The Militant Pine Marten

Segolene Royal's new daring campaign tactic

2007-02-04T12:45:00.000Z

The Militant Pine Marten's sources report that Segolene Royal's campaign team appear to be testing a new way of connecting with voters in a way that is truly relevant to them. It's certainly more appealing than Sarkozy's tubthumping.

Live from Old Billingsgate Fish Market: the London Sarkozy gig

2007-01-31T12:41:00.000Z

Hubristically assuming that the Militant Pine Marten has any regular readers, they presumably know that it dislikes Nicolas Sarkozy because of his authoritarianism and disdain for civil liberties, his predilection for repressive means to tackle any problems that come under his remit as France's Interior Minister, his general outspoken Blunkettness. However in a spirit of open-mindedness, and indeed curiosity, the Pine Marten decided yesterday to attend Sarkozy's public meeting held at Old Billingsgate Market in the City, to hear from the man himself what he had to say, and also to obtain some sort of idea on the sort of man that he is from such ethereal sources as his tone of voice, body language, and any ad-lib statements. I intend to simply give an account of Sarkozy's performance and its' content, keeping it as objective and dispassionate as possible. This is a significant departure from the Pine Marten's usual opinionated approach, so please bear with me, I'm making an effort here. I’d be delighted to engage in discussion subsequently, in the unlikely event that anyone takes me up on the offer.

At half-past six yesterday evening, the queue in front of Old Billingsgate Market opposite the Monument stretched all the way from the doors to Customs House about 200-300 metres down Lower Thames Street. The first noticeable thing was that people in the queue were overwhelmingly young people, from 17 or 18 year olds about to vote in their first presidential election to those aged about thirty, who have moved to London for work purposes, via students studying in London. Chatter in the queue indicated that although many were fervent Sarkozy supporters, which is hardly surprising at a campaign meeting, many were also there simply to hear what he had to say, being still unsure who to give their vote to. Clearly for all main candidates, everything is still to play for because a lot of people are undecided, and although the "tribal" centre-right and Socialist electorates still exist, they're seriously shaken. Everyone is listening very carefully to what Sarkozy has to say, but they will be doing the same for Ségolène Royal.

Inside the building, giant screens, boards bearing Sarkozy's slogan "Ensemble tout est possible" (reminiscent of the SNCF's '90s "SNCF: tout est possible") and drawing of open fields with a seagull flying over them, lighting, cameras, and all the paraphernalia of the modern, media-savvy political campaign organisation. UMP and other dignitaries in the front rows, press and TV on the sides of the stage, and a few dozen 16-19 year olds in white "Nicolas, on y croit!" tee-shirts sitting behind a cordon on the right-hand side of the stage, some carrying French flags.

At about half-past seven, to raucous applause, Nicolas Sarkozy walks onto the stage, the crowd having been warmed up by a frankly hilariously sycophantic welcome speech by the London Delegate of the UMP. He began with praise for the host city, "the seventh French city" (a reference to the estimated 200,000 French nationals living in London), which had welcomed many French greats in the course of its history. First to be mentioned was Napoleon, who applied for asylum in England at one point. He was followed by General de Gaulle and the Free French, and Sarkozy thanked London for this, and for enabling the Resistance in WW2. This was met by a approving roar from outside the building where about a thousand people who hadn't been able to enter the hall ("As we know, the British don't mess with safety regulations" said the UMP delegate) were following the event on big screens. This prompted Nicolas to announce with a big grin that he "hopes to always have this problem". Carrying on with the customary homage to de Gaulle, he had incorporated some of the general's famous quotes into the speech, notably that he has "a certain idea of France", and he praised "France, the France of always", as de Gaulle did after the Liberation of Paris in 1944.

He then moved on to a section especially targeted at French expats, pointing out that viewed from abroad, France's shortcomings are more clearly apparent, that having left France, contrary to what many of those who have remained claim, didn't mean that expats were less French, or had forsaken France. And that indeed, because absence makes the heart grow fonder, they were even more dismayed, and didn't see why France would do less well than other countries, when it has everything it needs to succeed. He added that from the outside, people saw only results, not obstacles and problems as some within the country may primarily see. Sarkozy finally added that by being outside France, expats "serve France in her universal and international dimension".

At this stage, he began to talk about his bid for the presidency, with a rhythmic succession of seven or eight sentences following the following format: "I want to be the president of a France that isn't timorous, that isn't scared of others of the future!" (This is proper tugging at the red, white and blue heartstrings stuff by the way). He then gave the reasons for which people left France such as the fact that work wasn't paid sufficiently, that risk-taking was frowned upon, backed up by examples of illustrious Frenchmen who had left to continue their work elsewhere such as the chap who discovered AIDS, who couldn't continue his research in France as he had reached the mandatory retirement age so left for the USA. Groups singled out as being particularly likely to leave were scientific researchers, entrepreneurs, those without degrees that no-one will give a chance to in France. He ended this section by saying that "there was no doom to decline" and that "decline and fatalism were not part of [his] vocabulary."

Beginning his home run, Sarkozy launched a full-scale attack on the Left, the ideals of May 1968 and the presumed negative attitude to work as a virtue. This last section is probably best transcribed as a series of sound-bites, as this essentially what it was:

"The catastrophic ideal of May '68"
"Everything is not due to Youth"
"The Left accepts poverty as long as everyone is poor"
"The Left tolerates injustice as long as everyone is equally a victim of it"
"The students of May '68 were spoilt children"
"The Republic is now a word emptied of its meaning, brandished as an excuse to do nothing"
"The Republic is Merit"
"I want to return its' moral value to work"
"Work emancipates and liberates" (yes, really, he said that)
"I don't want France to be welcoming only so those with no degrees, no jobs, no homes, no papers"
"At lunchtime, Tony Blair confirmed to me that the 35 hour week wasn't England's thing."
"The only good thing about the 35 hour week is that it's the only idea that you don't have to patent, as no-one will ever want to use it."

He mentioned some actual specific policies:

Free crèches so that mothers could work if they so wanted
Free education for all (including expats)
Freedom for students to work during their studies
Single employment contract with three progressive stages of employee status, as yet unspecified
Law forcing public sector workers to resolve disputes at the ballot box within 8 days of the problem arising rather than striking ("I want to finish off the strikers").
Compulsory civic service of 6 months for youths (very lukewarm and hesitant applause there from the teens down the right-hand side)

Finally, a few choice words on egalitarianism and state assistance:

"Egalitarianism and state assistantship are deleterious to human dignity"
"No assistance without work in the public interest"
"The State doesn't want to help he who doesn't wish to help himself"
"We can create a synthesis between quality of life and efficiency" (He actually said "douceur de vivre" which has additional connotations, but it's close enough)

The event ended with a stage invasion by the Jeunesses Sarkozistes, a rousing chorus of the Marseillaise with waving flags on the stage that everyone joined in, because it is after all a bloody good song, then the Sarko Youth sang Happy Birthday to the UMP delegate, and Sarko went for a crowd bath.

As attendees waited for twenty minutes at the doors as the Fuzz refused to let us out for some reason, opinion seemed to be mixed. Certainly there didn't seem to be any of the Sarkozy fervour that the Pine Marten eavesdropped on earlier. People weren't impressed by the anaemic rip-off of the theme from The Big Country that would seem to be Sarkozy's campaign anthem. To be fair, it's quite aggravating, and rather alien to a French election campaign. I suspect that his attack on what he called "Youthism" may have dampened the ardour of the predominantly youthful crowd. As a courtesy, I'll let Sarkozy have the last word: "One is never disappointed when one strives to make of one's life something greater than it is". He said that in the context of asking people to work for his campaign, but feel free to take it out of context and make of it what you will.

An important milestone on the road to losing any vestigial moral high ground

2006-12-31T14:02:00.000Z

Upon hearing yesterday morning that Saddam Hussein had been executed, I was surprised at my main emotional response to the news. I was partly surprised, as I had not expected that the sentence would be carried out so promptly. After all, I had expected that he would actually be present at the ongoing trial surrounding events at Al-Anfal. Not that there’s much doubt that he was indeed responsible for the death of 180,000 Kurds in 1987-88, it’s just that surely the point of such a trial is to make the guilty party face up to his crimes, and to send out the message that such behaviour will not be tolerated or go unpunished. There’s nothing much the court can do to redress the situation, and in my mind and that of many others, it’s not the business of the courts to facilitate revenge. Obviously, not everyone shares that view.

I had rather expected that my first thought would be “Well done, it couldn’t have happened to a nastier chap”, or something along those lines. Only it wasn’t. The emotions that the news of Saddam’s demise stirred up were anger mixed with shame. The two often go hand in hand. The anger comes from the fact that the entire process leading to Saddam Hussein’s arrest, trial and execution has been a complete travesty. I don’t want to once again bring up a topic that never fails to lead to an intractable argument, so let’s say that the circumstances leading to his arrest were at the very least of dubious legality. What is beyond doubt is that the arrest warrant, if you will, was for being under suspicion of possessing weapons of mass destruction, which has proved to be a trumped-up charge on the part of the UK government. Alternately, as far as the US government is concerned, it was for being an accomplice to Al-Qaeda and associates, which was also utter tripe. It isn’t as if there weren’t any other charges that they could have made stick.

Of course, because of the uncertainty over the legal standing of the circumstances leading to Hussein’s arrest, he had to be tried in a “special Iraqi court”, not by an international one as are other suspected war criminals and their illustrious brethren such as Slobodan Milosevic. No matter how nasty a man Saddam was, he deserved a fair trial as much as anyone else, and there was no chance at all of such a thing happening in Iraq. Of course, that was his own fault for having given just about everyone in Iraq a reason to want to see him dangling, but the desire for revenge is different from justice, even if the practical end result is arguably the same. To be fair, the Iraqi court did a remarkable job given the almost impossible circumstances in which the trial took place: several of Saddam’s lawyers were assassinated for example.

But the fact remains that the outcome of it all was that Saddam was sentenced to death and executed with the complicity of the US and UK governments. All the talk of letting the Iraqi people judge Saddam as they see fit without outside intervention is transparent nonsense. It’s just George Bush and Tony Blair washing their hands of the situation unconvincingly. Of course, George Bush doesn’t have to care quite so much about this. He governs the only real democracy in the world to regularly execute so many of its’ citizens. Capital punishment isn’t so much of a political hot potato in the US as it is in Europe. But here, it’s anathema, at least it’s meant to be. The EU makes it a requirement for membership that capital punishment should be abolished. It’s just a fundamental human right. But it would seem that it’s only a human right for people like us, a group of which membership is subject to fluctuating criteria. Margaret Beckett, on behalf of the British government, said that “the British government does not support the use of the death penalty, in Iraq or anywhere else. We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime. ‘We have made our position very clear to the Iraqi authorities, but we respect their decision as that of a sovereign nation.’”

This is quite obviously a cop-out. You have to be singularly naïve to believe that the Iraqi government can’t be influenced by the US or the UK.

The main problem with the outcome of this miserable mini-epic is not that Saddam’s dead, or that he didn’t deserve it. No one much regrets his passing. This will have no discernible impact on what people still amusingly refer to as “the security situation” in Iraq. Saddam Hussein hasn’t mattered in this conflict since he went into hiding in April 2003. The problem is that this is the schematic version of events leading up to this: The US and the UK invade Iraq and arrest Saddam on trumped-up charges. He is then tried by a kangaroo rat court with the collusion of the US and the UK who unconvincingly claim that it’s nothing to do with them. He is then sentenced to death and executed with the complicity of at least on government that opposes the death penalty. Where’s the moral high ground that it supposed to provide us with the justification for using violence against countries when we oppose it when used by anyone else? Why on earth would anyone listen to a word we say any more? Why would they pay lip service to all our admonestations on human rights and democracy?

George Bush says of Saddam’s death that “it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy”. Well I suppose that’s one interpretation of what democracy is supposed to be. It’s not one that the Militant Pine Marten shares though.

Why not make ID cards out of sew-on fabric, in the shape of stars?

2006-10-10T20:02:00.000+01:00

In the past couple of months, those of us who flatter ourselves that we are members of the group disparagingly referred to as “the Liberati” by the now – possibly temporarily - retired David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, have been tempted to delude ourselves into believing rumours that the National Identity Register project was suffocating under its’ own weight. Leaks from Whitehall suggested that the word on the Civil Service street was that spiralling costs and technical difficulties, combined with the Government’s ongoing ineptitude when it comes to implementing large IT projects would result in the whole wretched endeavour being shelved. It was tempting to heave a tentative sigh of relief, to take a step back and think that we’d won, the whole scheme was being sunk by the Government’s hubris. However at a speech at the Institute of Public Policy research, Home Office Minister Liam Byrne reassured us that there has been no such change of tack. The scheme may be more expensive than expected (well, not really expected so much as wishful costed) and experience some teething problems, but it’s still going ahead, albeit maybe in little baby steps rather than in leaps and bounds.

As of last week, anyone over 16 years of age applying for their first UK passport will still be summoned to an “interview centre” and have all their details recorded on the National Identity Register, which is the iceberg under the cards, even if ID cards themselves are not due to make an appearance until 2008. Initially, they won’t be carried by UK citizens but by people that are either resented by the natives, or ignored, namely foreigners. The Pine Marten associates with a motley collection of these rogues, and although they are generally sympathetic to its’ opposition to the scheme, they do tend to think that at the end of the day, they’re not actually affected by all this. Thanks to Liam Byrne, the Pine Marten has the distinctly unpleasant task of telling them that they are in fact, completely wrong. As of April 2008, all foreign nationals wishing to live in the UK for more than three months, including EU nationals, will have the pleasure of being the first UK residents to be "interviewed”, fingerprinted, scanned and issued with ID Cards. Welcome to the UK!

Singling out foreign nationals as guinea pigs is politically pretty astute. First of all, most people arriving in the UK will not realise that this isn’t normal, that UK residents do not carry ID cards, and therefore they probably won’t make a fuss. As they’re all from different places rather than a single hazy "abroad", they probably won’t discuss it amongst themselves much. From UK citizens’ perspective well, most probably won’t care, so the scheme will be tested in a low-key sort of way, to make sure that it’s ready to go live on a bigger scale. Many of those who do care about such things don’t really like foreigners coming to the UK anyway, and if they’re not sure, they can always be told that this will keep out benefit scroungers, health tourists, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers or whatever other savages the Home Office, the media or UKIP and their ilk decide are the unpalatable flavour of the month.

(Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that the United Kingdom Passport Service is now called the United Kingdom Identity and Passport Service or UKIPs? Coincidence probably, but also maybe a deliberate clue left by an understatedly dissident civil servant).

There are three main points that flow from this in addition to the standard arguments surrounding the scheme. The first is admittedly paranoid, but it does seem that the Home Office is particularly adept at giving everyone a false sense of security about the National Identity Register. It’s not beyond the realm of fantasy to think that leaks regarding the possible landing in the long grass of the scheme were not entirely unplanned. What is more certain is that the singling out of foreign nationals as an ideal test group for the introduction of ID cards is underhanded and manipulative. The second point is of a more symbolic significance: singling out an unpopular minority with neither the means nor the knowledge to defend itself on a tide of popular scapegoating is practice with a long and despicable history. It is deeply worrying that UK citizens live in a state that has no qualms about using such means. This is callous and morally repulsive both to UK citizens and to foreign nationals, hundreds of thousands of which have lived in the country for many years, mostly without being treated as second-rate residents. Finally, the shrill voices that make such a deception on behalf of government effective are always loud and forceful, their arguments as simple as they are flawed. But they’re not the majority. The majority are those who do not oppose ID cards actively because they do not think it will affect them, and so they don’t speak up, they don’t act. And if they don’t, they’ll find themselves wearing metaphorical sew-on stars on their metaphorical lapels before they can say “police state”.

Darius Cameron stalks Blairshazzar’s throne, Iznogoud prepares his bid for the Caliphate.

2006-09-05T20:35:00.000+01:00

It’s been a while since the Militant Pine Marten last piped up, but since it is mostly concerned with politics, and that for the duration of the summer the politicians have by and large been more concerned with their suntans, it decided to take a leaf out of their forest and do very much the same. Besides, since any theoretical readers will mostly have been enjoying their holidays rather than scanning these pixels at their office desks, there was really very little incentive to engage with the wider world. However, it is now September, and as millions of children endure the collective annual trauma of returning to school after a season of freedom, and as we return from attempting to recapture the feeling that they have just lost albeit for a shorter period and with a much lower likelihood of success, so have the politicians also resumed their posts. And so once again, the Militant Pine Marten must prick its’ little mustelid ears and hold forth on what it hears.

On both sides of the Channel, jostling for position as inevitably the tenures of two political heavyweights come to an end, although these two face the inevitable differently. The chief difference in the current situations of Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair is that whereas the date of the former’s retirement is set by the French Constitution, the latter does not seem to have yet come to terms with what must come to pass. But then, the current Prime Minister has never shown any inclination towards relinquishing any sort of power, and it was always quite clear that he would never leave Downing Street with good grace. Indeed, the alleged pact between Blair and Brown for an eventual orderly transfer of power has always struck the Pine Marten as self-delusion on the part of the Brown camp and Blairophobes. And so Blair desperately seeks to avoid the topic, like countless children last Sunday evening, who upon being told to prepare their satchels and go to bed early covered their ears and shouted “La-la-la! I’m not listening!”, and as the volume of their parents’ voices rose, so did their cries to drown out this new intruding, unwanted sound. “I’M NOT GOING! I’M NOT GOING! I still have other very important things to do!”. Only Tony isn’t referring to one last game or one last cartoon, what he has in mind is, in now typical, self-caricaturing style, one last paranoid, sinister plan to rid Britain of the scourge of yet-unborn juvenile delinquents. But the writing’s on the wall for Tony Blair, he just refuses to ask for a translation.

Outside the walls of Babylon, Darius Cameron may well be poised to set his Patrician behind on Blairshazzar’s vacated throne. He comes not at the head of a mighty host, but armed with pleasant sounding platitudes, vague proposals, and chubby shiny glowing cheeks. In fact, he’s really quite reminiscent of the Old King in an earlier incarnation. This is the new Tory house style: smiles, cheerios and sweetly scented hot air. Perhaps the finest illustration of the new prevailing mood was young Georgy Porgy Osborne’s rather disarmingly charming boyish enthusiasm for magnetic levitation railways. Frankly, maglev trains and scrapping ID cards is starting to look like quite an attractive set of policies. In fact, if the Tories are serious about this, and we have no reason to suspect this of course, it almost makes sense. Take the money earmarked for universal State surveillance, and use it for maglev railways! There are far worse ways of spanking away enormous sums of taxpayer’s money. Just make sure to bring over some Japanese and Chinese engineers to design and build the network.

That last suggestion would no doubt not be very palatable to some of Nicolas Sarkozy’s young supporters who appear to have confused his address to the UMP’s Youth organisation with a rock concert. Indeed, the event was blessed with the hallowed presence of Johnny Halliday himself, and even the rapper Doc Gynéco. Serious street cred there. Although it’s going to take all of the good doctor’s lyrical expertise to convert to Sarko’s cause those that the Great Pretender wished so famously to hose into the gutter.

The content of Sarkozy’s harangue was disappointing. Part of his appeal has always been that he was seen as a man of innovation, indeed he himself never tires of claiming that he would be the candidate of “rupture”, or fresh beginnings (and there’s Blair’s legacy by the way: all that “sweeping away the ashes of past”, “moving boldly into a Brave New World”, “a modern, forward-looking country”, that’s what will remain, together with the utter vacuity of such rhetoric). The problem is that what he has outlined in his speech is a simple old-fashioned backward-looking rightwing, nationalistic programme: “no” to gay weddings and adoption, strict immigration controls, compulsory “civic service”, and repeated invocations of the Heroic Youth of 14-18, the Heroic Resistance, and other venerated ancestor spirits. Finally, on the one area that really requires a little vision, a little daring, not to say a little sensitivity, that of cultural integration of the French of immigrant origins, he resorted to old-fashioned monolithic Republican dogma. “France is your Fatherland and you have no other, even if your parents and grandparents came from elsewhere”. The Militant Pine Marten happens to be in a position to claim authoritatively that it is perfectly possible to have two “fatherlands”, to have two cultures, to be not without solid roots, but to have two sets of them, each as strong as the other. Arguably, it makes for a healthier tree. But it does not appear that Sarkozy is a great one for multiculturalism. In today’s France, a president with that degree of shortsightedness would be positively dangerous.

One way or another, it’s going to be an interesting political year on both sides of the Channel, although the calibre of those that would replace those currently in power is not particularly reassuring. Hopefully, by the time all the aforementioned schoolchildren come to vote, we will have left them with some worthier candidates.

Forget Prescott’s free houses: what about the free Hawses?

