As I write this, I sit in a flat above a row of shops on a market street in Catford, Lewisham. The shop below me has boarded up its windows. The sun is shining and the street has an uneasy good humour but the fallout from three nights ago is palpable.
Three nights ago, I arrived in my road and walked straight into a discussion between the shop owners and stall holders. Everyone was closing up. Even as we stood together, figures in black hoods moved through the street, first in ones and twos and then in larger groups. People stepped out of their way.
I went into my flat and turned on the news. Riots had already broken out in Hackney, Croydon and then, Lewisham. At the other end of Catford High St, two cars were on fire and rumours of looting were growing. BBC News elicited panicky phone calls from my relatives. It was heading my way. I put some bits in a bag and headed over towards my girlfriend's house.
At the top of Catford High Street, I found a small crowd of residents with two maligned-looking police officers at their centre. An African man asked the officer if 'It was safe to walk down the High Street'. The officers looked at one another. One of them then responded.
'Well, I'd walk down it.'
Master of the non-committal response. We could hear the sound of distant alarms.
Some of us began to walk down it and arrived into the middle of a mob of around 200 'youths' in the process of smashing their way into Argos. The size of the group was both surprising and ridiculous. We watched as they forced their way inside and then began to emerge with HD cameras, arms full of jewelry and wide screen tvs on their shoulders, their faces masked or hooded, some with Halloween masks. The looters milled around, some actually queuing to get inside the shop.
There was no reaction from the police. Nobody stopped them for the 30 minutes or so I could see them. I couldn't get a signal on my phone. Either the network was overloaded or the Police were dampening it out of their fear of twitter. Just as I headed down a back street towards my girlfriend's house, three riot vans finally arrived. They didn't even stop beside the rioters but some of them broke off, legging it down the same street with their new televisions.
I suddenly found myself isolated amid a group about twenty masked looters. They were laughing and joking amongst themselves, euphoric. At that moment I realised that I was completely cut off. My phone didn't work and even if I could call the police, nobody would have come. If they wanted to rob me, it was entirely up to them.
As it happened, they had other things on their mind. Some carried their new appliances into pleasant, well built houses on the quiet suburban road and the rest vanished into another side street. I walked on to my girlfriend's house and the sight of people vanishing loot into the house opposite.
We then watched as the riots spread from borough to borough. Still David Cameron refused to break from his holiday. It seemed that only when the pleasant, middle class area of Ealing was hit that Cameron had something he could understand. In the Londo-Caribbean household in which I then sat, there was discomfort at the number of hooded black faces, but there were others too. As the riots spread to Birmingham and the North of England, the colour of the faces changed but the problems were the same.
'Unacceptable' Scolded Theresa May uselessly. A more upper class, haughty woman would be difficult to imagine. What could she possibly say when she has no mental comprehension of or physical association with the areas and people who were bringing the capital to its knees. When Cameron returned, the Conservative government's fears and priorities became obvious. They adopted exactly the same tactics faced by every ruling elite in a civil uprising. Criminalisation and sounding tough, denigrating the numbers of rioters (small of course). Before even the results of the Mark Duggan inquiry were concluded, phrases such as 'No possible justification' were heard. How could they know before the facts had been established? Their greatest outrage was at the national embarrassment caused with 2012 looming. Cameron blustered and soundbit but clearly could not comprehend how he had become the first Prime Minister to face riots on this scale in living memory. This was not the country that Dave was born to rule.
Many people have tried to offer reasons for why the city's order failed so badly over those nights. The thing that struck me was the total disconnection between those in power and the people and areas hit by riots. This disassociation was not just with the politicians. The media were spectacularly guilty of this, misidentifying Lewisham and mistaking Hackney for Deptford. The most embarrassing was their quotation of a rioter's incitement via twitter to hit the streets in which they translated 'endz' as meaning 'gang'. Anyone who has been to South London wouldn't make that most basic and sensationalising of mistakes. They looped riot footage from previous nights and turned the event into a spectator sport, whilst at the same time missing key developments and information that would have been useful to the public. But more serious is the complete inability of politicians to recognise what happened as anything more than a spate of criminality arriving as a bolt from the blue. In this, Cameron is like the child who puts his hands over his own eyes and believes himself invisible. Just because he can't see, doesn't mean it isn't there. As with every walk of life, if you cannot identify when you have a problem, what hope can you have of finding a solution.
In any case, a solution is no easy thing. Being white and middle (ish) class, my own perspective and understanding is far from complete, but as someone who has worked in Hackney and lived in Brixton, Streatham and Lewisham, I am not blind to the world in which the riots materialised. One of the things that has struck me in the days after the action has been the pleasant reassuring feeling of seeing police, not even that many police in Catford's case, on patrol, walking down a High Street at night. This is something I have scarcely seen in my time in Lewisham or Brixton. In South London particularly, we're all used to the sirens and the occasional flash of a high vis Ford Focus, (unlike some places, sirens are nothing new in Catford) but to see police on the streets has a calm purpose and civility that cannot be bought by one hundred invisible rapid response teams. In short, the number of police on the street two or three nights later does not feel excessive to me.
As for the rioters, whilst there have been a number of high profile exceptions - the ballerina, the teaching assistant, the millionaire's daughter non-withstanding - Cameron cannot and should not attempt to communicate with them directly. So vast is the gulf of empathy that seeing millionaires like Cameron, Osbourne or May purporting to have any clue about life on an estate is stomach turning. They need to find people who understand, make them visible. They need to stop hiding behind the bottled bluster and Daily Mail outrage that does nobody any favours.
The lives and often, the values of people left to fester out of sight and mind, not in-keeping with the 2012 presented view of Britain are toxic to a degree we haven't even begun to understand. Places where teenagers kill one another over 'respect', where the successful guy with the nice car and good house is the local drug dealer. Places where adults are killed by gangs of children and smart young men shouldn't stand up for their girlfriends for fear of brutal, violent reactions long divorced from any reason, proportion or perspective. That toxicity was the true cause of the riots. It already existed. Over the weekend it was merely focused by a dealer's death, targeted by twitter and BB chat and emboldened by the fact that for three days, nobody stopped it. It is not evil, or even 'sick' as the Prime Minister labelled it, presumably in another mistaken usage of urban slang. It is a mantra, a way of life that has risen out of places so forgotten by 'clean cut' society that the darkest of actions carry limited consequence.
