21st Century Vision

Old gods, new heroes

Two recent news items tell us something is afoot. The Yorkshire-based furniture chain Roseby's has collapsed with the loss of 1,200 jobs, but its Indian avatar is launching four Rosebys Interiors stores in Punjab. Meanwhile the Indian firm Tech Mahindra is opening a call centre with 500 jobs in South Tyneside. Even two years ago the talk was of the booming UK consumer economy fuelled by ever more house-price driven borrowing, while outsourcing service jobs to the Far East was seen as a major threat to British employment. What a difference a crash makes.

But perhaps the time has arrived to peer into the impact of a fracturing economy not just on mortgages and dole queues but on the way people react to frightening changes in what until recently had seemed the natural order. Part of the problem is that an unprecedented period of expansion has undermined every form of authority, as markets appeared to demonstrate that they were the only reality. Nearly 50 years ago That Was the Week That Was shocked the establishment by presenting religious faith as a consumer choice, concluding if memory serves that Buddhism was the "best buy". Today, only evangelicals and fundamentalists seem to regard faith as a guide to public conduct, and are treated as cases of overstated brand loyalty.

In a world dominated by technology, it is even more startling to contemplate the weakening of the scientific outlook. The more that is learned about the history of the universe, the physics of our own planet and the mechanisms of heredity based on DNA, the less of it penetrates public understanding. Space exploration is reduced to "Is there water on Mars?", the Large Hadron Collider to "Will it create another Big Bang?", and heredity to "Are there genes for obesity?". Meanwhile climate change denialists have flourished and academy schools are handed over to wealthy individuals interested in promoting creationism. No doubt the Royal Society has a good deal to answer for, but how was it or anyone to foresee that commercially-funded modern media would reduce the physical world to the realms of magic?

Now the authority even of markets has gone: not only has their brutality been revealed (it should never have been forgotten), but it is still only vaguely understood that they are the creature of society, which can trim them or to a large extent dispense with them if it wishes. We get the markets we vote for (and therefore deserve).

So the world is on the lookout for new sources of certainty. Part of the rapturous response to the election of Barack Obama is his articulation of an intelligent discourse founded on human values; though in truth it is not easy to discern what practical break he proposes with the past. In the UK the Glenrothes byelection win is represented as Gordon Brown's Obama moment, notwithstanding airport expansion, nuclear power and immigration crackdowns. Something of much greater substance is required if democracy is to be refounded.

The risk is that disenchantment with the old gods will trigger a flight to new and nastier ones. We are already seeing a semi-fascist resurgence in Europe. Stefan Zweig, observing a parallel moment in the Austria of the 1920s, remarked that Austrians had never paid so much attention to art as during the hyperinflation: "seeing that money was betraying us, we felt that only the eternal within us was truly to be relied upon". The Anschluss followed some years later.

All power corrupts - but rarely so openly

At Enfield and the Barnets United Nations Association we are doing our little bit for democracy. Together with the Enfield Civil Society Forum we are organizing a public meeting for candidates for Enfield and Haringey constituency in the Greater London Assembly elections on 1st May. Our idea is that citizens should have the opportunity to question the candidates on issues from local bus routes to climate change, and from the rot in our community which has led to a spate of murders of young black men in Edmonton to London's role as a world city. So if you are nearby on 21st April, why not come along to the meeting (see side panel for details)?

But goodness, doesn't our democracy need strengthening. What is so alarming is that some of the very people we elect to Parliament through the democratic process seem to be the ones who least understand what it means. Take two examples this week.

On Thursday the Court of Appeal denounced in ringing terms the government's capitulation to pressure from Saudi Arabia in calling off the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the huge bribes paid by BAE to secure arms contracts with the kingdom. "No one", the judges said, "whether in this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice", and they went on: "Had such a threat been made by one who was subject to the criminal law of this country, he would risk being charged with an attempt to pervert the course of justice".  As for Blair and his government: "To give in so easily merely encourages those with power ... to repeat such threats, in the knowledge that the courts will not interfere with the decision of a prosecutor to surrender".

What was the response from ministers? Pretty soon, and with the full support of the Conservative shadow attorney general, they were promising a "hands-on operation" to legislate to permit capitulation to blackmail in similar circumstances in the future. It does not seem to have occurred to these supposed guardians of the rule of law that you cannot logically pass a law which ceases to be one when it is inconvenient. What message does it send to those in developing countries whom we habitually lecture on the evils of corruption? Indeed what does it say to those - like Kibaki in Kenya and Mugabe in Zimbabwe - who when voted out of office simply refuse to go?