2006-06-01T19:36:00.001+01:00

There is a story that although given coverage in the media over the past week or so has been covered in a semi-jocular style, the sort of news story that one might expect to be dug up to fill up sparsely filled columns during the proto-silly season. Although it is indeed amusing in the sense that it’s barely believable, it is in fact not funny at all, it’s deadly serious and rather frightening. At least, it should worry you if you stop to consider its’ implications. The Militant Pine Marten refers of course to the forced removal of Brian Haw’s one-man protest from Parliament Square. Briefly, for anyone who missed it, Brian Haw has been camping in Parliament Square since June 2001, protesting against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Irrespective of your position on these, he’s pretty harmless. He’s just a tenacious pacifist who wants to share his views. Last week, 70 police officers descended on Parliament Square at the unsociable hour of about 2.30am and removed his display, citing new powers emanating from the brand new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005.

Now one could argue that a one-man pacifist protest does not constitute Serious Organised Crime, or indeed crime of any form as we understand it, and it doesn’t seem particularly organised, although the “perpetrator” and the subject of his protest, war, are pretty serious. I’ve been through the Act, and it does singularly fail to define what ”serious organised crime” is exactly, something that could turn out to be a bit of an oversight. The corporate body in charge of fighting serious organised crime that is created by this bill is called SOCA, and its’ functions are:

(a) preventing and detecting serious organised crime, and

(b) contributing to the reduction of such crime in other ways and to the mitigation of its consequences.

All reasonable enough, after all most non-gangsters aren’t particularly in favour of kidnapping, drug trafficking and so on, which one would presume to be the beef of what SOCA will be fighting against. However this is not necessarily the case as the Act also stipulates that:

(3) Despite the references to serious organised crime in section 2(1), SOCA may carry on activities in relation to other crime if they are carried on for the purposes of any of the functions conferred on SOCA by section 2 or 3.

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that what this means is that SOCA can pretty decide what constitutes “serious organised crime”. Those are pretty sweeping powers there.

To be fair, this act is not only about serious organised crime, it also has an entire section of general new police powers tacked onto the end of it, and this is where we find the bits that allowed them to demolish Brian Haw’s camping site, under PART 4 - PUBLIC ORDER AND CONDUCT IN PUBLIC PLACES ETC. - Demonstrations in vicinity of Parliament. However this entire section was included as an afterthought in the Act because essentially, Tony Blair didn’t like having to drive past a reminder that many in the UK disapproved of his handling of Iraq, and as Peter Hain, that onetime Leftwing firebrand said, the placards and Haw himself are a bit of an “eyesore”. Last October, after heckler Walter Wolfgang was ejected from the Labour Party conference for heckling Tony Blair over the war, the Prime Minister comforted him as he was being manhandled out of the room by shouting that he could make his protest, and should be jolly grateful for that. He flashed one of his famous winning smiles while he said. Why was he in such a good mood? After all the famous Bambi look has rather faded away in recent years and been replaced with Shere Khan’s menacing grin. Well because he knew that pretty soon, people like old Walter Wolfgang would find it rather harder to make their protest heard. Not anywhere near anyone who mattered anyway.

Now this all seems hilariously unlikely. These events are dismissed as slip-ups, officials reacting in a somewhat over-the-top way from time to time. After all, Tony apologised to Mr Wolfgang. But these aren’t one-off events, these are just high-profile events in an ongoing pattern of stifling dissent, curbing free speech, increasing the police’s repressive powers. The ID cards scheme is a part of this, and the many people who claim that it really doesn’t worry them because they’re not planning on breaking the law should remember that the law changes. One minute you think you’re heckling, the next you’re being arrested under the Terrorism Act. You may be exercising your proud right to free speech outside the Mother of All Parliaments one night when a load of policemen turn up and inform you that you may well be engaged in “Serious Organised Crime”.

Gordon Brown has of late been championing a National British Day and has kindly asked the People which day they’re most proud of, and it turns out to be the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta. A frankly excellent choice. But coming from a government that brazenly takes such excessive measures to silence its’ citizens, this is like the worst kind of hypocrisy.

Year of the Pine Marten

2006-05-10T22:13:00.000+01:00

It’s been just over a year since I started this blog, with no particular aim in mind. There had just been a lot of people who had asked me if I wrote one, or said that I should, and since blogging had become the new rock’n’roll, I thought that I might as well try it. I didn’t really have in mind any specific agenda, although I did and obviously still have a few axes to grind or simply areas that I find interesting and may well seem absolutely pointless to everyone else. One year later, I thought I’d take stock of where the Militant Pine Marten has arrived, what trees it’s climbed, what areas it has recolonised, how many birds’ nests it has devastated.

A quick scan of the archives reveals what this site has turned out to be about. Of thirty-seven published articles, about a dozen have been about civil liberties and terrorism, and more to the point the assault on the former under the pretence of fighting the latter. Three have been on the Byzantine manoeuvring on both sides of the channel as political vipers slither for position around moribund administrations on both sides of the Channel. That hasn’t been an edifying spectacle. So far, I think that France has the edge on the UK in this regard, but current events suggests that the Skulduggery Cup may change hands very shortly indeed. A further three articles have been on the EU and Europe in general, although admittedly there may be some who thought that the last one was about mushroom hunting. Which it was. Amongst other things.

Casual racism masquerading as common sense has faced a couple of mustelid denunciations, but I admit that it may have seemed to some that one of those was about bears. Other topics have included religion, education, capital punishment, the Iranian situation, civil disobedience, the Queen and her choice of newspapers, and recently a greater focus on what some term the social fracture, particularly in France where they’re more given to discussing things in such grandiloquent terms.

So I suppose that a year on, if someone asks me what the Militant Pine Marten is about, I might have to say that it centres on civil liberties, comparative Franco-British and European politics, with to some degree a thread of idealistic altruism throughout. I might also add that maybe what gives the Pine Marten a distinctive flavour is a dusting of whimsy. That’s what I might say. One of my artist friends however just says that “it’s quite an anarchistic website”, a comment that highlights the gap between my own perception and intention and that of the (thinly spread) world at large.

I have bothered to write over the past year for several reasons. An important one is that it has forced me to structure my thoughts in order to be able to convey them in pixels. In this way my ideas have grown clearer if not necessarily any better, and how they have evolved even over such a short time has become apparent. I also think that in years to come, I may be glad of a written record of what I used to think of some the salient and not-so-salient issues of the time. This will be useful, as it should stop me from lecturing younger people about how daft and wishy-washy they are. Finally, I don’t think that I would bother with this if I didn’t think that from time to time, someone would read what I had to say and possibly even like it (I’ll take the opportunity to thank all the people who bothered to argue about the death penalty). I suspect that vanity is an inherent part of any creative activity, and the Militant Pine Marten certainly isn’t above a little light narcissism.

This is the thirty-seventh post on this site, and by the standards of most blogs, that’s really not very many at all. Partly as a result of this, this blog isn’t exactly one of the great cybercrowd-pullers. On the other hand, most blogs don’t survive more than six months as the authors discover that it requires commitment, that it’s pretty thankless, and that maybe they don’t have that much to say. In this respect I have been very fortunate in that, if the Militant Pine Marten’s Blogotov Cocktail hasn’t exactly set the Blogosphere ablaze, there have been a couple of bright candle stubs. Very early on, attention was drawn to this site by the now sadly defunct Shot-by-Both-Sides (although John B is back in the saddle here!), and two articles were included in Tim Worstall’s excellent Britblog Roundup (first here, then here. I am also grateful to Tim for including my second ever article in his anthology of 2005 British Blogs (still available through the link to the left), which gave the Pine Marten a confidence boost. More recently, the Militant Pine Marten took its first tentative steps out of the online forest and was quoted in print on the second page of the Guardian (“Today on the web – The Queen at 80”, Friday April 21^st 2006).

Utterly chuffed by these small triumphs, the Militant Pine Marten is now convinced that it’s well worth continuing with this exercise. If anyone is still reading this, thanks for taking the time. We’ll see how this has evolved in May 2007!

The Royals are a bunch of Plebs

2006-04-19T21:04:00.000+01:00

For a long time, the Militant Pine Marten has refrained from discussing the Monarchy, whether as a political institution, or with regards to the individuals that compose the current Royal Family. I’ve been happy to leave them alone, and they’ve presumably been quite happy being totally oblivious of this. There are two reasons for which I haven’t said anything on the topic. The first is that I’m not very interested, the second is that I’ve always considered that it didn’t really matter what we call a head of state who has been stripped of any real political power. There are moral arguments against having a hereditary head of state that are solid, but in terms of any real impact, it doesn’t matter if you call a powerless figurehead a queen, a Lord Protector or a president. The financial argument is to all intents and purposes nonsense. The Queen cost the UK government £36.6m in 2004-2005 which is approximately five minutes of government spending. Probably. Anyway, I don’t believe for one second that if they abolished the Monarchy, they wouldn’t squander the money immediately on some other ill-advised scheme. It’s a drop in the budgetary ocean. So I came to the conclusion some years ago that if people want a queen, they should have a queen, and if somehow that does create some sense of cultural identity, then so much the better. My God, I even said that to David Dimbleby on live television for the Golden Jubilee. I actually told the Masses that I was in favour of the Monarchy for reasons of cultural identity. I was going to develop the point but some loud Scottish girl who wanted to become famous by shouting on TV interrupted my flow (incidentally if you’re ever on some live TV “debate”, make sure beforehand that you can put your point across in four seconds or less, otherwise it won’t happen).

So why have I suddenly changed my little mustelid mind? Well in today’s Le Monde, I discovered something that just blew the seal that was keeping a lid on any hostile feelings I may have had against the Monarchy: every day, the Queen reads The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail, for God’s sake. I can understand that the Monarch is quite likely to hold quite conservative views. You can hardly expect Elisabeth II to be a member of the Socialist Worker’s Party, but then I also expect my heads of state to be a little more enlightened than the 25% of British voters who would consider voting for the BNP. I would at least expect Her Majesty to make an effort to compare and contrast a few different sources. In fact, I’m sure that there are a lot of civil servants whose job it is to make sure that she knows everything that she needs to know. But when left to her own devices, she obtains her news from The Daily Mail.

On the other hand, why should we expect even-handedness and a healthy appetite for a little regular intellectual curiosity from Mrs Windsor? If we take a step back from the current monarch for a second to take in the entire Saxe-Coburg-Gotha tribe, why on earth would we expect anything else? Because if you take away the carriages, the ermine lining, the clipped speech, the pomp and the circumstance, something very remarkable becomes apparent: the Royals are just a load of very rich and very posh chavs. They are in fact the poshest chavs in Britain, probably also Europe, arguably the world. You may think that this is an oxymoron, but it isn’t. Consider the following. The Queen does in fact read one other paper: The Racing Post. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it just shows that one of her main preoccupations is really just the same as all the people who check their lottery numbers or football pools regularly.

The Queen and her ancestors for the past few generations have paid people to add to the Royal Collection on their behalf because essentially, they don’t know anything about art, and I suspect are very much of the school of thought that admits this but also insists that they know what they like. And what they like is having a great big art collection because that’s what people like them should do. For goodness’ sake, how nouveau riche is paying someone to demonstrate taste on your behalf? I don’t wish to sound snobbish, but then if you accuse me of snobbery for deriding the Windsors, you expose yourself to ridicule.

The Royal Collection may be the most onerous and flagrant demonstration of Royal chavery, but there are plenty of others. There’s the appalling schooling record of these people for a start. I’ll let Elisabeth off the hook on this one because in her day, well-brought up young ladies weren’t necessarily encouraged by their parents to become what they disparagingly called “blue stockings”, but the men have no excuse, particularly the little Waleses. Andrew had to switch courses from History of Art while at university. Harry at least had the honesty to admit that he was a bit of a donkey by joining the Army (incidentally I rather approve of this: it seems to me that the whole point of aristocracy originally was to selectively breed people to fight, and in the light of that, Harry may actually have made a sensible choice).

To summarise, the Royals are ignorant and vulgar and the Queen is open to the suggestion that Captain Euro will eat her corgis. Still, I’ve always considered that beyond the age of 80 years, people should be allowed to say whatever they like no matter how offensive or ridiculous. This pine marten certainly intends to be outrageously cantankerous and embarrassing in old age. With that in mind, and particularly because for her entire life the Queen has scrupulously avoided expressing an opinion on anything of any consequence, I would like to wish Her Majesty a very happy 80^th birthday. And as of Friday morning, I want to hear regular outpourings of pent-up rightwing bile. Albeit beautifully pronounced.

French youth has been cheated, excluded from the "Republican Dream"

2006-04-09T13:34:00.000+01:00

There has been quite a shocking amount of inkletting in the wake of the ongoing events both on the streets and in the circles of power around the proposed introduction of the Contrat de Premier Embauche (CPE) in France. In the French press, this has mostly been in the form of agonised soul-searching, except where it’s been a lot of vitriol, from both sides it has to be said. In the English-speaking press, there’s been quite a bit of commentary of the "Jet2.com condemns French strike action and calls for lazy frogs to get back to work!", but that’s only to be expected. Obviously not all analysis has been that simplistic, but there has been a certain degree of perplexity expressed as to why French youth and trade unions have been so steadfastedly and sometimes violently opposed a measure that purports to improve their chances of employment.

If all that French youth wants is a fair chance of a career, retirement and a decent pension like their parents, why the rejection of the CPE? Well in a nutshell, because it doesn’t offer them anything like a fair chance, and perhaps above that, because of near-universal fury at the high-handed way in which Dominique de Villepin set about implementing this pet project of his, at least partly to further his own political machinations. The CPE was foisted on France with no consultation of any interested parties, de Villepin having chosen to disregard the advice of just about all of his entourage and to go back on his earlier promise that no changes to employment legislation would be made without a preliminary dialogue. There was no real case for it. A similar and more measured new contract, the Contrat Nouvelle Embauche (CNE) was introduced in late 2005 and it is too early to measure its impact. For all that anyone knows, that may yet achieve just as much as any legal tinkering is ever likely to without attempting to address the underlying causes of the problem. The only explanations for this extraordinary lapse in political judgements are personal and of course basely political. Politically, this fits into the ongoing rivalry between the Prime Minister and Nicolas Sarkozy to secure the UMP candidacy for the 2007 Presidential elections. Sarkozy is always presenting himself as an energetic man of action with the drive and tenacity to push through tough reforms. “Qu’à cela ne tienne!” says de Villepin. He can be an unflinching strong man too, and he will make his stand on the CPE. On a more personal level, de Villepin is a great admirer of Napoleon (you have a choice in France if you’re in right-wing politics: Napoleon or De Gaulle, who in turn both thought that they were Louis XIVth), an Enarque, a technocrat. He’s not really a politician, he was appointed to the job from where he belongs, which is the Civil Service. He isn’t used to having to please anyone, and certainly not to have to account to the Street, let alone when it’s full of layabout students and Pinkos. He certainly never expected to have to pay much attention to the whining of “les Jeunes”. It’s not that he doesn’t care about their plight, it’s just that he wishes that they’d just recognise that it would be much better if they’d just let clever people like him decide what’s best for them because decisions like this are better left to grown-ups. And frankly, to people like him who went through the gruelling French Republican cursus honorum that has been delivering technocrats to run the country for a couple of centuries now. Which is an understandable opinion to have if you’re a civil servant, but not if you’re a Prime Minister. When you’re the Prime Minister you keep opinions like that to yourself and ask for guidance on how to handle the Masses from all the real politicians around you.

Out on the streets, the collective attitudinal landscape shapes behaviour. Essentially, the French young feel they’ve been lied to, stitched up and that the Government doesn’t care, so they have to make them care. There’s a long and illustrious history of effective people power in France (something to be proud of I think), there’s a strong tendency to default Bolshiness and there is undeniably an unfortunate tradition of political street violence (whatever you think of that, it’s ingrained in people’s minds, both the CRS – “On va casser du Bougnoule!/du Communiste!/de l’étudiant!” etc. – and the demonstrators – “CRS! SS!” and so on). The Lie is what they have been told since they were born, and it’s a part of Republican Dogma, France’s substitute state religion. This is how Republican life is supposed to pan out: wherever you are born and in whatever background, the Republic will ensure that every generation goes a few floors higher on the social lift. The Laic, Free and Compulsory School will give everyone the same opportunities. All you need to do is work hard at education for as long as you need to. This is why French teenagers hear the expression “Passe ton Bac d’abord” as a mantra to stop them from falling off the Republican bandwagon. And why the Baccalauréat results are posted in public places in July, deciding whether your parents will bore everyone they meet during the summer senseless boasting of your results, or whether shame will descend on the family. Baccalauréat results will determine where you stand in the pecking order of Grandes Ecoles which will produce the Republic’s elite for those who can stay the course. Entrance is by competitive examinations seemingly inspired by Imperial China. It’s pretty much identical to the Japanese system. When you’ve been through all that, you will have arrived in Republican Nirvana and you can relax. You see, paradoxically, the Republican Dream is both properly egalitarian and democratic, and yet totally elitist. And most importantly, it’s no longer real. The belief has gone, and everyone is undergoing a crisis of secular faith, be it the youths on the Street or the Prime Minister. It’s quite possible that Jacques Chirac’s spectacular and rapid loss of political mojo is due to the equivalent of a priest losing his belief in God.

The results of all this upheaval surrounding the CPE is that it’s been kicked into touch: Chirac’s intervention may have enabled de Villepin to just about save face, but his project’s dead in the water, and has been in effect taken out of his hands. Sarkozy, who is a proper political player, discreetly put the word out that he had nothing to do with the CPE. In a particularly skilful and understated display of political skulduggery, once the outcome was all but know, he unctuously pledged his support to de Villepin’s idea, the vindictive little snake. The Street has prevented the implementation of a measure which would essentially have amounted to institutionalised discrimination against the young, with which there would have been precious little Fraternité, Absolutely no Egalité, and without those prerequisites there isn’t much Liberté to do very much.

A poor attempt at patching over some cracks may have been avoided, but no one has seriously attempted to deal with the problem. Without a doubt, unemployment and particularly youth unemployment is France’s biggest problem, and some flexibility in the labour market would certainly help. But it has to be flexibility for everyone, not just flexibility for the under 26s. De Villepin’s attempt to preserve the economic security of the older electorate by taking hostage the under 26s is frankly despicable, and he will be punished for it. Unfortunately, at the moment, the only real beneficiary appears to be Sarkozy, and he’s not one of the world’s great listeners either.

A nuclear Iran may be peace for our time

2006-02-21T08:00:00.000Z

There is an unpalatable truth that we in general and Washington in particular have to swallow, and it's that if Iran wants nuclear weapons, it's going to acquire them. In an ideal world, it would be better that Iran didn't have nuclear capability, or at least it would reassuring, but that's no longer a realistic option, always assuming that Iran's claims to want only civilian nuclear installations is hokum. Frankly, if you were in the Iranian government, you'd want nukes too. Iran is now surrounded by American bases in Central Asia, Turkey and now of course Iraq. The USA is quite clearly hostile to Tehran and the two countries haven't even been civil to each other for twenty-seven years. Admittedly Iran started it by taking the US embassy's staff hostage in 1979, but nevertheless, the two countries are no longer on speaking terms and they won't be until something changes radically in the political landscape. The USA is also a demonstrably bellicose power that will tolerate no threat to its desired hegemony. Iran is a permanent thorn in the US' side in this respect since it is the most influential power in the USA's petrol station and its influence has only been increased by the Iraqi adventure. But in the aftermath of the Cold War, there is one constant in geopolitics: no-one tries it on with a nuclear-armed country: just look at North Korea. Therefore from a Iranian strategic point of view, it makes sense to acquire nukes, or at least to make others believe that they might have them. The real power of nuclear weapons is their value as a deterrent after all. No-one has anything to gain from actually using them.

The West is unanimous in its demand that Iran should desist from giving itself the means to produce nuclear weapons. Even France agrees with the US on this one, and everyone has tried to prevent this from happening. The EU, or rather the joint efforts of France, Germany and the UK, had a valiant attempt at a diplomatic solution, and obtained from Tehran that Iran stopped enriching uranium in 2003. However since then, the reformist (by Iranian standards) government of Rafsanjani was replaced by Ahmadinejad and his hardliners. It's fair to say that these chaps are by and large not very diplomatically inclined. In fact, the Militant Pine Marten suspects that Ahmadinejad is a posturing loud-mouthed idiot. In different circumstances he would probably be enjoying an all-expenses paid holiday at the Bush ranch in Texas, since both presidents share an interest in ill-advised macho soundbites, big guns, moral absolutism and not drinking. No matter. Unfortunately, the current Iranian government isn't interested in arriving at some form of agreement with Europe. It was always going to be difficult discussion anyway, as the arguments as to why exactly Iran shouldn't have the means to enrich uranium are questionable. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has never been a very convincing one, since in effect it stipulates that no-one is allowed nuclear weapons except for those who already have them. Strictly speaking that would exclude Israel, but the Israel has never really admitted to having nukes. At the same time, Iran has never admitted to wanting them. And since the Iraq business, our claims to have intelligence on middle-eastern countries' secret weapons programmes are devoid of any credibility whatsoever. You can see how the Iranian government isn't too impressed with our explanations as to why they shouldn't have nuclear weapons.