In those places, if you don't work at school or work outside of it (in the legal economy), the state will provide housing and care that will increase with the number of children you have. If you are under 18, you are ideally qualified for holding guns and hiding drugs as the state cannot meaningfully punish you and the gang can cast you adrift at any moment. That this way of life has become normalised, packaged and even glamourised has created ghettos, not just of people and places - of 'endz' in its proper usage, but also of values so skewed that those who do not know or conform to their rules can and do end up dead. This is because these areas are not policed by police. In places like that, the police are occasional visitors, like the clean freak aunt who occasionally drops in for a dawn raid or one off arrest. The everyday policing is left to the gangs and their codes of respect, an ideology shaped too by the playground mentality of children in which the latest trainers or Iphone denote more status than any GCSE could ever hope to. This creates a terrifying, urban (Unlike with Cameron, not a byword for black) Lord of the Flies society, but one in which the adults are actually present and at best powerless, at worst complicit as shown by the accounts of parents in Lewisham dropping their kids off by car so they could go looting.
The most terrifying thing about the London riots is that they have shown what is possible. They have shown that outside of these ghettos of values, wider society is not so strong. Cuts, efficiencies and the death of values in politics have left us vulnerable to the cynicism and instant gratification of the ghetto ideology as shown by the number of 'ordinary people' who joined in and fanned the flames, 'caught up' in the riots. The police are beleaguered and lest we forget, recently decapitated by the seemingly distant phone-hacking scandal. The press, especially 24 hour rolling news has been shown to be devoid of value and context, playing the riots more for its own ratings than to give information to people who needed it. News 24 was like a puppy dog chasing its own tail, excitable but bemused as riots bounced around like so many brightly coloured balls. The Conservative government by its makeup alone is a slap in the face to any hope of social mobility even without their policies on EMA and University tuition, and lest we forget, it is less than a year since the expenses affair showed our politicians to be truly, madly, deeply corrupt.
But whilst the institutions and their leaders may fail us, there is no shortage of evidence that good people still exist and in large numbers. The broom army, the nobility of parents who lost children but still appealed for calm, the dignity of so many victims. London in particular has never ceased to surprise me in the number of selfless displays of humanity from a purportedly unfriendly big city. But to my mind, what we lack is a social alternative, a positive ideology that we can take to the grim places and present as a different option to 'respect', to merely accruing big tvs, big trainers and big cars. Cameron's Big Society is flawed in every way apart from the necessity to create a means by which everyone can invest themselves for a positive end. The Big Society in its current form fails because it asks people to volunteer their time whilst cutting services, expecting sweeping, common magnanimity to take the place of government social provisions. What Cameron has failed to realise is that a wide-scale social change like the one he hopes for does not come out of a blue sky focus group to be implemented from the top down by people who are actually above society, insulated by wealth and breeding. Rather social change comes out of unrest, anger even, in short, exactly the kind of scenes we have just witnessed and for it to happen, the status quo, and the institutions that perpetuate it must be fundamentally altered.
Chief amongst this is for us to elect people who properly understand the people they represent. A coalition of teachers, youth leaders, engineers, scientists, outreach workers, business people small and large. We must get rid of this young, airbrushed, branded professional politician who is good for nothing more than playing politics. In doing so, we must not expect them to be squeaky clean or without prejudice. The politicians we have now are a response to the sanitising, corrosive effect of media scrutiny, but with Murdoch's power on the wane, we have a chance to put some real people into power. Politicians need to be seen as people who have succeeded in their chosen field and won the true, actual respect of their community. They need to have a connection to the communities they represent. They don't need to be perfect but accountable, accessible and as recognisable to the people on the estate as to those in the ghettos of Eton and Oxford. I suspect that there are some politicians like this in our parliament, but they lurk on the back benches, cowed by the superpoliticians into keeping their real opinions in party line check.
Whilst it may be a pipe dream, the best way to improve society is to properly represent the society that you govern, so that when issues arise, you have a means by which you can understand them and not, as both Cameron and Mayor Boris have done, incomprehensibly argue that massive city-wide social unrest is not in some way, a product of the way the country is run.
Sunday 14 August 2011
Sunday 10 July 2011
Snowballs in July
Compromise. It may be a dirty word, but we're told it's what reasonable people do. Compromise - a means by which the intelligent can get things done. But is it possible that as a result of extremist compromise, this week, the whole country has become a grey area?
There is a growing feeling that nobody is immune. This week and puns aside, our biggest selling newspaper has folded, the wider press undergo trial by media, the police head for the dock and even the Prime Minister has his back to the wall over the compromises he has made. He and the leaders of the other main parties have all pitched their tents on something called the centre ground. Compromise HQ.
Britain has not ruled the waves for a long time, longer than many of us would care to admit but rarely has the country seemed so rudderless. With the success of devolution, even the concept of Britain feels compromised. The stale taste of financial crisis hangs in the air and with it has come a litany of 'distasteful but necessary' acts of governance.
Tuition fees, pension cuts, cost of living increases in fuel and transport costs, wage freezes, long-term graduate unemployment. We are in a fight - a vivid, vibrant face smashing fight for the survival of the way of life that has given past generations so much. Recognisably British society is being dismantled one compromise at a time and we are the frog that sits in the pan as the water heats up around it, and patiently, naively, reasonably boils to death.
Right now, the four estates of British society are caught in a tempest born of moral compromise. Successive governments have regarded a fraternal relationship with News International as an essential part of governance. Placating the red topped beasts in fear of a compromised manipulated 'Public Opinion'. This week, we have seen Cameron, Brooks and serial bandwagon bandit Milliband effusive in their expression of outrage on our behalf.
Perhaps more terrifying is the lack of outrage in the public domain. We have been conditioned by nature and arguably, by technique on the part of politics and media to be complicit, apathetic, to see decision making of every kind as the arena of 'other people'. As the circulation of NOTW demonstrates, a sizeable proportion of the news reading population would rather apply their scrutiny to celebrities than the people whose decisions actually effect our lives. Occasional hard hitting exposes do not adequately compensate for the impact of the long-term corrosive effect of this kind of journalism.
There is a growing feeling that nobody is immune. This week and puns aside, our biggest selling newspaper has folded, the wider press undergo trial by media, the police head for the dock and even the Prime Minister has his back to the wall over the compromises he has made. He and the leaders of the other main parties have all pitched their tents on something called the centre ground. Compromise HQ.
Britain has not ruled the waves for a long time, longer than many of us would care to admit but rarely has the country seemed so rudderless. With the success of devolution, even the concept of Britain feels compromised. The stale taste of financial crisis hangs in the air and with it has come a litany of 'distasteful but necessary' acts of governance.
