05.05.10
Posted in politics at 11:23 pm by Rob Fahey
Creative Commons licensed image from Jaime Pérez on flickr
Tomorrow, May 6th, is election day. Finally, the debates, the arguments, the manifestoes, the smears, the Twitter backlash, the floods of Facebook links, the increasingly desperate tabloid front pages; they all collapse from uneasily co-existing probabilities into concrete certainty, as the ballot boxes are opened and the votes are counted.
You should vote. No, more than that. If you give a damn in the slightest about your country and how it is run, about the huge issues which touch on your life and the lives of everyone around you; if you want to have the right to ever open your mouth again in a discussion about politics, or government, or society; then you must vote.
Why? Because tomorrow is the single most important election that has happened during my lifetime. I was born in 1981, which makes me terribly old to some of you and laughably young to others, but also means that by the time I was born, Thatcher was firmly established. The Conservatives would rule Britain until I was 16 years old, to be followed by a landslide victory for the Labour party, giving them rule lasting until now – when they look likely to be kicked out of power, and I stand uncomfortably close to my 30th birthday.
Not a single one of the elections that happened in the meantime – 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001, 2005 – actually mattered a damn. In 1997, the tired, worn-out Conservatives, hated and reviled after too long in power, passed a landslide majority to Tony Blair’s New Labour; what seemed like a victory, back then, looks in retrospect like a torch simply being passed from hand to hand.
Labour and the Tories are not the same, of course, but from the perspective of the public, they share one thing in common, one thread which runs through the entirety of British politics from before my birth to the election which looms tomorrow.
At no point in the entire almost-30 year span of my life has a majority of the British voting public actually wanted the party in charge.
Not in one single election did any one of those Prime Ministers – not even Thatcher or Blair – command more than 50% of the vote. Thatcher’s “landslide” in 1983, which gave her a gigantic majority and gave the Conservatives the inertia to command the country for the following decade and a half, came off the back of 42.44% of the vote. Blair’s huge win in 1997, which gave him an even bigger majority in Parliament than Thatcher had enjoyed, came with just 43.21% of the popular vote.
Consider that next time you see anyone making a wisecrack about the American voting system which allowed Bush to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. No British government in my lifetime has ever won a genuine majority of the popular vote.
So why is tomorrow’s election different – or at least, potentially different? Because simple mathematics shows that there’s a chance – not a guarantee, but a chance – that for the first time in decades, the election isn’t going to give an overall majority to any party.
That’s something which the British system is designed to prevent. Our system is one designed by men who believed that “strong” government was more important that democracy. It is designed to give the main two parties the lion’s share of the seats, totally out of proportion with the actual votes which are cast for them, in the hope that one of them will get a strong majority, allowing the Prime Minister to essentially do whatever the hell they want for the next few years without the other parties being able to do a damned thing to stop them.
In its pursuit of strong governments, the system crushes us, the voting public, underfoot. A huge number of us – a majority, in fact – live in safe seats, where our votes count for almost nothing. Even in the precious “marginal” seats, like the parties themselves, MPs are often elected without a majority of people actually voting for them. MPs routinely sit in Parliament having been voted for by as few as 30% of the people who turned up to the polling booth – in some cases, even less than that.
And the other 70% of the electorate, who didn’t vote for this person now representing them? Under the British system, to hell with them. Having failed to back the winning horse, they’re now “represented” by a person who doesn’t share their views or beliefs, and is therefore about as capable of representing them on the national stage as Stephen Hawking is of performing Swan Lake. Those 70% might actively despise the person now sitting in Parliament under their name, but because their votes were split between a few other candidates, this hated fellow, like a cuckoo invading a nest, ends up walking away with everything.
Once you zoom out a little and look at a wider regional or national scale, the picture is even more sickening. Successive governments have been accused, fairly convincingly, of a practice known as “gerrymandering” – fiddling with constituency boundaries to take advantage of our dishonest voting system. Under the Conservatives, areas with large Labour voting populations would be divided in half, with some voters in one constituency and their neighbours in another; thus, a region with 30,000 Conservative voters and 25,000 Labour voters could be fiddled with to return two Conservative MPs rather than one for each party. Labour, of course, did its own fiddling in turn.
Net result? With 42.44% of the vote in 1983, Thatcher got 61.08% of the seats. In 1997, Blair pulled the same rabbit out of a differently coloured hat, taking only 43.21% of the vote and yet grabbing 63.43% of the seats. Things get even more ridiculous in 2005, the last election with Blair in the hot seat. With Labour’s ratings falling apart after the Iraq War, they polled only 36.91 % of the vote, yet marched back into power with 55.11% of the seats.
And that, perversely, is why your vote is vitally important tomorrow. Because tomorrow, the maths says that this might not happen – for the first time in a generation, we might be able to hang parliament.
In a hung parliament, there’s a good chance that the Liberal Democrats will hold the balance of power. I like the Lib Dems, personally – enough that they’re the only political party I have ever joined – but I don’t expect you to. Not all of their policies appeal to me, and while I think that on balance their hearts are in the right place, I don’t necessarily expect you to believe that, and convincing you of it would be a job for a conversation over a pint, not a blog post.
What’s more important, however, is that the Lib Dems have one key objective which I suspect would be top of their agenda if they held the balance of power – and that’s replacing the broken, horrible electoral system which I just described. They want to introduce something called Single Transferable Vote instead, which is a system used successfully in many countries around the world.
How it works is simple enough. Instead of one MP representing one constituency, you merge a few existing constituencies together, and have them represented by two or three MPs. Now, when voters go into the polling station, they don’t just put an X next to the name of their preferred candidate – they write numbers next to them, starting with 1 for the candidate they want most, then 2 for their next choice, and so on.
