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Nine bosses leaving
Eight red flags waving
Seven chiefs’ wages’ trimmings
Six staff a-staying
Five pilots wings
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the tenth day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Ten board members weeping
Nine bosses leaving
Eight red flags waving
Seven chiefs’ wages’ trimmings
Six staff a-staying
Five pilots wings
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the eleventh day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Eleven journos hyping
Ten board members weeping
Nine bosses leaving
Eight red flags waving
Seven chiefs’ wages’ trimmings
Six staff a-staying
Five pilots wings
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And Willie Walsh hung from a tree.

On the twelfth day of Christmas
My union sent to me
Twelve pay hikes coming
Eleven journos hyping
Ten board members weeping
Nine bosses leaving
Eight red flags waving
Seven chiefs’ wages’ trimmings
Six staff a-staying
Five pilots wings
Four rule book nerds
Three ballot cards
Two pension schemes
And an ab-so-lute vic-tor-y!

On a more serious note, the article posted at the Guardian is utterly preposterous and without merit. It suggests that BA staff are likely to find themselves on dole queues through their own fault, because the strike is the “ultimate kamikaze action”. Surely it’s the bosses who are performing said action by going out of their way to attack the union and staff terms and conditions, not to mention plenty of jobs? Why, in these fucking liberal papers, is it never the bosses doing the kamikaze stuff?

There’s more than enough evidence to point that way.

There’s an interesting article over at Socialist Unity, discussing the list of candidates being touted as the group to vote for – in thirteen of the six hundred odd constituencies anyway. It’s one of those things, one suspects, where a couple of lesser lights and nobodies want to get their name some publicity, so they come up with this list of rather self-evident lefties like Dave Nellist or John McDonnell and put it out there in blogoland.

Stuff like this, where people are advocating support for individual candidates spread across multiple organisations, is a stop-gap measure obviously. It is unsustainable, especially in a context where parties like the Greens are going to run candidates against socialists. That’s not happening at parliamentary level, but it is happening at council level and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

More importantly, it’s a stop-gap measure because it divides the forces of the anti-capitalist Left across several parties, replicating effort and subtracting from the critical mass of any given group. This makes it all the harder to share out tasks across many shoulders, to populate and enliven meetings and to gather together sufficient funds for particular activities required to grow any organisation.

The white elephant in this particular room is of course what to do in all the other constituencies. Where no alternative exists, vote Labour. Brown and Darling et al are capitalists, they want to increase opportunities for business at the expense of the workers and they want to take away the opportunities the working class has left, as a vestige of the post-war welfare settlement. But the Tories will do worse.

Of course quite a few Labour Party loyalists will bemoan a vote for anyone else. This blog (and arguments we have with people on Twitter) regularly feature the complaint that a vote for anyone other than Labour is really a vote for the Tories. This is a case of misdirected anger, one suspects, almost as bad as those people who demand that we ‘smash the Labour Party’, as though the existence of the Labour Party is what is standing the way of building a mass workers’ party that will campaign for socialist policies.

There was a comment on this that I wanted to reproduce from Socialist Unity though, which accurately sums up how I feel:

“In many parts of the country you can vote for a left candidate and be part of a campaign to build the left and have no chance of risking a Tory victory as the Tories come a distant third. A simplistic blanket – vote Labour – is as unhelpful as any other simplistic blanket demand. People should look at each constituency and make their minds up from the facts on the ground.

While the left should not be indifferent the outcome of the next election – and prefer a Labour Victory to a Tory one – it is not our responsibility (nor are we able) to try and rescue a discredited Labour adminsistration that seems incapable of taking the steps needed to save itself.”

The last part is particularly important: it is not our responsibility (nor are we able) to try and rescue a discredited Labour administration that seems incapable of saving itself. We, the socialist Left, aren’t able to save it because there aren’t enough of us and very few people who vote take notice of us anyway. It’s not our responsibility to save it because we should be socialists first, loyal to an ideal. That ideal is not served by a Labour government, and if it were, said government would have taken steps to save its own Left reputation.

Which hasn’t happened. All we recognize is that while Labour is not socialist, it’ll be less harmful to us (as socialists, as workers, as taxpayers) than the Tories. So we’d prefer a Labour victory – but we are not the arbiters of that. If Labour Party members want a Labour victory they should ask why the people considering standing against Labour are getting any sort of echo at all from working class constituencies, and petitition Labour leadership accordingly.

That this won’t happen explains a lot both about the self-deception required to remain a Labour Party loyalist and about the utter decay of the democratic accountability within the Labour Party.

Anthony Seldon has an article in the Sindy lamenting how unfair everyone has been to Tony Blair. There’s just not enough sympathy in the world for megalomaniacal twits with a god complex and their finger (formerly) on one of the Big Red Buttons. Some of what Seldon says is pure comedy gold, such as his comparison of Blair to Gladstone: “For them, moral conviction in foreign policy was core.” One wonders what difference it makes if your foreign policy is still resulting in the deaths of the same foreign people as that of your “immoral” Opposition.

I think Tony Blair is feeling very frustrated that he is not able to get any voice for himself. He is trying to get his own view out there, his own convictions about the war in Iraq. Everyone tends to rewrite history and he is not having the opportunity to say what the real version of events was.