Today we read that another MP and luminary of constitutional principle thinks that a fellow member should be censured for calling on speaker Michael Martin to quit because of his defence of the self-serving Spanish practices now so rampant in the Commons. Ex-minister Denis MacShane apparently believes that the criticism of Martin was part of a "plot to discredit the government and parliamentary institutions". Mr MacShane doesn't seem to get it: as a member of a party that exists for little else but to facilitate the aims of powerful interests (such as BAE), while at the same time claiming the right to employ close relatives with complete contempt for every principle of equal opportunities and withholding expenses claims from scrutiny, he and his colleagues are doing the job themselves. No plotter could hope to compete.

So come and help keep your GLA candidates honest, as they have every desire to be. Subject them to open and rational scrutiny. They will welcome it, and so should we. Only the shadowy godfathers who think politics is a form of well-rewarded powerbroking have anything to lose.

It's just not British

Britain was the first country to step bravely into the industrial age, and the first to benefit from the expansion of social, cultural and intellectual horizons that came with it. But Britain was also the first to encounter the many unpleasant surprises the new epoch ushered in: mass urban poverty and squalor, extremes of unwarranted wealth and privilege, the unpredictability of boom and slump, the radical ideologies and religious currents that swept up the dispossessed (and sometimes the merely caring) into social movements bent on justice. So great were the divisions that by the 1840s the novelist - and later Tory prime minister - Benjamin Disraeli was asking whether we were one nation or two, the haves and the have-nots.

Some would argue that social reform saw to it that British society got through the crisis, with the extension of civil rights before the law to everyone, followed by the political right to vote and stand for parliament and finally - with the welfare state and the NHS in the 1940s - the social right to a standard of life, education and wellbeing. Others point out there was more to it than that, that the subjective conditions of national cohesion included the popularization of high imperialism in India and Africa and orchestrated flag-waving for European wars. No doubt the winning formula was a combination of the two, but at all events Britain approached the end of the twentieth century not only as a powerful economy but also as a society which had absorbed major waves of immigrants from Ireland, Eastern Europe and its former colonies into the national community. There were tame nationalisms in Scotland and Wales, and only the IRA disturbed the national concert.

How is it, then, that all this is suddenly in tatters? Why has difference become discord and cultural variation not a strength but a threat? Perhaps it is in part that the social settlement of the postwar years was wrecked by Thatcherism and gross inequalities have emerged, perhaps also that the empire has evaporated and the opportunities for jingoism are so few, so overshadowed by the US superpower and so unsatisfyingly ambiguous - Iraq, Afghanistan - when they do arise. Perhaps too immigrants from Eastern Europe and refugees from an increasingly unstable developing world are arriving with no preconceived allegiance to the "mother country". Many of the latter also have raw wounds from the brutal realities of western domination of their home countries and economies.

So how do we set about re-establishing a sense of common belonging? The issues are complex, and require action at every level, at the UN, in the EU, nationally and locally. What seems less helpful is the hectoring discourse from government about a highly selective "Britishness". For example, according to the Ministry of Communities and Local Government, local authorities should be issuing leaflets to "new migrants" extolling such uniquely national virtues as obeying the law (tell that to BAE's bribery department); raising children properly (the 30% who live in households in poverty?), treating others with fairness and respect (unless they are seeking asylum); preserving the environment (such as by expanding Heathrow); and paying one's taxes (short of being a nondom or using offshore tax havens).

The ministry even wants new residents to be told to "behave morally and ethically", just as if no one outside this sceptr'd isle had ever thought of it, and as if "extraordinary rendition" had never entered our vocabulary.

Come off it. Apart from working multilaterally for an end to war as an instrument of policy, being realistic about our climate change obligations and campaigning at the UN to reverse rampant global inequality, there is one cardinal feature of "Britishness": we do not bang on about it. Would the government please set an example.

Now is the time for all good men ...

Over a late night vodkatini or two, East Europeans in and out of the European Union still sometimes ask each other what went wrong. The increasingly obvious instability of the liberal market order they signed up to in the early 1990s is one thing, and perhaps not wholly unexpected. After all, that is what they had always been told about capitalism; but it doesn't seem so important when you consider that even with the ups and downs there are goods in the shops. Then there is the class of sharp-suited plutocrats who emerged triumphant out of the wreck of the old economy. But when you set the sleaze and opportunism against the privileges of the old nomenklatura, is it really so different?

