Labour Vote takes a Walk.

Perhaps the most disheartening, yet unsurprising result of the recent Euro elections in the UK is the election of two BNP Euro MP's. Disheartening as their share of the vote increased marginally relative to the collapse in support for the Labour party.This, not the BNP is the real story of the Euro elections with the New Labour calculus that the great unwashed have nowhere else to go, returning to bite them where it hurts. Labour's party machine has atrophied and their campaign apparently disorganised and ineffective. The traditional Labour vote has unsuprisingly sat on it's hands and stayed at home.As a libertarian lefty outsider it does seem amazing that Labour high command failed to spot this draining of support and do something about it. Even if you take a base machine politics view of the debacle, the lack of GOTV is puzzling and does not bode well for a general election.

Posted on: 8 June 2009 | 10:50 am

Labour Vote takes a Walk.

Perhaps the most disheartening, yet unsurprising result of the recent Euro elections in the UK is the election of two BNP Euro MP's. Disheartening as their share of the vote increased marginally relative to the collapse in support for the Labour party.This, not the BNP is the real story of the Euro elections with the New Labour calculus that the great unwashed have nowhere else to go, returning to bite them where it hurts. Labour's party machine has atrophied and their campaign apparently disorganised and ineffective. The traditional Labour vote has unsuprisingly sat on it's hands and stayed at home.As a libertarian lefty outsider it does seem amazing that Labour high command failed to spot this draining of support and do something about it. Even if you take a base machine politics view of the debacle, the lack of GOTV is puzzling and does not bode well for a general election.

Posted on: 8 June 2009 | 10:50 am

The Politics of Mediocrity: Cameron's Vapid Play for The Centre Ground.

To any kind of leftist, be it tankie, old skool sectarian trot, trad social democrat or libertarian/anarcho-socialist type Conservative party conferences are very much an exercise in political anthropology. After all althought the labour party has divested itself of most of its social democratic principles, it's form and method of organisation are pretty familiar, even New Labour's vanguardist lenninist take-over was a textbook operation familiar to most leftwing activists. The Labour party still has the sinew and reflexes of a left-of-centre party so  it's internal politics can be easily followed.The Conservatives however have not and will not ever be a socialist party, it is the party of captial, of the petit borgeious businessman, Burkean stick-in-the-muds, the small landowner, the surrogate England party nostalgic for empire absorber of the old classical liberals and patrician neo-aristocratic one nationistas. As the cliche goes the Conservatives are designed to be good at one thing: winning elections which leads quite neatly onto another cliche being that it's no accident they are called 'the stupid party'. The Conservative party is not really interested in ideas, Ideology like their party's leadership is a means to an end. Conservatives being the ultimate pragmatists.Thatcherism was then an aberration for the Conservative party. The entryism of various libertarian, 'free market' idealists and other radicals into the Conservatives is still causing them severe indigestion even now. Only Thatcher could keep this coalition of eurosceptics, gonzo corporate 'libertarians' and the party's traditional class interests together. The party's ideological schisms and factions were hard to manage lacking. This brings us neatly to Cameron...Cameron is in many ways a sign of the party returning to its aristocratic blue-blooded roots and to the Conservatives pragmatic power seeking ways. To paraphrase Private Eye the general consensus was that the 'oiks' had had a good enough go at running the party and now it was the toffs turn again. Cameron's orientation is power and he will mouth whatever pieties are needed, politically cross-dress, softsoap and do  whatever is needed to get elected. The traditional Conservative position only made strange due to the 17 year old Thatcherite abberation. Cameron is returning the Conservatives to their political roots, be afraid!

Posted on: 3 October 2007 | 4:24 pm

The Drums of War Beat Faster

Iran is being prepared for war, many voices accross the web are warning of the impending catastrophe, From Arthur Silber to Empire Burlesque all are echoing the same theme: War is coming, be ready. For a UK citizen this then asks the question, how if/when such a terrible event occurs will it affect me, living in a small uninteresting island of the unfashionable end of Europe. Although it is terrible to pose the question in such a self centred way, international geopoltics can seem rather abstract to the ordinary man in the street and for the working class day-to-day survival is paramount. The bombing of Iran would raise oil prices, increase islamist terrorism and make the world an even unsafer place there is no upside even on the crudest and most amoral of utilitarian calculus. Another question for your average British person is would Brown go along with the attack? This is a hard one to call, every British semi-progressive type hopes that Brown will emulate Harold Wilson and refuse to provide logistical support or troops/planes. On the other hand it is perfectly convincing to see Brown's inherent atlanticism getting the better of him and the mysterious alchemy of the 'special relationship' taking it's toll on his political judgement and therefore troops being committed.Make no mistake the British antiwar movement must lobby hard, counter neo-imperialist propaganda and mobilise the British public against any involvement in a strike on Iran, otherwise the consequences will be lasting, bloody and protracted

Posted on: 26 September 2007 | 4:52 pm

Back once again

So I return having finally found a decentish bloggin' tool in Ubuntu Linux called Flock, a fancy 'web 0' browser, fully buzzword compliant and up-to-date and more importantly Free as in libre software.nati Politics has changed as has the international scene, Blair has gone, Brown a shoe-in interesting times ahead... No better time to blog, more soon. technorati tags:return, blogging, back

Posted on: 16 May 2007 | 11:10 am

Manufacturing Consent...One School Pupil at a Time.....

To paraphrase what the Jesuits used to say if you gave them a child when they were 5 yearsold the church would have that child for life, much the same is true of our ever creeping surveillance state with schools being in the front-line of this particular battle between a citizen's privacy andthe states desire to keep tabs on one. The pupils at a north London sixth form are an example of how this friction between individual liberty and the rationalizing technocratic and totalising aspects of the modern state will play itself out over the coming decades. The key bureaucratic innovation for this particular school is to let the 6th form pupils sign themselves in and out of school via their fingerprints, this of course entails that their fingerprints be held on a centralised school database to enable such a system to work properly. From the schools point of view, and the wider idea of bureaucratic rationality the idea of logging pupils makes perfectsense as it is more 'efficient', gives the pupils more 'control' over when they sign in and out and streamlines the administration of the school. As with most of these seemingly administrative measures, what appears innocuous and merely bureaucratic tidying up makes people more tolerant and willing to accept he monitoring tracking of their every day activities. So this biometric fingerprinting scheme by the schools is a straw in the wind, and another means of socialising people towards a total surveillance society.Unlike some Anarchist/Libertarian types I am not a conspiracy theorist on the whole, the surveillance society is not part of some evil master plan by the ruling classes to control society, in fact it would be an easier menace to combat if it were the case..but I digress, the surveillance state is the logical culmination of many different trends, both technologically and socially. The police, security services and related spooks are hard-wired to want more control and to extend their capabilities from their perspective the desire to use these technologies is unfortunate but understandable. Technologically Moore's law and the explosion of modern telecommunications technology have made the nightmare of total surveillance and monitoring a real possibility. Politically with the so-called War-on-Terror being in full swing it has provided perfect cover embracing and enhancing these technologies without fear of a public backlash. The British are of course one of the most heavily monitored societies in the western world, CCTV cameras, numberplate tracking and other intrusive technologies are quietly accepting with nary a murmer by the public. The old saw of: if you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to worry about is all too readily accepted.These social and technological trends were of course present pre 9-11 madness and 7/7 bombings, but these events have been used by opportunistic politicians and their cunning enablers within the police and security services to further restricit liberty and to pilfer a phrase manufacture consent. Biometrics in schools are the merely the start and if the current insanity in the middle east continues, be more afraid....