Tuition fees, pension cuts, cost of living increases in fuel and transport costs, wage freezes, long-term graduate unemployment. We are in a fight - a vivid, vibrant face smashing fight for the survival of the way of life that has given past generations so much. Recognisably British society is being dismantled one compromise at a time and we are the frog that sits in the pan as the water heats up around it, and patiently, naively, reasonably boils to death.
Right now, the four estates of British society are caught in a tempest born of moral compromise. Successive governments have regarded a fraternal relationship with News International as an essential part of governance. Placating the red topped beasts in fear of a compromised manipulated 'Public Opinion'. This week, we have seen Cameron, Brooks and serial bandwagon bandit Milliband effusive in their expression of outrage on our behalf.
Perhaps more terrifying is the lack of outrage in the public domain. We have been conditioned by nature and arguably, by technique on the part of politics and media to be complicit, apathetic, to see decision making of every kind as the arena of 'other people'. As the circulation of NOTW demonstrates, a sizeable proportion of the news reading population would rather apply their scrutiny to celebrities than the people whose decisions actually effect our lives. Occasional hard hitting exposes do not adequately compensate for the impact of the long-term corrosive effect of this kind of journalism.
Tuesday 5 April 2011
Follow the money... Making the best of the BS
Last night's Channel Four 'Dispatches' program seemed to me to be plowing a field that has become increasingly riven of late. As conspicuously studenty journalist Laurie Penny put University Vice Chancellors in her sights, the nation braced itself for more self righteous anger inducing revelations about these senior academic figures with their noses in the publicly funded trough.
The age of austerity, as well as being the go-to buzz phrase for a seeping diminution of general happiness and wellbeing has, it seems, got people wondering where all the money presumably floating around in the infrastructure of the world's sixth largest economy has been magicked off to.
On the evidence of programs like 'Dispatches', it would seem that said money has a way of collecting itself in the pay packets of those charged with allocating it. Channel Four's accusations had a ring of familiarity that can probably be traced to the public interest value in buying into a policy of' 'Look how much this bastard earns. Let's hate him'.
Bankers, Politicians, Public Sector Managers, Big Oil and even crumbly old academics have been 'caught' with their noses in the over-used metaphor, guilty of the sin of earning lots more money than the average Channel Four viewer. For a long time, this sense of indignation was not something we did not share with our American cousins who followed the whispered promise of the American Dream to selfishly recognise that one day, if they worked hard enough, it might be they themselves ignoring the complaints of the working poor as they luxuriated in their Limousine hot tubs. Funnily enough, ten percent unemployment has a way of changing minds.
One has to wonder why, at each 'revelation' people can even summon the energy to be surprised when those at the top of a given system take best advantage of it. Human nature it seems, errs wherever possible on the side of giant pay packets when a man earning £300,000 + is lauded for his nobility and restraint in not asking for a pay rise.
So how can this clustering of money help us in our current straights. In the argument around debt and cutting to manage it, it almost seems forgotten that just as in a household held hostage by their credit card, the only way to get back in the black for the long term is to make money, not to stop eating or buying shampoo.
So, I want to know if it would be possible to set up (and I cringe at employing this term) a 'Big Society Works Program.'
This would be a company,part run by the government which would own a proportion of the shares with the rest sold to investors, perhaps tying in some kind of exchange mechanism via the publicly owned banks and with an integrated charitable trust. The company could have an M.O similar to an industrial version of 'Challenge Annika' and could embark on a program of public works, including rebuilding Britain's road and rail services, urban redevelopment, renewable energies and entrepreneurship, integrated with a massive program of internship-based schemes. Companies and high net worth individuals could be offered investment incentives to take part in the scheme.
It would also be a chance to innovate and create something that could have a lasting value, with private attention to profitability and the public focus on service overseen by the government. This could create jobs and if successful could be a modern blueprint for public-private partnerships that Cameron and friends can point to when they talk about privatising the NHS or other sacred cows. The media too could be offered unprecedented access for as many 'fly on the wall' documentaries as they could make. This would be a project of many stories, and one that would allow the coalition when asked for the umpteenth time to say 'Actually, this is what we meant by the Big Society.'
This is much of the problem with the BS (a fitting acronym if ever there was one) as it currently stands. Anything good it does is virtually invisible, chipping away at a few local issues. For the idea to work, the challenges must also be big. Dare I say it, Nationalism, over localism. PR 101. Make it big, make it visible, make it obvious, have Alan Sugar do a TV show to find the board members.
This would obviously require bravery. It would be a brass balled sticking of the head above the parapet. The media would be like bloodhounds to every perceived crack or flaw, begging it to fail. Perhaps part of the deal could be that reportage and information gathering on the project would have to be done by paid BBC interns from outside of London.
The initiative could be founded upon the following principles:
1. A decent wage for decent work. No indecent salaries or executive bonuses
2. Open opportunities for all qualified people. Many of the works projects would be regional
3. Open media involvement to generate buzz and invite sponsorship
4. An innovation centre where cutting edge ideas could be exchanged and developed
5. An attainable, visible, viable program of public works, even something as simple as filling in pot holes
6. An integrated internship program and the opportunity for small business involvement and development
7. Executive management from some of the best business minds in the country
Given public services are being handed to private companies on the sly in any case, why not make it a workable public initiative that people can get behind and see in action?
The age of austerity, as well as being the go-to buzz phrase for a seeping diminution of general happiness and wellbeing has, it seems, got people wondering where all the money presumably floating around in the infrastructure of the world's sixth largest economy has been magicked off to.
On the evidence of programs like 'Dispatches', it would seem that said money has a way of collecting itself in the pay packets of those charged with allocating it. Channel Four's accusations had a ring of familiarity that can probably be traced to the public interest value in buying into a policy of' 'Look how much this bastard earns. Let's hate him'.
Bankers, Politicians, Public Sector Managers, Big Oil and even crumbly old academics have been 'caught' with their noses in the over-used metaphor, guilty of the sin of earning lots more money than the average Channel Four viewer. For a long time, this sense of indignation was not something we did not share with our American cousins who followed the whispered promise of the American Dream to selfishly recognise that one day, if they worked hard enough, it might be they themselves ignoring the complaints of the working poor as they luxuriated in their Limousine hot tubs. Funnily enough, ten percent unemployment has a way of changing minds.
One has to wonder why, at each 'revelation' people can even summon the energy to be surprised when those at the top of a given system take best advantage of it. Human nature it seems, errs wherever possible on the side of giant pay packets when a man earning £300,000 + is lauded for his nobility and restraint in not asking for a pay rise.
So how can this clustering of money help us in our current straights. In the argument around debt and cutting to manage it, it almost seems forgotten that just as in a household held hostage by their credit card, the only way to get back in the black for the long term is to make money, not to stop eating or buying shampoo.