But what about the aggression? Two major wars and many minor ones in the last few years, and - with Kurdistan, Gaza, Kenya and now Kosovo again - no sign of the universal pacification a benign capitalist order is supposed to bring: no "end of history", to use Fukuyama's phrase. And then there is the coarse materialism. OK, a little funky advertising hurts no one, can even be creative. But isn't the commercialisation of everything just too insistent, too all-pervasive, too - well too morally sterile?

And there is the deeper question of what happened to the high ideals of the early socialist period. How could so much talk of human liberation have ended in so little - rather like the great 1920 Tatlin Tower designs, currently on show among the Russian paintings at the Royal Academy and intended to house the Comintern but, like socialism itself, never built.

One interesting theory developed by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Žižek concerns the relation between the party and the working class. In anarcho-syndicalism the working class directly makes history, with little need for state or party. In early Marxism the party is merely the formal means whereby the working class emancipates humanity. Then with Lenin it becomes the repository of a codified Marxist theory, informing the practice of the popular workers' and soldiers' soviets, but also still to some extent learning from their experience. It is only with Stalin that the party acquires its final infallibility, so much so that loyal members who found they had unwittingly strayed from its line were only too ready to denounce themselves as traitors.

But isn't there a lesson for us in Britain too? Here we had a pragmatic working class party that engaged in dialogue with its base. But here too an infallible theory has gripped the party leadership and made it dismissive of all dissent, which must by definition be hostile, and party democracy has shrivelled in the cold blast of doctrine.

The paradox is, of course, that the theory in question isn't Marxism, it is neo-liberal market dogma. You only have to look at the contortions the Labour leadership went to to avoid uttering the word "nationalization" as regards Northern Rock to see how deeply it is in thrall to ideology, while the escalating attacks on civil liberties warn us all to watch our step. Late at night over a couple of drinks, people here too sometimes ask each other what went wrong.

Why do the people imagine a vain thing?

Just before Christmas I happened to turn on the radio just in time to hear a performance of Handel's Messiah. I was struck forcibly by the topicality of the aria "Why do the nations rage so furiously together? And why do the people imagine a vain thing?".

There was plenty of nations raging furiously together over Christmas, though actually it was mostly internal raging: Pakistanis furious at the murder of their opposition heroine, Benazir Bhutto, and Kenyans furious at the blatant rigging of their election result, but I want to concentrate on the people's vain imaginings.

Those were most starkly illustrated by the annual rush to the salerooms as soon as Christmas was over - or even before that, as millions of pounds were splashed out on-line on Christmas Day itself. Whatever happened to pigging out on lunch and slumping in front of the telly for the rest of the day, too bloated or too drunk to move? Ah, tradition's not what it was! Of course, Christmas long ago stopped having any connection with religion, but it used to be at least a brief hiaitus of calm when there was nothing to spend money on because all the shops were shut.

It's quite amusing in a way: Christianity hijacked the pagan winter festival to serve as the nominal birthday of Christ (nobody actually has a clue which day he was born on), now the new paganism has hijacked it back in the service of Mammon. Xmas (as it is now called) is the highlight of the spending year, ushered in by the frenzy of Xmas shopping and ushered out by the January Sales (starting in December).

Spending for what, though? To buy happiness, of course! This is the vain thing that most people now imagine. Richard Layard's book 'Happiness' - subject of the Enfield & the Barnets UNA Book Group's last discussion - makes it clear enough that, once basic needs are adequately met, more money (let alone more goods) does not bring more happiness. An article in today's Guardian by Oliver James goes further: selfish capitalism is bad for our mental health. It's not too good for our economic wellbeing, either, as the 'credit crunch' with which we are all now threatened will bring home to those of us who have been over-reliant on their credit cards.

It's hard to argue with Oliver James' point: you have to be slightly unhinged to brave Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon just before Xmas, or the first day of the 'January' sales, but thousands do. No wonder I find 'Xmas time' such a depressing time of year.

But come, thou goddess fair and free

In democracies the people decide the composition of their government through free and fair elections held at regular intervals dictated by law. Legislation is debated by elected representatives and implemented by an executive answerable to the parliament or national assembly. Disputes about the meaning of laws are resolved by impartial judges independent of the political process or other sources of influence.

So goes the theory; but every link in the chain can be weakened by determined forces. Sometimes it is done crudely, as with farming postal votes in the UK in 2005, or fraudulent attempts to smear opposition candidates in the recent Australian elections as secret Islamist sympathisers. But where serious interests are at stake the pantomime element recedes.