When the votes are being counted, they count all the number 1s first. If no candidate reaches the threshold for being elected, called the “quota” (this exact number depends on how many people voted and how many seats there are), then the candidates with the smallest number of votes, who have no hope of winning, are eliminated. Votes for those candidates are re-counted – but this time, it’s their No.2 votes that are counted, and added to the No.1 votes from the first round. If all the seats still aren’t filled, more of the low-scoring candidates are eliminated, and more votes are distributed around.
The net result? A few good things happen. Firstly, the MPs your district elects are a much closer approximation of how people actually voted in your region. It’s not perfect, but it’s much closer than it is today. Secondly, people who want to support smaller parties or independent candidates can do so without wasting their votes. Today, many people are forced to vote tactically – supporting a party they don’t really like simply in order to keep out one that they detest. With STV (the common abbreviation for this system), you can vote for the party you actually want, and then use your second or third preference to indicate that if you can’t have your first choice, you’d prefer the lesser of the other evils on offer.
Thirdly, and this is a big one – you get to vote for people, not parties. If you’re in a three-seat constituency, your local Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem parties will have to put up three candidates to stand a chance of winning across the board. Maybe you’re a life-long Conservative voter, but you don’t like one of the local candidates – he supports policies you disapprove of, or he was caught out being dishonest with his expenses, say. Today, you have a stark choice – vote for a man you don’t trust, abandon the party you want to support, or don’t vote at all. Under STV, however, you can vote for whichever Conservative candidates you want, in the order you want; you might even choose to vote for the one you don’t like, but as a third preference, essentially saying “I’ll take this guy if he’s all that’s on offer, but I’d far prefer one of the others.”
That’s a pretty nuanced thing to be able to say on a ballot sheet. Beats the hell out of simply putting an X next to the least worst option.
So why don’t we do this already? There are a few answers, none of them very good. Naturally, this system doesn’t really favour the existing big parties. No longer would they be able to control over 60% of the seats with under 50% of the vote. Smaller parties would get a much more fair allocation of seats, and the big parties would start having to work with one another and with the new small parties in order to create consensus and pass laws.
That’s terrifying to the kind of people who think strong government is more important that democracy, and music to the ears of everyone else. The past 30 years, if anything, are a stark warning of the dangers of “strong government”. Our Prime Ministers have become more powerful than Presidents, with few controls over their power and only a rigged, dishonest election every four or five years to reign them in. If they had to work with their parliamentary colleagues to reach consensus for the stuff they wanted to do, it would balance their power to some extent. Such a parliament would probably never have brought us to war in Iraq, for starters; indeed, most of the excesses of over-powerful leaders in the past 30 years could have been reined in.
Ah, say the Conservatives, but hung parliaments and weak governments result in economic downfall! Bloody nonsense. Of the 16 world economies presently rated AAA by the credit market rating agencies – the best arbiter we presently have of how stable and secure a nation’s economy is – 10 of them have coalition governments (which is what generally comes about after a hung parliament), and 12 of them use the STV system I just described.
A more pressing concern which is raised about STV is that it lets smaller parties into Parliament. Great when we’re talking about the Greens, some say, but what about the BNP? Won’t it give them seats too?
To which I say – yes, it might. I’m not convinced that it would, because BNP support in national elections is actually pretty low, and STV would give regions that have been filled with safe seats and thus stolen the people’s voices from them more flexible representation, so they’d probably be less likely to file a protest vote for the BNP. On the other hand, some people are just, well, racists. They’ll still vote for the BNP, and they might even elect a BNP MP.
Would that be the end of the world? No. We’ve had scum in Parliament before and we’ll have scum in Parliament in the future. More importantly, we’ve seen first-hand what happens when the BNP actually get elected. They stop being the outsiders, the rebels, the voices in the wilderness whom the establishment is trying to silence. They become part of the establishment, and suddenly people expect them to do something more than rant and rave about foreigners – they expect them to govern, to lead, to work for their constituencies and do things like filling potholes, interceding in planning permission requests, helping to attract business to the area, and so on.
None of those things are easily done with racist rhetoric – so in places where the BNP has won council seats, they’ve usually quickly turned out to be an utter shambles, and lost local support. In London, the BNP has a seat on the city’s Assembly since the last election; their man there, Richard Barnbrook, is a laughing stock. He’s not a Nazi stormtrooper terror, he’s a fat man in a cheap suit who’s never been good at anything in his life and thinks it’s the fault of Blacks, Jews, Gays and anyone else Different. Unsurprisingly, he’s an unmitigated disaster in the Assembly – laughed at, pilloried and mocked on a week by week basis, he’s no longer the daring underdog, and as such it’ll be a wonder if he manages to hold the seat at the next election. The BNP getting into Parliament wouldn’t be the end of the country, but it might be the end of the BNP.
I guess the logical point to end on is the question of what you should do now. There’s just one answer – vote. Vote for a hung parliament. Vote for this being the last time that you ever have to vote using this stupid, dishonest voting system; the last time that we return a parliament that simply doesn’t reflect what people actually voted for, the last time that dishonest MPs with friends in high places have been able to get shuffled into safe seats to avoid facing the wrath of the electorate, the last time that a Prime Minister without the support of the country has been able to bring us into a war we don’t want.
If you want to know the best way to vote in order to ensure a hung parliament which has a good chance of fixing the electoral system, get yourself along to Vote for a Change, a largely non-partisan website which takes your postcode, looks at the state of your constituency and figures out how best for you to vote. It’s not aiming to get any one party into power – it’ll recommend any of the major parties, as long as that vote will push things towards hung parliament.