So, I want to know if it would be possible to set up (and I cringe at employing this term) a 'Big Society Works Program.'
This would be a company,part run by the government which would own a proportion of the shares with the rest sold to investors, perhaps tying in some kind of exchange mechanism via the publicly owned banks and with an integrated charitable trust. The company could have an M.O similar to an industrial version of 'Challenge Annika' and could embark on a program of public works, including rebuilding Britain's road and rail services, urban redevelopment, renewable energies and entrepreneurship, integrated with a massive program of internship-based schemes. Companies and high net worth individuals could be offered investment incentives to take part in the scheme.
It would also be a chance to innovate and create something that could have a lasting value, with private attention to profitability and the public focus on service overseen by the government. This could create jobs and if successful could be a modern blueprint for public-private partnerships that Cameron and friends can point to when they talk about privatising the NHS or other sacred cows. The media too could be offered unprecedented access for as many 'fly on the wall' documentaries as they could make. This would be a project of many stories, and one that would allow the coalition when asked for the umpteenth time to say 'Actually, this is what we meant by the Big Society.'
This is much of the problem with the BS (a fitting acronym if ever there was one) as it currently stands. Anything good it does is virtually invisible, chipping away at a few local issues. For the idea to work, the challenges must also be big. Dare I say it, Nationalism, over localism. PR 101. Make it big, make it visible, make it obvious, have Alan Sugar do a TV show to find the board members.
This would obviously require bravery. It would be a brass balled sticking of the head above the parapet. The media would be like bloodhounds to every perceived crack or flaw, begging it to fail. Perhaps part of the deal could be that reportage and information gathering on the project would have to be done by paid BBC interns from outside of London.
The initiative could be founded upon the following principles:
1. A decent wage for decent work. No indecent salaries or executive bonuses
2. Open opportunities for all qualified people. Many of the works projects would be regional
3. Open media involvement to generate buzz and invite sponsorship
4. An innovation centre where cutting edge ideas could be exchanged and developed
5. An attainable, visible, viable program of public works, even something as simple as filling in pot holes
6. An integrated internship program and the opportunity for small business involvement and development
7. Executive management from some of the best business minds in the country
Given public services are being handed to private companies on the sly in any case, why not make it a workable public initiative that people can get behind and see in action?
Wednesday 30 March 2011
'Apathetic Bloody Planet' - A voyeur's account of Saturday's London Protest
Saturday 26th March. Protest day.
My Saturday was unfolding much like any other in my sleepy Catford flat. I was vaguely aware of breakfast, vaguely aware of Football Focus, half-heartedly attempting some work when the phone rang. It was my girlfriend. Not unusual. She calls often. But that day she was suffering from guilt. Her work colleagues in the NHS were on the march and she felt like she should be making some kind of gesture.
"Ok. We can go and meet up with them." I said.
"No need to go that far." She replied. "But I think I would like to go."
"Ok," I Said. "Bring some felt tip pens and we'll make a banner."
"We don't need a banner you weirdo." She said.
"Of course we do." I said, getting into the spirit of things. "Come over as quick as you can or we'll miss it."
Half an hour of phone-based indecision relating to train times and strategy followed until at last, she gave our tentative plan her seal of approval.
I carefully selected my wardrobe, opting for my most politically dissident combo of jeans and jumper. I also began to make our banner out of an old curtain pole and a cardboard box which once contained my girlfriend's Christmas present of Carvella shoes. (Unsure what the Socialist Worker's Weekly would have made of that.)
By the time my girlfriend arrived with the pens, I was watching the prattling, tedious News 24 coverage as the march, swollen with people, was making its way towards the centre of London. She had opted for reasons best known to her, to dress like Kate Middleton's black cousin.
"Well we are going into town." She said, indicating in her own way that this expression of our citizen's dissatisfaction might well involve some High Street shopping, whether Oxford Street was in flames or not.
"Fair enough." I said, and showed her the sterling construction work I'd done on our banner.
"Are you really going to carry that thing around?" She said.
"That's the idea." I said. "Now what do you think should be our slogan?"
A long discussion ensued. "Osborne you posh twat!" was vetoed on the grounds of my girlfriend's assertion that twat is a swear word. (She went to Catholic school. I'm from Scotland where 'dickhead' is a term of endearment) I wanted Cameron's famous "I met a Black man once" or "Tories are a bunch of Cuts". We settled on "We are NOT in this together George!!" which was informative if a little camp sounding to my ear. A further hour was enjoyed colouring in the banner. My girlfriend is quite artistic when the mood takes her and we delighted in colouring GEORGE in blue, putting sad and angry smiley faces in the O's, tracing round a pair of scissors (also blue, but a different shade) to symbolise the cuts along with artistically distressed lettering of THE NHS and THE ARTS. We debated whether the exclamation marks should be red or black, but after a brief squabble, settled on black for consistency.
By the time we'd finished the banner, Ed Milliband had taken to his feet in Hyde park, seemingly with the expressed purpose of making a complete fool of himself. The odd-looking school prefect of a man who has never had a job outside politics tried and failed to play the great orator.
My heart wanted to go out to him, but it didn't. His righteous indignation was off the shelf, his attempt to play 'man of the people' was laughable and his summoning of Dr King was nothing short of embarrassing. At that same moment, Anarchists were attacking shops on Oxford Street and Milliband's speech was played on News 24 in split screen with a vehement assault on Topshop which upset my girlfriend no end. (She would later purchase three items from their online store in a show of solidarity)
Banner complete, we quickly had some tea and Battenberg cake for energy. (The breakfast of bourgeois champions) I filled my rucksack with water and energy bars in case we were kettled and we made our way to Catford station.
My girlfriend, new to protest, was at first, embarrassed to be seen with our work of art. To give her her due, the other denizens of Catford, South London did not seem to know there was a protest on and regarded us with the pitying looks that masked assumptions that we were 'Care in the Community'. My girlfriend actually works in mental health and gets quite a kick out of pretending to be my carer in public.
We chatted animatedly on the train. Our politics are broadly similar. We hate the Tories, mostly due to genetics. (She's black, I'm Scottish) We hate the Lib Dems for being Tories. (I was stupid enough to vote for them. She knew better and enjoys reminding me of the fact.) We broadly dislike Labour and think that Milliband is hopeless. (I hold a grudge over the Hutton Report. She still hasn't forgiven Ken Livingstone for, well, anything...)
As we arrived in Victoria, it was evident we'd perhaps devoted too much time to our preparations. As we wound or way towards Hyde Park on foot, it was clear that we were against the current and that at after 4pm, many protesters were on their way to the pub.