We tried nicely and it didn't work. So now we're going to take them to the UN Security Council, whose main means of action is economic sanctions, however those didn't work in Iraq and there's no reason to expect a different outcome in Iran. It will create a sense of national unity, of defiance, it will rally the more liberal Iranians to the theocracy, and any hardship will be blamed on the West and specifically the US (and probably Israel too for good measure). But they won't back down. You have to hand them that: they're a tenacious nation, the Persians. And so it remains for the USA to make not-very-veiled threats to physically prevent Iran from building nukes. This is also useless as Iran won't give in to such threats. They have more stomach for a fight than we do by a long way. The USA can't really invade Iran. Its forces are massively overstretched already, they have two wars on their hands in the region already, and Iran isn't as delapidated as Iraq was. So it would probably use air strikes to destroy nuclear facilities and kill scientific personel. However they also know that Iran will retaliate with low-tech means such as sabotage (sabotage is really easy when targeting oil infrastructure too given the combustible nature of the target), blocking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, unleashing Hizbollah in Lebanon and generally creating a guerrilla warfare zone that stretches from Gaza to Afghanistan. And if that happened, you'd have to wonder if it wouldn't have been better to let them have a couple of nukes. After all, when it comes down to it, we have hundreds if not thousands of them.

If we can't convince them, scare them or fight them, how exactly can we stop them from acquiring nuclear weapons? We can't. The solution would be a lot worse than the problem. More generally, the technology is fifty years old now. Everyone knows how to make simple nuclear weapons so eventually, we'll have to choose between a world where everyone can have nukes, or where no-one can. Hopefully we'll choose the latter. In the meantime, we will have to accept that Iran is an important regional power, and we have to treat them as such and stop ignoring them as we have done for 27 years now. They won't do as they're told and we can't make them. Iran has won this round, as fairly and squarely as anyone in the game of geopolitical chess.

Liberticidal Hat Trick

2006-02-15T16:28:00.000Z

A fair proportion of the Militant Pine Marten's readers land here while looking for information on actual pine martens, only to be disappointed by the lack of focus on mustelid natural history. Just this once, I'm going to give make their visit worthwhile by giving them a world exclusive on the UK's population of pine martens. Here's the scoop: they're all going to leave this Sceptred Isle. They're not going to be eradicated by pollution or persecution, and although loss of habitat doesn't make life any easier for British pine martens, there's enough old pine forest left for a population to survive here if they want to. But pine martens don't just need suitable habitat, food and indulgent gamekeepers, they need freedom too. They don't take kindly to being caged up and they're bolshie animals. So they could survive here if they wanted to, but the word on the forest floor is that they're not actually certain that they want to any more, and they're considering emigrating to Canada where all the material conditions for mustelid happiness are met and the government isn't quite so zealous on curtailing individual freedoms.

In the past two days, the House of Commons has passed two liberticidal bills, and they'll be trying for a hat trick today. On Monday, appeased by what must be one of the weakest government concessions to avert a defeat in the Commons ever, MPs voted in favour of the introduction of ID Cards but more importantly of the associated database's creation. Many MPs were opposed to making ID cards compulsory, but were apparently fooled by the sop that they would only be compulsory for people who wanted passports. Since about 90% of the UK population have passports, this "concession" still makes ID cards pretty close to compulsory. Even MPs aren't by and large so stupid as to not realise this, which suggests that amongst potential Labour rebels, they were glad of the opportunity to claim to have made a stand for civil liberties whilst simultaneously not antagonising the government. There's a place for that sort of face-saving ploy, and it's not when voting on bills that will fundamentally redefine the balance of power between the Citizen and the State. This was a shameful display of collective spinelessness.

Possibly to reward MPs for their compliance, yesterday the government allowed a free vote on its' proposal to outlaw smoking in public places. Now obviously telling people that the entire country has become a no smoking area isn't on the same level as recording everyone's fingerprints and iris patterns, but it does fit well within the Blair government's well-established predilection for generally forbidding people from doing things that they took for granted before. The MPs' choice was really quite remarkable. They could have chosen to allow people to light up in a few selected smokers' reservations such as pubs that don't serve food and private members' clubs (surely the whole reason for the existence of a private members' club is that you can choose who joins and make up your own arcane rules?), but no, they thought it would be better for us all if no-one could light up anywhere outside their homes any more. That's indicative not merely of a justifiable concern for public health, but also of a level of puritanical authoritarianism and haughty disregard for people's ability to make informed choices for themselves. There are after all greater evils that having a smoke in the pub.

One such evil is, according to Gordon Brown, "glorifying terrorism". Now the Militant Pine Marten has already covered this in some detail back when the idea was first mooted just under a year ago. To summarise, it's a bad idea because "glorifying terrorism" is legally very similar to "openly approving of people, organisations or movements that the government doesn't", or put more succinctly "sedition". The Lords have already rejected this new offence for this very reason, so why is it suddenly back on the table? Because Gordon Brown is doing a Sarkozy and is preparing to become Caliph instead of the Caliph, and so he has decided that he too needs to engage in some macho political one-upmanship, and at the moment that means being even tougher on terrorism while draping himself in the rhetorical Union Jack. Obviously there must still be people out there who believe that terrorism is legal in the UK.

Blair and his government started on this path in 1997 by showing a blatant disregard for parliament, for due process, for the so-called gentlemen's agreement that passes for a British constitution. This led to systematic small abuses of power, loss of accountability, institutionalised contempt for anyone outside Blair's inner circle. Blair's growing messianic zeal and personal belief that if he thinks that something is right, it is, and therefore those who disagree are in effect political blasphemers, has led us into the Iraq war and now seriously threatens our liberties, and we're finding that there isn't much that we can do about it. But what's even worse is that most of the electorate doesn't even seem to care. On Monday, only 70 people demonstrated against ID cards outside Parliament (some distance away because the government banned protests outside parliament following the messy looking protests against the foxhunting ban, which just projected the wrong image or something). Now I know that people are at work on Mondays but where for example are all the politically-minded students? And I'm prepared to bet that the Tories, who are finally shaping up to look like a real opposition party, won't include anything about repealing ID cards in their manifesto because there are no votes to be won in civil liberties. Let's hope that it all turns out to have been worth it. In exchange for all this, let's hope that we really are very safe indeed. In fact we'd better be invulnerable to any harm. Because otherwise we'll be no better off than the Syrians, and at least they have good weather and can have a cigarette where they choose.

So long, and thanks for all the bird's eggs.

Cathartic cartoons

2006-02-07T19:15:00.000Z

There exists an amateur film made in 1978 of a spectacular landslide that took place in town named Rissa in Norway. The town was built on a deposit of a particular kind of clay that is held together by salt ions. When too high a proportion of the salt ions are washed out by for instance heavy rainfall, the clay particles lose their cohesion, and a quickclay is formed, or in other words, the soil liquefies, and a rapid landslide results. In this particular case, a man was digging the foundations of a barn, and by doing so happened to just tip the chemical balance of the soil, with catastrophic consequences. The film shows the liquefaction phenomenon spreading up the valley from the digging site, and the entire valley down to the bedrock flowing like a river, carrying houses, cars, roads, absolutely everything at speeds of up to 60 km/h down to the fjord. Obviously Rissa was flushed off the map, and the resulting small tsunami in the fjord caused serious flood damage to the town on the opposite shore. In one of those strange ironies of fate, the man who dug the whole and started the whole catastrophe in the first place was one of the very few people whose house was left standing. He was also almost certainly the most unpopular man in Rissa. It occurs to the Militant Pine Marten that the chaps who ran the ill-advised cartoon competition in the Danish newspaper the Jyllands-Posten must feel a bit like him.

At this stage, the general consensus is that the current wave of violent reaction to the now notorious set of a dozen cartoons is as disproportionate considering the offence as the 8 million cubic metres of clay that flowed through Rissa were given that all that the poor chap who set it all in motion had done was dig a one metre deep hole in his garden. Clearly, taking offence at foreigners deriding one's culture through heavy-handed, crude stereotyping is fair enough. Lacking a sense of humour to the extent of taking it out on an entire nation and burning their embassies is something more than a simple sense of humour failure. It's tempting of course to put down the scenes of violence that we are now witnessing in the Middle-East mainly but also in Europe to a clash of civilisations, or to an Enlightenment conflict between secularism and religious obscurantism. Or if you're inclined to think that way, just to fall back on the opinion that Muslims are all a bunch of backward savages anyway. But none of these are an adequate explanation for current events. An entire people doesn't suddenly go on the rampage against a small faraway country with little or no influence over their lives because of what is essentially a collection of bad jokes.

What we're seeing here is an extraordinary manifestation of collective catharsis. By and large, since September 2001, being a Muslim has been quite uncomfortable, both in the West and in the Islamic world. In the West, there's an unpleasant climate of suspicion against Muslims. Look around you, and you'll see the apprehension in commuters' eyes when a chap with a long, thick beard steps onto the train. It isn't fair, it isn't rational, but it happens all the time and Muslims feel it. If you live in the Middle-East or Central Asia, all hell has been let loose, and that's in addition to the problems that appear endemic in the region to do with essentially awful governments, whether secular or religious. All the time, people are being permanently assured that it's all mainly America's fault, and admittedly, the USA hasn't really been helping much in this respect. So in the West, Muslims have to live with the undercurrent of hostility and try and be gracious about it, and in the Middle-East they have to watch bombs falling and their lives fall down around them while being powerless to do anything about it. In those circumstances, it's understandable that you may want to vent some frustration, blow off some steam, maybe burn the Stars and Stripes, shout very loud and break something. Noisily. What you want to break is the US Marine Corps or Ariel Sharon's neck, but Sharon's already broken and the Marines shoot back. But a couple of Danish embassies, well, what are they going to do about it? Denmark may not matter much to you, but it's Western and one of their newspaper editors was clueless enough to commission those cartoons. The Danes will do as scapegoats.

Maybe when the landslide has stabilised and the waves from the impact have settled down, we'll have a clearer view of the underlying problem. It may release some tensions, and clearly show who and what is really to blame for this insane situation, and it's probably going to turn out to be widespread paranoia on both sides of the divide, combined with (mostly) American heavy-handedness, ignorance and therefore contempt of each others' cultures, with an entrenched and erroneous belief in the Middle-East that all local problems are someone else's fault. And when everyone acknowledges that, then maybe we can stabilise some slopes and adopt a more informed approach to digging foundations for sheds in unstable areas.

The Hopes and the Hope-nots

2006-01-27T08:07:00.000Z

For the last couple of years, the Militant Pine Marten has been conscious of a growing climate of fear or at least of anxiety in the West. This is possibly true elsewhere also, but as I have no real first hand knowledge of the collective emotional state of the developing world (and even that statement assumes that such a tremendously sweeping generalisation could ever have any value), I'll leave it aside for the purposes of this discussion. At first glance, it would appear that a high proportion of some of the most important problems facing our societies at the moment are to a great extent due to variations on the theme of fear being played in the background. I'm not referring here to intestine-knotting terror of course, just to the low-intensity highly pervasive forms of this most primal and debilitating of emotions. A good example would be what happens when you're walking down the street at dusk and a bunch of swaggering teenage boys in hoodies are walking down the same pavement towards you. Maybe you cross the road. Maybe you just avoid eye contact. Maybe you just decide to put on a blank facial expression, gird up your loins and walk through them. Whatever your reaction, you're slightly scared that their intentions are hostile, and you perceive a threat to some degree. Meanwhile, despite your best efforts to conceal it, the boys in question have perceived that you perceive them as a threat, which makes them feel that maybe they should be a threat, even if it isn't clear why, and anyway since you're clearly hostile to them, the chances are that they should indeed be hostile towards you. Suddenly, collective paranoia and prejudice has spawned a real antipathy. It's irrational, it comes out of nowhere, but the thought that there could be a threat leads to fear, that fear leads to suspicion, and in turn that generates a threat that has no logical reason to exist.

That example happens in some form a million times every day, in Tube stations on London, outside Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées, everywhere, and it may seem innocuous enough, but it's one of the main causes of the much larger problem that in France is termed "l'insécurité", the widespread fear of crime, which is generally far greater than the actual prevalence of crime justifies. But this pervasive climate of fear is too tempting not to be exploited by politicians such as the Militant Pine Marten's betes noires Charles Clarke and Nicolas Sarkozy to introduce rafts of illiberal legislation to protect us or rather alleviate our collective fears, and of course on a larger scale it provided Bush and Blair with the means to persuade their electorates that they should be allowed to start a war. Exploiting collective fears in order to further one's agenda is hardly a new political trick. Indeed, just talking about it fuels the fear, which affords the Powers That Be greater freedom to pursue their goals, and the process is self-perpetuating.

However great tides of fear come and go, they can be dispelled quite easily, people can stand back, take stock, shake their heads and wake up. Underlying all that there remains, I think, a more discreet and yet powerful collective emotion that leads to division, apathy, hostility, and of course fear and violence: increasingly, people lack hope, and without hope it is almost impossible to try and improve anything either for oneself or for society and the world at large. Not believing that things are likely to improve leads to entrenchment and withdrawal. Returning to a theme dear to my mustelid heart, I believe that this is why the French electorate rejected to draft EU constitution last year. Surveys show that better off voters were professionally, and the higher their level of education, the more likely they were to vote in favour of the Constitution. Conversely, those lower in the pecking order tended to oppose it. However this had nothing to do with traditional divisions between Right and Left, Europhiles and Anti-Europeans. This was a difference of opinion between the Hopes and Hope Nots. People are worried by the fact that the EU opens up its member states with uncertain consequences. and whereas those in higher socio-professional groups feel ready to deal with whatever this form of globalisation may bring, those lower down want to protect their current status by turning inwards (these are generalisations of course). For the same reason, successive French governments have found it impossible to introduce meaningful reforms to the welfare system and employment legislation: most of the electorate has no expectation that the risks will lead to any improvements so they cling on to what they have.

This immobilism through loss of hope is by no means unique to France. In the UK for example, it's behind the fact that most younger members of the electorate don't bother to turn up at the polling station: they don't believe that they can change anything. If you're in the habit of not bothering to dispose of glass bottles in the recycling bin provided by the council because you think "what difference will I make on my own?", it's the same thing. Some of the worst culprits are the environmental miserabilists who have set about convincing us all that we're all going to die poisoned by radiation and drowned in melted ice caps, starved because we've eaten all the cod and bonobos. Their attitude indicates that for all their pious pontificating, they've actually given up any real hope of doing anything about it, making it all more likely that theirs are self-fulfilling prophecies. They've left all the hope to those who think that we can carry strip-mining Creation and that it will all turn out fine in the end (which it might, but it's unlikely).

What we need now is to break out of the cycle of hopelessness, despondency and self-fulfilling miserable predictions. It may be quite likely that things will end badly, but it's absolutely certain that they will be awful if no one tries to make a difference because they've given up believing that they can. Social justice isn't just about giving to the Have-nots. It's just as important to return hope to the Hope-nots.

"On aura une maison
Avec des tas d'fenetres
Et si c'est pas sur
C'est quand meme peut-etre"
Jacques Brel

In which we learn where the Militant Pine Marten has been of late

2006-01-10T19:36:00.000Z

As happened back in August, the Militant Pine Marten has been back to the woods to gather its thoughts for the best part of a month. I'm going to allow myself to be sufficiently presumptuous to assume that a couple of people somewhere out there have been wondering if I'd gone into hibernation or just moved on. I thought that after this long wait you may like to see where I've been.

This is the view from the woods just before sunset. As you can see, it was pretty cold.

After night falls, the woods are left to the roe deer and the pine martens, although most of them aren't very militant at all.

Here's a rare picture of some humans out early the next morning for some contemplation of their own. And a little hunting, just like me.

Eventually, the light started to fall, the humans went back inside, and the pine martens were once again given the run of the place.

And so now you see why the Militant Pine Marten couldn't bring itself to think of the world's troubles. That's what the trips to the woods are for: a little contemplation, a little hunting, a little unadulterated simple joy at the beauty of the world.

Merry Mustelid 2006!

Weightier matters will now return to the fore.

Non-civilian disobedience

2006-01-10T18:58:00.000Z

It was with a degree of astonishment that I was jolted out of my slumber on Monday morning by General Sir Michael Rose calling for Tony Blair to be impeached on the Today programme. You may remember the general from back in the Nineties where he was in charge of operations in the former Yugoslavia for a while, and in that capacity used to appear on the news with some regularity, although I personally can't remember whether he was any good. I don't think that anyone was really very effective in that sorry episode, but that's not relevant here. What surprised me wasn't the call for Tony Blair to be held accountable for conning the UK into the Iraq war, that sort of demand has been quite common over the past three years. No, the interesting part was when he said that he would have refused command of such an operation, although he is now retired, and that active commanders should do the same by resigning, if not by simply refusing to follow orders.

Refusing to obey governments for ethical reasons is nothing new, it's just civil disobedience, but in the military this has traditionally been called insubordination, desertion or even mutiny. They used to shoot people for it. Civil disobedience is a vallid means to reassert the electorate's power over the State, but in a democracy it's generally assumed that the military is subservient to elected politicians, doesn't express opinions, it just acts as a tool of the State to defend its' citizens or implement various aspects of foreign policy. The military is the means by which the State exercises its' monopoly on violence. It's not supposed to do politics, that's what happens in countries with the sort of regimes that we don't approve of.

But at a more shall we say philosophical level, what Sir Michael proposes makes sense. After all, the military is composed of a lot of men and women who are expected to get themselves killed if the government asks them to. Let's also not forget that by and large, before this happens, they will have killed a lot more people on the other side, and these days those are mostly civilians rather than enemy combatants. So one way or another, democratically elected governments distribute a lot of death all round when they send the military to war. The same democratically elected governments wouldn't usually openly consider so much as giving one of their citizens a mild kicking, and that includes members of the armed forces, until such time as they are sent into a conflict.

The usual justification that is given is that members of the armed forces have volunteered to expose themselves to mortal danger whenever they are told to by their government. Which strictly speaking is true. But I think that in return, it's only fair to make sure that governments don't do that without a damned good reason, which doesn't include made-up scare stories about WMDs. So although it's often held as an incontrovertible truth that normal assumptions about the rights of the individual don't apply to the armed forces, actually, why shouldn't they? What's the worst that can happen if soldiers say no? People won't be killed? Damn. Since the Nuremberg trials, soldiers have no longer been able to use the fact that they were following orders as a defence against accusations of war crimes. They have a duty to disobey immoral orders, to act according to their conscience. Well since their supreme commander is in effect an elected politician, there's no reason why a soldier should have to put his life and that of the "enemy" in danger if he or she doesn't consider the justification compelling enough. I'm not actually calling for all the armed forces in the world to operate independently of their governments, there are after all plenty of examples of that being a pretty undesirable thing, but generally trouble results from armies doing things that they haven't been told to do, rather than not doing things. For instance, imagine of in July 1914, the Czar's heads of staff had just said "You know what, Nick? I don't think so. Niet. We're off for a think about agrarian reform instead".

The Militant Pine Marten is no great fan of the military: it's the whole suppression of the individual, unquestioning obedience, authoritarian killing machine aspect of the military that doesn't agree with me. To the extent that I refused to join the Mustelid Scouts when I was just a martenet - why on earth would anyone want to spend their spare time in a uniform doing what the older kids tell you? But if the military are going to openly recognise their duty not only to obey their political masters, but also to subject orders to the judgement of their consciences and to act on it, then I think that things are looking up.

During the enquiry following the sinking of the Titanic, most of the surviving steerage passengers testified that the scarce places in the lifeboats had been given to First Class passengers in priority. Amazingly, because of the society in which they lived, they found this to be perfectly normal. Hopefully in the near future, the idea of unquestioningly killing others and allowing yourself to be killed unquestioningly on the instructions of someone else will come to be seen as just as absurd.

You don’t need a justification for clemency

2005-12-13T17:56:00.000Z

At 8.35am GMT, former gang leader Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin prison in Northern California, having been convicted 24 years ago of four murders. The Militant Pine Marten will not argue whether or not he was guilty, since it lacks any real knowledge of the evidence presented or the circumstances, but that isn’t strictly relevant here. Suffice to say that Williams always denied his guilt.

Williams’ last chance for a stay of execution was an appeal for clemency to the Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican Governor of California by the Grace of Loki the Trickster God presumably. It’s quite often suggested in the media that although Schwarzenegger is part of the Republican top brass, he’s actually a closet liberal. Certainly socially, he’s perceived to be rather more liberal than George Bush, but then that’s not terribly difficult. The problem is that I haven’t seen any evidence of his alleged liberal leanings. Stepping in to stop gay weddings in Sacramento doesn’t strike me as very socially liberal, and approving the state-sponsored killing of a man who may have been a murderer, and may or may not have been repentant isn’t very liberal either.