It may, however, tell you that you live in a safe seat, and to vote with your conscience. In that case, I would implore you to vote Lib Dem – for one reason, and one reason alone. Your vote won’t change who gets elected in your seat; it’ll still be the incumbent party in power in your region on Friday morning. However, it will nudge the Lib Dems’ national percentage up – and when push comes to shove on electoral reform, the bigger the percentage the LDs have, the more muscle they’ll have for the argument that the British people deserve better representation and a fairer system. If, on Friday morning, we can point mutely at a LD vote share of almost 30%, but less than 15% of the seats in Parliament, then the unfairness will be even more plain for people to see – and for once, your vote might not be a wasted effort, even in safe seats.
But whatever you do – whether you follow this advice or not, or agree with me on STV or not – please, please vote. We may be waiting another thirty years for a chance to really shake up the government of this nation, and if it’s anything like the last 30, it’ll be a very painful wait indeed.
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04.27.10
Posted in games, work, writing at 7:09 pm by Rob Fahey
I’ve been ignoring this blog, of late. Apologies to my handful of subscribers. Fear not – exams are upon me, and the opportunities for procrastination presented by blogging are too delectable to pass up upon. With that in mind, I’m working on a fairly mammoth post about the upcoming election, proportional representation, and what’s truly at stake on May 6th.
In the meanwhile, pray indulge me a few quick links to some stuff I’ve been working on recently.
First up, here’s a gigantic retrospective article on the making of Halo 2 which I wrote for Eurogamer to commemorate the closing of the original Xbox Live service earlier this month. Bungie were amazingly helpful in writing the feature and gave me fantastic access to the original developers of the game. It’s been known for years that Halo 2 had a tortured development process – the feature, I think, puts some meat on those bones and demonstrates just how close the team came to utter disaster in the years after Halo’s breakout success.
(I love writing features like that. My favourite task for all of last year was writing Eurogamer’s mammoth World of Warcraft retrospective feature (that link takes you to part one – part two is here). They seem to do pretty good traffic too, by all accounts. Editors, commission more of them!)
Secondly, here’s a feature I wrote on the current troubles at Infinity Ward, the studio which made last year’s billion-dollar hit, Modern Warfare 2. It’s all about how this saga is an expression of a deeper struggle in the creative industries – one between a philosophy which says you must nurture your creative talent, and a rival philosophy which says that if you own the copyright, you can always hire new, cheaper talent. If you don’t want to register for GamesIndustry.biz (it’s free, though), you could read it on Eurogamer instead.
On a similar note, here’s a piece I wrote in the aftermath of the Digital Economy Bill being passed by Parliament – on why stupid, badly considered law like this is damaging, but ultimately pointless, since it amounts to trying to hold back the tide by holding out your hands and shouting. The Internet has changed culture as profoundly as the invention of recordings did in the first place – companies sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending otherwise are, ultimately, doomed. That one’s on Eurogamer, too.
We’ve also done quite a few episodes of Stage Clear since I last updated. We’re winding down to the end, now – we’ve recorded our last “normal” episode (Season 2, Episode 13), and we did a live show at an event in Southampton a couple of weeks ago which should be posted on the site shortly. One more studio show (in London, with the wonderful GameWank guys as special guests and co-hosts), and possibly another live show, and then I’m off to Japan for a year – at which point we go on extended hiatus.
Whether the show returns depends largely on two factors – whether anyone wants it to, and whether co-host Perrin and I can maintain this sham of a so-called friendship for that long.
Proper blog post in the next couple of days. I promise.
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09.20.09
Posted in politics, technology, web at 2:39 pm by Rob Fahey
Creative Commons licensed image from nrkbeta on flickr
In recent weeks, there has been some fairly solid grassroots inertia gathering behind a campaign against new legislation being proposed by Lord Mandelson, the business secretary. The gist of the legislation is straightforward – it proposes that individuals accused of illegal downloading should, after a certain number of accusations, be disconnected from the Internet.
There are several grounds on which this proposal is mad, bad and downright dangerous. First and foremost, while the details have not been fully nailed down yet, the implication of what has been revealed so far is that users will not be disconnected after being tried for a criminal offence which is proven beyond reasonable doubt – rather, you’ll just need to be accused a certain number of times before it’s decided that you’re definitely guilty and your connection is severed.
This is a brand new step in the abuse of the British legal system by copyright holders. Some of you may recall a series of cases in the past few years where copyright holders employed legal firms with low moral boundaries to send out letters to large numbers of people whom they accused of downloading movies, videogames and so on. (I reported on one of those mass-mailings, which was initiated by game publishers including Atari and Codemasters, for The Times – the story made the front page.)
Those letters were simple legal blackmail. They told the recipients that they had to pay a few hundred pounds, and warned that if they tried to contest this, the legal costs would be much more expensive – so just pay up, and we’ll leave you alone. The reason for this blackmail approach is straightforward – the “evidence” which they had of copyright infringement would probably never have stood up in court. It certainly wouldn’t have stood up in a criminal court, where you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that your accusation is true – and on a good day, it would have fallen flat in a civil court too. (In Britain, civil courts have a less stringent standard of “proof” – you only have to prove that “on the balance of probabilities” something is true, rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”.)
The copyright holders know this. They know that it’s technologically nigh-on impossible to pin an act of downloading to an individual. Simply standing up and saying “I’ve got a Wi-Fi network” means that anyone within 100 yards of your house could have been responsible – even someone who sat on a bench in the park outside with a laptop – and that’s even before the question of things like spoofed IPs and the likes are considered. Unless you basically catch the person red-handed – raiding their home to find the infringing file sat on their hard drive and their bittorrent client merrily seeding it to the world – you basically can’t prove an act of downloading.