I called a friend of mine who was on the Equity (The Actor's Union) protest. She said that most of the actors had given up, (shock) but that the march had stalled in Piccadilly Circus where "things were getting ugly." With no other plan, we headed over to meet my friend in a Soho Starbucks. I held the banner aloft as we cut through St James' park, passing a young family entirely kitted out in Barbour jackets, blissfully unaware, feeding the ducks. In my forgotten socialist heart, something stirred.
As we made our way up, crossing the Mall into the centre, we could hear the roaring of a large crowd. We'd come out at the back of Fortnum and Mason. My girlfriend asked if we could go in and browse, seemingly unaware of the wall of riot police surrounding the building on three sides. We skipped round onto Piccadilly and found the March and the handful of anarchists who had climbed onto the fronting of F and M, the symbol of London poshness.
So these were the anarchists. Even in my longing to strike a blow for the common man against the system, I couldn't shake the feeling that these people were complete idiots. They were such a cliché. Skinny young men with questionable hair and combat trousers, women with piercings and tattoos they will regret in their 30s, jumping up and down in a rant so choreographed that it came across like an unhygienic, talentless Glee Club number. There were only a handful of them, and whilst they had got the crowd going and smoke bombs were being thrown, the majority of the marchers caught in the bottleneck looked on with bemusement and frustration. Even so, it was loud and unsettling. My girlfriend insisted we found a group of school children to march next to in case things kicked off.
After sampling the atmosphere, we cut away from the march and went to join my actor friend. Clearly, the anarchists had been busy. We passed many smashed windows of banks and shops. I was surprised and confused to see that, for reasons best known to them, they had completely smashed in the window of Anne Summers but left the Starbucks opposite untouched. Why Anne Summers? I thought anarchy was supposed to be fun. The pedant in me couldn't help noticing that they had misspelled 'Tory' in their graffiti.
So far, our protest had consisted of a pleasant walk through the park, a brief rubberneck at some idiots on a roof and a very nice hot chocolate in the spiritual capital of corporate oppression. I couldn't help noticing that in spite of the apocalyptic images on television, the city, non withstanding one or two broken windows was not in the grip of revolution.
After our hot chocolate, we ambled through towards Covent Garden. At my girlfriend's request, I disassembled our banner so we could go inside vintage clothing shops without alarming the security guards. I pretended the metal curtain pole was a walking stick, a pretense we used to make motorists stop and let us cross the road. The fires of revolution had left us and after dinner in Marylebone, we made our way back to Charing Cross for the train home just as darkness fell, only to discover the closest thing we'd seen to a riot in Trafalgar Square.
It was at this point that my girlfriend, previously keen to avoid trouble, decided she wanted to see things up close. Just as protesters began lobbing flaming debris at a line of police, we crossed into the square. The boys and girls in day glow were trying to protect the much maligned Olympic clock from people who seemed more militant than me about their belief in how pointless it is.
We had to move quickly as vans filled with riot police did their best to park on top of us and loitered on the edge of the square as more and more police began to arrive. It would be accurate to say that a lot of the 'hard line' people in the square were drunk and that the small fires they'd started looked much more dramatic on television. It would also be fair to say that a line of riot police coming towards you with shields and batons can make you glad you brought your curtain pole.
"Kettle!" The shouts went up from some of the black clad lookouts at the edge of the square. At that moment a mass of protesters broke out of the square before the police could encircle them. We were caught up in the rush as they escaped down the Strand and ducked into the station where we watched things unfold until our train back to mundane, unrevolutionary Catford arrived.
As we sat in the flat, drinking tea and buzzing from the adventure, listening to the entirely unrelated and totally normal wail of passing sirens outside, watching the BBCs Trafalgar Square images that made it look like the opening scene of Gladiator, several things occurred to me.
1. British people are rubbish at protesting. The people who protest are not representative of the majority of people who are frustrated with the obvious shortcomings in how the country is run. It was markedly obvious that aside from those protesting the War in Libya, too many of the faces were white, left wing members of decaying unions or eccentric pressure groups. Though the march had been broadly larger than expected, the popular uprisings of the Middle East could teach us much about how to hold an effective demonstration.
2. As my girlfriend pointed out. Stupid and pointless as they are, the only people who actually 'did anything' were the anarchists. They alone seem to have the understanding of what it takes to make yourself heard, non-withstanding the weak, plaintive bleating about the 'vast majority of peaceful demonstrators' who marched peacefully and were completely ignored. They were just as politically impotent as me and my girlfriend and the most revolutionary thing we did that day was send back a Wagamama's curry because it was cold and still felt bad about not tipping. In France they turn over cars and set fire to them, whereas here, limp little bonfires made out of placards are what passes for 'anarchy'.
3. The media are idiots. Harsh when as a journalist, I'm basically insulting myself, but the coverage of the event was not realistic. The crushing predictability of the whole scenario was not disseminated by the media who went from one little flashpoint to the next as if this were the fall of the Berlin Wall.
4. The police are full of disdain. The police do nothing to help themselves, predictably insisting that the numbers involved are half what they are in the face of the wild exaggerations of the demonstrators. They regard the whole thing as a hassle and a waste of time and many do not believe in the politics they are defending in principle when they take up their batons. They completely failed to protect the banks and businesses that had their windows smashed by enemies of the state who are far from the brightest or deadliest in the world. They may be a 'small number of criminals' but when a handful of tanked idiots can smash up the centre with little more than a rock, a stick and and anorack, the police have to look again at their tactics. (As someone who used to work for the Police, I'm not usually quick to criticise)
5. Most importantly, the government is out of touch... and so, regrettably are the opposition, which is perhaps why we might have to get used to making ourselves heard in more direct ways. George Osborne appeared on television in the days before the protest. He actually had the nerve to say that 'He knew how difficult it is for people just now.' No George, you don't. You are part of the most elitist government in two generations and like David, Nick and depressingly, Ed, you have never held a real job within the society you purport to be enlarging. You don't take the Tube, you don't live in Catford, Brixton or Peckham. You are not reliant on any public initiative to give you better access to work or support. You and your friends are not and have never been reliant on anything that you are scrapping.
People actually do see through you all. We also see through the Big Society as a way of passing moral responsibility onto us, as if we should somehow feel guilty about not volunteering to run essential services in the country at ground level. Forgive me George, but that's what you're paid to do...