I’m not idly questioning the jury in this case’s integrity or judgement, I’m basing what I say on Schwarzenegger’s own words. Last week, the governor said that he was "agonizing" over the case. Well you don’t agonize over things that you’re certain of, and even within a legal system that allows the State to take away its’ citizens’ lives, surely being unsure of their guilt is reason enough to show clemency? However it does not appear that Schwarzenegger thinks like that, stating, "I could find no justification for granting clemency".

This is an abhorrent statement. You don’t need to justify clemency. But you do need to explain why you let someone die, and you’d better be damned sure that he’s guilty. Something which Schwarzenegger was not. So why did he sanction Williams’ death? The obvious explanation is that he did it to align himself with influential figures and sections of the Republican Party grassroots, which is understandable in the context of political skulduggery. Only political machinations in a democracy don’t usually involve anyone’s death, especially not in a country that is the self-appointed global guardian of freedom, democracy and the legacy of the Enlightenment. For a group of proselytising Christians, Bush and his friends seem to have surprisingly little grasp of the concept of forgiveness. This continuing appetite for judicial revenge all seems a bit ‘Old Testament’.

In two years’ time, Bush will leave the White House, and his gang of neocon zealots with him. They haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory. At which point there’s a good chance that Schwarzenegger will be secure among the Republican nomenklatura whether he demonstrates a little effortless magnanimity or not. He can afford to make a point, to affirm what he stands for, if he really is a liberal Trojan donkey in the midst of the Republicans. But maybe he’s just a Macchiavellian greasy pole climber. Either way, I doubt that it will have been worth going to bed every night knowing he wasn’t quite sure if that man should have died or not.

"Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad." - Conan The Barbarian, 1982

"Yes we bloody well will." – The Militant Pine Marten, 2005

Watch the Right, watch the Left and watch your back*

2005-12-07T18:23:00.000Z

Could someone please explain to me what exactly it is that El Caudillo Blair is currently trying to achieve in Europe? If you cast your minds back to June 2005, you may remember Tony Blair’s barnstorming performance at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. It was all talk of breaking the deadlock, giving the EU a new sense of direction and impetus, moving forwards with our new partners from the East, making Europe modern, forward looking, and if you think that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s classic Vintage Tony circa 1997 and you’ve heard it all before. Most of the MEPs hadn’t been as overexposed as the UK electorate to old-style Tony magic, and once again it worked. Tony must have been delighted.

In much of Europe, Tony Blair enjoys something of a reputation as a miracle worker. He seems to be able to do nothing wrong. He even managed to avoid serious electoral retribution over the Iraq debacle for goodness sake! He’s also seen by many as Socialism’s new hope. A Jedi of the Left who will restore balance to progressive politics. And much of the UK electorate believed that once too. So it’s understandable that when six months later, the achievements of the UK’s stint at the presidency of the EU are precisely nothing at all, many of our European partners feel rather aggrieved. In fact Le Monde, which has been having a misguided love-in with Blair for a few years now, has stopped only slightly short of calling him a coward and a traitor:

“Despite his critics, Tony Blair may yet achieve his goal. Lacking the courage to define his European policy and explain it to his electorate, the ardent European enlargement enthusiast that he was risks promoting Euroscepticism in the East, just 19 months after they joined the Union”.

However making a mess of EU policy after building up expectations is one thing. But Blair’s current budget looks like a deliberate attempt to alienate everyone. The EU budget is in its current fix because the two biggest bullies in the playground are having a fight and won’t let anyone else have any fun until it’s over. The Franco-German camp won’t budge on the CAP reforms voted in 2002, that are currently in progress, and the UK won’t budge on its rebate obtained by Margaret Thatcher in 1984, when the UK was a much lesser economic force. But Blair’s proposed budget involves “refunding” some of the rebate to the richest countries in the EU and cutting the amount of money going to the poorer new members. This is a simplification obviously, but it looks a lot like a snub to countries that Blair had been happy to consider the UK’s natural allies in “New Europe”.

But while Blair has been busy winding up all of Europe, trouble has been stirring at home, in the form of David Cameron, the new leader of the Conservative Party, who have been a joke party for the best part of a decade. Thanks to an uncharacteristic moment of collective lucidity, the Tory members didn’t elect the worst candidate for once. David Cameron is all smiles, affability and witty comments and in that way reminiscent of a chubbier version of Tony Blair a few years ago. In terms of giving the Tories a chance of actually winning an election, he’s a very good choice. The question though is that of what he stands for. Having given up on working out what Tony Blair is all about, I’d like to know what his new sparring partner is for?

Today he gave us a very small glimpse of that. In a demonstration of uncharacteristically slick political operating for the Tories, the day after his election, the new leader made his first policy statement, and of all things it was about social justice. Social Justice! Oh! David! Bold move there, straight for the Labour jugular! The Tories can’t do social justice, that’s a Lefty area, surely? The Militant Pine Marten was intrigued and impressed. And then it came. David Cameron is “deeply committed to social action for social justice”. And there we have it: David Cameron has been watching Blair’s technique, and he’s going to do the same. He’s going to use rhetoric that suggests that there is a great hopeful generous plan, an optimistic progressive ideology. And actually, there will be surveys, focus groups, Parliamentary Working Groups, consultations and mainly a load of marketing drivel and management consultancy jargon with some branding. Full marks to David Cameron. If I may, I’d like to suggest that Sir Digby Jones should be invited to join the “Social Justice Group”.

The political landscape in the UK may be shifting, but not necessarily in a very encouraging way. Tony should watch the Right. David should watch the Left. And we should all watch our backs.

*I admit to adapting this from an Anti-Flag lyric, but in exchange I’ll plug the album. It's only fair.

In which the CAP does good things for good people, and for partridges too

2005-11-22T15:37:00.000Z

I think it’s probably not too controversial to say that the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy doesn’t have a good reputation, especially in the UK. The average UK voter doesn’t really know all that much about what the EU actually does and doesn’t really want to either. Instead, a lot of facile clichés and myths are served up as facts and are peddled by lazy journalists and editors. Amongst these are the famous stories about how the EU specifies the acceptable curvature of bananas and wants to ban the Traditional British Banger. But one of the more legitimate concerns of voters throughout Europe is amount of money that the EU spends on agriculture through the CAP. By the end of 2005, the EU will have spent 46% of its budget, €49 billion, mainly on guaranteeing minimum prices and export subsidies. Indeed, until 1992, that is all that the CAP’s budget paid for, meaning that all subsidies were directly linked to production. Within Europe, this system meant that overproduction was endemic, as was the environmental damage linked to intensive agricultural production. Although there have been reforms to decouple production from subsidies, by and large the same problems still persist. Approximately 80% of the CAP’s budget goes to only 20% of EU farmers, while 40% of small farmers receive only 8% of the available subsidies.

To summarise, the productivist model of the CAP work like this. The more a farm produces, the more it receives in subsidies. The more farmers produce, the less agricultural commodities are worth. The less they’re worth, the more the EU has to compensate the farmers. As too much has been produced for the EU’s needs, it has to be exported. As it’s too expensive due to guaranteed prices, the EU has to subsidise exports so that European producers can undercut others. As a result, Third World producers especially can’t compete and go bankrupt. But it’s not only sugar cane growers in Jamaica who suffer. If you run a large farming concern in the EU, it’s all gravy. You can benefit from economies of scale to produce as much as possible, and you’re rewarded for it. This encourages you to use pesticides and artificial fertilisers liberally. There’s no incentive at all to stop hammering your environment and producing commodities that are of no use to anyone. But if you’re a small family farm, you can’t produce enough volume to make it worth your while, you can’t increase your yields because agricultural chemicals and especially machinery is unaffordable and won’t pay for itself on your small acreage. So you build up hopeless amounts of debt to stay in the game and end up selling up to the local barley baron to compensate for having a worthless pension. You can’t easily convert to another crop or diversify because you’re working to pay off your debts and can’t afford the initial investment or the risk. In fact, small farmers caught in the CAP productivist system are in a situation that is familiar to their aforementioned Jamaican counterparts.

So you’ll be glad to read that the Militant Pine Marten brings you agricultural tidings of great joy, having just witnessed the beneficial effects of the CAP reforms that were made in 2003. Briefly, in 2003 the EU decided to decouple subsidies from production gradually and instead to link direct single payments to environmental practices, animal welfare and food safety. In the UK, this mostly comes in the form of Defra’s various Stewardship schemes. The Militant Pine Marten was visiting a small family farm of the sort that was at the receiving end of the previous productivist model. This farm hadn’t really made any money for a decade or so. Suddenly, the kitchen has been redecorated, the tractors are looking in far better repair. Oh, you may not care very much, but you’ll probably be more impressed by the environmental benefits: people like that generally. The environmental benefits come in the form of an explosion on the local population of grey partridges (English partridges if you’re English, Hungarian ones if you’re from North America). Populations of grey partridges throughout the EU collapsed as intensive farming practices were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s especially. The thing is that young partridges live on insects in grass and fields. However the use of vast amounts of pesticides, the destruction of grass banks and hedgerows to rationalise fields weren’t conducive to vast insect populations. The grey partridge is as good an indicator of environmentally friendly agricultural practices as you could want. I am glad to report that the partridges are back, in high densities, to the extent that three of them will grace my table later this week.

The CAP has been a bad thing. It’s still far from ideal. It needs to stop doing things like making Tate & Lyle the single largest recipient of subsidies in the UK (to the tune of £127 million last year, for Christ’s sake). The shameful export subsidies need to be scrapped, although Peter Mandelson doesn’t seem to be doing too well on that front. But other stated aims of the CAP such as “to ensure fair living standards for the agricultural community” and now to improve and protect the environment, landscape, wildlife are being met, and as more reforms in this vein are introduced, the situation will improve. So you see, it’s not all lazy French farmers stealing money from hardworking British management consultants! Give the EU a chance. It stumbles around like a drunk a fair amount, but it will find the way home eventually.

UPDATE: Today the EU announced that in accordance with a WTO ruling, it was abandoning the insane sugar subsidies. This was by a long way the worst example of ill-considered agricultural policy. Well done the Council of Ministers! You see? I told you they were sorting themselves out.

“Don’t get me wrong, I have lots of black and Arab friends, but…”

2005-11-17T20:47:00.000Z

In the wake of the recent rioting in France, every French politician is trying to demonstrate that he or she is in touch with the deep problems that have been made so painfully apparent, in a manner not identical, but in terms of generalised psychological impact comparable, to the New Orleans catastrophe. A worrying number of MPs from Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party have crawled out the woodwork to reveal that in a low-key sort of way, they think that the problem could probably be solved by, if not sending people back to where they came from, at least making sure that it’s going to be damned hard for any more to join. This includes plans to limit the reunification of families (wives and children coming to join fathers working in France), the obtention by married partners of French nationality. Then of course there’s a fair amount of support for the repressive approach favoured by the Interior Minister. Jean-Marie Le Pen (who has been having a whale of a time grandstanding on Russian television this week) has been having a marvellous time watching the UMP tentatively reaching for National Front policies. There has also been a somewhat strange surfacing of a theory whereby much of the recent trouble was caused by widespread polygamy amongst black and North African citizens. And that last piece of hysterical nonsense is in fact a admission of unthinking prejudice.

In a remarkable article today, the Moroccan-born philosopher Alain Badiou relates how his 16 year old adopted son Gérard has been arrested six times since March 31st 2004 and today, for no particular reason apart from the fact that they’re teenagers, and some of them are black, others are from North Africa, some Turkish, and that in the manner of teenagers, sometimes they stand around having a chat. They are regularly arrested, asked for their papers, harassed, insulted, and then released sometimes after up to two days. The police then apologise to the parents. Now Alain Badiou doesn’t live in a sink estate, he lives in a rather more affluent area of Paris, so imagine the sort of police harassment that young inhabitants of Clichy-Sous-Bois are subjected to. Badiou speculates that the police there may not apologise quite so readily.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the French police is institutionally racist. Everyone in France knows this, but they don’t like it, they’re in denial about it, it doesn’t fit with their ”certaine idée de la France” as De Gaulle called it. But more disturbingly, the police reflect and amplify the poisonous low-level ambient racism that permeates much of French society. Casual prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities is acceptable in conversations in France to a degree that is no longer easily thinkable in the UK for instance. The following translated email conversation is I think an entertaining yet pertinent illustration of this. The names of the participants have been changed, but their ethnic origins have been retained through the use of ironically stereotypical names. I must stress that they are what may be termed pinko fruitloops to a man (and a woman), and that the shocking ethnic stereotyping and discriminatory language is in fact SATIRE, all in the poorest possible taste. The point of this is that the participants were able to easily riff off on this in these terms because they are regularly exposed to people who speak like this with no qualms whatsoever. They’re not happy about this. So they deal with it with gallows humour, a reaction more usually associated with the Brits, to their credit.

Nigel Dupont _ This article is well worth reading, but it’s not pleasant. [Refers to the aforementioned article]
Sandra Dupont _ Yes. But the problem is that no one will admit it. No one. And the worst thing is that most people who won’t admit it do so because they don’t really believe it.
Nigel Dupont _ Personally, I’m not a racist, however…
Gérard Bové _ Well exactly. Don’t get me wrong. I have lots of black and Arab friends, but…
Nigel Dupont _ You idiot, you don’t say “black”, you say “renoi”! [”Noir” in Verlan, a slang device whereby the syllables of a word are reversed].
Sandra Dupont _ Rubbish. You say “un black”. It’s more “roots”.
Nigel Dupont _ Does anyone know what’s the current favourite slang term for an Oriental is?
Sandra Dupont _ “Niaque” I think, at least that’s what they said in “Taxi 2”.
Isaac Levi _ No, it’s “Bougnoule”, I should know, I’m… Oh hang on.
Nigel Dupont _ Don’t you start piping up, Yid Boy.
Isaac Levi _ I have a Kabylian friend who came out top of his class at college, so he’s not exactly a crack dealer. He is regularly harassed by the rozzers for no reason. He was even beaten up by the police once. It’s all pretty ugly. But you want to know what the worst thing is? I’ve been beaten up because they thought I was an Arab! And that’s just inadmissible!
Gérard Bové _ Hey, be a bit careful when talking about crack dealers! There are some perfectly decent crack dealers. I have plenty of friends who are crack dealers. It’s sweeping generalisations like that that spread the problem.

Once again, I must stress that this not exactly random selection of the French electorate, and that they are in fact mimicking the sorts of comments that they hear every day. They’re really nice people, just with a twisted sense of humour.

The Militant Pine Marten has a suggestion to start dealing with this, because we’re not going to solve France’s current problems unless we change people’s unthinking attitudes. If the police is the worst example of widespread racism, then Nicolas Sarkozy could start by stamping ruthlessly on the sort of abuse mentioned above. He likes to talk and act tough I believe. Well here’s a perfect place to apply that. Investigate all claims of abuse. Make examples of police officers that participate. Show the citizens of France, both native and immigrants or their descendants, that the French Republic doesn’t tolerate discrimination by the organs of state against any particular group. That’s after all the great underlying fundamental idea isn’t it? Well do it! Go on Sarkozy, if you want to be the man of the hour, if you really believe what you say, start making the ”Egalité” a reality by punishing those who undermine the idea with the apparent tacit agreement of the State. No more blind eyes, no more heads in the sand. You’re always saying that the French should face facts and deal with them. Well show them how!

And if you won’t do that, then at least have the decency to stop pretending that you care about anything but power.

France is under threat from reactionary far-right opportunists – amongst other problems

2005-11-08T11:01:00.000Z

On the sidelines of the turmoil that France is currently engulfed in, a despicable attempt at making political capital is going on. Yesterday evening, two MPs from the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), the majority centre-right party of which Nicolas Sarkozy is the leader, tabled the French legal equivalent of a white paper. Doing this is always a great opportunity for political immortality as a law that is passed successfully bears the name of the MP who first suggested it, but that’s just run-of-the-mill political vanity. The ideas put forward by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and Georges Fenech are a pretty spectacular brand of irresponsible political posturing.

Dupont-Aignan and Fenech want a tightening of existing anti-rioting legislation. Specifically, as reported in Le Monde, he suggests that “from now on, the simple act of not spontaneously leaving a gathering susceptible of causing a breach of the peace from the first instruction to disperse should constitute an offence”. In addition, they propose want to “authorise the police top use their weapons when their physical persons or those of people” and places under their protection “are endangered”, but also “when they have no available alternatives to stop or prevent the flight of individuals who refuse to obey a reiterated order to stop”.

The first part of this is quite simply the denial of freedom of assembly, guaranteed by article 12 of European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights. Well, not the entire denial of course. They wouldn’t dream of that. It’s just subject to the police being happy with the crowd’s presence, and being satisfied that they don’t want to cause any trouble, so in other words it would be a crime not to go home if the police suspect that your intentions are objectionable. It’s denial of the right to protest. The second part is even more fundamentally repellent: in the event that people don’t go home when asked to, or don’t submit to arrest once the police have decided that they should, the police can shoot them if they see fit.

What in the Republic’s name are these two thinking of? It is patently obvious that the current situation on the streets has nothing at all to do with inadequate legislation, and it certainly hasn’t come about because of an insufficient level of state-sanctioned violence! These are not only revolting suggestions, they are deeply irresponsible. If it wasn’t already bad enough to have Sarkozy fanning the flames with his inflammatory language, his colleagues think that what France really needs now is for a truck full of kerosene to crash into the conflagration.

Who exactly are Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and Georges Fenech anyway? A little research reveals them to be unremarkable reactionary right-wingers, with far-right leanings and delusions of grandeur. Undistinguished versions of Sarkozy if you will, but without the brains. Dupont-Aignan is the founder of “Debout la République” (“Republic, stand up”), a sovereignist association within the ruling UMP. Most of its members were also part of the electoral list lead by Charles Pasqua and Philippe de Villiers for the 1999 European elections. De Villiers is essentially the upper class, traditionalist Catholic version of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who needs no introduction. Suffice to say that he’s pretty damned right wing in a really nasty way, which fits in quite neatly with Dupont-Aignan’s ideas. Dupont-Aignan has twice stood for the UMP party leadership, in 2002 and 2004, soundly beaten by Sarkozy in the latest election. He is also a candidate for the 2007 presidential elections. To use my tried and tested Iznogoud metaphor, he wants to be Caliph instead of the Caliph, except that he’s only the Grand Vizier’s recalcitrant lackey. As for Georges Fenech, he is amongst other claims to fame the author of a report entitled “Placement under mobile electronic surveillance”. Amusingly, this was sent to Dominique de Villepin. The cover letter contains the sentence ”I have decided to entrust you with a mission of reflection on the subject of mobile electronic surveillance”. I’m sure that Dominique felt honoured that the eminent author of ”Tolérance Zéro” should have felt that he had the intellectual calibre to engage with the topic. I think that these facts give a good idea of these men’s political leanings. They’re Far-right Lite. Crypto-Fascists for ordinary decent folk. And of course frustrated, narcissistic fabulists.

State-sanctioned violence against crowds, ignoring what they have to say, denying them any real voice through legitimate channels is what has lead to the appalling events of the past twelve days. Sarkozy’s brutal rhetoric and police brutality against a section of society that feels – and is – victimised by the police turned another suburban riot into an insurrection. Because let’s be clear about this: twelve days of rioting across the entire country is an insurrection. That’s what we’re talking about here. In one sense at least, the young second generation immigrants have perfectly absorbed French Republican values. Every single significant social and political shake-up in France since 1789 has been the result of the disaffected, the poor, the powerless taking to the streets and waking up successive sclerosed governments through violence. In 1789, it was the starving Third Estate. In 1830, Louis XVIIIth’s attempted return to the Ancien Régime brought about another popular uprising. Napoléon III’s self-indulgent warmongering and subsequent abandonment of Paris to Prussian troops lead about the Paris Commune, ending in a massacre of the insurgents and ultimately the beginning of the 3rd Republic. Repeated rioting and fighting in the streets between far-right leagues, trade unions and left-wing organisations brought to power the Front Populaire and the beginnings of the welfare state. The stifling social conservatism of the political establishment brought the young to the street in 1968, demanding emancipation. Like all of these events, the current insurrection is the result of a social and economic cauldron boiling over after simmering for many years as the political establishment and a large section of French society ignored it.

It is a sad truth that meaningful change in France always appears to be catalysed by violence. Let’s hope that De Villepin and Chirac resist the temptation to fight fire with fire and to cave in to the more unsavoury current of their party.

”_ Mais, c’est une révolte?
_ Non Sire, c’est une révolution!”