The solution the media industries have found is as straightforward as it is morally bankrupt – if you can’t work with the legal system, bypass it. Instead of having to fight things in the courts, and work with awkward concepts like “evidence” and “proof” and “justice”, they have lobbied the government to give them a system whereby they alone will be allowed to act as judge, jury and executioner. No courts, no police – just a few accusations from the likes of Sony, Disney or Activision and job done – off with his modem!
It’s not hard, of course, to see how a system where punishment is based on accusation rather than proof could be open to abuse. Indeed, it’s not so much a system open to abuse, as an abusive system.
Then there’s the question of the punishment itself – the cutting off of Internet access. There’s a generational issue at play here, I fear. Many people in their fifties, sixties or older – Lord Mandelson is 55, by the way – probably don’t see disconnection as much more than a slap on the wrist. These are people who probably don’t often check their own email or read webpages, who don’t manage their bank accounts or mobile phones or tax affairs online, for whom news stories about online shopping or Wikipedia or iPods seem impossibly exotic and futuristic. The Internet is a luxury, its removal no different to taking away a games console or a child’s toy.
That’s not what the Internet is to my generation – by which I mean anyone under 40, realistically speaking. I’m in the first generation to have grown up with the Internet as a constant presence (I’m a little ahead of the vanguard, since an early obsession with computers meant I was using Fidonet at a tender age), but people ten years older than me have used it for all of their working lives.
To many of us, the Internet is a service almost as vital as water, gas or electricity. It’s not only our primary social tool, it’s our first point of contact with the corporate and government services on which we rely. It’s essential for our work lives, for our lives as citizens – for our finances, our taxes, our democratic rights. It’s our touchstone for research, information and news.
This isn’t restricted to a handful of Internet obsessives. Countless people in the United Kingdom – whole swathes of the population – rely on the Internet for some aspect of their employment, even those whose job doesn’t involve computers in any way. They interact with their banks, their electricity, gas and water companies, their local councils, the Inland Revenue and the wider Government almost exclusively online. Their votes in elections are informed by online information, making it a crucial tool for democracy – and their social interactions with friends and acquaintances are often also carried out online.
Cutting that off is the removal of an essential service – the crippling of an individual’s ability to function as a normal member of modern society. This isn’t taking a toy from a naughty child (or at least, a child accused of being naughty by a biased third-party) – it’s a step back to the medieval concept of taking someone’s hand for being accused of stealing. It’ll cripple them, but at least they won’t do it again, eh?
Lord Mandelson doesn’t understand that, and nor do those who have worked with him on this proposal. (The media companies who urged him into this decision do know this, but why let the basic injustice of the punishment get in the way of protecting profits from their failing, outdated business models?) The proposed punishment in no way fits the crime – bear in mind that if you shoplifted a DVD from HMV, you’d get little more than a caution and a telling-off, despite the actual material losses involved in that crime. Download the same film from the Internet, an act which causes no direct material loss to anyone involved, and you could be cut off from the social, government, civic and financial services provided by the Internet. It’s an insane imbalance.
If you’re reading this, the chances are that you understand. You’re an Internet user. You know how vital it is – how damaging it would be to everything from your career to your social life if it was to be turned off on you. And unfortunately, you’re one of the few people who will ever know the extent of these laws, because the mainstream press – largely owned by the same companies which own the media groups lobbying for these laws – is mostly keeping quiet on this.
As such, you have a responsibility to act. That could be as much as writing to your local MP (they get remarkably little mail – and only a very tiny amount of that is lucid, well-argued and intelligent, so every decent letter gets considered fairly seriously, meaning that you can make a difference), or as little as getting involved in the campaign being waged by the fantastic Open Rights Group, or signing the petition organised by 38 Degrees, which is working with the ORG on the campaign.
Whether Labour is on its way out the door or not, this legislation needs to be killed dead in the water – because it’s much harder to repeal old laws than it is to bring in new ones. Be it just another in the litany of bad bills which Labour have run through parliament, or the sting in the tail from a dying government, this would be a basic attack on liberty, freedom of expression and the rights of consumers and citizens. We can’t let it happen.
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06.09.09
Posted in politics at 9:37 pm by Rob Fahey
- Creative Commons licensed image from akanekal on flickr
We woke up on Monday in a country that was a little less pleasant than it was on Sunday. The election of two BNP MEPs – one in Yorkshire and the Humber, one in the North West constituency – seems to confirm the dire predictions that the scandals dogging parliament would hand a breakthrough to the fascists.
The worst thing about this isn’t the simple fact that Britain will now send two of these vile, racist clowns to the European Parliament in our name. Rather it’s that this victory gives the BNP a platform which they’ve never previously enjoyed. As newly elected MEPs, they cannot legitimately be ignored by the nation’s broadcast media – and despite obvious distaste on the part of the interviewers, they have duly found slots on the week’s news programmes to spew their blatant, if weasel-worded, racist invective.
Worse again, the system of pay and expenses for MEPs essentially means that in the coming four years, the BNP’s operations will be funded to the tune of as much as four million pounds – by the taxpayer. That money is unlikely to temper their message, but it will improve their ability to deliver that message, which is a depressing prospect.
What went wrong? How did Britain, which for all its flaws is genuinely one of the most decent and tolerant nations in Europe, elect a pair of racist, homophobic, misogynistic, white supremacist politicians to the European Parliament? How the hell did it come to pass that this nation marked the 65th anniversary of D-Day – one of the greatest sacrifices made to combat the Nazis – by giving a platform to a new generation of fascists?