In one way at least, it seems the march had some effect. In spite of using the day as basically a date with unusual post dinner entertainment, I do feel more political. I think the greatest difficulty of modern politics is in its inability to penetrate real life, (a quandary not aided by the space aliens leading the various parties) but in talking even just to someone I know well, I was struck by what the cuts could mean. My girlfriend works in mental health. She is on a placement in a trust that is facing massive cuts. Unfortunately, and to be non PC, the crazy people are rather selfishly, not aware there's a recession on and will require just as much care and attention even if staff are cut. Blanket cuts will mean that there are less burly nurses to jump on potentially dangerous service users which puts both the service user and the mental healthworker, (mine included), at greater risk. No doubt there are many people, probably more than the half million or so who may or may not have marched on Saturday who could voice similar concerns.
So yes, there is a budget deficit, but we have a right to expect the people we misguidedly elected to come up with a better solution than blanket cuts to services that are more intricate and fragile than our well heeled politicians seem to understand. Because if and when the people we care about are put at risk by cuts, in whatever way, it will not be the anarchists or the unions that David and George have to worry about.
They'll have to worry about the people, because if we take to the streets for real, it will not be to vandalise Topshop.
Thanks to Reuters for images
http://www.nickbain.co.uk/
My Saturday was unfolding much like any other in my sleepy Catford flat. I was vaguely aware of breakfast, vaguely aware of Football Focus, half-heartedly attempting some work when the phone rang. It was my girlfriend. Not unusual. She calls often. But that day she was suffering from guilt. Her work colleagues in the NHS were on the march and she felt like she should be making some kind of gesture.
"Ok. We can go and meet up with them." I said.
"No need to go that far." She replied. "But I think I would like to go."
"Ok," I Said. "Bring some felt tip pens and we'll make a banner."
"We don't need a banner you weirdo." She said.
"Of course we do." I said, getting into the spirit of things. "Come over as quick as you can or we'll miss it."
Half an hour of phone-based indecision relating to train times and strategy followed until at last, she gave our tentative plan her seal of approval.
I carefully selected my wardrobe, opting for my most politically dissident combo of jeans and jumper. I also began to make our banner out of an old curtain pole and a cardboard box which once contained my girlfriend's Christmas present of Carvella shoes. (Unsure what the Socialist Worker's Weekly would have made of that.)By the time my girlfriend arrived with the pens, I was watching the prattling, tedious News 24 coverage as the march, swollen with people, was making its way towards the centre of London. She had opted for reasons best known to her, to dress like Kate Middleton's black cousin.
"Well we are going into town." She said, indicating in her own way that this expression of our citizen's dissatisfaction might well involve some High Street shopping, whether Oxford Street was in flames or not.
"Fair enough." I said, and showed her the sterling construction work I'd done on our banner.
"Are you really going to carry that thing around?" She said.
"That's the idea." I said. "Now what do you think should be our slogan?"
A long discussion ensued. "Osborne you posh twat!" was vetoed on the grounds of my girlfriend's assertion that twat is a swear word. (She went to Catholic school. I'm from Scotland where 'dickhead' is a term of endearment) I wanted Cameron's famous "I met a Black man once" or "Tories are a bunch of Cuts". We settled on "We are NOT in this together George!!" which was informative if a little camp sounding to my ear. A further hour was enjoyed colouring in the banner. My girlfriend is quite artistic when the mood takes her and we delighted in colouring GEORGE in blue, putting sad and angry smiley faces in the O's, tracing round a pair of scissors (also blue, but a different shade) to symbolise the cuts along with artistically distressed lettering of THE NHS and THE ARTS. We debated whether the exclamation marks should be red or black, but after a brief squabble, settled on black for consistency.
By the time we'd finished the banner, Ed Milliband had taken to his feet in Hyde park, seemingly with the expressed purpose of making a complete fool of himself. The odd-looking school prefect of a man who has never had a job outside politics tried and failed to play the great orator.
My heart wanted to go out to him, but it didn't. His righteous indignation was off the shelf, his attempt to play 'man of the people' was laughable and his summoning of Dr King was nothing short of embarrassing. At that same moment, Anarchists were attacking shops on Oxford Street and Milliband's speech was played on News 24 in split screen with a vehement assault on Topshop which upset my girlfriend no end. (She would later purchase three items from their online store in a show of solidarity)Banner complete, we quickly had some tea and Battenberg cake for energy. (The breakfast of bourgeois champions) I filled my rucksack with water and energy bars in case we were kettled and we made our way to Catford station.
My girlfriend, new to protest, was at first, embarrassed to be seen with our work of art. To give her her due, the other denizens of Catford, South London did not seem to know there was a protest on and regarded us with the pitying looks that masked assumptions that we were 'Care in the Community'. My girlfriend actually works in mental health and gets quite a kick out of pretending to be my carer in public.
We chatted animatedly on the train. Our politics are broadly similar. We hate the Tories, mostly due to genetics. (She's black, I'm Scottish) We hate the Lib Dems for being Tories. (I was stupid enough to vote for them. She knew better and enjoys reminding me of the fact.) We broadly dislike Labour and think that Milliband is hopeless. (I hold a grudge over the Hutton Report. She still hasn't forgiven Ken Livingstone for, well, anything...)
As we arrived in Victoria, it was evident we'd perhaps devoted too much time to our preparations. As we wound or way towards Hyde Park on foot, it was clear that we were against the current and that at after 4pm, many protesters were on their way to the pub.
I called a friend of mine who was on the Equity (The Actor's Union) protest. She said that most of the actors had given up, (shock) but that the march had stalled in Piccadilly Circus where "things were getting ugly." With no other plan, we headed over to meet my friend in a Soho Starbucks. I held the banner aloft as we cut through St James' park, passing a young family entirely kitted out in Barbour jackets, blissfully unaware, feeding the ducks. In my forgotten socialist heart, something stirred.
As we made our way up, crossing the Mall into the centre, we could hear the roaring of a large crowd. We'd come out at the back of Fortnum and Mason. My girlfriend asked if we could go in and browse, seemingly unaware of the wall of riot police surrounding the building on three sides. We skipped round onto Piccadilly and found the March and the handful of anarchists who had climbed onto the fronting of F and M, the symbol of London poshness.