We like to think the standards observed in Russia's December elections are a throw back to an earlier era. True, several parties now contest seats in the Duma, but with media coverage strongly skewed to Putin's Our Russia party, and the atmosphere of tension sustained by the occasional apparently political murder of a journalist, the outcome was never in much doubt. What we do not like to think, however, is that Russian methods in some ways parallel our own.

No, journalists are normally safe to walk the streets of London (though the Gilligan-Kelly affair should give us pause), nor do we close down Channel 4 or block the internet; that's not how we do things. Instead our methods are so open and so public that, like the rules of grammar which all of us unthinkingly observe all the time, we do not notice they exist or how they work unless we make a special effort. A press overwhelmingly owned by corporate interests and dependent on advertising revenue provides the context. An electoral system that generates a two-party duopoly, a two-party duopoly that preserves the electoral system, media that reflect and reinforce the duopoly, together with parties now almost completely reliant on the media for the projection of their ideas - it all adds up to a cosy set of unacknowledged deals which cynics have summarised as "two great parties, one great programme".

In short, we like a little bit of democracy, but - being British - not too much, thank you.

Our system can no doubt work for long periods, provided it is required only to legitimate the fine tuning of an accepted social order. But when it comes to evaluating electoral practices elsewhere, particularly where fundamental issues are in play, our system is a poor guide.

There is the faint absurdity of Gordon Brown (he of the "election that never was") exhorting President Musharraf to hold an early poll in a Pakistan descending into flames, but it is perhaps in Kenya, also with its British-based system, where we see the defects of our approach magnified to monstrous proportions. We taught and teach that democracy simply means majority rule. We forget that this requires either political institutions that focus exclusively on a narrow range of choices based on a stable economy and social order, or else a well-informed and critical electorate able through its media to identify and analyse not just public performance but also the role of special interests. We certainly have the former, though it may eventually play us false. Kenyans meanwhile struggle to acquire the latter.

The checks are in the post

Ministers love to pontificate on the deficiencies of governance in Third World countries, so it is only fair that the deficiencies of governance in this country should come under public scrutiny - and haven't they just, following the appalling loss of the personal data of 25 million people.

The question of course arises: whose fault is it? Who gets to carry the can? We can rule out the possibility of ministerial resignations (see the blog of October 25th) and the head of HMRC has already (most unusually for them!) done the honourable thing, so it's all his fault - right? Well maybe.

Hamish McRae in the Independent makes some telling points about the proliferation of tax regulations and the disastrous idea of trying to merge the Inland Revenue with H.M Customs and Excise - two huge institutions with very different cultures and ways of doing business. But even before that merger the Inland Revenue was out of control. Mention them (or, now, HMRC) to my accountant and you'll get a litany of complaints about their shortcomings that will go on for at least half an hour. He is, perhaps, more outspoken than most accountants, but I imagine he is not the only one with complaints.

The bottom line is that the Inland Revenue had lost sight of the fact that it is a public service, and HMRC continues in the same vein. Typical was an incident 3 or 4 years ago when - despite having sent my return in at least twice - I was doorstepped by an IR official demanding to know why they hadn't recived one. In due course I went in person to the local tax office to deliver a third copy; at the desk I asked for a receipt, only to be told, in belligerent tones, that they no longer issued receipts. Instead I was handed (from a high pile) a letter explaining why not - which boiled down to "people who get receipts can cause trouble, so we aren't going to give them any". The man at the desk - clearly picked for his physical presence - was aggressive and arrogant. His attitude said clearly that any taxpayer was, by definition, a fraudster who wasn't going to put one over on him. This is the public face the IR wished to display, and I have no reason to suppose that HMRC is any different. It is an attitude that permeates all their relations with the public.

It used not to be like that. The Inland Revenue has never, of course, been loved, but there used to be an acceptance of the idea of innocent until proven guilty. The change is one that has permeated down from government, from ministers who increasingly see the public not as their democratic masters but as awkward customers to be kept firmly in their place. Hence the erosion of civil liberties, the growth of the nanny state and the eagerness for ever more comprehensive databases and for ID cards. The present fiasco has at least put a dent in the plans for those unwanted, expensive items.

Will it also make HMRC wake up to its true place in society? I'm not holding my breath.

The IQ Question

A couple of days ago James Watson, the maverick scientist who shared the Nobel Prize for medicine with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 for their work on the structure of DNA, caused outrage by asserting that black people were less intelligent than white.