There is, at least, a silver lining. The figures speak for themselves; support for the BNP did not actually rise in the districts where their MEPs were elected. In both the North West and Yorkshire/Humber, the BNP vote was actually several thousand votes lower than it was in the last European election five years ago.
The BNP simply picked up these seats by default. With a low turnout, the vote for the Labour party collapsed; the Tory and Lib Dem votes slumped, in numeric terms, although the Tories managed to chart a very small rise in percentage share. The Green party surged, picking up 50% more votes than previously, but they already held a number of seats and it’s very hard to acquire more from that position. The BNP held steady, only slightly down on 2004′s numbers, and with an incredibly low turnout, that was enough.
I can think of no better metaphor than the one Justin at Chicken Yoghurt employed in his post on the subject on Monday morning – “This isn’t about a surge in support for fascists, it’s about a collapse in support for New Labour. The tide went out and exposed the stinking crap beneath the polluted waves.” The crap has always been there, it’s just that Labour’s muddy estuary water covered it up previously. No longer.
If that’s the silver lining, though, the reality is still sobering. Almost a million people cast a ballot for the BNP last Thursday – a million people who, on some level, see the party as acceptable, even as attractive.
I’d argue that the blame for that figure lies squarely at the doors of our major parties – and parts of our media. Britain has no truck with fascism or racism, on the whole – but in the past ten years, New Labour, the Tories and some segments of the media have done nothing but strengthen the BNP, giving credibility to their ridiculous narrative and turning them from a party on the outer fringes of lunatic politics, into a party that wins a million votes in an election.
This has happened because our political leaders, on both sides of the house, are too cowardly to challenge the BNP – or the BNP’s best cheerleaders, the tabloid newspapers who decry them loudly while simultaneously lending weight to all of their misguided, dishonest messages. We have spent ten years with a story running around this country about immigration. The story says that there is a “flood” of immigration to the UK. It says that our borders are open to whoever wants to come in, that bogus asylum seekers are clogging up our ports. Worse, it says that these people are taking jobs from British workers, and that the government discriminates against British citizens by putting immigrants at the top of the queue for housing, social services, healthcare and benefits.
These things are lies. They have been proven, time and again, to be lies. The figures cited by the BNP – and by tabloids like the Daily Mail – for immigration are based on (presumably deliberate) misinterpretations of the statistics, ably assisted by right-wing lobbyists such as MigrationWatch UK. Our borders are not open, nor are they assaulted by bogus asylum seekers. It is harder than it has ever been for a foreign person live and work in the UK, even as a qualified professional – or even as someone with many years of life in this country behind them. Our immigration system is tough as hell, our borders unwelcoming – even to the most genuine of migrants.
This is the reality – but somehow, the government and the opposition parties have allowed the BNP to get away with its lies about immigration. Of course, the BNP isn’t really talking about immigration at all; that’s one of many convenient phrases which the party uses to refer to “non-whites”. Most of the people it takes issue with aren’t actually immigrants, but are the children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants – with as much right to claim the label “British” as anyone else on the island.
Are the party’s million voters, however, racists? Perhaps. There’s certainly a big swathe of people there who fit the stereotype – angry, impotent white men who haven’t gone anywhere in life, who being too cowardly or not able enough to channel that anger into challenging the system choose to lash out at minorities who are, ironically, generally even more disenfranchised than they are. Ethnic minorities. Gays. Women.
I don’t honestly believe that there are a million angry racists swarming out to the polling stations, however. I suspect that much of the BNP’s legitimacy, if not its vote, comes from people who think they have genuine concerns about immigration. Exposed to an ongoing narrative about foreigners coming over here, committing crimes, taking jobs from honest British workers, building mosques to recruit for Terror!, and whatever else is on the front page of the Mail or the Sun this week, why wouldn’t they believe that these things are true – and that our major parties are failing to tackle serious threats to the nation?
Worse, both Labour and the Tories have done nothing but exacerbate this belief. Each has played a dangerous game where they attempt to outdo the other in being horrible to immigrants (and the disabled, and the unemployed). Each time Labour reveals a new way of making it harder for people to stay in the country – regardless of how settled and integrated they may be, or what a huge contribution they may make to the nation, as many recent cases have demonstrated – the Tories have a nastier one. Every word of vile, tabloid-pleasing rhetoric about asylum seekers that spills from a Tory mouth is immediately matched by two from someone on the other side of the House.
We are now, after twelve years of what should have been progressive government, a nation which treats those who come here as our guests as scum. We have built concentration camps to house immigrants as they pass through our increasingly cruel court system – concentration camps to which they are hauled in long trips across the country in the backs of windowless vans, with no consideration for age or illness. We have documented cases of families, of children emerging from these camps malnourished and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Meanwhile, supposedly one of the greatest democracies in the world now routinely sends genuine asylum seekers, fleeing persecution in countries where life is far cheaper than in ours, back to nations where they face torture or death. A young gay man was ordered to be deported back to Iran, which flogs and hangs gay people, with the Home Office’s advice being to keep his sexuality quiet – hardly possible, given that he had just gone through a court appeal process on the very basis of that sexuality. This ruling was quashed after an outcry; others were not. Our craven government sends people to their deaths in violent dictatorships rather than face grumpy tabloid headlines; our vile opposition says this isn’t enough, and wants even tougher rules.
The rhetoric and the reality of this evil system have emerged because Labour and the Conservatives don’t have the balls to fight the fascists on the real issues. Strong government and strong opposition would confront them on matters of genuine principle. Should we welcome asylum seekers fleeing persection? Should people from all around the world who wish to work hard and contribute to our society be allowed into Britain? They should be willing to roll out the facts, to place the isolated statistics used by the BNP or the Daily Mail into context and show the reality of immigration, the pettyness of the so-called “flood”.