Posted on: 19 July 2006 | 3:45 pm

testing testing

Posted on: 11 July 2006 | 12:36 pm

Beowulf's not dead, only sleeping...A long hiatus..but I'm back as I have finally installed and set-up Ubuntu on my system and intend to blog more frequently... so apologies for my absence and back to bloggin'

Posted on: 9 July 2006 | 6:23 pm

Europeans are From Mars, Muslims from Venus: How we Get the Islamic World Wrong part II

Freedom of speech is presented your typical liberal as a costless, weightless, contextlesss state of being. This particular defined freedom is mans natural state of being that other people and entities suppress. The liberal sees freedom of speech as occurring in a relative vacuum. Circumstance, economic reality the social background in which the speech takes place are completely ignored. Freedom of speech like voting, representative democracy and many other parts of modern living is an artificial construct a convenient shorthand for a variety of different political and philosophical positions.How then does this relate to the Danish cartoons and the West’s relationship with the Islamic world? From a Muslim perspective westerners exercising their ‘freedom of speech’ are doing so in a state of historical amnesia, as if the last 300 years of colonial domination and expropriation never took place. The Danish cartoonists seemed to have no awareness of the cultural context in which their images would be received. Without thinking they have reproduced many of the same orientalist stereotypes that have recurred many times throughout Europe’s love/hate relationship with Islam. Images of fanaticism, the uncivilised lesser other combined with a long shameful history of anti-Semitism and the Muslim reaction to these images and the fig leaf defence of ‘free speech’ is not only understandable but alas predictable.When westerners accuse the Islamic world of over-reacting it is merely another demonstration of our historical blindness and inability to face up to our colonial past.The Danish cartoonists are obviously free in a technical sense to publish and say whatever they like, given the easiness of blogging for most westerners there are no real formal restrictions to speaking what’s on your mind. What the cartoonists were not free to do was to orchestrate how people would react to what they actually published. Being of a Libertarian bent free speech is taken as a given, existing it seems to be taken away.What exactly is meant by the idea of ‘free speech’ is open to(much) debate. I am technically free to publish anything I like on this blog, tho’ if I start posting copyrighted images and text all over the place then various different corporate entities may start taking an interest in my speech and move to curtail this speech. If my blog was in Germany and I for whatever reason used Nazi imagery the long arm of the law would take a keen interest in what was being wrote and who was writing it. Freedom of speech in modern capitalist societies is curtailed in many different ways, try questioning how your workplace is run, answering back to your ‘superiors’ and you will swiftly find out how far the writ of free speech runs in reality.

Posted on: 30 March 2006 | 4:47 pm

Europeans are From Mars, Muslims from Venus: How we Get the Islamic World Wrong part I

While watching the whole controversy over the Danish Muhammad cartoons evolve the reaction of the various different progressive factions within the western left has been interesting to observe. Aside from the typical internecine spats that the left is so good at one must look at the underlying issues behind the irruption of rage and the resultant counter-reaction by western ‘liberals’, old skool conservatives and the ‘decent’ left(Oliver Kamm and his ilk). What has been extant is the paucity of knowledge displayed by both left and right on Islam and its relation to Prophet MuhammadThe original offence was caused by the Danish paper publishing the cartoon depicting Prophet Muhammad as having a bomb in his turban. Muslims would of course find this offensive and the typical commentariat line taken on this is that it offends Qu’ranic injunctions about making images of the divine along with similar religious taboos. Western commentators do however miss another reason why Muslims would find this cartoon so offensive. Islamic culture has two main traditions for the transmission of religious and theological knowledge that of the Qu’ran and it’s surrounding exegesis and that of the Hadith. The Hadith are the collecting sayings and actions of the Prophet, at first transmitted orally and then written down and checked for their veracity. The Hadith can in some respects be seen as analogous to the New Testament within Christian tradition. So what I can hear you asking do the Hadith have to do with the flare-up over the Danish Muhammad cartoons? Ordinary Muslims like their Christian counterparts have many different spiritual traditions some esoteric and based on mystical ritual(see the Sufis and Miester Eckhart), others more legalistic/philosophical i.e Augustine and the Islamic practitioners of Kalam. Both the philosophical and mystical sides of these religions tend to be elite projects; the ordinary believer will tend to evolve their own form of piety and relation to the overall mythos, a kind of ‘folk’ spirituality that identifies them with their religious tradition. This ‘folk’ spirituality can be seen in Catholic devotion to certain saints and in Islam to Muslims focus on the life and actions of the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet Muhammad to many Muslims is to adapt a Shi’a phrase an ‘object of emulation’, thus if a Muslim was considering whether to perform a certain action first he may consult the Qu’ran and then the Hadith to see what Prophet Muhammad did in a similar situation. Emulating Prophet Muhammad for the ordinary Muslim is a way of expressing and acting out their spirituality. This perhaps explains why the Danish cartoons provoked such a strong reaction amongst ordinary Muslims. By insulting and caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad it is by implication an insult to the ordinary Muslim believer and the way he or she conducts their life. The Danish cartoonists evidently did not consider how Muslims would react to these cartoons. They did not think how their depictions would be perceived by ordinary Muslims and had no appreciation of the wider cultural context in which these images would be received. This would seem to point to the Danish cartoonists giving no thought as to how easily images may be spread round the globe these days. Also like many of the liberal commentariat they gave no thought to how the West is perceived in the Islamic world and how this might affect how these cartoons would be received.In part II of this post I’ll be looking at issues of free speech relating to the publication of the cartoons.