Strangely, for such an eminent scientist making a verifiable pronouncement, he adduced no evidence for his assertion. Instead he said that he expected such evidence to become available in the next decade; in fact specifically that genes for intelligence would be found. He may or may not be right about that - my uninformed guess is that such genes will indeed be discovered - but it is seriously bad science to assume the results before doing the experiments, and here he is assuming not just that genes for intelligence will be discovered, but that they will be found to be less numerous, or flawed in some way, in black people compared with white.

Of course, there are racial differences, and it is perfectly possible that IQ is one of them. It certainly seems that black people can run faster than whites, and they also have greater or lesser risk of certain diseases such as sickle cell anaemia. There was, indeed, a study some years ago which showed that white Americans had higher IQ than black ones, but the explanations for this are many and various: familiarity with IQ tests was one - over time since IQ tests were first introduced average scores have gone up, showing clearly that part of what such a test measures is a learnable ability to do IQ tests; nutrition was another: during the years of slavery the nutritional input of blacks was far below that of whites, and things have improved only slowly since - blacks are still, on average, poorer than whites and are likely, on average, to have a worse diet, albeit less so than when they were slaves. Nutrition certainly affects IQ, so it is reasonable to suppose that black people were originally just as intelligent as white. A study of Africans who stayed in Africa might be interesting, but has never, so far as I know been done, and there too there would be drawbacks: they may not have been enslaved, but they were colonised, and  nutritional standards there are not so good either.

There are also different kinds of intelligence, of which the one measured by IQ is only one. Emotional intelligence for instance, where my (alas evidence-free) guess would be that black people would score higher than whites.

The real question is what Dr Watson was hoping to achieve by his contentious statement. He must have known that, however scientifically it was cloaked, it would be seized upon by racists. Maybe he just likes to cause trouble - he has done it before.

Civil Liberties were under attack as never before during the Premiership of Tony Blair, but he has - thank Goodness - finally departed. Gordon Brown, when he at last achieved office, made a number of commitments as to what he would achieve in his first hundred days. One of them was to repeal those sections of the Serious Organised Crime Police Act (2005) relating to peaceful protest near Parliament. Today is his one hundredth day, so how are civil liberties faring under Mr Brown's benign hand?

Nor very well, it turns out. Not only has no attempt been made to repeal any portion of the Act, but it has been invoked in even more draconian form to ban a peaceful Stop The War march due to take place on Monday to mark the return of Paliament from its summer break and a planned statement on Iraq by Mr Brown.

There is not a shadow of an excuse for this. Previous Stop The War marches have passed off peacefully enough, even the 1-2 million strong effort just before the Iraq war was launched. This one is taking place on a weekday, so will be confined to a few thousand at most. Yet the police have been instructed to prevent it going ahead. Such an instruction is surely unconstitutional - or would be if we had a constitution - and so, in theory, the police could and should ignore it, but of course they won't.

The march goes ahead anyway. Those who support civil liberties in this country should report for duty in Trafagar Square at 1pm on Monday. Your right to Freedom of Assembly and freedom of Speech are under threat, and should not lightly be given up.

Hell freezes over!

This blog has often taken a negative view of events, and an even more negative view of the record of the current Prime Minister, so it is refreshing to have good news to mull over, and a genuinely positive addition to Mr Blair's famous 'legacy'.

Many Prime Ministers have tried to unravel the Gordian Knot that is Northern Irish politics, and until now all have failed. But finally it looks as though peace has irretrievably broken out, and it is in large part due to Tony Blair's enlightened policy since he took office. It is also worth paying tribute to the - unexpected! - capacity for change shown by Dr Ian Paisley (at a time of life when one tends to get stuck in one's ways) and Gerry Adams, the former gunman turned peacemaker.

That's not to say that Stormont will see a love-in between Paisley and Adams, or that there won't be animosity and festering resentment in many parts of Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere for decades to come, but the sources of the animosity have been dammed and it should now begin, slowly, slowly, to wither away.

What is needed now are fora where the two sides can come together and each see that the other is composed of ordinary human beings, with all the normal range of human feelings, and hardly an inhuman monster in sight. Integrated schools would be good, so that children are not automatically drawn into seeing those of another religion as 'different', though it may take a little while yet for the levels of resentment to subside sufficiently for that to work in some areas. Social clubs, sports teams, pubs and bars...wherever people meet and socialise, things have been polarised for too long and it will take bravery to reach out to the other side - not so much for the reaction to be expected from them, as for the opposition from one's own side.

Integration will happen, though, eventually. It took a long time after the Reformation before the various Christian sects could live amicably together in England. "Catholic or Protestant?" is not a loaded question here. Roll on the day when it isn't in Northern Ireland either.