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.
Permalink
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.
Permalink
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.)
Permalink
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.)
Permalink
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?
Permalink
12.09.08
Posted in politics at 10:09 pm by Rob Fahey
Picture from leafar. on Flickr
When Boris Johnson campaigned to become Mayor of London, a major aspect of his platform was the claim that Ken Livingstone was operating a cliquey, unaccountable and opaque executive – in place of which he, Boris Johnson, would usher in a new era of transparency, openness and honesty.
This week, his most senior advisor on the Olympics – one of the two biggest projects London is undertaking during his tenure, the other being Crossrail – became the centre of attention after substantial financial misconduct in his day job (a senior executive and founder of Carphone Warehouse) came to light. Naturally, both journalists and, frankly, the people of London rather wanted to know what Boris was going to do about the fact that his Olympics advisor had just been kicked out of the City, and whether any action would be taken.
Here’s how Boris responded – transparent, open government in action. “La la la la”? Is this what centuries of development of democratic politics have won us?
Paul Ross, the chap in question, stepped down today. Which makes him, on this matter, a moral cut above Boris Johnson.
(A sidenote. Boris is presently under investigationмебели and may face a standards enquiry into his conduct over the whole Damian Greene affair, which I’ve blogged about before. Boris, you see, is chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, and in that role – which is meant to be non-political – he was informed by the Met’s acting commissioner about the process of the investigation.
Unfortunately for Boris, his loyalty to the Tory party seems to be more important to him than his loyalty to the policing of London, so he reacted by making prejudicial public statements about the ongoing investigation (which he’s not meant to do), phoning up Damian Greene to have a chat with him about the whole thing (which he’s definitely not meant to do), and generally barging through every code of conduct the Mayor is meant to uphold like a bull in a china shop.
He may now face a standards enquiry which may well suspend him from office for some time – but has the power to remove him from his position and ban him from holding any public office for up to five years, should the allegations against him be upheld in full. It seems too much to hope for, but if there were ever an affair in which a politician deserved to be hoist on his own petard, it’s this one – and frankly, if any good at all is to come out of this sorry Damian Greene affair, it should be a clear line in the sand between operational policing and politics.)
Technorati Tags: Boris Johnson, Conservatives, Damian Greene, London, policing, politics, Tories
Permalink
12.02.08
Posted in politics at 10:38 am by Rob Fahey
I really, really didn’t want to write anything about this topic, but today’s evening papers carried just enough utterly uninformed crud on the matter to make me annoyed enough to want to get it off my chest. Sorry to those in the line of fire (i.e. anyone still reading, having established that this is another post on politics).
Last week, a Conservative MP was arrested in a fairly heavy-handed manner by the police. He was arrested on suspicion of “conspiracy to cause misconduct in a public office”, a rarely used but relatively sanely worded offence which, in essence, seems designed as a bit of a catch-all with which to charge senior public figures who’ve been arranging to do naughty stuff like giving or accepting bribes. Note that it’s a “conspiracy” offence – a pretty specific term which means that you didn’t actually DO the naughty stuff, but you knowingly aided and abetted.
This chap, one Damian Greene, has suddenly become the heart of a great deal of chest-thumping and furious scribbling by the newspapers and the blogosphere alike. Apparently, his arrest is not only evidence that we live in a police state, it’s also a shocking assault on British democracy and of principles which date back to the very basis of our parliamentary democracy.
Now, let’s be perfectly clear here – our Labour government has absolutely no compunction about assaulting British democracy. Their attacks on the fairness of our judicial system, on the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and on the role of Parliament in decision-making are grevious, well-documented and absolutely appalling. So from the outset, if there were to be an accusation of Labour using the police force for political dirty work… Well, I for one wouldn’t put it past them.
However…
Well, the “however” is a big one. There are two key problems with chest-beating over Damian Greene’s plight. The first is that it illustrates that British people don’t seem to know what a “police state” is, but we can forgive that on the grounds of exaggeration and hyperbole (in return for which, I demand a free pass next time I opine that Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is definitely worse than Hitler).
The second, a bit more worrying perhaps, is that it illustrates an equal lack of understanding regarding their own history and the basis of parliamentary democracy.
Lots of newspapers and commentators have been shouting about Charles I – a particularly nasty and mentally unstable king with a proclivity for the more obscure and esoteric aspects of religion, who managed to precipitate a civil war and get his head chopped off when he attempted to assert the whole “Divine Right of Kings” nonsense and win absolute power back from the increasingly empowered parliament. Charles, you see, was told to bugger off when he tried to force Parliament to give up some of its MPs to his forces. “Aha!”, cry the budding historians in the papers, “This set a precedent of parliamentary privilege, which has just been broken! The end of all things is upon us!”