So these were the anarchists. Even in my longing to strike a blow for the common man against the system, I couldn't shake the feeling that these people were complete idiots. They were such a cliché. Skinny young men with questionable hair and combat trousers, women with piercings and tattoos they will regret in their 30s, jumping up and down in a rant so choreographed that it came across like an unhygienic, talentless Glee Club number. There were only a handful of them, and whilst they had got the crowd going and smoke bombs were being thrown, the majority of the marchers caught in the bottleneck looked on with bemusement and frustration. Even so, it was loud and unsettling. My girlfriend insisted we found a group of school children to march next to in case things kicked off.After sampling the atmosphere, we cut away from the march and went to join my actor friend. Clearly, the anarchists had been busy. We passed many smashed windows of banks and shops. I was surprised and confused to see that, for reasons best known to them, they had completely smashed in the window of Anne Summers but left the Starbucks opposite untouched. Why Anne Summers? I thought anarchy was supposed to be fun. The pedant in me couldn't help noticing that they had misspelled 'Tory' in their graffiti.
So far, our protest had consisted of a pleasant walk through the park, a brief rubberneck at some idiots on a roof and a very nice hot chocolate in the spiritual capital of corporate oppression. I couldn't help noticing that in spite of the apocalyptic images on television, the city, non withstanding one or two broken windows was not in the grip of revolution.
After our hot chocolate, we ambled through towards Covent Garden. At my girlfriend's request, I disassembled our banner so we could go inside vintage clothing shops without alarming the security guards. I pretended the metal curtain pole was a walking stick, a pretense we used to make motorists stop and let us cross the road. The fires of revolution had left us and after dinner in Marylebone, we made our way back to Charing Cross for the train home just as darkness fell, only to discover the closest thing we'd seen to a riot in Trafalgar Square.It was at this point that my girlfriend, previously keen to avoid trouble, decided she wanted to see things up close. Just as protesters began lobbing flaming debris at a line of police, we crossed into the square. The boys and girls in day glow were trying to protect the much maligned Olympic clock from people who seemed more militant than me about their belief in how pointless it is.
We had to move quickly as vans filled with riot police did their best to park on top of us and loitered on the edge of the square as more and more police began to arrive. It would be accurate to say that a lot of the 'hard line' people in the square were drunk and that the small fires they'd started looked much more dramatic on television. It would also be fair to say that a line of riot police coming towards you with shields and batons can make you glad you brought your curtain pole.
"Kettle!" The shouts went up from some of the black clad lookouts at the edge of the square. At that moment a mass of protesters broke out of the square before the police could encircle them. We were caught up in the rush as they escaped down the Strand and ducked into the station where we watched things unfold until our train back to mundane, unrevolutionary Catford arrived.As we sat in the flat, drinking tea and buzzing from the adventure, listening to the entirely unrelated and totally normal wail of passing sirens outside, watching the BBCs Trafalgar Square images that made it look like the opening scene of Gladiator, several things occurred to me.
1. British people are rubbish at protesting. The people who protest are not representative of the majority of people who are frustrated with the obvious shortcomings in how the country is run. It was markedly obvious that aside from those protesting the War in Libya, too many of the faces were white, left wing members of decaying unions or eccentric pressure groups. Though the march had been broadly larger than expected, the popular uprisings of the Middle East could teach us much about how to hold an effective demonstration.
2. As my girlfriend pointed out. Stupid and pointless as they are, the only people who actually 'did anything' were the anarchists. They alone seem to have the understanding of what it takes to make yourself heard, non-withstanding the weak, plaintive bleating about the 'vast majority of peaceful demonstrators' who marched peacefully and were completely ignored. They were just as politically impotent as me and my girlfriend and the most revolutionary thing we did that day was send back a Wagamama's curry because it was cold and still felt bad about not tipping. In France they turn over cars and set fire to them, whereas here, limp little bonfires made out of placards are what passes for 'anarchy'.
3. The media are idiots. Harsh when as a journalist, I'm basically insulting myself, but the coverage of the event was not realistic. The crushing predictability of the whole scenario was not disseminated by the media who went from one little flashpoint to the next as if this were the fall of the Berlin Wall.
4. The police are full of disdain. The police do nothing to help themselves, predictably insisting that the numbers involved are half what they are in the face of the wild exaggerations of the demonstrators. They regard the whole thing as a hassle and a waste of time and many do not believe in the politics they are defending in principle when they take up their batons. They completely failed to protect the banks and businesses that had their windows smashed by enemies of the state who are far from the brightest or deadliest in the world. They may be a 'small number of criminals' but when a handful of tanked idiots can smash up the centre with little more than a rock, a stick and and anorack, the police have to look again at their tactics. (As someone who used to work for the Police, I'm not usually quick to criticise)
5. Most importantly, the government is out of touch... and so, regrettably are the opposition, which is perhaps why we might have to get used to making ourselves heard in more direct ways. George Osborne appeared on television in the days before the protest. He actually had the nerve to say that 'He knew how difficult it is for people just now.' No George, you don't. You are part of the most elitist government in two generations and like David, Nick and depressingly, Ed, you have never held a real job within the society you purport to be enlarging. You don't take the Tube, you don't live in Catford, Brixton or Peckham. You are not reliant on any public initiative to give you better access to work or support. You and your friends are not and have never been reliant on anything that you are scrapping.
People actually do see through you all. We also see through the Big Society as a way of passing moral responsibility onto us, as if we should somehow feel guilty about not volunteering to run essential services in the country at ground level. Forgive me George, but that's what you're paid to do...
In one way at least, it seems the march had some effect. In spite of using the day as basically a date with unusual post dinner entertainment, I do feel more political. I think the greatest difficulty of modern politics is in its inability to penetrate real life, (a quandary not aided by the space aliens leading the various parties) but in talking even just to someone I know well, I was struck by what the cuts could mean. My girlfriend works in mental health. She is on a placement in a trust that is facing massive cuts. Unfortunately, and to be non PC, the crazy people are rather selfishly, not aware there's a recession on and will require just as much care and attention even if staff are cut. Blanket cuts will mean that there are less burly nurses to jump on potentially dangerous service users which puts both the service user and the mental healthworker, (mine included), at greater risk. No doubt there are many people, probably more than the half million or so who may or may not have marched on Saturday who could voice similar concerns.
So yes, there is a budget deficit, but we have a right to expect the people we misguidedly elected to come up with a better solution than blanket cuts to services that are more intricate and fragile than our well heeled politicians seem to understand. Because if and when the people we care about are put at risk by cuts, in whatever way, it will not be the anarchists or the unions that David and George have to worry about.
They'll have to worry about the people, because if we take to the streets for real, it will not be to vandalise Topshop.
Thanks to Reuters for images
http://www.nickbain.co.uk/
Monday 28 March 2011
Jamie's Dream School Review
Good intentions drip from this programme like one of Jamie’s rich sauces and I have found myself so compelled by this telling insight into teachers and the taught that I am yet to miss an episode.I wanted to wait to see how the experiment unfolded before setting down any thoughts, but find myself struggling to make sense of it, and not least the worrying allusions to the future.