They should, in other words, have spent the past decade framing this debate, forcing the fascists to fight on even ground. Instead, the phrasing and form of this whole discussion has been crafted by the BNP and its ilk. Parliament obsesses over the idea of being tough on immigration, instead of robustly responding to the idea that there’s an immigration problem. They talk about addressing the concerns of the BNP voters, rather than addressing the misinformation they have been fed. Rather than creating a new narrative, they seem content to flow with the clever and dishonest narrative of the far right.
My fear, today, isn’t about what the BNP will do with its minimal new-found power. Rather, it’s what the power-hungry, principle-free Labour and Tory parties will do in response – what new, aggressive, inhumane measure they will introduce to try to appeal to the BNP’s electorate, how much more rabble-rousing anti-immigrant rhetoric will now emerge not from Nick Griffin, but from the Home Office and the Shadow Cabinet. The fascists have dragged our democracy down to their level, and that’s more depressing than any BNP electoral victory could be.
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06.03.09
Posted in politics at 3:58 pm by Rob Fahey
This is just too delicious (and simultaneously horrifying) not to post. It’s the Daily Star’s front page reporting on the Air France flight which crashed into the Atlantic this week. Let’s consider a couple of things briefly…
Firstly, the “new Bermuda Triangle” isn’t actually near Bermuda, and doesn’t really have a shape given that it’s not actually had any other accidents around it. The Bermuda Triangle was named that becuase it was around Bermuda (duh!) and also because of the huge number of maritime disasters in the region. I like a snappy headline as much as the next man, but this is ridiculous.
But not as ridiculous as… The line above the headline. Go on, you probably missed it first time round. Have a look. Yes, dear reader, “AIR FRANCE JET SWALLOWED BY BLACK HOLE”.
…
I’m not sure I have words for that. Other than “unlikely”.
And that’s ignoring the paper’s decision to pick the single fruitiest picture of the prettiest passenger they could find to illustrate the whole mess. Do you think they considered “LOOK AT THIS DEAD GIRL’S TITS!” as a possible – and more honest – headline, or did they go straight to the black hole theory without passing Go?
(The horrifying part, of course, is that as Anton Vowl rather depressingly points out over at The Enemies of Reason, the same paper will presumably be telling its readers how to vote in the elections tomorrow. Assuming it’s not swallowed by a black hole in the meantime.)
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05.12.09
Posted in games, politics, work at 5:55 pm by Rob Fahey
I’ve written a pair of retrospective pieces in the past few weeks, tying up two stories which I’ve been covering pretty much since the start of my writing career. I don’t expect that either of these stories is actually dead and buried now, but they certainly seem to have reached conclusions of a sort.
First up, a summary look at the rise and fall (and fall, and fall, and fall…) of Eidos, Britain’s one-time great white hope for games publishing. They were bought by Square Enix last month, finally putting an end to years of speculation as the wheezing corpse of the company limped towards an uncertain end.
Secondly, I couldn’t let Duke Nukem Forever pass into the great beyond without a farewell. As I mention in the article, I started my career with Duke – my very first published page in a national magazine included a news story about two exciting new PC games being announced back to back. They were Duke Nukem Forever, and Daikatana. (I’d like to pretend that I’ve got better at calling ‘em over the years, but I’m not entirely convinced.)
Presently stuck in the middle of SOAS’ end of year exams. When I close my eyes, kanji dance a crazy jig on the back of my eyelids, mocking me by being almost, but not quite, recognisable. Count yourselves lucky – if I didn’t have so much revision to do, I’d definitely be writing a gigantic post about the present expenses scandal.
(Suffice it to say that I respectfully disagree with (the otherwise wonderful) Stephen Fry on this one; for one thing, I think there’s a different morality involved when it’s public money on the table, and that a higher standard of moral behaviour can rightfully be expected from those whom we trust to make the laws that govern our nation. For another thing, while Fry is quite right in calling out the nation’s journalists as a venal and disgusting bunch when it comes to expenses and allowances, I don’t think anyone is proposing to let them run the country. Pigs place their snouts in the trough – that doesn’t mean MPs need to.)
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04.14.09
Posted in games, work, writing at 12:26 pm by Rob Fahey
You may have caught the controversy over Konami’s new Iraq war game, Six Days in Fallujah, last week. In a nutshell, the Daily Mail decided that this was a horrible insult to everyone who has ever even heard of Iraq, rang up some of the usual suspects and ran a chest-beating “evil game makers make fun of Iraq tragedy raaagh” piece.
I got a chance to write about this for two very different audiences – once for GamesIndustry.biz and Eurogamer.net, and then for The Times on Saturday. I’m pleased with The Times’ coverage – we wanted to present this as a discussion of accuracy and relevance, and challenge the idea that games can’t intelligently address current affairs, which is quite a progressive position for a traditional newspaper.
Also, if you missed it, Episode 9 of Stage Clear went up late last week. Our iTunes feed is still broken (I believe it’ll fix itself next week), so you’ll probably need to download it manually – sorry!
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04.08.09
Posted in politics at 2:33 pm by Rob Fahey
I love my city. The breadth and depth of my affection for London has only grown over the years that I have lived here, and friends are often amused by my enthusiastic outbursts about the city or its history. I often succumb to a strange urge to play tour guide, dragging anyone who’ll humour me around areas I find particularly interesting, scenic or historic.