This proves, if any further proof were required, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Yes, Parliament told Charlie to sling his hook – but in doing so, they did NOT establish parliamentary privilege. In fact, Parliamentary Privilege then wasn’t terribly different to how it looks now – essentially, it guarantees a limited set of rights to MPs in the House, including important ones like freedom of speech… And freedom from arrest. “Oho!”, cry the newfound historical experts! Except that, er, that freedom from arrest doesn’t actually cover criminal matters. Damian Greene was arrested on a criminal matter. Equally, the Palace of Westminster is not, as such soi disant experts seem to believe, a church or cathedral in the 1500s. Criminals and criminal acts are not in some way “safe” within their walls, and police search rights and warrants apply there just as they do in any other office.
No “ancient and undoubted right” of the House of Commons has been breached. In fact, there’s essentially nothing unusual about what just happened – there have been similar cases scattered over the past century, at least half a dozen if not more. Few of them got very much airtime – but then again, few of them happened just when a government that was a dead-set to lose the next election suddenly looks like pulling some kind of strange victory from the jaws of defeat.
The funny thing is, there’s another aspect of Charles I’s unfortunate reign which is much more relevant to what has happened to Damian Greene. It came at the very end of his unpleasant life – when he got his head chopped off. In that action, Britain set a much more important precedent than the one Greene’s supporters claim – the principle that no man, not even the divine king himself, is above the law. The laws of the land apply equally to all, and police investigations must proceed on exactly that principle.
The other thing that the Damian Greene blowhards seem utterly outraged over is the idea that their man was arrested for “exposing” the Government – which is, of course, the duty of the Opposition.
Fine and good. If Damian Greene, or the police, turn around tomorrow and say “here’s the document they arrested me over – it’s information of great public interest which the Home Office tried to suppress for political reasons”, then neither I nor anyone else in the country will consider any further action against him even remotely justified. The man will be owed an apology by the Metropolitan Police, frankly.
To read the papers and the blogs, you’d think that has already happened. But… It hasn’t. In fact, we don’t know WHAT Damian Greene leaked, or tried to “groom” his Home Office source into leaking. Here, the waters are much muddier than the papers and the Conservatives would like us to believe.
The reality is that of the recent Home Office leaks, some are definitely public interest documents – but others are not. Others are personal details of cases the Home Office is working on, which have no right being in the public domain. Others still are more worrying – they’re internal Labour Party political documents, discussing the loyalty or affairs of various members of the party. My understanding is that they’re not really “Home Office” documents – they leaked from within that department, but they’re related to the Labour Party’s internal workings, not to the business of the Home Office itself. Their leaking isn’t in the public interest. It’s pure, brazen, political espionage.
If that’s what Damian Greene was up to, then he wasn’t acting in the public interest. Such actions are considered criminal in any sphere, and most certainly are not covered by parliamentary privilege. If the Met was made aware of solid evidence of that kind of action, then their course of action in this case was absolutely correct. If anything, the fact that our MPs can be investigated on matters like this is proof that our democracy still works, at least in some ways. The only way in which this is a harbinger of the sky falling in is the unfortunate fact that following this outcry, the Met will think twice about investigating political misdeeds in future – removing, with a deep sense of irony, yet another barrier to the abuse of our democracy.
Technorati Tags: Conservatives, Damian Greene, Labour, politics, Tories
Permalink
11.22.08
Posted in politics at 6:20 pm by Rob Fahey
(Photo by willhowells on flickr)
The overriding problem with British politics in recent years is, in my view, straightforward – with little to choose between the two major parties and a first-past-the-post voting system which excludes everyone else (even the Lib Dems, realistically) from the race, democracy has been looking increasingly pointless with each passing month.
The Tory surge we saw a few months back, where Cameron’s rehabilitated party opened a 30-point lead in the polls, wasn’t really on the back of any crucial difference in policy. Sure, the Tories don’t like ID cards (which is good) and David Davis managed to whip them into opposing 42 day detention before his principled stand in calling a by-election for his seat gave his nervous colleagues a golden opportunity to defenestrate him from the party’s day-to-day running. Both of those things are laudable.
On almost everything else, though, what’s to choose? The Tories are every bit as repugnant as Labour on key issues like immigration, and perhaps even more unpleasant on questions of crime and enforcement. Despite the frequent attacks on “the welfare state” from Conservative supporters, the party itself doesn’t actually have any policies to reduce welfare dependancy that Labour isn’t already implementing (some of them desperately unfair and discriminatory, placing huge, unnecessary burdens on genuinely disabled and ill people).