Posted on: 7 February 2006 | 5:04 pm

Undemocracy: Why the Glorification of Terrorism Law is a Bad Idea

The latest refusal by the Lords to endorse the new offence of ‘glorifying’ acts of terrorism is an example of Blair’s native political cunning in denying the Lords any real political legitimacy. Like many ‘new’ labour reforms the keeping of the Lords as appointed preserves the old style power patronage and ‘modernises’ the process of appointing members to the Lords. So ‘new’ Labour keeps the appearance of having a check on it’s political power while in reality having no legitimate check at all. Still for all this the Lords is trying its best to quash or modify this current piece of very illiberal legislation presented by the ‘new’ Labour government.The key idea behind this legislation is that if anyone is found to be glorifying the nebulous offence of terrorism then under this new law they can prosecuted and ultimately gaoled for this. This legislation then contravenes the basic right of free speech and could affect anyone in UK who might offer support to national liberation movements, revolutionaries etc.. Indeed it is quite possible if these laws had been brought in during the seventies then UK born supporters of the ANC might have been prosecuted. This exposes a key weakness with the legislation in that no-one can really agree exactly what terrorism; there is really no legally watertight way of defining it. One can objectively describe it as acts of violence that cause terror to a wider civilian population, but that would encompass much of modern warfare and leave governments open to prosecution themselves, a definite challenge to their legitimacy. So this law has at its heart a vaguely defined idea to stop people, maybe possibly being inspired by statements supposedly supporting ‘terrorism’. From the amount of equivocating in the above sentence it’s easy to see how a team of skilled defence lawyers could drive a coach and horses through any attempt to prosecute a person under these laws.The government is trying to legislate on the idea of preventing probable harm based on some very weak potential causal links between those supporting terrorist actions and those carrying out the actions. The great danger of this law is of course the potential suppression of free speech by any government using this legislation. Posit the following hypothetical scenario: another 7/7 style bombing happens in London, the police comb through the bombers internet records, regular websites he visits. The police find that the bomber regularly read for example Lenin’s Tomb frequently. Lenin is an SWP member and is ardently anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist. The government remembers Lenin’s publishing of the Craig Murray torture documents and uses the above law to prosecute Lenin and shut down his blog. Even if the prosecution was to fall apart the damage done to potential critics of the government could be quite substantial. Bloggers would be very reluctant to post anything controversial that might support say the Palestinians, rebels in Aceh amongst other resistance movements worldwide.What then will happen when this legislation gets punted back to the Commons? Since Howard’s departure the political calculus within the Common’s has changed. Cameron is tilting the Tories towards a ‘Blue’ Labour vaguely libertarian middle ground in it seems a last throw of the dice to win the next election. Cameron’s instincts may make him oppose the bill, which alongside the Lib Dems opposition and Labour rebels visceral hatred of Blair and principled opposition may defeat the bill or force serious watering down of the putative ‘glorification’ offence itself. Whatever the actual outcome of this legislation Liberals, Libertarians and Libertarian Socialists must fight every attempt by the organisational Leninists of ‘new’ Labour to restrict free speech in this country any further, this means organising across party and ideological lines to stop anymore assaults on our liberty. Remember the government doesn’t give you rights, these rights already exist, the government will try to take these rights away don’t let them do it.

Posted on: 18 January 2006 | 10:35 am

Fear and Loathing in Tehran, Persians Play Politics with the West

While watching the news it seems that the public is being pre-prepared for some kind of military action against Iran. The tenor and tone of the news stories are all slanted towards the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons being unthinkable. Iran is being painted as an alien, alienated other all hints of the ordinary Iranians humanity and complexity being leeched from the discussion. Like much of the media coverage of the crisis it does (as ever) serve to obscure the brutal statist realpolitik of the underlying issues behind the current round of brinksmanship.There are a number of factors pushing towards a military confrontation with Iran, the Israeli insistence that it be the only nuclear power in the Middle East, American calculations concerning security of oil supply and leverage over neighbouring friendly regimes. Russia also has large commercial interests in Iran, alongside large Chinese investments in Iran’s energy supply. Iran brings to the fore major international tensions concerning security of energy supply and the corresponding influence of the great powers over the Middle East. The coming confrontation and strikes on Iran may lead to ever greater and more deadly confrontations in future.Aside from the wider geopolitical picture there is the question of what kind of response the US will have to Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. The Iranians having learnt from Iraq’s reactor being bombed in 1981 by the Israeli air force have secreted their nuclear facilities deep underground to guard against easy air strikes and beyond the reach of most conventional weapons. The US has rather conveniently developed a new class of sub-kiloton level nuclear weapons specially designed for penetrating and destroying well hidden targets. In addition to this the majority of US ground forces are tied up next door in Iraq and thus a perceived threat from Iranian nuclear weapons would under new US strategic doctrine compel a pre-emptive strike.  The logical endpoint of all these developments is then the use of these newly developed nuclear weapons against the Iranian targets.This would of course be a horrifying development; the breaking of the international taboo against using nuclear weapons would unleash horrifying new developments with the bar against their use being perilously low. Once one kind of nuclear weapon has been used then it becomes very hard not to justify using them in other circumstances as long as the cost benefit analysis sticks….It is to be hoped that some soft of compromise with the Iranians is cobbled together by those in positions of power and influence otherwise our children may come to regret the dalliance with delusion indulged in by those wishing for a final, deadly reckoning.

Posted on: 17 January 2006 | 4:14 pm

The 'Modernisation' of the Lib Dems: Corporatism with a Human Face and Blarism Redux

The recent attempted knife welding by ambitious young blades in the Lib Dems is I think an interesting illustration of all that is wrong with British politics and politicians. The lib dems have broadly two wings the so-called economic liberal ‘free’ marketeers producers of the ‘Orange Book’ and the welfare statist Beveridge types. The debate between the two wings of this party is a profoundly depressing illustration of how sterile British political debate has become. The ideological spectrum ranges from authoritarian neo-liberal corporatist (‘new’ Labour) to socially liberal neo-liberal corporatist (Cameron’s Conservatives) with the marginalised warriors of the old post-war consensus sitting on the sidelines (old labour). Like the Thatcherites before them the Lib Dem ‘free’ marketeers and self styled ‘modernisers’  wish to see ‘competition’ introduced to public services, private public partnerships with the full panoply of the reformed corporate state being brought to bear on the problems of British society.  People are to be given the choice of services they use, but as per ‘new’ Labour this choice is to be managed, kept within strict boundaries with the old consumer/producer dichotomy maintained and Croslandite ‘new’ class assumptions left unexamined. While portraying themselves as sceptical of the state, it seems the Lib Dem modernisers like ‘new’ Labour seek merely to promote corporatism with a human face. They seek to promote this corporatism in the name of liberty while ignoring or forgetting the great liberal themes of industrial democracy, the co-operative movement and the libertarian socialist currents that have always been present in their tradition. All of this ideological jockeying is of course motivated by a desire to occupy the centre ground. The ‘free’ marketeers by desiring to occupy this centre ground are implicitly accepting the Blairite consensus and portray any attempt to provide an alternative to this consensus as being unrealistic and out-of-touch. This drive for the centre ground unites both their pragmatic desire for power and their ideological biases providing them with a sense of purpose that their welfare statist opponents lack. Also while being correct in calling the welfare statists out as having some implicitly illiberal and paternalist policies their alternative as detailed above isn’t much better. Indeed the left wing of the Lib Dems has not really articulated any coherent alternative vision with them fighting a rearguard action, hoping to restore the old post war consensus. Ultimately both wings of the party seem to be missing a historical opportunity to present a real libertarian socialist alternative to the mainstream Blairite corporatist consensus. It is frustrating to see a party with the potential to articulate these views being pushed towards being merely another centrist placeholder, the Lib Dems need a transplant of ideological backbone but not the kind that ‘free’ marketeers are proposing!