London is my adopted home, the world city I love best and the cornerstone of my identity. I long ago passed, without even noticing, the milestone where I began introducing myself as “a Londoner, originally from Ireland”, as distinct from “an Irishman, living in London”.
Perhaps that’s why, when things go wrong with my city, I feel quite genuinely upset and hurt by them – an unusually emotional response, and one I have to work hard to rationalise. Our failure to tackle gang violence in parts of the city twists like a knife in my guts. I fume as I watch Boris Johnson fiddle while the Tory boroughs who dominate his Mayoralty disassemble the decision making apparatus and power of the Mayor’s office, and scheme to push our transport policy back towards private cars and away from public transport, walking and cycling.
My emotional response reached a peak when the Metropolitan Police shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell tube station in July 2005. The violence of it was even more shocking because it happened right in my neighbourhood. A resident of Vauxhall since I moved to the city, Stockwell is one of my local Northern Line stations. I use it several times a week. I’d probably stood in the very carriage where plain-clothes police, after failing to give a clear warning, fired seven bullets into the head of an uncomprehending, unthreatening civilian.
In the intervening years, the initial gut response has chilled into a more rational, cold anger at the events themselves, at the police culture they represent, and most of all, at the amateurish, blatant cover-up which ensued, and at the establishment which allows that flimsy cover-up to stand.
This week, we’re talking about another death in my city. Ian Tomlinson was a 47 year old man who worked as a newsagent in the City of London. On his way home on the day of the (almost entirely peaceful) G20 protests on April 1st, he died of a heart attack inside a police cordon.
Minutes before his death, Ian Tomlinson – walking home, with his hands in his pockets and his back to the police lines – was clubbed across the back of his knees by a police officer and then pushed to the ground in a completely unprovoked assault. As a friend commented after seeing the video which has been released today by the Guardian newspaper, Tomlinson was pushed so hard that he actually bounced off the ground. A few minutes later, he was dead.
So, what’s the standard procedure here? Well, as Unity points out over at Liberal Conspiracy, the police in Britain have taken to treating criminal assaults which result in death as murder cases – even, in one case, where the heart attack that killed the man happened over 24 hours later.
It will not surprise you, I suspect, to discover that matters are treated rather differently when the assailant is a police officer, as distinct from a member of the criminal peasant underclass that we’re told to live in constant fear of.
Within hours of Ian Tomlinson’s death, the police were denying that he’d had any contact with their officers. Instead, they gave the newspapers a rather different story – one where gallant police officers rushed in to help this man after he suffered a heart attack, but were tragically impeded in their work by vicious rioting crusties and anarchists who pelted them with bricks as they tried to rescue him. The newspapers, having long since discovered that reprinting official statements is much easier than actually doing journalism, and that a story about evil crusty anarchists delights a certain knuckle-dragging section of the audience, reprinted the police line unquestioningly and knocked off down to the pub.
Five years ago, that would have been that. A handful of eyewitnesses would have protested that this simply isn’t what happened, but their comments would have gone unheard outside of Indymedia and a handful of student newspapers. Middle England would have shaken its head at the antics of these terrible dreadlocked crusties, killing that poor man. End of story.
Today, however, we all carry video cameras, and the story is different. We have footage of a police officer viciously assaulting Ian Tomlinson. The police lied about this. We have eyewitness accounts of the “rioters” providing first aid to Tomlinson, and requesting help from the police, along with footage of the crowd standing back, making room and allowing police medics to work on the stricken man. The police lied about this. We have footage of police officers quite distinctly not being pelted with bricks. At one point, a solitary empty water bottle sails towards the officers and bounces harmlessly off body armour. I’ve been hit by more dangerous projectiles in business meetings. The police, once again, lied about this.
They did more than lie, however. They also concealed. The City of London is one of the places with the most surveillance on the face of the planet. In a nation filled with CCTV, the City stands out like a hotspot – there are cameras on every wall and every corner. Footage from those cameras, which would have revealed the lies of the police, was not released. As an interesting parallel, I invite you to consider the fact that on the day when Jean Charles de Menezes died, the CCTV cameras in Stockwell station and on the tube train where he was shot were, apparently, malfunctioning. What unhappy coincidence!
Moreover, they smeared. Remember when the press breathlessly reported that Jean Charles de Menezes was an illegal immigrant? (He wasn’t.) How about the reports that he may have been a drug addict, possibly even involved in the trade? (He wasn’t, on either count.) Both lies have entered the popular perception of de Menezes, muddying the water around the Met’s behaviour and giving knuckle-draggers the opportunity to mutter “bloody got what he had coming to him” around their mouthfuls of cheap lager.
It’s little surprise, then, that in the day following Ian Tomlinson’s death we saw the beginning of allegations that he had attacked the police (he hadn’t), had verbally assaulted them (he hadn’t – not until they smashed him into the pavement, anyway) and even more unpleasant insinuations about his alcohol use (utterly unproven and entirely irrelevant – attacking a completely harmless man with his hands in his pockets who’s had a few beers is no better than attacking the same man when he’s sober).
One wonders what would have happened if the people who filmed the footage hadn’t sent it to a newspaper. What if they had sent it directly to the police, for instance? Would it have been released? Or would the “managed enquiry” presently underway by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, an enquiry whereby police officers themselves investigate their own colleagues (the word “Independent” here is, presumably, intended to be ironic) have reached the most convenient conclusions, sat on the evidence and hoped it would all go away?
There is other footage, too, which is worth looking at from the G20 protests. There is footage (and eyewitness accounts) of a baton charge on protestors who are sitting down on a road, harming no-one. There is footage of a violent police assault on a crowd of protesters, all of whom are holding both hands in the air and chanting “not a riot, not a riot”.