On privatisation, the Conservatives are as deeply enamoured with PFI and other such dishonest wheezes as Browns’s treasury has ever been. On transport, they’re big fans of private cars, as they’ve always been – proved admirably by Boris Johnson’s recent decisions to halt various public transport, walking and cycling focused projects in London because they would have inconvenienced drivers. (Let’s be realistic – if you’re driving in Zone 1, you deserve to be inconvenienced, preferably by being beaten with sticks until you learn some bloody sense and regard for your fellow man.)
None of this is surprising. After all, both the Tories and Labour are chasing the same dragon – they both want the love and support of Paul Dacre and Rebekah Wade, the editors of the Daily Mail and the Sun respectively. By extension, they’re both seeking the support of Daily Mail & General Trust and News International – the two most powerful and influential media companies in the United Kingdom.
They’re also, coincidentally, the same companies which make tons of money out of screaming about our BROKEN SOCIETY on a daily basis (because “Crime Figures Approach Record Low” or “Number of Child Abuse Cases Actually The Same As It’s Always Been Pretty Much” doesn’t sell many papers). Oh, and they both despise the BBC, because they don’t like having to compete with a publicly funded body that doesn’t have to fill its broadcasts with adverts and appeal to the lowest common denominator in its current affairs reporting.
Anyone notice how those two strands – Broken Britain and Bastard BBC – seem to have dominated both our media discourse and political discourse in recent months? Watching Brown and Cameron alike lapping from Rupert Murdoch’s wrinkly Australian teat is enough to make me feel furious and ashamed, and I’m only an adopted son of this nation. For those of you born here, it should be enough to create a spike in sales of Guy Fawkes masks and dynamite.
However! The past couple of weeks have been fascinating, because there’s suddenly a gulf of policy opening up between Labour and the Conservatives – where previously you’d have had a tough time passing a razorblade between them.
It’s the economy, of course, that’s driving this. Up until now, the Tories haven’t liked talking much about their economic policy. There’s a sneaking suspicion that this is because the shadow treasurer, George Osborne, is actually even more of a repugnant, over-privileged and insolent little oik than Cameron, and much worse at hiding the fact – so the less he says, the better. Certainly, he hasn’t seemed capable of opening his mouth without sticking his (expensively shod) feet straight into it in recent weeks. He’s so bad, in fact, that during the Northern Rock crisis (and ever since) his Lib Dem opposite number, Vince Cable, became the go-to guy for media looking for an opposition statement, completely bypassing the bumbling Tories.
Anyway, they’re still not talking about their economic policy – much. But they’re saying enough for us to understand that little has changed in how the Tories think, no matter how many times they put the word “compassionate” into their speeches and press releases.
The Tory approach to the global recession is this. They will cut taxes for big business. They will cut back on spending – although they won’t say what’ll be affected, it’s safe to say that the NHS, policing and transport will see at least some cutbacks in order to balance the books. Note that in London, Boris Johnson (the country’s most senior elected Tory) has cut back on the Metropolitan Police’s budget, despite running his election campaign partially on a law and order ticket. That move was probably formulated by his advisors from Policy Exchange, a thinktank hugely popular with Conservative Central HQ and whose recommendations are likely to form the heart of any national Conservative administration.
The Labour approach is almost the opposite. They will cut taxes for individuals. They will increase spending – borrowing money in order to implement both tax cuts and major government projects. The idea is that as the private sector declines temporarily, the government can borrow money cheaply and use it to generate work for the economy – big, headline infrastructure projects that will keep money flowing through the economy and unemployment nice and low.
The Tory approach, which owes much to Reagan-era trickle-down economics, is exactly the same kind of attitude they had in the early Eighties, under Thatcher. Then, their approach to inflation and recession was to allow the unemployment numbers to swell – in the process causing untold damage to many British communities, especially in the North of the country, where the social impact of widespread unemployment is still being felt. Next time you hear David Cameron talking about “Broken Britain”, bear in mind who broke the bloody thing in the first place.
Labour’s approach is being derided by the Tories for creating a “tax timebomb”. If you borrow now, they say, you’ll have to pay back later – so we’ll all be taxed more heavily down the line.