Posted on: 18 December 2005 | 6:56 am

New Tory New Cameron: The Coronation of a Meeja Prince

With a mixture of horror and fascination I’ve been watching the progress of the Tory leadership contest and the steady but relentless progress of Cameron towards the crown, Cameron’s victory has been skilfully achieved and his use of the media almost Blairite in its discipline and cunning if one were particularly paranoid you might think that Alastair Campbell has been advising Cameron on the sly, but aside from such conspiratorial thoughts. Cameron is perhaps the purest expression of all that is wrong with contemporary Britain a perfect fusion of ruling class privilege alongside hypermodern media management techniques. Cameron’s Eton education alongside his experience working as a director at Carlton Communications do seem the perfect schooling for a modern political leader. Not to mention his extensive blue-blooded connections to the royal family and the wider aristocracy, as Private Eye noted the Tories really have decided that ‘oiks’ have had enough turns at the tiller and that the toffs deserved another go. Cameron has through a friendly media and his own particular skills managed to keep his blue-blooded background out of the leadership contest, indeed very few people seem at all surprised that the leaders of both the Tories and Labour are both well groomed plausible public schoolboys, the more things change the more they remain the same when it comes to our political elites it seems. Cameron’s whole political playbook does seem lifted from Blair’s reshaping of the Labour party as has been evidenced by an extensive ‘rebranding’ exercise conducted by his team after the leadership victory. As in Blair’s presidential approach to leading the Labour party the Tories are to be relabelled ‘Cameron’s Conservatives’ a new more media friendly symbol of two blue squares overlapping has been devised. The Tories are to be reshaped in to Blue Labour, defiantly non-ideological and based on the appeal of Cameron’s personality and vaguely libertarian social mores. Cameron is also trying to put environmental themes back into the core of Tory policy making with the appointment of Zac Goldsmith realising that a Blue/Green coalition is as viable as a Red/Green one, and it provides a means of differentiating the Tories from Labour .The question is: have the Tories selected a winner? Will Cameron have the ability to best Brown at the next election? I think the answer is a qualified maybe, all depending on how much Blairite ‘modernisation’ the more rabidly rightwing members of the party can take. There is also the question of how long Cameron’s media honeymoon lasts and of course those ever present ‘events’ that plague any politicians career. Cameron is however a big danger and any progressive should monitor his progress very carefully as beneath the media friendly veneer and post-ideological waffle lie the potential for implementing some extremely retrogressive policies. New Cameron New Danger!

Posted on: 10 December 2005 | 10:27 am

Coppers Want More Shooters: Why Arming More Police is a Bad Idea

After the recent tragic shooting of a female police officer in Bradford the police are once again pressing for more of their officers to be trained in the use of guns. The general consensus among police officers is that the percentage of armed officers be increased from 5% to 10%. There are also calls to recruit ex-soldiers into the police force to counter the perceived terrorist threat and as a result of this shooting. The police and various unscrupulous politicians are exploiting the current circumstances to press for yet more authoritarian police statuesque measures (see the current anti-terrorist bill with its provision for people being held for 28 days without trial). The media is also cynically egging this on due to the victim’s photogenic nature and easily marketable backstory. As ever events like this reminds one that politics has little to do with morality; keeping and increasing power is the name of game and many players see this incident as another means of doing this…So why is arming the police a bad idea? Really it comes down to a mirror image of the American gun rights argument: that the government can’t be trusted with sole monopoly over the means of delivering force on it’s population, and of course adhering to the sound revolutionary principle of having the means to kick the current government out of office, using force if necessary. The converse of this point of view is to keep the police unarmed and thus on an equal level to the citizenry that they are recruited from, either everyone’s armed or no-one at all. Any other position is inconsistent and incoherent leaving the general population open to predation of an ever unsatisfied and more illiberal police force. The police like any politically savvy institution recognise that as Mao put it ‘power grows from the barrel of a gun’ There are two fundamental tensions in the history of British policing that of the bottom up localised force organised county by county conflicting with the perceived need from the government to have a nationally organised force to deal with nationally organised crimes. The second tension is that of the centralised. British policing prior to the Bow Street Runners had been generally a bottom-up ad hoc phenomenon, community run and community organised. The general trend over the last 200 years has been to centralise, professionalize and ‘streamline’ the police, separating them further from the population that they originated from, having yet more armed officers and recruiting ex-soldiers militarises the police turning them into an occupying army rather than a community run and organised institution. Aside from these philosophical objections to an armed police force there are also sound utilitarian reasons for not trusting the police with the use of deadly force on an unarmed population. The recent police assassination of Mendez while getting on the tube is perhaps the clearest example of why arming the police is a very bad idea, after all guns are quite a handy way of getting around all that messy trial stuff and those antiquated notions of being innocent before being proved guilty, all that messy business of actually having to present evidence in a trial and it does circumvent those running dog defence lawyers as well. All in all more guns for the police is a win/win scenario and anyone with any nous can see that the police an institution will press as hard as they can to extend their powers at the expense of other groups in society. In this instance it is in the interests of wider society for politicians and activists to oppose more police being able to use firearms in the course of their daily duties.

Posted on: 20 November 2005 | 4:40 pm

A Corporatists Daydream: Tescos Cut Down to Size(or not..)

American readers of this blog are obviously familiar with the depredations of Walmart and the company’s manipulation of the US planning laws to fuel its seemingly exponential growth. In the UK the closest equivalent to Walmart is Tesco in terms of its market power, and the leverage they have over both consumers and producers. Tesco has not really innovated to expand, more a case of doing what other supermarkets traditionally do except better, bigger and cheaper. Tesco like Walmart has aggressively expanded taking market share from its traditional competitors and hurting other non-grocery related businesses like M&S as well. While not being a monopoly Tesco does hold a dominant place within the UK supermarket sector with one out of every eight pounds being spent by UK shoppers in Tesco. Now it’s being reported that the Office of Fair Trading (an oxymoronic title in our current system) seeks to divest Tesco of some of its stores so as to curb its market dominance. The typical vulgar libertarian would throw their hands up in horror at this, for how can the government dare intervene in the sacred workings of the free market thus the kneejerk response by Adam Smith Institutes of this world would be to support Tesco against the government. In fact the whole debate is framed in statist language with both sides accepting the same basic assumptions. The traditional social democrat along with the vulgar libertarian in this instance do not truly look at the material causes of Tesco’s dominance of the market place and both offer no true solution to the problem that Tesco and it’s ilk have become. The typical social democratic or to be more accurate the liberal reformist approach is to do as the Office of Fair Trading suggests: trim Tesco’s wings slightly by forcing it to sell a few stores. This again is very short-sighted and ignores what (in a terms used by a FSA regulator) the complex monopoly of the Supermarket sector. As I noted above as businesses the supermarkets are pretty much interchangeable as can be observed whenever one supermarket takes over another’s store. The lettering and colouring might change but the way the business works remains pretty much the same. So removing a few stores from Tesco may slow down its expansion or at best stop it completely what it will not do is stop another supermarket chain doing exactly the same thing in an ever so slightly different way. The internal logic of the current state capitalist marketplace coupled with the complex monopoly of the Supermarket chains does tend to produce predictable outcomes….The vulgar libertarian refuses to recognise the role of the state in subsidising, cosseting and encouraging the growth of the supermarket as a viable business. Supermarkets could not exist without widespread car ownership, a viable road network, biased planning laws, subsidies to the trucking industry among a million other small perks and tweaks provided by the state. Tesco and other supermarket’s large size and consequent economies of scare are only possible within a oligarchic and cartelised state-capitalist marketplace. Take away the artificial supports and the large supermarket chains like Tesco would cease to exist in their present form, who knows what free market alternative would supplant them but it would reasonable to speculate that consumer and producer co-operatives of some variety would localise and decentralise the current supermarket distribution networks in favour of locally manufactured and produced goods.Tesco’s size, market dominance, political influence and leverage with local councils are as ever a symptom of the dysfunctional nature of modern capitalism rather than a cause. Reformist and pseudo-free market approaches to fixing this problem miss the point and perpetuate the problem, kill the state and kill Tescos anything else is just window dressing.