He was dealing with someone who was an evil dictator and that was the right thing to do, in his mind, because what was at stake was world peace. In another sense he has been remarkably consistent and I think is tremendously frustrated at not having the opportunity to say that.

If there is one thing worth pointing out to Professor Seldon, it’s that Mr Blair is very good at re-writing history all by himself, without needing the help of his accomplices in the declaration of war, or the media. Moreover, he’s had ample opportunity to put his side of the case – whether it’s in ridiculous speeches to Labour Party Conference or making disingenuous comments about faith on Parkinson. To help the Professor along, here’s some remarks from Blair at the 2003 Labour spring conference is Glasgow:

“I hope, even now, Iraq can be disarmed peacefully, with or without Saddam [my bold].

But if we show weakness now, if we allow the plea for more time to become just an excuse for prevarication until the moment for action passes, then it will not only be Saddam who is repeating history.

The menace, and not just from Saddam, will grow; the authority of the UN will be lost; and the conflict when it comes will be more bloody.”

If that were not sufficient, then the March 12th draft resolution before the United Nations proposed conditions which Saddan Hussein could have met in order to be ‘let off’. The six conditions all concerned the weapons of mass destruction, none of them concerned the human rights of Iraqis or free and fair elections. On that note, quite a few sources have since indicated that the Iraqi government was willing to offer a deal which would ultimately have resulted in a democratic Iraq. The US and UK did not take up these offers.

With all this in mind, I’d say the re-writing of history undertaken by Blair, in which the invasion was also about Iraqi human rights – not just a naked power grab or the result of a ‘sexed up’ dossier – is what Seldon should be spending his time moaning about.

On a wider note, the glibness with which Seldon dismisses Saddam as an “evil dictator” offends me. There’s no question he was a dictator, but how are we identifying his evil traits? Killing people? Then what makes his “evil” nature different from Blair, who notched up wars in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq, where somewhere over a million people have died, rather dwarfing Saddam’s total. Or perhaps the issue is not one of bodycount – perhaps it is a moral distinction.

Is killing lots of people somehow more moral if you do it for a ‘better’ purpose than someone else? Hitler and the Jews or Stalin and the ‘kulaks’, this is the sort of attitude which is the signature of people we traditionally regard as “evil”. We tend to ignore it when it’s exhibited by people on our own side – such as Trotsky and the hostages he took, or Eisenhower and the order to firebomb Dresden and Cologne, or Truman and the decision to use the Atom bomb.

We can argue about the greater good that may or may not have emerged from such situations – but this doesn’t bring back the dead, and it doesn’t help their families. And in my eyes, the “end” which Blair sought was both illusory and reprehensible. Illusory because the idea of a free, democratic Iraq was never going to be achieved with force of arms, and reprehensible because what has been achieved isn’t better than the “disappearances” or militarism of Saddam’s regime.

So if Saddam is an “evil dictator”, does that make TB an “evil democrat”?

See also: Ten Percent.

I quite enjoyed watching Slavoj Zizek’s appearance on BBC Hardtalk, though I must confess I found the interviewer a little superficial, as well as occasionally being incapable of properly following up his own questions. Such as, in the video below (part 1 of 3), the interviewer quotes back to Zizek a statement from one of his books, about how the worst Stalinist repression was better than the best liberal democracy. Yet when Zizek goes off on a tangent about how ‘mysterious’ Stalinism is, compared to the brutality of fascism, the interviewer doesn’t pull him back.

On superficiality, in part 2 (0.34) the interviewer attempts to argue that far from demonstrating the weakness of the liberal-democratic-capitalist system, the recent catastrophes of the global War on Terror and the financial meltdown prove its resilience. This is of course nonsense, because in truth neither present a real challenge to that system.

The first ‘challenge’ is in fact symptomatic of the lack of a real challenge to the system. Terrorism is a result of impotent rage, of the inability to change whatever it is one opposes, rather than being a vibrant social movement with the ability to affect the life-processes of capitalism. The second ‘challenge’ is part of the capitalist economic cycle and will (probably, in the current context) result in the further consolidation rather than overthrow of ruling class power.

Overall, I thought the interview was enjoyable though. I liked that the interviewer was prepared to challenge the Euro-centrism of Zizek’s worldview. It is probably a fair point that in India or in China, the last decade has not been spent in obsession with the War on Terror, from the point of view of the average citizen. And Zizek hits back with excellent answers: the war on terror has direct relevance outside of newspaper scoops and the protest movement. In areas outside of the Arab world, it directly results in death and poverty.

Where Zizek goes a bit off is the analysis he iterates in First as Tragedy: the problems liable to challenge the capitalist world order are global environmental crisis or the harvesting of human bio-data etc. I think a lot of this is pretty extreme, and ignores more basic social forces at work in the global economy – such as the forced integration of whatever redoubts of ‘embedded liberalism’ are left into the sphere of American finance capital, and the effect this is having on working people in the relevant areas, and the forms of resistance being generated.

I’ve been meaning to do a review of First as Tragedy, so I’ll come back to all that in a future post. In the meantime, I enjoyed the interviewer bringing up Norman Geras’ objection to what Zizek said and though Zizek should have pasted this approach to the wall for all he was worth. In absence of that, you’ll have to settle for my take on the Geras criticisms. Or you could just watch part 3 of the interview instead.