The Duke of Liancourt to Louis XVIth following the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789

It’s a trying week for authoritarian, arrogant home secretaries

2005-11-03T14:54:00.000Z

This week is turning out to be rather an interesting one politically on both sides of the Channel. Yesterday evening, the Blair government came within one vote of being defeated in the House of Commons over its proposal to criminalise the “glorification of terrorism”. Until now, Tony Blair has been able to assume that his majority would make sure that any motion that he tabled in the Commons would be successful, however this latest vote suggests that many Labour MPs voted against the government. I’ll just point out that of all the people who didn’t vote at all, I wouldn’t have expected George Galloway not to bother to be there. I hope he has a good reason like Vince Cable (Liberal Democrat MP for Twickenham), who ironically was prevented from voting on a security matter because of security procedures. On a separate matter, the question of whether or not the period during which terrorism suspects can be held without charge for up to 90 days instead of the current 14, the Home Secretary Charles Clarke was forced to postpone a vote to avoid possible defeat. These are both important matters, particularly for those with an interest in preserving civil liberties, but of course what has really taken up column centimetres this week has been the second resignation of David Blunkett in twelve months.

Strictly speaking, David Blunkett is an authoritarian, arrogant former home secretary, rather than a serving one, but Charles Clarke has only ever been a pseudo-Blunkett, who can be relied on to carry on with the previous agenda without doing too much, or indeed any, thinking about it. Anyway, it looks like David Blunkett’s chronic arrogance problem is what brought him down. Once again, he just didn’t really believe that the rules applied to him, because he’s somehow special. Which is of course just good old-fashioned Xerxes-style hubris. To use a contrived classical metaphor, David Blunkett flogged the Hellespont once too often and the sea decided to scatter his ships.

Meanwhile, over in Paris, Nicolas Sarkozy, the third arrogant, authoritarian home secretary, has been having a bad week also. To a great extent it’s his own fault: his troubles were predictably brought about by being arrogant and authoritarian. An inquiry is underway into exactly what happened in Clichy-Sous-Bois last Thursday night, but what is certain is that three teenagers of North African extraction thought that they were being pursued by the police, took refuge in an electrical substation, where two of them were fatally electrocuted. Word quickly went round that they were victims of police brutality, and soon enough a riot was underway. Law and order, specifically taking a tough uncompromising line on law and order, are Sarkozy’s favourite areas, so I suspect that he was delighted at the opportunity to take centre stage. Unfortunately earlier in the week, he had referred very publicly to disaffected youths in sink estates as "scum". Also, in the summer, following similar incidents, he had vowed to clean up another estate "with a high-pressure hose" suggesting that the inhabitants were muck. So he was going to come up with some pretty conciliatory words to calm down the situation. But instead on Sunday he said that he would take a "zero tolerance" approach, that he didn’t want do any ordinary policing but wanted to make arrests. Then he sent an additional seventeen companies of CRS (riot police) and seven squadrons of gendarmes to Clichy-Sous-Bois to make sure that some proper repression took place. And so the problem escalated, and the violence continues and spreads a week later.

Politically, Sarkozy has jumped on the highest law and order horse he could find, and succeeded only in worsening the problem. His tough rhetoric and muscular reaction plays well to many members of his rightwing UMP party, but on the ground, it’s a disaster. He’s been severely criticised within the government, although the Prime Minister and the President have been trying to keep that quiet for the sake of appearances. But Sarkozy may well have severly damaged his credibility, having failed in the one area that many assume is naturally his greatest strength.

Clarke, Blair, Blunkett and Sarkozy all have in common a stunning degree of arrogance, the conviction that they don’t need to listen to anyone else because they’re always right, the accompanying inability to admit to mistakes, the belief that the rules don’t apply to them because they are above everyone else. They are wrong. And they will eventually all learn this the unpleasant way. This pine marten can’t wait.

I wish you all a merry Jerusalem Artichoke Day!

2005-11-03T12:25:00.000Z

You may not be aware of this, but according to the French Republican calendar, today, Tridi 13^th Brumaire of the Year 214 of the Social, Universal and Indivisible Republic, is Jerusalem Artichoke Day. Accordingly, the Militant Pine Marten would like to congratulate all Jerusalem artichokes, and wish everyone else a very happy Jerusalem Artichoke Day.

The French Republican calendar is an interesting one, having been officially introduced on 6^th October 1793, or in Republican parlance Vendémiaire 15^th, Year II of the Social, Universal and Indivisible Republic. The idea behind the Republican calendar was to do away with the religious connotations of the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII to replace the less accurate Julian calendar. The Julian calendar had been introduced by none other than Caius Julius Caesar in 45 BC, however as the Julian year was about 11 minutes longer than the actual time between two consecutive Spring equinoxes. Therefore by 1582, the measurement of time was somewhat out of kilter, so on the 4^th October of that year, the Pope announced that actually it was October 15^th, and eleven days of everyone’s lives were wiped off the slate. General levels of numeracy and literacy weren’t great back then, and a lot of people resented the fact that their lives had been shortened in this way. But there was nothing for it: Gregory had taken the eleven days, he wasn’t going to give them back, and we still use his calendar today.

Except, that is, for France and its dominions between 6^th October 1793 and September 9^th 1805, or Fructidor 22^nd Year XIII if you prefer. The Republican Calendar is not in fact physically very different from the Gregorian calendar, since it is also a solar calendar, however it differs in the ideas behind it. Essentially these are that it should be divided into nice, orderly units in base 10, and that all religious connotations should be replaced with proper reasonable Republican ones. In practice, it works like this. The year is 365 or 366 days long if it’s a leap year. This is divided into 12 months (a slight slip-up with respect to the base 10 agenda) of thirty days each exactly. No more of this messy, illogical 30, 31, 28 and 29 days every leap year malarkey! In the same way, the silly seven day weeks are replaced with three ten-day decades in every month. Days have ten hours, each hour being further subdivided into one hundred minutes, comprising one hundred seconds. That last bit never caught on and was quickly abandoned. You’ll notice that this adds up to only 360 days, so to make up for it there are five or six complementary days at the end of each year known as sansculottides in honour of the revolutionaries amongst the common people who didn’t wear culottes or pantaloons, and wore trousers instead. Apart from the Republican clock aspect, which is frankly taking a decent idea just a little too far down the path of decimal militancy, it’s a perfectly serviceable calendar.

More importantly, it is a fun calendar. The names of all the months were devised by the (bad) poet Fabre d’Eglantine, whose only lasting legacy is the lacklustre French folk song ”Il pleut, il pleut, bergère”. However on this occasion he surpassed himself, and the months are named after changes on the natural world associated with the time of year. The year starts on the Autumn equinox (mostly the 22^nd September but variable, something of a shortcoming), on Vendémiaire 1^st, which is the month of the grape harvest, the vendanges. This is followed by Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, Germinal (yes, like the film with Gérard Depardieu and the novel by Emile Zola), Floréal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor. The days of the ten-day week however have pretty uninspired, arid names: Primidi, Duodi, Tridi and so on up to Decadi. You can spot the influence of the base 10 zealots there. Instead of all those backward Monarchist saints, the days are devoted to animals, plants and agricultural implements, hence today being Jerusalem artichoke day. Finally, the year ends with the five or six complementary days, which are the Festivals of Virtue*, Genius, Labour, Opinion (good inclusion, that one), Rewards and finally of the Revolution.

Assuming you’re still reading, you may be wondering what the point of all this is. The answer is simply that I think it was a fun calendar, and that in a way it’s a shame that Napoleon abolished it because he found it inconvenient and annoying. I’d like it if some enterprising printer decided to produce some up to date Republican calendars (it was New Year’s just over a month ago). And of course I wanted to celebrate the Jerusalem artichoke, a vegetable that doesn’t enjoy the spotlight very often, and that deserves more recognition.

If you’d like to experiment with the Republican calendar, or just have a bit of fun in your lost moments, you can download a free Gregorian/Republican converter by clicking here.

*The Festival of Virtue just happens to be the Militant Pine Marten’s birthday.

Tony Blair has abandoned education as a means of social promotion

2005-10-25T15:08:00.000+01:00

A few years ago, a primary school headmistress that I know summoned the mother of a boy who was falling behind seriously on literacy, to a great extent because his parents never checked whether or not he did his homework. She decided to drive home the nature of the problem quite starkly, and asked the lady bluntly whether she wanted her son to be able to read or not. “Of course I do! Of course I want him to be able to read! I don’t want him to read books like a poof though.” The poor child is not unique in being cursed with stupid, irresponsible parents, and that’s not something that the school or the State can do anything about (not unless someone is prepared to introduce some kind of procreation licence, and I’m sure that there are those who think that would be a jolly good idea). I don’t know what happened to that boy, but I do know the teacher, and I’m pretty sure that she did her damnedest to make sure that he did learn to read, and that consequently he stood a better chance of breaking out of the vicious spiral of ignorance with all its attached evils that he was destined for by his parents and background. But then he was lucky enough through a shake of life’s dice to have fallen in the catchment area of that particular school and to have landed on that particular teacher. And of course that’s one of the things that free, universal schooling is supposed to provide: the opportunity for social promotion.

Tony Blair’s great radical reform of schools may not explicitly set out to do so, but one of its main effects is going to be to make sure that the chances of children like the one mentioned above to rise above the status into which they were born thanks to education will be reduced to a minimum. They’re already not great as things stand. I have yet to read the White Paper, but Tony Blair’s speech given on Monday at Downing Street to a group of parents (which parents? Randomly selected ones pulled off the street? Probably not) is sufficiently detailed and long-winded to provide a pretty good idea of what is involved.

The overall goal is “a system of independent, self-governing state schools with fair funding and fair admissions”. This sounds good, you have to admit, until you try and fathom what exactly Tony means by this. It’s a classic piece of Blair rhetoric in that way. I’m particularly curious to find out what he means by “fair”. This pine marten sets a great deal of store by “fair”, and over the years I’ve come to believe that he doesn’t. In Tony’s own words, ”within two years, virtually every school will be a specialist school”. In practice, this means that there will no longer be a real National Curriculum. Schools will be able to decide what they do and don’t teach, and will be actively encouraged to develop specialisations in certain subject, and then to ”market them to parents”, who “should be able to exercise choice” under the new system, but more on that later. The curriculum will be determined by parents’ groups, charities, businesses, faith organisations, anyone who cares to have a say in it really, and importantly anyone who cares to offer some funding. Indeed, they will be actively encouraged to set up their own schools under the new proposals if they don’t like what’s on the market. I can hear Sir Digby Jones of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI, sometimes referred to as the Bosses’ Union) now: "Students learning Ancient Greek instead of Accounting costs British Business eight-hundred billion quid a decade!" The only people who will not have a say in this are local education authorities (LEAs). LEAs will monitor standards and commission services, but not run schools. Councils will liaise and mediate, but won’t be education providers.

Really it boils down to this: the State is giving up on providing universal, good quality education. Instead, as for everything else that the British state has washed its hands of in recent years, education will be opened to the universal panacea that is The Market. That’s not leftwing paranoia, Tony said so, not me: “There will in one sense be a market. The patient and the parent will have much greater choice. But it will only be a market in the sense of consumer choice, not a market based on private purchasing power”. The last part of that sentence is disingenuous nonsense, as the Blairs must surely know following their efforts to make sure that their children went to the best schools. If it is true that education will remain free, the much-vaunted parental choice will only apply to those who are best placed to take advantage of the new system through their background, educational level, postcode, inclination and ability to do so. The boy with the useless parents at the beginning of this story would not benefit from this alleged choice that his parents have. So those that will benefit will be those that already have the greatest ability to make the system work for them, and therefore the children who have the least need of the State’s help. Children born into poorly educated or simply poor backgrounds or areas are being abandoned. The State is giving up trying to offer social promotion through education, it’s taking away the opportunity to rise purely on one’s own merits, through one’s own work, assisted by the State. In fact, it’s giving up on trying to help those who can’t help themselves.

And if the State stops doing for its citizens the things that they cannot do on their own, then what exactly is the State for apart from its own perpetuation?

“Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.”

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26. (1)

Civil liberties defenders should hang out with the foxhunters more

2005-10-20T17:36:00.000+01:00

Inspiration can come from the most unlikely places. Those amongst you who have misgivings about the Blair government’s cavalier attitude to civil liberties as they seek to combat Evil in all its devious forms by playing "Variations sur le Thème de l’Acte du Terrorisme, en cas de Force Majeure" repeatedly, until we stop being able to distinguish the notes and doze off, should probably take a good look at what the persecuted minority that are foxhunting supporters are up to. If you haven’t been paying much attention to this ongoing conflict over the years, it may come as a surprise to you that, following what appeared to be a final triumph for opponents of foxhunting earlier this year, when the 1949 Parliament Act was used to finally force the ban into law, the foxhunters haven’t actually stopped hunting at all. If their PR war left something to be desired, especially compared to that of their opponents, they have no lessons to take when it comes to their current civil disobedience campaign. You may think that foxhunters have no right to use civil disobedience tactics, they’re for people like you who oppose the introduction of ID cards or nuclear waste reprocessing. However they’re just as viable for the defence of foxhunting, and the Militant Pine Marten is impressed.

Before I explain why this is case, I should define what I mean by civil disobedience*. At its simplest, civil disobedience is simply the refusal by people who consider a law to be iniquitous to submit themselves to it. However as this leaves the door open to arguments such as "Well suppose I disagree with the law that forbids murder then?", I shall add a few details. First of all, an act of civil disobedience must be conscious and intentional. Breaking a law by mistake doesn’t count. Making a conscious decision to sit in the "whites only" seat on the bus when you’re black does. Such an act is also public, which is a major difference with a criminal act, which must be clandestine to reap benefits. It is an individual action that purports to have a collective goal: the participant breaks the law to benefit others. Civil disobedience is non-violent. Its effect should come from its resonance with a with a larger body of people. Finally, and this is of course where the whole concept turns into a legal and philosophical powder keg, civil disobedience calls upon "higher principles" than those invoked by the lawmakers. Whereas these could be religious or ideological, they can also be constitutional. In this way, paradoxically, it is possible for civil disobedience to strengthen established institutions. Now that we know what we’re talking about, let’s move on to the case in point.

On the 20th November 2004, the rightwing philosopher (and foxhunter) Roger Scruton published the Hunting Declaration, inviting foxhunters and supporters to openly pledge to disobey any eventual ban on foxhunting. The text fulfils all of the above criteria. None of the signatories hid their identities, denied that they would be breaking the law, and importantly the website states "The success of the Declaration will be judged by the press, public and Government, by the number of people who sign it, and especially those that do not hunt.". So far, outright defiance has not been necessary. Interestingly, what the foxhunting supporters are doing now is to push the law as far as it will go, testing both the word of the law, and the authorities’ will to enforce it. This may be enough if not to have the ban law repealed, to maintain a situation in which it is not effectively enforced, until such time that another government will repeal it. Although I’m quoting Che Guevara out of context here, I don’t think I’m taking too many liberties with the logic if I say that this stage is analogous to the pre-revolutionary stage described here:

"Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."

So far, the ban’s opponents haven’t quite finished exploring legal routes, and of course they can’t become violent because there is at least a semblance of constitutional legality. And anyway what Che liked wasn’t civil disobedience, it was revolution, which is a different matter. However there is scope for making the authorities’ lives really difficult through civil disobedience should they decide to start trying to prosecute hunts, which would be a pretty expensive and time-consuming process.

Now the fact is that this is very, very interesting stuff for anyone who has toyed with the idea of refusing to carry an ID card if they are introduced and made mandatory. It is very similar to what the NO2ID (banner on the left) campaign is trying to achieve: first you sign a pledge that you won’t register for an ID card, then you give money to support legal resistance should it come to that. The key things are being non-violent, being public, and not giving up. And of course accepting that the PTBs are likely to make your life harder. But that’s not going to be so easy for them if a million people do the same.

And when you’re out there demonstrating against ID Cards and sitting in the way of the riot police van, don’t be surprised if the guy next to you is in tweeds. He’s already a civil disobedience veteran after all.

* Acknowledgements to Mahatma Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau and the Wikipedia.

Let us build a Europe of the Mushroom Hunting Peoples

2005-10-07T10:26:00.000+01:00

This week’s European Union summit on beginning formal accession talks with Turkey ended in success despite the single-minded opposition of Turkey’s old sparring partner Austria. It was Austria, not Greece as you could have expected, that single-mindedly opposed Turkey’s entry into the EU. Given that relations between Greece and Turkey have been somewhat strained for the past few decades, in particular because of the ongoing disgraceful situation concerning Cyprus, this may have come as a bit of a surprise to some. After all, Greece and Turkey have been rivals for at least 3,300 years, ever since a young man from around the North-West Anatolian town of Hisarlik eloped with his Greek chum form Sparta’s wife. So one could expect that given the lack of any such recent outrages, the Austrians would have come to terms with their traditional rivalry with the former Ottomans and buried that particular hatchet. However the price for Austria’s change of mind if not of heart – the opening of accession talks with neighbouring Croatia – suggests that the Austro-Turkish struggle for influence over the Balkans isn’t quite over. Although there’s precious little evidence that Ankara has any interest in becoming once again closely involved in that particular nest of vipers. There’ll be trouble in the Balkans, yet.

While as always, the EU ship sailed closer and closer to the diplomatic wind, Chancellor Schuessel of Austria explained on television that "it was necessary to understand people's concerns about the EU's ability to truly welcome", which at face value is a reasonable statement. The Austrians may be rather less keen than anyone else in the EU on Turkish membership, but there’s hardly overwhelming popular support for the idea. According to Eurobaremeter, only 10% of Austrians favour Turkish accession, but across the EU, the figure is only around 37%, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. So if the EU’s political elite don’t want a repeat of the last summer’s disastrous referenda on the proposed EU Constitution in France and the Netherlands over Turkey (and bear in mind that at the moment, France at least is planning on holding a referendum on Turkish accession when the time comes), it’s going to have to address some popular concerns.

The big question that we all have to answer is this: what is the EU going to be? This raises others. What is it for? Where does it stop? In fact, what is Europe? Is it a cultural sphere? Is it simply a geographical area limited by seas and the Urals? If so, where exactly in the Urals? If it’s defined by culture, which particular aspects of culture? There are those who maintain that it’s religion. Jacques Delors once said that the EU was a “Christian club”, and I’m sure that this is a statement that resonates with many Austrians, and other Europeans. But this argument doesn’t really hold water. Certainly most Europeans are nominally Christians, whether Catholic, Orthodox or any of the branches of Protestantism that you care to choose. But how many Europeans really define themselves in this way? What proportion of those who oppose the entry of a predominantly Muslim population into the EU make any decision based on their religion more than let’s say once a month? How often do they attend a service? For most them, not very often I’d wager. This is a difficult argument because it runs into the wall of religious and arguably racial prejudice. This is a low-level, insidious emotion that lurks in the background, but it’s real nonetheless.

In an uncharacteristically optimistic article this week, Timothy Garton Ash, who has been pretty miserable and downcast of late, attempts to answer some of these questions, and does so well. He claims that the EU is not becoming some sort of super-state as many rabid anti-Europeans (Eurosceptic is such an anaemic term) claim. Neither is it simply a giant free trade zone as many continental Euro-enthusiasts fear that the British want to make in into. It’s a new form of Commonwealth of Nations for want of a better term, united by a common political vision, a commitment to democracy, human rights, and improving the lot of its peoples through economic strength. These may sound like vague concepts, and in a way they are, but they have a life of their own, and it will take more than populist political pandering to the electorate’s fears to stop them.

In the meantime, if Europeans need a simpler idea of what unites Europe to cling onto until such time as the aforementioned ones gain some credence amongst them, I suggest that rather than any political goal, geographic notion or religious criterion, they should use the pan-European love of mushroom hunting. In every member state of the EU (except for the UK, which explains why by and large, the UK has never really embraced the European ideal as much as its partners) and in its expansion frontier to the East, people love picking mushrooms. It is an activity that unites generations, provides a sense of continuity, stimulates contemplation, and leads to a social gathering around a very special meal, while fostering a friendly sense of competition. I am reliably informed that our Turkish friends are very keen mushroom hunters too.

So go out to the woods, pick some mushrooms, reflect on the fact that fellow Europeans and aspiring Europeans throughout the continent are doing the same. After the weekend, email or telephone your friends across Europe and tell them about it, thereby creating a pan-European sense of purpose. Calm down, enjoy it, relax, let the anxiety slip away, and together we shall build a Europe of the Mushroom Hunting Peoples!

Draft French anti-terror laws highlight the UK's drift towards being a police state

2005-09-27T12:27:00.000+01:00

Charles Clarke’s French counterpart Nicolas ‘Iznogoud’ Sarkozy has just unveiled his very own proposals for a raft of anti-terror legislation. Surfing the growing wave of fear amongst the French electorate (a phenomenon known as l’insécurité) has been an important part of Sarkozy’s rise to political prominence, and his current role as Interior Minister offers an ideal platform on which to continue to build his reputation as a fearsome opponent of muggers, terrorists, young men in hoodies, and now weirdly the Militant Pine Marten’s very own cousin, but more on that later.