Posted on: 6 November 2005 | 8:26 am

The New Corporatists and Schooling a Definition of Fascism in New Labour

Mussolini was reputed to have said that "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Mussolini like many of the fascists that followed him was an ex-Marxist, merely inverting many Marxist ideas and organising principles and lined up his interests with that of the conservative small businessman and the Church (sound familiar…). Modern Britain is of course very much different from post-World War 1 Italy but similar trends can be observed when it comes to the aligning of corporate and state power. Many trends in ‘New’ Labour thinking from the encouragement of PFI/PPP to the focus on importing private sector ‘talent’ into the civil service seem hell-bent on erasing the difference between the private and public sectors with it’s neo-liberal corporatist approach. Government agencies are to be routinely sham privatised, leaving the control and command apparatus pretty much the same if a little more exploitative and efficient at screwing the ordinary worker out of any surplus value they might create. True privatisation would of course place the agency in the hands of the workers rather then selling it to the highest paying rentier, but I digress. How does this tie into the governments plan for making schools more independent and thus more control over their own destiny? As any political cynic will tell you: ‘follow the money’ which means when it comes to school reforms questioning: how will these schools be funded and by whom? Essentially funding is divided into three different categories that of the Academy which is partly funded by private companies or individual, the Foundation school locally funded by the LEA but controlled by the governing board of the school and the Independent ‘Specialist’ school again funded by the LEA but with central government funding for their subject specialist status. This is all to be swept away with the government’s reforms with City Academies becoming the norm every school is to be independent and self governing, yet funded centrally by the government. This would it seems grant Whitehall unprecedented power over these nominally independent schools further reinforcing the government’s centralising and micromanaging tendencies a further problem is in the way that private interests are allowed to dictate the ethos and nature of the schooling. This has been amply demonstrated by Reg Vardy’s creationist interventions in the City Academy he has part-funded in Sunderland. Part of the deal for his£2 Million’s worth of funding has been the promotion of his highly reactionary and anti-scientific Christian fundamentalist views within the classroom, parents and pupils can do nothing about this as they have no say over how the school is run or organised.  The usual rejoinder to this is that Blair’s proposals will give parents more choice and therefore the bad schools will shutdown and the good schools grow. Education is to be marketised and hence made more responsive to parent’s wants and needs. All good solid libertarian stuff I can hear you thinking, or is it?Now any non-authoritarian Socialist or Libertarian is obviously for reduction or marginalising of state control, Blair’s proposals do nothing to enhance either the parents or child’s liberty when choosing or organising and education for themselves. The market for education is again to be highly cartelised with very high start-up costs for parents and an extremely strong regulatory framework controlled by central government essentially the merging of the corporate and governmental state that I alluded to earlier. Parents in this so-called market are to be reduced to passive consumers with corporatised schools responding by expanding and contracting according the demand of parents. Blairite ultras like the Vulgar Libertarians would argue that this will lead to a diversity of schools and hence happier parents/pupils with local councils reduced to commissioners rather than providers of Education services. This ignores how a highly cartelised market in education would distort price signals leading to the schools rather the parents or children being the main beneficiaries of these reforms. Also the very fact that these schools would be centrally funded would tempt any government to intervene, panic or blackmail schools on a whim. Now the previous LEA model of school funding and planning was not brilliant I would agree but it at least allowed more local democratic input for parents than these corporatist proposals. Also these proposals leave the whole idea of what a school is and how it works completely untouched with all the traditional reactionary authoritarian models of education being reinforced rather than challenged. Any hint of allowing children control over their education is dismissed as ‘child centred’ and ‘old’ labour, truly democratic community and parent controlled schools are definitely off the agenda. Those seeking a truly liberal, humanistic education for their child rather than a better run sausage factory will have to turn to home schooling, alternative ‘free’ schools and parent run co-operatives; New Labour has nothing to offer you.