Well… Yeah. That much is obvious. But, while I don’t like everything (or, indeed, very much at all) about Brown’s handling of our economy in the past, on this topic – he’s dead right. We’re facing a recession, and in the face of that, the right thing for a government to do is to cushion the blow until such time as things start improving. The Tories’ policies, in contrast, would see the Government crawling back into its shell for the duration, keeping the Treasury’s books balanced at the expense of deepening and lengthening the recession, and causing untold human misery as the unemployment figures soar.
We are a socialist nation, a nation whose heritage from centuries of parliamentary democracy is a state which looks after its people, engages in moderate redistribution and, crucially, puts its citizens ahead of its economy – at least nominally. That’s a reflection of the will of the British people. American-style economic focus, and the recoil they feel from concepts like redistribution or socialism, are alien to these shores.
Yet even in America it’s accepted that big Government spending is going to be needed to keep the hounds from the door during the coming recession – while in Britain, Cameron’s Tories would happily batten down the Treasury’s hatches, say “fuck you” to struggling families and individuals, shrug as the unemployment lines grow, and then look cheerful when the economy booms again and pat themselves on the back for “responsible fiscal policy”. Meanwhile, just like last time, entire familes, estates and towns will never quite recover…
Labour’s alternative is that we’ll pay a little bit more when times are good, in order to prevent things from getting REALLY unpleasant when times are bad. That seems reasonable to me. It’s good enough to make me realise that as much as Labour’s period in government has angered me in many ways, the alternative is (still) much worse.
It seems reasonable to everyone else too, it seems. This week, MORI put the Tories’ lead over Labour at… Three percent. Not enough to put the Tories in government if an election were held tomorrow. With the veneer of party unity sliding from the Conservatives as Osborne proves an increasingly divisive figure, the common belief that David Cameron will be on the steps of No.10 some time in the next couple of years seems to be looking less and less certain.
Technorati Tags: Boris Johnson, Conservatives, Daily Mail, David Cameron, economy, Gordon Brown, immigration, Labour, Lib Dems, Liberal Democrats, London, politics, Rupert Murdoch, The Sun, Tories
Permalink
11.06.08
Posted in books, politics at 10:18 am by Rob Fahey
Author Michael Crichton died today, aged 66. He had suffered from cancer for a number of years. For those who don’t know of the man, he wrote the novels on which movies like Jurassic Park and Rising Sun were based, and was one of the creators of long-running medical drama ER.
I haven’t felt quite as conflicted over someone’s death for quite a long time.
I absolutely loved Crichton’s early work – I remember having those massive two-books-in-one editions of stuff like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and Rising Sun when I was a teenager, and they were pretty influential on the kind of things I got interested in and started reading science-fact work about. It’s entirely fair to describe Crichton as an inspiration, someone who showed me that a love of science and a love of literature didn’t have to be mutually exclusive – a torch now carried by wonderful authors like Neal Stephenson.
(Lots of his early books were poorly converted into movies, sadly – I think one of my favourites is Congo, which is desperately underrated after being made into an utterly awful movie.)
Then… Well, then it went to shit. The man turned into a massive, epic, neo-con twat, and the quality of his books plummeted at the same time. From being someone who would inspire you to look into a field of science you didn’t know about and broaden your horizons, he turned into someone who was genuinely anti-science – a naysayer and fearmonger who might as well have walked out of the pages of a tabloid newspaper, rather than spinning great fiction from cutting edge research. Next, a thriller about the biotech / genetics industry, was awful. Prey, which dealt with nanotechnology swarms, was passable – and then became awful by the end.
State of Fear was… Well, it was pretty much the end of his career, and for good reason. It was practically the book in which he “came out” as a neo-con – taking an extremely dim view of the science behind global warming, so much so that it made him into a darling of the Global Warming Denial movement in US politics (especially Senator Jim Inhofe, a serial abuser of science and bare-faced liar on the topic of global warming).
It’s not that he took a controversial (and largely unsupported) view of the science, it’s that he took it so damned seriously. He didn’t, in interviews or in the text, present this as being a deliberate provocation to try to stir up debate – he presented it as being God’s own fucking truth, and everyone who disagreed was a brainwashed idiot. Pretty rich for a man essentially promoting a ridiculous conspiracy theory. The end result was a passage in one of his books where he depicted one of his outspoken scientific critics, in extremely thinly veiled terms, as a “child rapist” – one of the most infantile and disgusting things I’ve seen an author do in modern times.
So, mixed feelings. One of my favourite authors as a boy, and one of my most disliked literary figures in later years. Rest in peace, Michael – but part of me is glad he won’t be ruining my memory of his brilliant early books any further, too.