On Monday evening, Sarkozy appeared on television to discuss his proposals, and the man has absolutely nothing to learn from our own Charles Clarke when it comes to tough talking and quite frankly straightforward posturing. In fact, he makes Clarke sound like a big pussycat, although his direct pilfering of the Home Secretary’s exact rhetoric is sloppy work. Consider the following withering response to the suggestion that his proposals represent a threat to civil liberties: "The first liberty is to be able to take the Metro and the bus without fearing for one’s life". You may recall the following statement from Charles Clarke, issued after an equivalent comment about civil liberties: "It is a fundamental civil liberty of people in Europe to be able to go to work on their transport system in the morning without being blown up." Nicolas, fais donc un effort, merde! That’s just really sloppy work. It’s a ridiculously glib thing to say in the first place, let alone to plagiarise it.

Apart from stealing Clarke’s weak arguments, Sarkozy had some typically robust ones of his own to air, further reinforcing his image as the dogged defender of France’s security. First of all, he started by making quite sure that everyone was in the proper paranoid state of mind to be prepared to listen to him, opining that the terrorist menace "exists in France, at a very high level" and that on a scale of one to five, it was "closer to four than to three". To fight this, Sarkozy explained that "We want to know who is going where, for how long, and when they’re coming back". Now you may think that it’s really none of the State’s business where people choose to go on holiday, in which case you may be swayed by the further explanation that "It is not normal that an individual living in one of our inner cities should suddenly leave for four months to Afghanistan, three months to Syria". You may be swayed by that, but I’d like to think that you’re not. Keeping track of people’s movements, keeping them under surveillance in case they decide to do something "not normal" is proper police state behaviour, not the behaviour of a country that makes a good claim to having invented liberty in the modern political sense. It shows a frightening contempt for individual liberty, for the fundamental values of the French Republic, more importantly in an increasingly varied society, for difference. Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be attempting to scare the electorate into supporting his presidential ambitions, a tactic with an extremely distasteful history.

However for all his unpleasant rhetoric, Sarkozy’s actual proposals fall far short of the levels of State surveillance of the individual proposed and indeed to a great extent implemented by Charles Clarke. Apart from the plan to scrutinise people’s movements, the rest of the legislative proposals in France will seem very mild to the British electorate. Broadly, they cover installing more CCTV cameras (British readers may forget that these little gadgets are nowhere near as popular in the rest of the world), the keeping of logs of people’s phone calls and internet use (but not of the content of the communications), increased sentences to terrorism-related offences, and increased access for the police services to files on citizens’ number plates, driving licences, passports, identity cards, visa applications, etc. However this remains far from the level and depth of information that Clarke wishes to include in British ID cards, or to the proposed availability of this information. The fact is that the British have allowed themselves to gradually be subjected to a degree of surveillance that would be anathema in the rest of Europe, certainly in France. Indeed, even Sarkozy hasn’t dared propose any legislation that far-reaching, knowing that it wouldn’t wash, that it would probably be unconstitutional (incidentally, I’ll take the opportunity to point out that the UK should really draw up a written constitution to protect citizens’ liberties).

Finally, why is my cousin a menace to the security of French citizens? Well my cousin is young, lives in an inner city, and has suddenly left to spend a few months in Syria. In addition, my cousin has all her life associated with blacks and people of North African descent, has a strong anti-establishment streak and is a bit lefty. All factors which, according to Sarkozy, perfectly fit the profile of typical French Jihadist.

Direct democracy causes organ failure and the wrong choices

2005-09-08T17:33:00.000+01:00

Continuing the theme of drawing your attention to events in far-flung corners of the world that are not widely reported in ours, it appears that there is a new phenomenon that is worrying the leadership of the People’s Republic of China. Money on table now: which of the following do you think that Hu Jintao and the Party Lads are most apprehensive about. The ecological catastrophe that accompanies China’s insane economic growth? The economic disparity between rural and urban China? The fact that a 100 million Chinese are now Internet users and that it’s really hard to keep tabs on exactly what they’re using it for? Wrong, wrong and wrong, sorry, you lose. China’s leaders are worried about the nefarious influence of the People’s Republic’s own version of Popstars or The X-Factor.

The Chinese version of the programme is called The Mongolian Cow Sour Yoghurt Super Girl Contest (after its sponsor, a dairy product company), known as Super Girls for short, and that’s how I’ll refer to it from now on. It was broadcast by a regional satellite television channel in Hunan, and the contest’s finale was watched by 400 million Chinese viewers last weekend. Viewers were gripped by Super Girls fever, voting by SMS, finding ingenious ways of flaunting the rules limiting each person to a single vote. The winner of the three finalists was a 21-year-old student from Sichuan called Li Yuchun.

So who cares, you may ask? It’s just the same crappy reality television that we have in the West. Maybe the following comment from a Shanghai editor named Gu Yun, quoted by Shanghai News, will give you a clue: "This kind of contest can be considered a democracy apprenticeship for the 1980s generation". You can almost hear the reaction of the Party Nomenklatura from here, can’t you? "Great Chairman Mao Almighty! I thought we’d taught these snotty kids a lesson back in Tiananmen Square? I told you we shouldn’t allow that degenerate poppy-rocky music!"

Democracy apprenticeships are not something that the Chinese leadership want to hear about. Voting by text message to evict someone from the Big Brother house may be something that to us is at the least banal, to many crass and symbolic of a whole lot of stuff that we don’t like much (although it’s not uncommon for lazy thinkers to make the same claim as Gu Yun). But in China, this is the first example of direct democracy that they have ever witnessed. On Super Girls there was no Sharon Osbourne, no Simon Wossname, just the cumulated votes of the viewers. And what’s more, no-one overruled them, and Li Yuchun won fair and square. The viewers loved this, and they want more.

But there’s another problem: it’s not just the fact that 400 million people have now had a taste of direct democracy that worried the apparatchiks. They don’t like the result either. You may think that to the State, it’s pretty irrelevant who wins some tacky reality television talent show sponsored by a yoghurt manufacturer. But not so. Quite apart from the fact that generally, authoritarian governments tend to consider that nothing is irrelevant to the State, Li Yuchun is just not the sort of girl that they like very much.

In China Daily, the State-run English language newspaper, the chaps are trying really hard to pretend that they don’t mind. That they don’t mind that "rabid fans" elected "transgender looking Li Yuchun from Chengdu". They note with some dismay that "nearly all the beautiful and lovely Super Girls" were "kicked out in earlier rounds" (well you should have got your friends to vote for them then, shouldn’t you?). The style of writing is interesting, in that it always relates what "other commentators" in state-run media have said, inferring that China Daily is different, whereas it is no such thing. Heaven forbid that anyone at China Daily should be "concerned that the programme signalled the further erosion of traditional Chinese culture". And they certainly wouldn’t want anyone to think that they agreed with the unspecified commentators who "speculated that her fan base consisted of young girls who considered her to be their boyfriend because of her appearance". Or in other words, she may be lesbian, something that the People’s Republic prefers to draw a discrete red flag over.

Whereas China Daily doesn’t disapprove of these things, it would be failing in its duty to inform the public if it didn’t report the flipside of the Super Girls coin:
"But unfortunately not all the opportunities lead to happy endings, though the girls have sung to their hearts' content, some ended up with sadness, or even, tragedy. It is reported that a 15-year-old girl from central China's Hunan Province who dreamed of becoming Super Girl but dissatisfied with her figure died of organ failure caused by hunger."

It is reported by whom exactly? Of course, this may be true, there’s no way of telling. Anyway, it’s only sensible to warn young people with ideas of the sorts of nasty things that happen to people who fall in with the wrong crowd.

Maybe I’m being excessively cynical, so just to be fair, I’ll let China Daily have the last word, because even I acknowledge that the following is a valid question, based on my experience of reality talent shows: "How come an imitation of a democratic system ends up selecting the singer who has the least ability to carry a tune?". The paper also suggests that The Mongolian Cow Sour Yoghurt Super Girl Contest 2006 may be cancelled.

But that’s only fair enough given that it causes girls’ organs to fail and results in the wrong decisions being made.

Trouble à t’moulin à rumeurs

2005-09-07T11:04:00.000+01:00

It may have escaped the attention of many people outside France that Jacques Chirac has been taken ill. Indeed, the idea was that the French weren’t supposed to notice either. Not just the Great Unwashed either, but absolutely everyone up to the highest levels of the State was kept in the dark from the evening of Friday 2nd September, when Chirac was taken to hospital, to 10am the next day. During that time, no one at the Elysée thought it necessary to tell the prime minister Dominique de Villepin, the Cabinet or the President of the Senate Christian Poncelet, who would take over from Chirac if he was incapable of governing through illness or death.

First of all, what exactly happened? According to Le Monde (Monday’s edition you’ll notice), after entertaining an Andorran delegation, at about 6.30pm, Our Jacques retired to his office for a little late-night cramming. Once there, he experienced a strong migraine and troubles with vision in one eye, whereupon he called his doctor, who decided that this required some check-ups at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital. So the President’s motorcade (without the usual motorcycle outriders to avoid attracting attention) left the Elysée Palace at about 8pm. There, doctors decide to keep him in for further tests and observations overnight, but Chirac decides to tell no one apart from his wife, his daughter and his private secretary. He’ll call the prime minister on Saturday after he receives the test results.

Dominique de Villepin was told of Chirac’s hospitalisation at about 9.30 the next day, which is when the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed on Sunday evening on TF1 to have been told. But this is where the first evidence of jostling for position in the wake of the President’s possible quitting of the scene appears. You see, in France as in the UK, it’s the party conference season, and as head of the UMP party, Sarko was at the conference in La Baule. It looked for all the world on the televised coverage of the conference that Sarko was told about Chirac’s condition at 1pm by de Villepin himself, which suggests that the President didn’t bother to tell him, a deliberate display of spurning.

The shenanigans and political manoeuvring in the immediate aftermath of the President’s illness remind me of a similar sequence of events in Cuba in 2001, when Castro collapsed during a speech and his entourage’s body language seemed to be a rehearsal for the immediate post-Castro distribution of power. Castro’s planned successor is his brother Raoul. The question in France is whether de Villepin is Chirac’s dauphin.

Under the Ancien Régime, the king’s death would be greeted with a cry of “Le Roi est mort! Vive le Roi!” to indicate that there was no vacancy in power, that there was continuity in the organs of State. The problem with what’s just happened with Chirac is that no one made any such assurance. Indeed, communication on exactly what the President’s state of health is remains vague. Currently, all that the Elysée has said is that he had a “minor vascular accident”, although it’s pretty clear that what we’re talking about is a small blood clot in the brain. Traditionally, for some unfathomable reason, the French President’s health has been a state secret. Mitterrand kept his prostate cancer a secret from 1981 onwards, publishing monthly completely fabricated health bulletins. Potentially, this can lead to the State having no effective head without anyone knowing, to a power vacuum, and this is an anomaly that must be rectified in future.

Admittedly, Chirac’s not dead, and isn’t planning on departing this Earth anytime soon. But this event does almost certainly mean that he won’t stand for reelection in 2007, denying Sarko his coveted duel with the Old Man. So the big question is whether Sarko or de Villepin will be the Centre-Right’s favoured candidate in 2007, or even whether there could be a Sarko vs. Villepin scrap, since there is nothing to stop either of them throwing their hat in the ring regardless. Sarko may do this in his single-minded drive to become Caliph instead of the Caliph. I don’t think de Villepin would, in order to avoid fragmenting the Centre-Right vote. Either way, this is going to be an election to watch, where for once, there will be no geriatric candidates except for that perennial furuncle on France’s face that is Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Left-leaning writers shouldn’t be scared or embarrassed to write about religion

2005-09-02T14:01:00.000+01:00

IMPORTANT NOTE: I am absolutely not making any comment on the existence or non-existence of God, on the validity of any specific religious beliefs, on the authenticity of religious texts, or indeed on the relative merits of any specific religion. Except when specified, the term “religion” is used to denote the concept of a set of beliefs of beliefs and values centred around God, not a religious organisation. The term “God” is used to mean the various concepts of a divine being, pantheon thereof or essence that exist in various forms in different religions, monotheistic as well as polytheistic. This piece is about the effect of religion on individuals and their behaviour, not about the validity of belief systems.

There is a very important topic that Left-leaning writers (and I use the word in its broadest possible sense) in particular are very reluctant engage with: religion. We don’t really like to discuss it for a variety of reasons. For many, it seems to be a somewhat embarrassing relic of earlier times. It doesn’t fit with the secular, humanist view of the world. Others simply dismiss it as a load of superstitious claptrap, indeed hostility towards religion – especially organised religion – is widespread. It’s not only viewed as irrelevant, it’s also considered nefarious, it impedes Humanity’s progress, it’s an obscurantist force. Finally, and I suspect that this is a more important reason for avoidance of the topic than is generally acknowledged, it’s difficult to write about. Theology is not something that all that many people are very familiar with, it’s not a way of thinking, of viewing the world, that they’re used to. And so discussion of religion among Leftie writers tends to be limited to the following three topics:

- perfectly justified vitriolic attacks against religious zealots trying to mix religion and politics;
- habitual and visceral attacks on organised religion (more or less justified);
- militant atheism, which is often indistinguishable from religious zealotry.

Otherwise, writing about religion in the mainstream press or online remains the preserve of those further on the right of the political spectrum, with some particularly hilarious material coming from the super-conservative Protestants in the US, reactionary Roman Catholics in Europe, and of course everyone’s current favourite extreme Islamist clerics.

This does not strike me as a good thing. It’s painfully obvious that religion is a very powerful force in the world, far more so than was the case a decade ago, certainly far more than during the Cold War. Therefore ignoring it, dismissing it as irrelevant, backward, the favoured material of reactionaries, is simplistic, counterproductive and misguided. So I’m going to stick my mustelid neck out and throw into the Leftwing Ideas Ring the supposition that religion can be a good thing, a force for good, a friend of progressive politics.

Karl Marx’s famous claim that “religion is the opium of the Masses” sums up the general attitude to religion on the Left quite well. And there is of course truth in this statement. Unthinking, blind faith not in God (and I don’t limit this to the Christian God, but to the idea of God, found in one form or other in all religions) but in the interpretation of God made by people with a more or less openly stated and earthly agenda of their own, does nothing at all for the advancement of Humanity. Indeed, it holds Humanity back by discouraging individual thought, theological inquiry, by seeking to impose a subjective view of the divine and repress dissent, often through violent methods. The ravages of this form of religion are all too plain to see in the world at the moment. The inclusion of so-called “Intelligent Design” in American school curricula, the pernicious stranglehold of Protestant fundamentalists on the current US administration, the resurgent influence of the Council of Guardians in Iran, and to a lesser extent the accession of Joseph Ratzinger to the Papacy are all examples of this.

But all of these admittedly extreme cases have in common the fact that all of them are perversions of religions to achieve earthly goals. The Council of Guardians wants to make sure that it has complete control of everyone and everything in Iran, the Christian Zionists want the US to re-establish the Biblical Israel (and thereby bring about the Second Coming – I’m not certain of where this strange little doctrine came from), Al-Qaeda wants to cause as much havoc as possible and make everyone live in the Middle-Ages.

Manipulation of large numbers of people is made possible quite simply by illiteracy, ignorance, lack of personal exploration of theology. Traditionally, Roman Catholics did not study the Bible much. Until Vatican II, Mass was conducted in Latin, which being the language of an ecclesiastical establishment didn’t really allow for anyone to form their own opinions much. Islam suffers from the same problem: the Quran is usually printed in Arabic, and most Muslims don’t speak Arabic, let alone read it. So Roman Catholics have relied on catechism classes, which follow the Roman Catholic Church’s agenda, whilst many Muslims rely on the self-justifying Hadith for their interpretation of the Quran.

Religion doesn’t have to be like that, and beyond fulfilling basic emotional needs such as providing people with a sense of the purpose of life, and reassuring them that death is not simply oblivion, it has a valuable purpose. Many scientists for example seek in science and reason a coherent worldview, and reason is certainly a better tool for that than superstition and mysticism. But science is not very good at all at telling people what is right and what is wrong. Nature has no concept of compassion or of mercy. Evolution doesn’t really allow that life has a purpose other than replicating itself. That’s what differentiates humans from the rest of the Earth’s biomass: we’re self-aware, we want a purpose in life, and yet through concepts such as mercy and compassion, we think twice about gaining an advantage over others or indeed other species if it’s going to cause them harm. It can instil in people a respect for others and for the rest of Creation (I use that term because it’s quite elegant, not to indicate a religious belief, and absolutely not because I’m a creationist).

But that sort of beneficial effect doesn’t come from blind faith alone or from top-down, dogmatic organised religion. It comes from individual familiarity with the various religions’ fundamental texts, from honest discussion, probing, healthy scepticism and above all, forcing one’s self to approach all of these matters with an open mind. Too often, the Bible and Quran for example are used to find justifications for preconceived ideas. I am always amazed by the sorts of things that Christian zealots manage to justify using the Bible. You have to wonder how much clearer the statement “Thou shalt not kill” could possibly be. And the entire Gospels are about love, compassion, non-violence, mercy and importantly, not mixing up religion and politics. After all, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" just means "Sorry, I don't do politics".

It is often said that if people don’t believe in God, they’ll believe in anything. This is quite clearly true. Banish God, and you can find yourself believing in Stalin or National Socialism instead. If you ignore God, sideline him, make him irrelevant, you risk losing your sense of direction, purpose, balance. This leaves the door wide open for dishonest, manipulative religious zealots, or indeed any other belief system that fills the human need for a sense of purpose. Some fill the gap with frenetic consumerism, others muck around with statements such as “well I don’t believe in God, but I believe that there’s some sort of undefined vague greater power that doesn’t really require me to do anything or not do things and is about as intellectually useful as a liquorice spade”. But one way or another, people will believe in something, and intelligent, informed religion is as good as any positive philosophy. Because people who believe in positive things are more likely to make the world better, to vote for good politicians, to spread open-minded, tolerant, generous ideas, to not kill people or oppress them, to stand up to those who would do such things or tell them what to think and feel. And barring the extremists, those are the sorts of things that Lefties – and indeed decent rightwing people – believe in. So Leftie writers, don’t abandon the topic of religion to rightwing bigots and self-serving, cynical zealots. It’s nothing to be scared or ashamed of.

You should always carry with you a piece of string

2005-08-20T12:50:00.000+01:00

After a thoroughly enjoyable fortnight of climbing trees and chasing squirrels, I have returned from the woods. Obviously I have been a little cut off from the usual cares of the world during this time, and so until I catch up on everything, I won't have anything terribly serious to write about. However in between raids on bird nests, I had time for some reflection, and I realised something important: I never have a piece of string available when I need one. I reasoned that there must be many others in a similar situation, and thought that this represented not only a business opportunity, but also a chance to really help people. And so I decided to do my best to provide Mankind with string.

Maybe you need a piece of string right now? In that case, I'll wager that you don't have one to hand. You're certain that you must have some string around the house somewhere, and in fact you're sure that you saw it lying around just last week, but you can't remember where. If at this moment, you don't need a piece of string, I'm sure that you can remember an occasion when you were faced with this very problem.

It used to be said (and this was probably one of Lord Baden-Powell's ideas) that a boy need not fear being caught unprepared to face an unexpected situation if he always carried with him a pocket knife, a sixpence and a piece of string very much like the one pictured here. I would adapt that advice for the Twenty-first Century by increasing the amount of cash to £10, but the principle remains sound. If you've read JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, you may recall that just after finding the One Ring in the caves under the mountains of Barak-Skrudge (I forget the exact name), Gollum found himself looking for the answer to the question "What does it have in its' pocketses Preciousssss?" Well had Bilbo carried with him a piece of string, Gollum could have found himself strangled to death or tied up and abandoned in an underground cavern in short order, rather than just robbed of his birthday present.

If you were about to leave your home without a piece of string in your pocket, I strongly recommend that you give serious consideration to bidding for this item.

You'll notice that I have not so far approached the topic of the physical dimensions of this piece of string, and it may seem a reasonable question at first sight. However it is part of the very nature of string that it exists in a constant state of dimensional uncertainty. In fact, this state of flux also accounts for the elusiveness of pieces of string. At any given time, it is impossible to determine where a piece of string is and what its' dimensions are. This is hardly surprising if one is a believer in superstring theory of course, which basically holds that strings are the one-dimensional building blocks of the Universe. Specifically, the elemental particles that make up the atom are themselves simply composed of strings in varying degrees of excitation. I am not certain of the precise degree of excitation of the piece of string on offer here as I do not have a suitable particle accelerator to determine its state. Suffice to say that it is a splendid specimen of a piece of string.

Whether you were about to leave the house stringless, are interested in the fundamental fabric of the Universe, or simply want to make a temporary handle for an awkwardly-shaped package, this piece of string is for you!

The Militant Pine Marten has returned to the forest for a fortnight

2005-07-31T15:56:00.000+01:00

I shall return with some new mustelid musings on August 15th or thereabouts. Have a good first half of August everyone (assuming optimistically that there is anyone).