Posted on: 30 October 2005 | 7:18 am

The Glorious Gober Method: How M&S Have Brought a Superior Brand of Snake Oil

Marks and Spencers have recently invested a large amount of their employees money(according to shop workers union USDAW around £10 million)  into a motivational scheme designed to raise sales and address the flagging fortunes of the huge retail group. This scheme is designed and pedalled by the almost stereotypically American Mary Gober with the inevitably trade marked ‘Gober Method’ with its three pronged approach to improving service. This consists of changing the ‘psychology of service’, the ‘language of service’ and the ‘management framework’. In short convert, indoctrinate and wave the big stick…Lets look at exactly what Mary Gober means when she talks about a ‘psychology of service’ in essence the ordinary worker is to be optimistic and to use that horrible word ‘pro-active’ when speaking to customers, worker self worth and self respect is another aspect of this along with responsive to complaints. So far, so obvious and it seems Gober is cadging the ‘typical New Age decadent neo-hippy tropes’ of ‘self-realisation’, typical touchy feely stuff fed to the poor sap who has to implement this method. Indeed the M&S workers are being sent to huge motivational seminars that resemble Billy Graham’s revival meetings with the gospel of Gober being pounded out at the management pulpit to the expectant and cowed workforce. USDAW to its credit has called the events a gigantic waste of money and I would argue that they’re right for reasons that we’ll look at later. The second part of the ‘Gober Method’ is where the ‘language of service’ is looked at. The workers vocabulary is to be reconstructed according to the ominously named ‘Telephone Compulsory Standards’ and the mind bogglingly named ‘Service Excel Mind-Set’. All this seems to boil down to is ensuring that all Customer Service reps say the same thing at the same time according to what the management perceive the customer actually wants. The third part of Gober’s method is I think the most important and interesting. Her ‘management framework’ this is where her method devolves down to the usual technocratic buzzwords such as ‘change management’ the dreaded ‘team building’ and the blandly named but insidious ‘service delivery process improvement’. Now it has been remarkably difficult to track down examples of what these buzzwords actually mean, if you look at her website there are testimonials, information about the seminars and the usual self-promotional guff that you would expect you’ll also notice that all the above buzzwords are trademarked. Gober is very protective about her methods it seems which does seem make me think that what she’s selling to these companies is the merely technocratic Taylorism soft-soaped by pseudo-religious new age psychology and motivational tools. What does seem slightly different about this method is the emphasis on indoctrinating employees into its way of thinking with motivational coaches being trained within the organisation to ensure that the ideology is reproduced and strengthened among the staff. Gober has obviously aware of organisation entropy and these coaches have been designed to counter it. It would be interesting to revisit some of these organisations in about five years time to see how closely they’re adhering to the strictures and disciplines of the Method! As has been observed within capitalist corporations all management techniques can be reduced to Taylorism and the refining of command and control over the frontline worker. The Gober Method is then unsurprisingly old wine in new bottles dedicated to streamlining and making more ‘efficient’ the customer service ends of large corporate organisations. Like most of these methods it does not address the structural problems of these corporations that produce de-motivated staff. The Gober Method sees this is something that can be adjusted by merely changing the mindset of the staff within an organisation, what it deliberately fails to recognise is that workers are quite capable of seeing that they have no control over their own workplace, how their company is run, the stupidity of management and the general pointlessness of their own jobs. The Gober Method seeks to falsely align the interests of the worker with that of senior management all under the excuse of serving the customer better. Interestingly the Gober Method makes no mention of the workers needs and wants and completely ignores any role for unions or other means of representation. This is not surprising due to the top-down technocratic command and control mechanisms that the Gober Method uses to implement its changes. A long-term fix to these problems would of course be the dismantling of these over-large corporate structures and democratic worker self-organisation of whatever remained. Without these changes corporations orientated around customer service and call-centres will keeping buying the same snake oil with a fancy new set of buzzwords slapped on the front each year, pathological structural weaknesses in corporate capitalism makes this predictable as the sun setting. The Gober Method constructs a slightly more comfortable and shiny cage for the average worker and does nothing to address the real problems. Marks and Spencer’s staff have my sympathy.

Posted on: 9 October 2005 | 7:51 am

Government Tries to Ban Anything with the Word 'Terrorist' in it(Well not

Much has been written over the past few weeks about the governments new anti-terror legislation, the rationale behind it and the civil liberties that the legislation will inevitably curtail. An interesting political aside from this is how the legislation is how it has exposed the political tension between the Home Office and the PM over the legislation. However this is beside the point when it comes to legislation itself there is one very dubious idea out of a slew of other extremely dubious ideas that stands out. The securocrats and spook groupies have hit upon the idea of outlawing 'incitement and glorification' of terrorist acts. Now despite me not being a lawyer this does seem an extremely broad thing to try to outlaw, and also seems open to abuse...the governnment has tried to limit this glorification clause to 20 years(A sop to the IRA methinks) which is another puzzling inconcistency with the legislation for surely terrorism is terrorism is terrorism? This does perhaps expose the real target of the legislation: so called Islamic 'extremism' and Jihadist ideologies. This also ties in with attempts to crack down on bookshops and distributer of the associated literature. The government seems hellbent on making illegal an ideology. to outlaw a way of thinking even. There are three reasons why this a bad idea. One : it simply won't work given that it is impossible(I hope) to police and legislate the contents of people's heads. Two: it completely tramples over people's right to free speech and thus contravenes both common law and convention in this country and the more recent human rights convention that we signed up to. Thirdly to give any government these kind of restrictive powers is a hostage to fortune and places far too much faith in human nature not to abuse it. To adapt an old cliche power corrupts and this legislation would corrupt completely. So why does 'New' Labour want this legislation? I think there are a number of reasons for this. Firstly 'New' Labour's DNA is woven from the blood of ex-Trots, ex-stalinists and hard-left leninist types. One suspects that they've retained their suspiscion of 'liberal' reformist ideologies and retro-fitted it to the reigning ideology. Boiling it down it means many 'New' Labour types have no natural sympathy for liberal or libertarian ideas and this means that their natural reflex is to command and control. to democraticaly centralise is the natural impulse. The recent anti-terror legislation is an example of this. This also dovetails in with 'New' Labour's and Blair's obession with controlling and massaging the message.

Posted on: 20 September 2005 | 4:24 pm

Management, Power and the Abuse of Language

Recently on the Observer’s business pages there has been a debate concerning what’s wrong with current management language, technique and practice. It was an interesting and well written article illuminating how modern managers and their accompanied gurus try and use language to control reality(to which there is an equally interesting reply). Like the French deconstructionists the modern high priests of management theory holds all is text, and that there is no escape from language. To the modern manager every power transaction is mediated and massaged by language and by having control of the language they therefore have control over their relationships with underlings and with the customers of their company. As Baudrillard once tried to deny that the Gulf War ever happened the modern manager tries to deny the last hundred years of union organising ever happened…...What then are modern examples of management abusing and distorting language to their own ends? Well a short look at any type of ‘customer service’ focused organisation would provide many examples of how to call white black, or to insist that 2 + 2 really does equal 5 and that any attempt to deny this is just the bolshie employee being ‘negative’. A good example of this is how many people’s jobs have had the word manager appended onto them or the rise of the dreaded ‘facilitator’ the preponderance of ‘teams’, workshops and other pseudo-consultative facsimiles of democratic worker participation in their own workplaces. In the world of software people are sold ‘solutions’ and ‘packages’ with the idea that people sell products and services being seen as hopelessly old fashioned (and more to the point unprofitable)Language, and in a much more strong sense the written word is a techne. A form of technology a means of interacting and defining the world and like history it is organised and defined by those with power. So in one sense the Foucault’s and Derrida’s of this world were entirely correct to focus on how important language is as a tool of constructing and defining the world around them and thus of power relations between different groups in society. So how have the powerful used language to cement their position and freeze out their opponents? One example of this is the idea of ‘Shareholder Value’, this innocuous and oft-used phrase is the excuse for a variety of wrongs done to the ordinary worker and customers of large company. The idea of ‘Shareholder Value’ is that being the owners of the company the shareholders are therefore entitled to the majority of the profits. Thus working back from this conclusion management theorists recast every action by a manager in terms of how it could increase ‘shareholder value’ this also led to the idea that by granting managers share options you would align their interests with that of the shareholders and hence lead to an increase in share price….needless to say the Enron and Worldcom financial disasters along with other studies have shown how true that theory turned out to be. The idea of ‘Shareholder Value’ recast how language was used and abused throughout an entire organisation. This led to the consultants and theorists talking of ‘releasing’ value. The use of the world ‘release’ is in itself an interesting in that it implies that this so-called value is being held against it’s own will and that once freed it will as return to it’s ‘natural’ home…the ever deserving shareholder rather than that of the worker who generated the value in the first place. All debates within a company were framed in this language everything measured against this over-arching ideology, alterative views and approaches were frozen out.  So language is used to obfuscate and hide the mechanics of power within organisations, who has it and how it’s used. It is used to falsely align the interests of the workers with that of those who own the businesses, to divide and rule and work against any idea of workers acting collectively in their own interests. A recent study by the GMB union noted that the UK had one of the highest numbers of managers as a proportion of the work force in the industrialised world, leading to the all to plausible idea that many jobs are having the word manager shoe-horned in there as a sop to their workers and to make the senior manager feel better about themselves. Technocratic apologists for this state of affairs responded to this report by saying that modern service industries need this level of management to actually function properly which in itself is a highly debateable proposition…Employees are not stupid and do realise on the whole when management is trying to pull a fast one and many subtly resist the increasingly stupid diktats from above, the ceaseless re-organisations, re-naming, re-engineering and messing around of their own working lives. Large companies are organised on command and control lines akin to how the soviets organised their own industries. Practising a kind of ‘black planning’ they suffer many of the same problems as their Soviet counterparts. Any large organisation relies on feedback loops and quality information being transmitted to the planners, the most efficient means of conveying this information being some kind of market. Due to the size of these organisations markets simply won’t work, consequently means of monitoring and controlling the workers who actually do the job (and have some idea of what they’re doing) are needed. This is done via statistical analysis, neo-Taylorist time and motion studies, and meaningless target setting. As those wonderful hucksters McKinsey’s like to say if it can be measured it can be managed. The wilful and semi-deliberate abuse of language is all part and parcel of how these large organisations actually work, a natural consequence of their dysfunctional over-sized nature. This situation will not stop till workers actually have some democratic control over the companies they work in.     