Permalink
06.26.08
Posted in politics at 10:44 pm by Rob Fahey
The worst thing that has ever happened to British politics is the movement of both our leading parties to the centre of the political spectrum. With both the Conservatives and Labour occupying a centre-right position, the ugly face of centrist politics has been revealed. Devoid of strong ideals or leanings, centrist parties find themselves stuffed with politicians who don’t believe in a damned thing except gaining, and then retaining, positions of power.
On Labour’s benches, this much is perfectly obvious from the fact that the party has abandoned any concept of social liberalism. Stop and search powers, 90- and then 42-day detention without charge, increasingly harsh immigration laws and prison sentences, ASBOs, the reclassification of cannabis in the face of all scientific and social evidence… All things which fly in the face of what should have been the whole ethos of the Labour movement, but which have been convenient for a government keen to win headlines for being “tough”.
Earlier this week, perhaps the most utterly unpleasant Home Secretary the Labour administration has produced – yes, even more unpleasant than the arrogant, delusional and self-justifying David Blunkett – managed to come out with what is, to me, the single lowest ebb of everything this government has done from a liberal, progressive or even simply moral standpoint.
Do you see the picture on the right? That’s an image that was spread around the world in 2005, depicting two teenage boys moments before their execution in Iran. Their crime? They were convicted of being homosexual – the Iranians protested that they were “rapists”, by which they meant that the two boys had simultaneously “raped” each other. They were blindfolded, placed on the back of a truck, had nooses hung around their necks from above – and then the truck drove off. There are later pictures from this series, which I have not put here as they are, understandably, incredibly distressing.
Now here’s what Jacqui Smith, our delightful Home Secretary, had to say this week on the question of deporting homosexual asylum seekers back to Iran. “With particular regard to Iran… the evidence does not show a real risk of discovery of, or adverse action against gay and lesbian people who are discreet about their sexual orientation.”
Stonewall, a gay campaign group, reckons that 4,000 people have been executed in Iran since the 1970s for being homosexual. Jacqui Smith disputes that figure – but there’s little dispute over another figure which shows 140 people being executed under the current regime alone for homosexuality. Regardless, Ms Smith’s view is essentially that gay people in Iran are fine as long as they’re “discreet” – shut up, don’t talk about it, and hope every day that nobody with a grudge against you discovers your secret.
Of course, you may have spotted the essential logical flaw in her entire argument. Completely aside from being a disgusting thing for a public servant in a civilised nation to say, the whole statement misses the fact that by coming to the UK and seeking asylum on the grounds of sexuality, refugees from Iran have already given up the option of living “discreetly”. Besides which, if they could, they would – gay people all over the world choose to hide their sexuality in the face of repression because it’s more important to them to be with their family and friends. Those who run from Iran and other countries like it do so at great personal cost and risk, and only do so because they have been found out, or because the strain is no longer bearable – and in both cases, if they don’t face capital punishment for their sexual orientation before they leave, they certainly will upon their return.
Still – who cares about that, when there are headlines to be won in the Daily Mail and the Sun? Figures for the processing of asylum seekers make vital news in this era of focused xenophobia, when much of the population seems to make no distinction between economic migrants and those fleeing persecution. If the cost of making the Home Office – and by extension, this failing, morally bankrupt Labour government – look good is the lives of innocent people whose only crime is their sexual orientation, then so be it. They’re only Iranians anyway, the tabloids will probably assume they were gay terrorists.
By the way, the case that kicked this all off was that of a chap called Mehdi Kazemi, a young gay man from Iran who moved to Brighton to study English in 2005. In 2006, his boyfriend back in Iran (a nation in which Jacqui Smith maintains there is no “real risk of discovery or adverse action” against gay people) was executed for his sexuality – but not before naming Kazemi as his partner during interrogation (for which read “torture”). The Home Office’s reaction was to try to deport Kazemi back to Iran, and only an extensive public campaign on his behalf, as well as multiple legal appeals, made them reverse this decision.
Now Jacqui Smith wants to draw a line in the sand and prevent any more Iranians from escaping through the “loophole” which saved Mehdi Kazemi’s life from a brutal execution. The loophole which she wishes to close is that Britain has traditionally been a compassionate and thoroughly decent nation of people – and having destroyed much of that trust and decency within the nation itself, the next objective seems to be to snatch away any compassion in our dealings with the persecuted, vulnerable people who throw themselves upon our mercy at our borders.
Technorati Tags: asylum, Daily Mail, immigration, Jacqui Smith, Labour, Mehdi Kazemi, politics, The Sun
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