Al-Qaeda is just a Nihilist religious Trotskyite movement

2005-07-28T15:48:00.000+01:00

The Algerian press reports a state of confusion, disbelief and incomprehension following yesterday's claim by the local Iraqi Al-Qaeda franchise that they had executed Ali Balarousi and Azzedin Belkadi, two Algerian diplomats who had been abducted in Baghdad last week. Many Algerians do not understand why diplomats from their country, which although it cooperates with the US to fight terrorism, has been no great supporter of America's actions in Iraq, have been targeted by an Islamist group in Iraq. It is a reasonable question.

Following the abductions, the group's communique claimed that the fact that Algeria had kept its embassy in Iraq open implied support for the American-led invasion and for the current Iraqi regime. When it announced the murder of the two diplomats, it justified the action by saying that Algeria doesn't apply Sharia Law, provides "support for Christians and Jews in Iraq" , and is responsible for the "shedding of Muslim blood" in Algeria, a reference to the bloody struggle between armed Islamist groups and government troops in the 90s.

None of this is even a half-decent attempt at explaining exactly why these people claiming to be Al-Qaeda considered it necessary to murder the two diplomats. The language of the two last sentences of their communique provides a better insight into their motivations however:
"Praise Allah, those who carried out the abductions snatched the Algerians from the hands of the police in the very centre of Baghdad. They succeeded without a single one of them being caught."
These people are boasting. It's that simple. Why do they abduct innocent people, taunt them, humiliate them, parade them around like caged animals? They do it for the jazz. They're glory hunters. Maybe they really do believe that this furthers God's cause, or that this will liberate Iraq, or some other similar nonsense that they have been told by the people who do the thinking for them.

But the tone and style of this little text and other announcements by like-minded Islamist groups are remarkable in that they are identical to that used by hard-left revolutionary movements. Take, for example, this little paragraph:

"This struggle, under conditions of an overwhelming predominance of Imperialist relationships on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the permanent character of the Islamic revolution as such... The Islamic revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena."

Who do you think said that? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi perhaps? Or maybe Ali Benhadj, the former number two of the Front du Salut Islamique who was arrested in Algiers yesterday after appearing on Al-Jazeera to "salute the mujahideen of the Resistance in Iraq". No, actually it's an extract from Leon Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution, in which I replaced the word "capitalist" with "Imperialist" and "Socialist" with "Islamic". This form of high-profile violence has no value at all in terms of an ordinary resistance movement, it will simply degenerate the situation further. But it makes sense in the context of a Trotskyite model of exporting and propagating an Islamist revolution.

From the personal point of view of the author of the communique who calls himself Abu Maissar El Iraqi and claims to speak on behalf of the "Department of Information of the Al-Qaeda Organisation in Mesopotamia" (note the self-agrandising use of the nom de guerre "El Iraqi" and the excessively inflated job title), what is there to gain from this? Probably violent death at some point down the line. One could hope that he really does believe that he'll find himself with 72 virgins in the afterlife, because apart from that, there isn't much to look forward to. But this is the wrong way of thinking about the problem, because the people who carry out these actions in the name of God are, paradoxically, nihilists.

Strictly speaking, Nihilism is an extreme rationalist ideology that rejects religion, but these words could come from an Al-Qaeda textbook:

"Be severe to yourself and severe to others. Suppress the sentiments of relationship, friendship, love, and gratitude. Have only one pleasure, one joy, one reward -- the triumph of the revolution. Night and day, have only one thought, the destruction of everything without pity. Be ready to die and ready to kill any one who opposes the triumph of your revolt."

They are in fact taken from Michael Bakunin's Revolutionary Catechism. So these men do not expect to achieve anything in this world, or even to stay alive. All that counts is that they should destroy as many of the institutions and people that oppose their pseudo-religious ideology as possible.

So much for what drives the footsoldiers of this Islamist revolution, but what of the masterminds, the people who orchestrate the violence, or at least encourage it, who recruit those who dirty their hands? They'd probably tell you that they're fighting God's War, come up with some suitable rant about Djihad, but this is nonsense. What they want is temporal and spiritual power over as many people and as many countries as possible. To this end, they have poisoned the minds of the kind of people who are prepared to carry out atrocities in Madrid, on the London Underground, in Baghdad by infiltrating schools, mosques, governments etc, all this despite having no formal organisation. And their strategy is to take advantage of the chaos and horror in Iraq and Afghanistan for example to position themselves as the de facto only credible source of authority and power. They deliberately aggravate the situation and escalate the violence, and through mediatic coups like these latest murders, they present themselves as leaders of the resistance, they claim to speak for all those without a voice. And if they convince enough people that this is the case, it will become the case.

Abu Maissar El Iraqi and his colleagues will have been dead for a long time, as will countless others that they claim to be fighting for, and if all goes according to their plan, these Nihilist religious Trotskyites will enjoy the sort of power that the Council of Guardians in Iran dream of. That's if it all works out according to their plan. The good news is that it won't, because these people are so wound up in theory and dogma that they can't see the reality of the situation which is that the vast majority of Iraqis and Afghans have no interest in this way of doing things and are in fact rather interested in having a decent earthly life. This will go on for years, countless thousands will die, and then it will dwindle and extinguish itself in a puff of hubris. What an unbelievable waste.

"Gruetzi Meister Petz! ": Swiss forced to rethink hardline naturalisation policies as bear applies for citizenship

2005-07-27T15:13:00.000+01:00

It's not often that you read anything about Switzerland in the news, and when it does happen, it tends to be unpleasant. Unsavoury financial dealings, the rural German-speaking cantons rejecting membership of the EU, electing really nasty right-wing candidates to the Federal Council or being really unwelcoming to immigrants. So it makes a pleasant change to read that an inhabitant banished from the country since 1904 has returned unexpectedly: the bear has wandered back into Switzerland.

In addition to the ubiquitous and frankly tedious cow, the brown bear is an important symbol for the Swiss, and in particular for the inhabitants of the capital, Bern, which was named after the bear. Admittedly, this could have happened under more auspicious circumstances, since the town was founded in 1191 by Duke Berthold V of Zaehringen after he killed a bear there in the course of a hunt (apparently). As it happens, the nature of the relationship between the Swiss and the bear never really changed all that much, and the last reported bear in Switzerland was shot in 1904.

The bear in question was sighted by three people in the Ofen Pass National Park in the Graubuenden, a region which is about as mountainous, rural and remote as it can be in Europe. It also shares the characteristics of many other locations with a similar topography: it's insular, riven with incomprehensible rivalries and people have a tendency to dislike those from the next valley, let alone foreigners. In fact, the good people of the Graubuenden were instrumental in making sure that it remained very, very difficult for anyone to gain Swiss citizenship.

So the question that the locals must ask themselves is whether they are prepared to welcome Meister Petz home. After all, according to Swiss law, the final say on whether or not someone is accorded citizenship belongs to local communities, and they don't come much more local than those in the Graubuenden. If I were them, I wouldn't worry about the bears. There are never very many and by and large, they keep themselves to themselves (until they take a dislike to you and rip your face off). However, they may have a legitimate gripe if the wolves that have reestablished themselves in France, having travelled from Italy, turn up. One tried it last year, but the fresh mountain air must have disagreed with it because it promptly found itself dead. The fact remains that French experience reveals that wolves have learned some new tricks since they were last in the vicinity.

In 2002, the newly arrived French pack came up with a brilliant idea: why bother running down roe deer which aren't very big and are pretty fast and agile, when you can kill 400 sheep in one go with next to no effort? The result was this:

How do they do it? Well they just scare a herd of sheep towards a cliff edge and watch them plummet to a messy death. You can see how this would annoy the locals quite badly. As a result the French PTBs authorised the killing of some of the culprits. However despite the fact that there is a branch of French administration specifically charged with dealing with wolves (the Lieutenants de Louveterie were instituted by Charlemagne), it's turned out that so far, no-one has been able to remember how you hunt wolves and I'm not aware of any success. Bears by comparison regularly get themselves shot by mistake, as happened to a female named Canelle a year ago.

As a pine marten, I welcome the return of the bear to Switzerland. Switzerland without bears is like Australia without kangaroos. So let's just hope that this bear stays there for the requisite minimum of twelve years and can convince the locals that it is willing to make the effort to be a good Swiss citizen. It's going to have to learn to speak Romanche first though.

"It's worse than that: he's dead, Jim!"

2005-07-21T09:17:00.000+01:00

The Militant Pine Marten has just found out with great sadness that God has decided to beam up James Doohan. James Doohan will have been better known to just about everyone in the world as Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise. The Militant Pine Marten readily admits to being a bit of a Trekkie, but for different reasons than the prevalent ones expressed in these tributes left on the BBC website. I have never considered that Scotty, Bones, Kirk and Spock were "part of my family when I grew up", and Star Trek had absolutely nothing to do with my decision to study engineering. I'm sure that James Doohan was a lovely person, but really, I have no idea, I didn't know him. As to whether or not he was a great actor, I'll leave that to others to decide. What does that entail anyway? If it's measured by how much pleasure he brought to people through his performances, then surely he is.

But that's beside the point. The reason for which I am saddened by Doohan's disappearance is that he was one of the faces of a cultural phenomenon that had - and indeed still has - at its heart a fundamentally benevolent, internationalist, pluralist, positive, optimistic view of humanity and its future. I think that Star Trek can be best summed up as the United Nations as it ought to be - in space. It portrays a united humanity that has mostly overcome its' great problems of poverty, inequality, racism, religious sectarianism, intolerance, etc and has instead decided to focus its attention on exploration, on trying to indulge humankind's insatiable curiosity to find out what or who is over the next hill (or indeed solar system), how things work and what we're here for in the first place.

Star Trek portrays a culture that invites others to join it, but imposes it on no-one (do you see rose-tinted parallels with the EU here?). The "Prime Directive" , overused as a plot device, is simply the principle of non-intervention, designed to protect other cultures from possibly well-meaning but misguided or uninformed outside meddling. We could really use an effective Prime Directive of our own. And at the same time, it does not shy away from the fact that sometimes, the rules have to be bent a little, and that there are those out there with whom no meaningful dialogue can exist (they're big in the real news right now).

It shows a version of the future in which science, technology, engineering and medicine form a fundamental part of humankind's development, and are not bad things that destroy the environment. This is all based on the discovery of sustainable non-polluting energy in the form of nuclear fusion, something that I think we will see in our lifetimes if the chaps at ITER do their jobs and indeed are allowed to do so by the PTBs. Personally I detest the backward, mediaeval view espoused by some of the more "virulent" environmentalists that science is bad, that we should all go and live in tree houses. Nuclear fusion and warp speed are where we should be boldly going!

And so I'm sad to hear of the passing of James Doohan, but I hope that through his performances he helped some people realise that it isn't all hopeless, that there is a point in trying to make things change for the better. None of knows how the future will turn out to be, but let's hope that when it comes, it will not be too dissimilar to that shown in Star Trek.

Live Long and Prosper.

Don't buy food from supermarkets: they are utter scumbags

2005-07-18T17:39:00.000+01:00

I read yesterday that Asda, the British outpost of the Wal-Mart empire, is pretty unhappy about unfair planning laws that stop it from erecting great big warehouses full of discounted food and drinks and so-called "designer" clothing in every empty space in the UK. As a result, they have sent representatives to see the Deputy Prime Minister, they have been to Number 10 and to the Treasury to ask them if they would be so kind as to remove this restriction to their ability to make a lot more money. The thing is that all the good spots have been taken by branches of Tesco, and Asda/Wal-mart find this terribly unfair. They want a bigger slice of the retail pie, and Tesco has been eating into Asda's pudding of late.

Now I feel terrible for those poor Wal-mart shareholders, and I have no particular love for Tesco. However mostly I feel nothing but a deep loathing for the big supermarket chains. The supermarkets are responsible for the biggest orchestrated, legal rip-off of anyone who has anything to do with food for the past few decades. And since everyone is intimately involved in food, that's all of us. Asda and Tesco make much of their low prices in all their advertising and marketing, but this is just smoke and mirrors. Because for every 99p pack of economy sausages (and no-one in their right mind should contemplate eating such a thing anyway) that a customer buys, they will also buy two frozen pizzas on special offer for a tenner that they hadn't planned to buy, and the in-house magazine (why? Why on earth would anyone want a supermarket's magazine?). Then they'll make a series of other impulse purchases, and return home having spent a lot of money on items that they didn't really need or want, too much fresh food that they will end up throwing away, and instead will eat the miserable frozen pizza. Every Day Low Prices, my mustelid bottom!

Their other great mantra is telling consumers about choice. Rather like our political masters in fact. However this is also a great big lie. When Tesco and Asda receive planning permission to open a hypermarket on the outskirts of a town, they inevitably kill off the local competition. The construction of an out of town supermarket is retail napalm for the local area. And fewer shops mean a more restricted choice for consumers. Supermarkets inevitably mean that consumers are faced with a homogenised, standardised food offering. I hope that the people from Asda are sent packing. However they'll probably present John Prescott with a report all about offering consumers more choice, with a forward by Digby Jones (N.B.: I haven't written about Digby yet but his time will come. Supermarkets are quite simply expensive and rubbish. If you can possibly avoid it (and you can, just use the local market instead), don't buy any food from them.

PS: While one section of the machinery of state is engaged in discussions to help Asda to rip us all off some more, Defra, formerly the Ministry of Rural Cleansing, has just produced a report snappily titled The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development. This is actually quite interesting reading on a related topic. Another reason not to buy food from the damned supermarkets.

Celebrate Bastille Day to spurn the terrorists and the timorous PTBs

2005-07-14T14:33:00.000+01:00

I almost fell out of my tree with disbelief when I learned earlier today that the annual "bal populaire" in honour of France's national day, known as Bastille Day in the English-speaking world, in London had been cancelled this year. Apparently the local Powers That Be decided that the general security situation was too dangerous just now, and so decided to abandon the festivities.

What spineless, timourous muppets.

Think of the words that are usually daubed all over the place, amongst the piles of red, white and blue paraphernalia: "Liberte, egalite, fraternite". Those are pretty close to being the very things that the people who orchestrated the bombings in London last week disapprove of. There could be no much greater show of defiance, no more conspicuous display of scorn than to have a great big, loud party, full of not only French but also British and others celebrating these great ideals. I say ideals because obviously France slips up on "Liberte, egalite and fraternite" with some degree of regularity, but at least there's a collective sense that those are the things that people believe in. But the officials decided that it was just too dangerous to make a demonstration of this. Surely that should be for the people who want to attend to decide?

Don't give in to this officially-sanctioned fear. This evening, go out and celebrate these ideas derived from the Enlightenment. They may be high ideals that we'll never quite attain, but they are pretty much what the West and friends believes in, they are universal values not just for the French but for everyone. So don't let a bunch of terrorists and two-bit officials scare you into subdued mumbling in front of sensationalist news reports.

Tonight, go out and have a drink, a laugh and a dance for Liberte and sod the fear-mongers!
Joyeux 14 juillet a tous et a toutes!

A Pyrrhic victory in the War Against Terrorism isn't worth winning

2005-07-12T11:29:00.000+01:00

Charles Clarke is increasingly displaying squirrel-like hoarding behaviour. He's collecting information like a squirrel collects nuts and acorns. Pine martens often eat squirrels for breakfast, so this has attracted my attention. Our beloved Home Secretary seems to believe that hoarding vast amounts of information about everyoneis the solution to just about everything. His pet ID cards project is supposed to be the solution to benefit fraud, illegal immigration, identity theft, so-called health tourism, terrorism... Oh no, hang on, not terrorism it appears. Following last week's bombings in London, Charles Clarke was asked on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme if he thought that ID cards would have prevented them. "I doubt it would have made a difference" answered Mr Clarke. To give credit where it's due, at least he's admitted that they wouldn't be much use to ensure our security. That particular huge pile of information about the details of every single resident of the United Kingdom wouldn't have helped one jot. So having cleverly worked this out for himself, what conclusions did Mr Clarke draw from this realisation? Maybe we should concentrate time, money, technology, expertise and effort on some real intelligence work on the ground. Or maybe there should be sniffer dogs in Tube stations. I don't know exactly, I'm a pine marten, not a policeman, but some measure that could demonstrably deter or obstruct terrorism.

But no. Charles Clarke thinks that what we need is - wait for it! - another gigantic hoard of information about every single individual. Specifically, Charles Clarke now wants to keep records of every single telephone call, email and text message for five years, to ensure the traceability of terrorists' movements, and to foil plots such as the London and Madrid bombings. Now that's pretty intrusive I think. But that doesn't deter Mr Clarke, because he wants this applied across the entire EU. Charles Clarke wants to snoop on 456 million people.

I appreciate that Clarke needs to be seen to do something in the wake of the attacks on London, but this is ridiculous. The amount of data that he's proposing should be amassed is so vast as to be practically unusable. Never mind the cost and logistics of this proposal, how would the security services ever find the relevant, useful information? Al-Qaeda operatives are unlikely to send emails such as this one:

"From: SectionChief@al-qaeda.org
To: Ahmed@islamofascists.com

Hey Ahmed, how's it going?
Are we still on for the car bombing of the Royal Palace in Copenhagen on Tuesday at 3.15pm?

Take it easy,
A."

Information on its own is of no use whatsoever. Where would you start looking? What would you do? Run filters on emails for the words "Al-Qaeda" and "terrorist jamboree"? It's extremely unlikely that you'll foil any terrorist plots in this way. But it is extremely likely that you could charge a lot of innocent people for "acts preparatory to terrorism" and "glorifying or condoning" acts of terrorism.

The problem is that a lot of draconian legislation intended to counter terrorism ends up being used against ordinary criminals, or even ordinary citizens. For example, last week the Law Lords decided that in the case of a prisoner named Harry Roberts, the Parole Board could keep evidence that was used to deny him parole secret, under the appalling "Special Advocates" system. Since the defendant cannot see the evidence, he also can't defend himself. This dubious system was introduced by the The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA).

Charles Clarke seems to believe that he can protect us all from terrorism amongst other ills by giving the State the means to keep track of everyone's movements, particulars and communications. However we have come a long way since the time when this sort of constant surveillance was the norm in the Eastern Block (Jaruzelski era Polish joke: "Poland is the only country in the world where the TV watches you"), and there is now so much data to collect and sift through that it's doubtful whether it is even technically possible to do so at all, let alone effectively. One need only look at the difficulties that current police states have in trying to do this sort of thing. "Seditious" websites are popping up faster that the Chinese government can shut them down. Iran has effectively given up trying to control electronic media and Persian is now the fourth language on the Internet. Cuba only manages to control it because no-one can afford computers.

I don't wish to be blown up on my way to work, but I do not want the State to keep me under surveillance "for my own good" either. In the past year, people have started interrupting email conversations, stating reasons such as "I don't want to end up on some government list". That is not a concern that citizens of free countries are supposed to have. What is the War on Terrorism about after all? Isn't it about preserving our freedom, our liberties, our way of life? If we sacrifice those in the interests of beating the enemy, then it really is a Pyrrhic victory.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin - Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

The next French president will be a comic character

2005-07-06T11:24:00.000+01:00

Since Jacques Chirac has clearly thrown in the towel and decided to cruise out the remaining two years of his mandate as President of France by slowly turning into the Duke of Edinburgh, a pine marten's thoughts must turn to pondering what will happen afterwards. One thing is almost certain: the next French president is not going to be in the De Gaulle mould, that is to say grand old statesmen who consider that they embody what De Gaulle "une certaine idee de la France" , or as Louis XIV (the prototype for De Gaulle) more honestly said, that they are the State. France is going to have a new model of president, possibly even one who isn't yet of pensionable age.

A report in Le Monde today reveals that none other than good old Jose Bove is giving serious consideration to standing as a candidate. For those of you who aren't sure who Bove is, you will probably have heard of him as the farmer who dismantled a branch of McDonald's in 1995 as a protest against poor food and all that it entails. In France, absolutely anyone can stand in the first round of the presidential elections, and so it's quite usual to have a selection of two or three independent candidates with not a hope of making it through to the second round. But Bove's possible candidacy could cause an extraordinary political contest in 2007 because of the following fact: he would actually have a very good chance of winning.

If the old alterglobalisation warrior made it to the second round - and all that is needed for that to happen is that he should be one of the candidates with the two largest shares of the vote in the first round - he would more than likely face the current darling of the French right, the current Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. This would be an incredible result, it would be the most polarised political confrontation that anyone can remember. This eventuality is best illustrated by the following picture, highlighting the uncanny resemblance of Sarkozy and Bove to two universally known French comic characters, both created by the late Rene Goscinny: Asterix The Gaul and Grand Vizier Iznogoud.