Posted on: 15 September 2005 | 12:59 pm

Islam and Secular Medical Ethics

In the past few days there has been in interesting story concerning a Muslim family and their fight to reverse the doctor’s decision to withdraw life support from ‘Mr A’. What is interesting about the case is how it exposes the different worldviews and approaches to the issue of who lives and who die and how one distinguishes between actively letting someone die and consciously helping another human being die. Another interesting aspect of this debate is the framework it is conducted in. Secular medical ethics is often conducted in the language of high utilitarianism in which concepts like ‘quality of life’ are bandied about. It is a language of clean measurements and distinctions, with scales for measuring a patient’s well-being. What is interesting about secular medical ethics is that is based around the idea ends rather than means, the value of life in this mode of thinking is not absolute but contingent on other external factors, like for example whether the patients condition will ‘improve’ or assumptions of how they will experience the world. Indeed the whole enterprise of medical ethics is permeated with ideas of externally measuring a persons worth and this has become the establishment view. Without this backdrop it is impossible to understand why the family of the man known as ‘Mr A’(due to court rules on anonymity) is fighting so hard to put him back on the life support machine. Islam like the main Abrahamic faiths is based fundamentally on the idea of regulating the means not the ends. Its concern is not so much that the actions of believers and their effects on other people, but that their actions are ‘just’ and reflects the will of Allah. Another key difference to secular medical ethics is that all life, in fact everything comes from Allah. Allah is the ultimate power and ultimate arbiter of human affairs. He chooses when people die and when they live. Secular medical ethics starting point is the humanistic post-enlightenment philosophies of John Stuart-Mill, Jeremy Bentham et al. For the medical ethicist man is the measure of all things, god or anything faintly transcendent is scrubbed from the picture an unhelpful irrationality for the medical calculus.So what the battle of ‘Mr A’s’ life support being switched off demonstrates is a clash of worldviews that would, at first sight seem hard to reconcile. The family and the doctors are speaking mutually exclusive languages. From the family’s perspective it is of no matter as to ‘Mr A’s’ quality of life, it is irrelevant as how he lives just that he lives. In some respects this can be seen as quite a progressive viewpoint as they do not quibble with any of the modern medical interventions that have so far been needed to keep ‘Mr A’ alive. This does conflict with the implied wish of the family for ‘Mr A’ to have a natural death, i.e. a death chosen by Allah rather than man and that the doctors do everything possible to keep him alive. The doctors however see things differently from their perspective they are taking away artificial interventions that are preventing a man from dying from what they would see as a ‘peaceful death’.