And then there is the iconic footage of the windows of RBS being smashed, a few minutes of footage which is being wheeled out by every right-winger or authoritarian to justify the actions of the police on the day. Yet… Look closer. In this footage, there are no more than half a dozen actual “rioters” – and at least three dozen photographers and cameramen from the press.
Is it entering the realms of conspiracy theory to wonder who told those cameramen to gather at that exact spot? To ponder whose decision it was that RBS, alone out of all of the businesses in that part of the City, should leave its windows unboarded on April 1st? To question why those five or six window-breakers could not be isolated (they’re a long way away from the rest of the crowd already) and rounded up? Instead, the entire crowd was penned in with them, in a process known as “kettling”, and deprived food, water and toilet facilities for several long hours, as well as being assaulted by police if they attempted to leave the cordon.
I have no illusions about the composition of these demonstrations. The only time I have attended them was at some of the early Stop the War demos, and I quickly became disillusioned due to the heavy presence of loudmouthed groups like the various Socialist factions, who seemed determined to dominate proceedings. On the day of the April 1st protests, I showed my support for the demonstrators by, er, going to the giant Westfield shopping centre on the other side of the city with a friend and buying stuff I didn’t need.
But even if I don’t agree with all of the sentiments of those protestors, I believe that they have a fundamental right to be heard. The nation is angry, and rightfully so, and we have a right to take to our streets – OUR streets, note, built and maintained with OUR money, for OUR benefit – and express that anger peacefully. The police, however, have chosen to try to clamp down on and discourage protest – keeping reasonable moderate people away by portraying peaceful protests as “riots”, and when the protesters don’t cooperate and riot as they’re meant to, the police create violent situations for the media to film and broadcast.
More than our right to protest, however, there is another right to consider. We have the right to walk through our streets without being assaulted and killed by the police force that we pay to protect us. We have the right, when a police officer commits a criminal act in broad daylight (or any other kind of light), for that act to be treated with seriousness, not covered up as our supposed protectors close ranks around the culprit. Innocent people should never have to be afraid of the police, and I fear that today, in my city, that assertion is crumbling.
The Metropolitan Police is a part of my city, an intrinsic, vital part of the functioning of this great urban landscape – but as each of these stories emerges, I find myself less and less sure who these people are actually serving. Where does “keeping us safe” end, and “keeping us in line” begin – and when did we cross that line?
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03.19.09
Posted in games, work at 1:57 am by Rob Fahey
I’ve been even more sporadic than usual in my updates here of late. I’m blaming my workload; it turns out that doing a university course which everyone and his dog warned me was “really really tough” at the same time as trying to earn a living like a proper person is actually quite hard. Who’d have thought it, eh?
I have, however, been finding time to talk bollocks about videogames once a week, which you’re very welcome to listen to. Episode Six of Stage Clear, featuring a discussion of horror games and a section which co-host Perrin is worried will “get us into trouble” (I’m not sure with whom, exactly, we’ll be in trouble – his mum?), is live on the Stage Clear website (and on iTunes, if you’re that way inclined) right now. (Episode Five, which I never mentioned on this blog, is up there as well. We didn’t just skip that number in case it was unlucky.)
Couple of other quick links – a piece in The Times about why the right games triumphed at this year’s BAFTAs, and an editorial on Eurogamer and GamesIndustry.biz on why it’s fair to point the finger at videogames over childhood obesity (as long as you’re pointing fingers in quite a few other places simultaneously, starting with the parents).
Second term is almost finished, so I get a month of my old life back before the exam term begins. I’ll blog properly once that happens and stop just spamming links to other stuff I’ve been up to, promise.
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03.02.09
Posted in games, work, writing at 6:21 pm by Rob Fahey
Well, not so much “news” as a collection of links illustrating what I’ve been up to recently.
I never mentioned that Episode 3 of Stage Clear went live last week, marking three whole weeks of actually obeying the schedule we set ourselves. I’m off out to record another this evening, which will bring us to a month. I’m as surprised as you no doubt are (and slightly frightened, if I’m being truthful).
We’ve had great feedback to Stage Clear so far, which is wonderful. To be perfectly truthful, we set out to make a handful of recordings with the assumption that only a couple of our friends would listen, and that they’d get bored after the first few. However, our download figures are significantly better than that, and we’ve had fantastic feedback, which has taken us somewhat by surprise. At this point, we’re thinking about bizarre things like “growing the audience”, but honestly, the only way we’re keen on approaching that is through word of mouth – so if you like the podcast, please do tell all your friends / fake Facebook friends / forum pals / mortal enemies. (Of course, if you don’t like the podcast, you should keep your filthy mouth shut*.)
On a more actually-serious writing front, I’ve been doing bits and pieces for The Times again recently – their games coverage is genuinely going from strength to strength at the moment (no, seriously), with me on the sidelines chipping in context and analysis columns to go alongside some really good feature spreads. Most recently I talked a bit about “How Nintendo took on the world. And won.”, and to go along with the launch of Halo Wars last week, I penned a column “In defence of game sequels”.
Oh, I also got a barrel of good feedback for last week’s Eurogamer / GamesIndustry.biz column, Creative Downturn, so I’m rather chuffed with that too.
I think that’s about the lot. Other than that, I fear that my life has largely been absorbed in a whirlwind of learning kanji and new grammar structures, as my attempts to absorb Japanese at a ridiculous pace continue. You’ve all been spared any further political rants as a result – it’s not that I haven’t been shouting at the television, it’s just that I don’t have time to write it all down right now…
* Or tell us why you don’t like it. We’ll either improve based on your suggestion, or mock you publicly in the next episode, depending on how much we like you.
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