In case you're not up to speed with these characters' attributes and what they mean to the French electorate, here's a quick summary. Asterix is a plucky little chap. He's mischievous, he's fiercely independent, loyal, clever and fundamentally anti-authoritarian. In fact, the whole point of Asterix and his village is that they resist the Roman occupation. Iznogoud is the Grand Vizier in Baghdad The Magnificent. He is a self-serving, scheming, cruel man who exploits people and his power to further his own agenda, which is to become Caliph instead of the caliph. He is the embodiment of corrupt state authority. Are you beginning to see how this political scenario could be one hell of an event?

I'm going to assume that by now you're thinking "interesting an idea as this is, it's just some strange mustelid fantasy, it's not in any way real". However it is a fascinating prospect precisely because it's not at all unlikely. It is almost certain that Sarkozy will stand in the 2007 election, and if he does, he will almost certainly make it through to the second round. He is the French right's wonder child, and even if many of them don't like him (De Villepin and Caliph Haroun El-Chirac positively hate him), they will back him because they think he can win. This is not dissimilar to the Labour Party's relationship with Tony Blair in the UK. He is widely seen as a great advocate of law and order, and at a time when there is such a deep climate of fear in France, this is very powerful. He is seen as a doer, for better or for worse, not simply one of the usual givers of vacuous promises. His instincts are pretty authoritarian, rather like David Blunkett.

Jose Bove is a bit of a wildcard because he isn't really a politician. Nevertheless he could be a serious contender. Cast your minds back to the results of the 2002 election. The second round was a contest between the right (Chirac) and the far-right (Le Pen). Chirac had won 19.88% of the vote in the first round, Le Pen 16.86%. You'll notice that candidates don't need a very large share of the vote to go through to the second round. The main candidate of the Left was Lionel Jospin, the Socialist candidate, who polled only 16.18%. The combined centre-left won 27.12% of the vote, the hard left 10.44%. Importantly, the real winning candidate was "none of the above" as there was a record 28.40% abstention rate. The left-wing vote was split for the usual reasons. The left-wing parties, unable to agree on the colour of dung, fielded no less than seven candidates in as many parties that often only differ on points of detail. If Bove were to have the backing of a significant section of the Left, he could become the candidate of choice for a large section of disillusioned French left-leaning electorate.

He has in fact stated that he will stand only if he has the backing of the hard left and the Greens, and if his candidacy would not cause a repeat of the 2002 scenario by splitting the left-wing vote into insignificance. In other words, if he plays, he'll be playing to win. I would love to see this happen, amongst other reasons because it would make George Bush's head explode, and that alone has to be a good enough reason to pray that this comes to pass.

Would it be a good thing for France to have a government formed by Bove? Probably not. He's good with agriculture, but his economic policies beyond that would most likely be pretty awful. On the other hand, I wouldn't like Sarkozy to have that sort of power either, mainly because of his very authoritarian views. So what's it to be? Asterix or Iznogoud? Well, as Gracchus tells the Roman senate in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus:

"I'll take a little Republican corruption along with a little Republican freedom, rather than no freedom at all under Crassus!"

And Crassus very much wanted to be Caliph instead of the Caliph.

The innocent may well have nothing to fear. Yet.

2005-06-28T17:34:00.000+01:00

Whilst a large chunk of the British nation basks in the warm glow of nostalgia and low-key self-congratulation, watching Mrs Windsor wave at the Fleet to commemorate Admiral Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805, its government is debating whether or not to build the foundations of a police state. And there appears to be precious little concern about this amongst much of the electorate. The only serious mass opposition to the scheme seems to be based on the realisation that it will cost around £300 per person to implement. However the financial cost is really irrelevant. It wouldn't the first time that a government blew a stupendous amount of money on an ill-conceived, harebrained scheme.

The problem with this plan is not how much it will cost financially, it is what it will cost us in terms of liberty, in terms of the nature of our relationship with the State. If implemented as currently proposed, the proposed ID cards will record the following information on each citizen: his full name, other names by which he is or has been known, his date of birth, his place of birth, gender, address, previous addresses, other addresses, a photograph of his head and shoulders, signature, fingerprints, other biometric information about him, residential status, nationality, entitlement to remain in the United Kingdom where that entitlement derives from a grant of leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom, the terms and conditions of that leave, and I can't be bothered with this any more. Just have a look here if you want to see the truly staggering amount of information that the government wants to keep on people: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4630045.stm.

Think about this for a second: do even you yourself even know that much about yourself? The odds are you don't. This is an absolutely incredible level of what amounts to surveillance on the part of the State.

Now there are many out there who will say something along the lines of "So what? The innocent have nothing to fear" or equivalent. Well maybe they don't. Not now. Because they haven't done anything illegal. Not anything that is currently illegal in any case. And maybe this government won't ever abuse this information, maybe it won't use it to keep tabs on everyone. Maybe the next one won't either. But ask yourself this: do you really believe that with that amount of information at its disposal, no governments or part of the machine of government will ever give in to the temptation to use it in a way it isn't supposed to? Perhaps even with the best intentions, just this once. But then you can become used to that sort of thing very easily. And I find it very difficult to imagine that any government, once they have created or inherited such a system, would ever dismantle it. You never know when it may come in useful after all.

Finally, once you have this system, once it's in place and you've become used to it, and everyone more or less complies, and you have nothing to fear because you're not a criminal, some less scrupulous government in twenty years' time may well decide to make you a criminal by making something that you consider perfectly normal illegal. At which point you will have something to fear.

So right now, please all go and plead with your MPs to oppose against this scheme at every possible opportunity. Thank you.

The 21st Century hasn't quite started yet, but it should be a good one

2005-06-20T14:44:00.000+01:00

It is a strange and yet apparently true fact that of late, centuries have tended to last about fifteen years longer than they should, delaying the start of what should be the current one by the same number of years. Have you not noticed that the XVIIth Century only ended in 1715 with the death of Louis XIV of France? Only then did anyone bother to really get stuck into to the Siècle des Lumières. Then that century didn't finish until Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, which was really the tail end of the French Revolution, itself the culmination of the Enlightenment. The Congress of Vienna established the shape of Europe for the XIXth Century, and that came to an end at some point between 1914 and 1918, ending the tensions that had built up over the previous century to be released to their cataclysmic conclusion. And with that done, the XXth Century started. And now I suspect that we haven't quite finished the XXth Century, and won't for another ten years.

The fact is that we haven't finished tying up all the loose ends from the last century. A lot of our immediate problems, conflicts and importantly political leaders are just part of old stories that have yet to reach their conclusions. Of particular importance are all the problems left after the end of the Cold War. The ongoing war in Iraq is a case in point: it's the consequence the West propping up a corrupt, brutal regime to act as a bulwark against another pretty unpleasant regime in Iran, which itself arose because the previous incumbents under the Shah had been a corrupt regime propped up by the West. That and the fact that Afghanistan was just a Cold War battlefield in which the Soviets fought Mujahadeen who were armed and trained by the West to act as a bulwark against the Soviets. Can you see the pattern here?

Closer to home (and obviously that's a subjective statement, but as far as I'm concerned, that's somewhere in the middle of the Channel, on average) we're still dealing with the aftermath of the Cold War, and many of the people in positions of influence are themselves Cold War veterans, or in other words, yesterday's men. Take Jacques Chirac for example. He's been at the centre of French and European politics since the 1960s, and now he's at the top, waiting to start collecting his pension in a couple of years, having really made a bit of a mess of just about everything of late, particularly with regards to the French People's rejection of the European Constitution. Of course his task wasn't made any easier by the fact that the guy in charge of drafting the Constitution was Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a man who was President between 1974 and 1981 and as such, isn't quite up to speed with the spirit of the times. Tellingly, the Constitution was most opposed by the young, and most popular with the older generation. So maybe one of the big problems with this Constitution is that it seeks primarily to address the concerns of yesterday, or at least is perceived that way.

Tony Blair has tried to make political capital from this by striding through the smouldering remains of the ratification process like the Pied Piper, telling everyone that he is the man of the hour and knows how Europe can get rid of the rats, but I find this unlikely, if only because no-one else in Europe much likes his vision. In fact, Blair has been behaving much like Chirac and Giscard d'Estaing, albeit in a more slick, polished way: he really doesn't like to have to take anyone's opinion into consideration. Blair is possibly the man of the hour, but he's not the man of the future.

Because here's the really good news: the men (and I use the masculine term as a stylistic choice, in this context it obviously includes women, at least I hope it does) of the future haven't actually turned up yet, because the future hasn't quite started yet. Even yesterday's men have grasped that there are new things out there that are bigger than traditional national politics and that really matter to people. Chirac's been going around the UN promoting the Tobin Tax on international capital flows to fund development in the Third World. Blair's been prancing across the world stage with his chum Bono trying to reduce Third World debt. In fact he's even succeeded a little, so let's give credit where it's due. It's a shame that these two choose to overshadow these actions with frankly shameful playground arguments and macho posturing in Brussels. Not everyone has quite picked up on the change in the air of course: Dubya and his gang of evil thugs don't seem to have worked any of this out yet.

The men of the future are going to be people who really understand this stuff. They're also going to be people with their fingers on the pulse, people who are familiar with informal networks that transcend traditional political parties, class divisions and especially national borders. People who hopefully have a broader understanding of what Douglas Adams' character Dirk Gently called "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things". And of course they will almost certainly mostly be a bunch of self-serving, manipulative and devious so-and-sos, but their motives don't really matter as long as they make things move in the right direction, and hopefully there will be a couple who are capable dreamers.

So next time you catch yourself thinking that everything's going pear-shaped, that the older generation have failed us, that the younger generation care only about mobile phones, clothes and haircare products, and that all that old idealism has just died, just remember that actually, it's just gestating and hasn't given birth yet. The 21st Century and the future will probably start in about 2015, and if we start working on it now, it should be a good one.

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the
dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity:
but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act
their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."

T. E. Lawrence from "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

"A no vote would only be a screw up for your own personal objectives for Europe, which are totally confused and not shared by most sensible people"

2005-05-27T10:05:00.000+01:00

The above quote from a friend of mine comes from a discussion on the European Union in the run-up to the French referendum on the proposed EU Constitution that will take place on Sunday. It is in my opinion a harsh accusation, but also an opportunity to explore what I believe that the point of the European Union is, or at least should be, and why it is that the French should vote yes on Sunday, or at least why they shouldn't vote no.

The main problem with voting no in my view is the following: this is currently the only deal on the table. Now in itself, this is not a good enough reason to adopt a constitution. This is the way in which Napoleon came to power after all: he turned up in 1799 with the only working draft constitution for France available, threatened people a bit and won. However the EU faces a problem: institutions designed for 15 member states are not going to work with twenty-five, and probably about thirty within a decade. The whole machine is just too much of a disparate morass to avoid grinding to a virtual halt under the sheer mass of tasks that it's trying to manage. So from a purely practical point of view, the EU needs to be reformed in order to keep going. Admittedly, it would have been a good idea to deal with this problem before the accession of ten new member states, but they didn't, so there we are.

Of course, a simple bureaucratic reform, a streamlining of the EU civil service and processes, wouldn't require a constitutional treaty, however the problem is not simply bureaucratic, it's political, and it's the politics that are the real issue here.

Many opponents of the EU rightly complain about the organisations democratic deficit and lack of accountability. An important aspect of the constitution is that it does away with a lot of the "behind closed doors" stuff. It gives the European Parliament a whole lot more power, and the European Parliament is elected directly by the citizens of the EU, theoretically not along national party lines. This will remove much of the influence of the Commission, though not of the Council of Ministers, so it's returning power to national governments too. In other words, it makes the EU institutions more answerable to the electorate, more democratic.

Finally, here's the big question: what do those who oppose this constitution want to do instead? It can't continue as it is, and admittedly there are those who would be glad to see the whole thing break down. Fair enough. But I don't think that most Europeans hate the EU that much, it's an extreme point of view, especially given that the EU has brought so many tangible benefits to so many people. It's by no means certain that if this constitution is binned, there will be an opportunity to renegotiate. Even of there is, it will take something like a decade, and faced with the growing institutional paralysis of the EU, member states will have had to work ways around it. Again, some favour a looser, more flexible system in which like-minded member states create networks of alliances, treaties and agreements between them. But you don't need a European Union to do that. That's just run-of-the-mill politicking.

It is not an outcome that does justice to what is in effect the boldest, most successful and groundbreaking political experiment ever carried out. The EU, for its myriad faults, is a Commonwealth of states and people who have all chosen to be a part of it. This has never been done before. Just by its very existence, the EU exerts a good influence on the world. Look at what has happened in Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia. These are all countries that are striving to become more democratic, more humanitarian, more prosperous, and all because of the goal of becoming a part of the EU. Think of the formerly totalitarian regimes that the EU has been able to absorb such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, and all the former Soviet Block nations. Surely the continuation of this process is reason enough to make sure that the EU doesn't just stagnate?

And this brings me to why the French should vote yes tomorrow: if they don't, they're breaking a promise to almost half a billion people, but especially to the people of the new member states and those of aspiring members. After all that they've been through, after being excluded from Europe for sixty years and finally clawing their way back, are the French really going to let them down by voting no? Are they going to deny everyone else a chance to make the EU work after driving the process for over fifty years? Do they want to be the dog in the manger?

I don't think so. I think that they will vote yes, and let the European fledgling leave the nest and spread its wings on its own.

2005-05-18T10:05:00.000+01:00

Queen's Speech: Darth Blunkett's back and so is the notion of sedition

In the aftermath of the latest election, I had hoped that with his greatly reduced - though still healthy - majority and newfound need to actually consult with other people such as MPs, Tony Blair might tone down his messianic zeal and unshakeable belief that whatever he thinks is right, and that this alone justifies any decision that he may care to take. No such luck. Just to make that point clear to anyone who may have any doubt, he immediately brought David 'Darth' Blunkett out of his retreat to act as the Cabinet Enforcer. Then yesterday, Her Majesty Mrs Windsor came to tell us what the deal is going to be.

I'm not going to go through the entire contents of the Queen's Speech, I'm just going to concentrate on one particular bill in it that gives me the mustelid willies. I refer to the Counter Terrorism Bill (draft) , the latest complement to the Terrorism Act 2000, a pretty Draconian piece of legislation that was subsequently superdraconised by the Prevention of Terrorism Act at the end of the last Parliament.

The Counter Terrorism Bill (draft) is thought to introduce the twin criminal offences of "acts preparatory to terrorism" and of "glorifying or condoning" acts of terrorism. Now I don't want anyone to start thinking that pine martens are particularly in favour of blowing up innocent people as a means to bring about an ideological end, however these notions are vague enough to be causes for high levels of concern. But I am worried that these offences, and particularly the latter, could be an open door to reintroducing the notion of sedition into English Law.

An often heard quote from an anonymous source is that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" (just think of everything that's been said about Nelson Mandela over the years), so presumably, in Law, there is a clear definition of what is meant by the word "terrorism". A good place to start you'd assume, given the international scale of the problem, is the UN. So what does the UN, which is after all the main source and guarantor of international law, have to say on the matter?

From the UN Office on Drugs and Crime website (http://www.unodc.org/unodc/index.html):

"The question of a definition of terrorism has haunted the debate among states for decades. A first attempt to arrive at an internationally acceptable definition was made under the League of Nations, but the convention drafted in 1937 never came into existence. The UN Member
States still have no agreed-upon definition. Terminology consensus would, however, be necessary for a single comprehensive convention on terrorism, which some countries favour in place of the present 12 piecemeal conventions and protocols."

Or in other words, there's still a fair amount of poetic licence allowed in individual states' legal definition of who is or isn't a terrorist. Never mind, I'm sure that good old English Law can help us for domestic purposes. Let's see what the Terrorism Act has to say (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00011--b.htm):

"1. - (1) In this Act "terrorism" means the use or threat of action where-

(a) the action falls within subsection (2),

(b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and

(c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.

(2) Action falls within this subsection if it-

(a) involves serious violence against a person,

(b) involves serious damage to property,

(c) endangers a person's life, other than that of the person committing the action,

(d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or

(e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

(3) The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.

(4) In this section-

(a) "action" includes action outside the United Kingdom,

(b) a reference to any person or to property is a reference to any person, or to property, wherever situated,

(c) a reference to the public includes a reference to the public of a country other than the United Kingdom, and

(d) "the government" means the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.

(5) In this Act a reference to action taken for the purposes of terrorism includes a reference to action taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation."

Now I realise that this is a load of Legalese, however what it boils down to, in conjunction with the proposed Draft Bill, is that the UK Government can prosecute anyone in the UK for acts against any organisation that it likes anywhere in the world. Saying that when all's said and done, Palestinian suicide bombers may have a point worth listening to for instance would probably qualify as "condoning terrorism", and therefore be a criminal offence.

To summarise, this reintroduces the legal notion of a crime of opinion. It opens the door to reintroducing sedition, a Common Law offence that was declared obsolescent by Lord Denning on the grounds that it was too broadly defined and inhibited too much the free and full discussion of public affairs, as a criminal offence. It makes openly holding certain opinions illegal. This is a stunningly illiberal legislative proposal.

Maybe I'm wrong. After all, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a pine marten, albeit possibly a seditious one. But just because I'm paranoid, it doesn't mean that I'm wrong.

The election's over: it's time to get political

2005-05-06T09:56:00.000+01:00

"Would you like to know the results?" asked my girlfriend as I awoke to another five years of New Labour government. "Yes please" I blearily replied, having given up watching the results come in at about 3am to catch four meagre hours of agitated sleep. "Labour have won again but with a smaller majority, with the Conservatives gaining most of the seats that they lost. The Lib Dems have lost ten seats". "WHAT? How can they lost ten seats? Every bloody result had a swing to the Lib Dems! Oh sh*t." And with that, I decided that I couldn't face getting up. I stared out of the window, turning over miserable thoughts in my mind about once again supporting the losing side. It's not that I'm not used to that by now, but you know, I'd allowed myself to believe for a few weeks that this time around, Blair and his gang would take a severe pasting to the benefit of the Lib Dems. I was also rather keen on the idea of Robert Kilroy-Silk having to sit next to George Galloway for the next five years. Anyway, the Lady bought me a cup of coffee to ease the pain, and I decided to face the world and have a detailed look at the election's results.

At which point it turned out that She had completely misunderstood the result summary dispensed by the half-asleep political junkies who were passed out in the living room and that the Lib Dems had in fact gained some seats, that Tony had indeed taken a serious kicking, that half of my little daydream about Kilroy and Galloway had come true and that all in all, it wasn't too shoddy a result. At least there'll be no more of Tony steamrolling stuff like the Flat Earth and Terracentric Cosmology Act through the Commons, which is a pretty good start. He may even have to consult with other people every so often.

However, this does not detract from the fact that it is perfectly feasible that the Lib Dems could have lost a load of seats despite gaining a load of votes because the UK's electoral system is almost as unfair as the US' one. Here's what I mean.

Currently, 619 seats from a total of 646 have been declared, or 95.8% of them so I consider that the following statistics are significant enough for our purposes. Of those, Labour have 57.0%, the Tories 31.5% and the Liberal Democrats 9.5%. But their shares of the vote are respectively 36.3%, 33.2% and 22.6%. The Tories and Labour should be neck-and-neck as regards the number of seats in the House of Commons. The Liberal Democrats should really have more than twice the number of seats that they have. Regardless of the actual political parties, this means that over half the people who support the Lib Dems aren't represented in Parliament, and conversely, Labour supporters have ridiculously more clout than their share of the vote entitles them to.

I'm pretty damned unhappy about this, and you should be too. In fact, I'm so unhappy that I never want to see this sort of travesty of democracy again. We theoretically have a representative form of government, and this pine marten thinks that we should be represented properly. In other words, now that everyone's in the swing of political things, instead of forgetting about politics for the next five years as usual, I propose that we should all start badgering our political masters about electoral reform until their ears bleed. I want to see people out on the streets and newspaper editors drowning in a deluge of angry letters. I reckon that a really good way to combat political apathy would be to have an electoral system in which everyone's vote counts, not just those of floating voters in marginal constituences. Essentially, what I'm driving at here is that we need proportional representation.

So what can you personally do? Well you can start by clicking here http://www.makemyvotecount.org.uk/home.html and signing up. Then you can get yourself properly involved and stuck in to some political militancy. Introducing proportional representation is the necessary condition to ensuring that your voice is heard, that any change can happen, that you decide how the country is governed. Whether you care mostly about Iraq, the environment, third world debt, transport, the EU, you should support proportional representation because that's how you can guarantee that the political class will listen to you.

Admittedly many in the political class have a vested interest in avoiding electoral reform like the plague so it's not likely to be an easy change to bring about, but with enough popular support (and remember that your MP depends on that for his job) it can happen.

And particularly for those of you whose immediate reaction is to dismiss the idea as a no-hoper, I leave you with a quote by from Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand:

Que dites-vous ?... C'est inutile ?... Je le sais !
Mais on ne se bat pas dans l'espoir du succès !
Non ! non, c'est bien plus beau lorsque c'est inutile !

(What say you? It is useless? I know!
But one doesn't fight in the hope of success!
No! No, it is far more beautiful when it's hopeless!)