Posted on: 2 September 2005 | 6:41 pm

Super Furry Animals - Love Kraft Review

This is possibly the best album that the Super Furries have done yet integrating all the wide and varied elements of their sound, and yet again demonstrating their melodic and lyrical gifts to wonderful effect.As you can tell I’m a long time Super Furries fan having seen them quite a few times over the years it has been a pleasure to follow the anti-Oasis in that they just got better and better over the years growing ever more inventive and ever better song writers with each new album. As a band the Super Furries have seemed at some points unsure as to what direction to take sonically and in terms of their song writing. They combine political awareness and principles with manic off the wall humour and an ability to write a great tune.The band have always thrived off the playing off of polar opposites when it comes to constructing their songs managing to mutate Country n’ Western into Belgium gabba or dismember a 10cc style love song into a Neu! style krautmetal stomper. This dialectal conversation between differing musical extremes has however become less of a feature of their sound since the excellent Phantom Power with a new influence being introduced into the melange that of sun kissed country rock, taking in Gram Parsons, The Byrds, The Eagles and Crosby Stills n’ Nash into their many influences. One criticism of the band is that they can stray into pastiche or homage of their many influences. As Simon Reynolds once said of The Orb it’s hard to kiss the stars with the tongue in your cheek. The other problem is  that sometimes their radical juxtapositions just don’t work. It is a testament to Gruff the lead singer’s song writing ability that the band can pull of their songs at all or even get away with the disparate genre fusions that they do attempt. This is an inherent risk in their approach to making music, but with each album they have got better at synthesising their Techno, R n’ B and dance influences with their core psychedelic 60’s influenced sound. Where the Beta Band failed the Super Furry Animals have gloriously succeeded.So that leads us to the question is ‘Love Kraft any good? In short the answer has to be yes, ‘Love Kraft’ is rapidly becoming one of my favourite Super Furries albums with nary a weak song. The album starts with the sound of water splashing as a nameless somebody slips into the pool. This sets the tone for the album with relaxed chilled low tempo numbers ruling the roost. ‘Zoom’ arrives on the scene languorously with a lovely Rhodes style melody line meandering its way through the song. Gruff sounding typically laidback secure in the knowledge that he’s written yet another killer hook laden chorus. As the Super Furries have got more experienced as band, and as unit playing together they’ve got better at layering their sound. Zoom demonstrates this in abundance with the relatively Rhodes and guitar line of the beginning being layered with strings, then choral accompaniment….then comes the brass. Few bands would have the sonic nous to get away with this.‘Atomik Lust’ reprises the country rock influences of Phantom Power with Gruff sounding the plaintive cowboy backed by Beatles style horns. This is a very catchy little number punctuated by Amon Duul II style noise-outs and squelching moogs. This song perhaps demonstrates how skilled the band have got a fusing genre’s and styles into a cohesive whole and what masters they are of the build-up and breakdown within an individual song.‘The Horn’ makes me think of Neil Young’s ‘After The Goldrush’ with its simple circular melody irresistibly nagging away at you coupled with a waltzing 3/4 time signature create a ramshackle sound. This song evokes watching western’s on a Saturday afternoon, Clint Eastwood and John Wayne.‘Ohio Beat’ picks up the tempo slightly, not to a large degree but in a way that’s agreeable yet fits in with the rest of the album. Gentle acoustic guitar strums complement Gruff’s voice well giving a smooth sonic backdrop for the song to work it’s magic. Another song that’s defined by the smooth layering and a gradual build-up of lush sonic detail. ‘Ohio Beat’ by it’s sheer intricate construction resembles a kind of perpetual melodic motion machine, cycling but never stopping fooling the listener into thinking it’ll go on forever. Possibly one of the best song’s that the Super Furries have ever written‘Lazer Beam’ is where the band leaves the beach and hits the club, squelching moogs make a welcome reappearance along with Bee Gees style choruses and Daft Punk style vocoder abuse. Alternately Stevie Wonder and classic disco are brought to mind along with the Super Furries perennial obsession with mid seventies MOR rock a la ELO and 10cc. This song will become that most horrible of things an indie disco hit with the student hordes be afraid people!‘Frequency’ is an excellent song dropping down a gear after the exertions of the previous two songs. Sun kissed Cali-style rock bumps along with rather excellent string backing which has been a constant through-out this album. Another lazy melody and well written chorus top this all off.‘Psyclone’ is built on dance music’s foundations, looped Timbalandesque cod-eastern R n’ B drum lines bump into jangling honky-tonk pianos and rattling tabla lines. The wonderfully orchestrated strings deployed with a lightness of touch enhance the song no end. The song has a ghost-like quality to it bringing to mind ‘Blue Lines’ era massive attack and fellow Bristolian Tricky.‘Cloudberries’ show’s the gentle reflective side of the band with Gruff sounding mournful and melodically downcast. Just as you start worrying they’ve turned into Coldplay the song mutates typically into a light bossa-nova number to tap your toe to, then taking a sharp right turn into droning choral style terroritory before stopping. Unlike previous albums this is executed very smoothly and although unexpected does not jar in any way.This album is very much worth getting one of the best things that the band have ever done, a summation, a synthesis and an apotheosis of their unique sound…go get.

Posted on: 27 August 2005 | 2:05 pm

Late Feudal Theme Park Opening in Hanworth Norfolk!(Complete with revolting peasants or your money back!). Contact your nearest Judge for further deta

Forget contract feudalism who said the old variety was dead. A case in point being the Hon Robert Harbord-Hamond, youngest son of the 11th Baron of Suffield who recently tried to assert some various dubious property rights over a local village green. This distant descendant of William the Conqueror following in fine family tradition by trying to expropriate yet more common land from the peasantry. Like the supposedly extinct coelacanth this land dispute is a living fossil from which it is possible to see the origins of modern land disputes and the nature of statist property rights and how they act as the building blocks upon which modern capitalism rests. While also pointedly reminding us that Britain is very much not a classless society. The villagers have asserted their right to own this land in common and use it for their own purposes, while the land owner in contrast like many of his ilk before him sees it as a resource to which he has prior claim. Now any good anarchist or libertarian socialist, unlike the vulgar libertarian flacks would see this attempt by the landowner to appropriate yet more land as inherently unfair and exploitative and as a blatant attempt by the landowner to ignore the prior common claims to the land. Like a pathetic reprise of the great enclosures of the 16th century he tried to fence his way round the property, to which the commons committee was not amused. This story unsurprisingly got a small mention in the Guardian and no further comment in the newspaper in a whole, despite what I see as its importance in illustrating how property rights of the past inform the present. What this interesting and unusual case does is remind us of the origins of the modern distribution of land in the UK and the ancient conflicts and struggles that have shaped this distribution of the land. It also reminds us of how the ownership of land has always been a concern of the powerful and how it continues to animate their concerns. Possession of land like most assets translates into political power and influence, the aristocracy like large companies and governments have not forgotten this fact. After all they’re not making anymore of it, as the ole’ georgists say! The majority of people in the UK are oblivious the historical iniquities that seem frozen in time around, it’s perfectly natural to accept the layout of the landscape and division of the land as ‘natural’ or as the result of inexorable economic forces over which we have little influence. This would be mistake and any socialist worth his salt would argue that had certain events gone one way or another things might be very different today(the enclosures being a case in point). Being a materialist doesn’t make one a determinist let alone a pessimist. Land distribution is the result of deliberate decisions and deliberate exploitation of changing circumstances. As Kevin Carson points out in his splendid class analysis of the transition from feudalism to state-capitalism the people who expropriated the land from the peasantry were the usual suspects who used this transition to extend and strengthen their own power. The mechanics of exploitation may change but the kinds of people doing it have remained pretty much the same. The Baron’s son being a beautiful example of this demonstrating how the aristocracy retain old reflexes and habits when it comes to dealing with the ‘rabble’. Luckily the Norfolk villages faced the baron’s son down and he has stated that he will be not defending the case in the court. Whether the bad publicity got the better of him or he had a sudden attack of conscience it is a good result for villagers and should alert us all to how the past as so often in this country can become the present.

Posted on: 20 August 2005 | 12:51 pm

Beowulf Returns

After acquiring a shiny new laptop I'm back to regular blogging so expect to find a few posts by myself in the next few days.

Posted on: 14 August 2005 | 2:25 am

File-Sharing is Dead, Long Live File-Sharing!

As usual the mainstream media has got the latest American supreme court decision on file-sharing wrong. British journalists are notoriously technically inept when it comes to technology stories and watching Newsnight last night did nothing to dispel my opinion of that. Kirsty Wark was obviously out of her depth and failed to ask any probing questions of the smug BPI lawyer and just let the Freenet programmer spout his pre-prepared line. This as well as being extremely annoying, and a waste of good airtime failed to address the real issues behind the court's judgement. Grokster, like Napster is an also-ran it is trying to make money out of an extremely commoditised market, so commoditised that the chief means of sharing ones files is actually free. What mainstream commentators have failed to notice is that the most popular file sharing programs and protocols that exist today are free. They are free, open source and available to anybody through networks like G2, Gnutella, Edonkey et al. Companies like Grokster and Kazaa cannot and will not survive this onslaught of open protocols and open programs, the judgement from the supreme court will hasten their end. Copyright, like patents are a state imposed and sanctioned monopoly anything that brings their end closer is a good thing. File sharing is dead, long live file-sharing!

Posted on: 28 June 2005 | 12:16 pm