I went to six different schools, so have had a broad taste of the education spectrum through the 1990s. The last school I went to was then ranked in the bottom five in the country. I now teach in a prison so know what it is to have challenging students with sob stories and tough backgrounds. What concerns me most about the Dream School
Alarm bells should begin to sound at this premise, but Dream School
As American Entrepreneur Alvin Hall said after his own turbulent class, these kids are ‘not bright’, but they are smart enough to see that they hold all the power. They seem to be allowed to come and go as they please and pretty much do what they want. The uniform policy seemed to have quietly disintegrated by day two without any hint of a challenge.Such discipline as is imposed is either misguided like the efforts of David Starkey, toothless like those of the school’s long suffering headmaster and all ultimately undermined by the overly pally, hyper sentimental mumblings of Oliver himself.
David Starky rightly came in for criticism after his snide approach to his first lesson but his underlying instinct to challenge the pandering, softball, kid-gloved approach to dealing with hard, worldly, system-wise young men and women was not wrong.
If initiatives like Dream School
The battles the teachers fight for basic respectful behaviour from their students would be aided by an attempt to address this problem, alongside an admission that in the real world education is not always going to be exciting all of the time.The real world will not give the constant one-to-one attention and praise that some of them crave or reward them for completing basic tasks without giving up. The real world will not care if, as volatile student Harlem is fond of saying ‘that’s just the way I am.’ The real world is unfair and in large part uncompromising. It will sack them and mean it.
So if not education, perhaps the value of Dream School
So Dream School
So in this heralded age of austerity, I suspect that young people don’t need a dream from Jamie, they need a dose of reality.
Many thanks to C4 for images.
http://www.nickbain.co.uk/
Many thanks to C4 for images.
http://www.nickbain.co.uk/
Monday 21 February 2011
Axis of Not So Evil?
After the decade just past, many people in Western countries could perhaps be understood for harbouring a subliminal unease at Islamic nations, organisations and even people. This, if we are honest has not been the occupation merely of the BNP or English Defence League. Islam, in its cartoon-villain portrayal has been 'the bad guy' for ten years or more with little real differentiation between its various strands.
But now we have the opportunity to see much of the Islamic world at its ideological best. What strikes me most about this is the overwhelming bravery, a cousin perhaps of the same conviction however misguided that has made fundamentalist Islam such a dangerous enemy. Any way you regard it, these are people who are willing to die for what they believe in. Now it seems that the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and even Iran are turning this most powerful of weapons upon their long entrenched, long unquestioned masters.
It seems that we can respond to this sweeping wave of democratic expression in a number of ways. There is noticeable unease at the 'Real Politic' of the situation. Dictators however awful have provided a stability of sorts and also perpetuated a laziness in our commercially orientated diplomacy. Far easier to understand the whims of one overlord, however eccentric than embrace the messy, complicated, mannered chaos of a democratic government, particularly in its messy foetal stages.
Britain and the US, outward cheerleaders for democracy have been chastened in this expression by the long heralded elections in Gaza which brought Hamas to power. It seems there is no position of response for those who express their championed democratic rights by voting for people we don't like. So Obama and friends sit uncomfortably on the fence, waiting and hoping for the settling of the dust in such a way that their own interests in the region are not compromised. This is not a heartless response. Pragmatism keeps the lights on and means that there is petrol at the pumps.
However, as the Libyan uprising encounters the most cold-blooded regime response yet, the time may be coming when the outside world will have to choose whether to act in support, daring that such an action would be received well by the people and not in the oft painted way of their dictators who claim a sinister Western influence and seek to unite their people behind a xenophobic patriotism. A risk yes, but less so at a time when people are no longer slavishly buying the pantomime posturing of their jilted masters.
As people who generally do not hold our leaders to such account, the answer for now may be to embrace this action ourselves through the same social media as have given oxygen to the popular movements and helped turn whispered discontent into real revolutions. In any case, these new democracies are going to need support and reintegration into the international political and economic communities and we as a people, if not as a nation do not want to be seen as having perpetuated the regimes that are now close to collapse.
In short, just like in the changing countries on our news channels, what we do now as a people and as a country is vitally important. Can we find some of the same great motivation which for us requires no more bravery than to turn on our computers and email our friends and MPs?
Or will our brothers and sisters in the East who have been democratic for all of a week once again put us to shame?
http://www.nickbain.co.uk/
But now we have the opportunity to see much of the Islamic world at its ideological best. What strikes me most about this is the overwhelming bravery, a cousin perhaps of the same conviction however misguided that has made fundamentalist Islam such a dangerous enemy. Any way you regard it, these are people who are willing to die for what they believe in. Now it seems that the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and even Iran are turning this most powerful of weapons upon their long entrenched, long unquestioned masters.
It seems that we can respond to this sweeping wave of democratic expression in a number of ways. There is noticeable unease at the 'Real Politic' of the situation. Dictators however awful have provided a stability of sorts and also perpetuated a laziness in our commercially orientated diplomacy. Far easier to understand the whims of one overlord, however eccentric than embrace the messy, complicated, mannered chaos of a democratic government, particularly in its messy foetal stages.
Britain and the US, outward cheerleaders for democracy have been chastened in this expression by the long heralded elections in Gaza which brought Hamas to power. It seems there is no position of response for those who express their championed democratic rights by voting for people we don't like. So Obama and friends sit uncomfortably on the fence, waiting and hoping for the settling of the dust in such a way that their own interests in the region are not compromised. This is not a heartless response. Pragmatism keeps the lights on and means that there is petrol at the pumps.
However, as the Libyan uprising encounters the most cold-blooded regime response yet, the time may be coming when the outside world will have to choose whether to act in support, daring that such an action would be received well by the people and not in the oft painted way of their dictators who claim a sinister Western influence and seek to unite their people behind a xenophobic patriotism. A risk yes, but less so at a time when people are no longer slavishly buying the pantomime posturing of their jilted masters.
As people who generally do not hold our leaders to such account, the answer for now may be to embrace this action ourselves through the same social media as have given oxygen to the popular movements and helped turn whispered discontent into real revolutions. In any case, these new democracies are going to need support and reintegration into the international political and economic communities and we as a people, if not as a nation do not want to be seen as having perpetuated the regimes that are now close to collapse.
In short, just like in the changing countries on our news channels, what we do now as a people and as a country is vitally important. Can we find some of the same great motivation which for us requires no more bravery than to turn on our computers and email our friends and MPs?
Or will our brothers and sisters in the East who have been democratic for all of a week once again put us to shame?
http://www.nickbain.co.uk/
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