I’ve argued before, in a post on paedos and prisoners, that in the human rights framework, a judgement that frustrates the populist sentiment is a feature, not a bug. The case of Abu Qatada is cited as an example of a problem, but I see it as the system working well. The man (odious as he may be) hasn’t had a proper trial, and the European Court pointed this out. What’s wrong with that?

The response from the reactionaries is “he doesn’t deserve a fair trial”. This implies a two-tier system of liberty and justice, an Us-and-Them approach which eventually dehumanises certain groups. We need an effective justice and security system to provide some protection against violence and extremism. But it has to apply a consistent set of rules and procedures if it ismto woeffort perky. And we also need an external court of human rights, to protect us from the careless elements in our own society, who are happy to dispense with due process whenever it is not to their taste. it’s a shame that our Prime Minister is pandering to these “careless elements” and I hope the other party leaders, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, do not follow suit.

White people love their divide and rule. We should not play their game. #tacticasoldascolonialism

This has prompted a predictable backlash, with Tory and Lib Dem MPs demanding she resign from Labour’s front bench, and Ed Miliband ensuring she make a swift apology.

I find myself having mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it can be read as straight prejudice. Swap ‘white’ for ‘black’ or ‘Muslim’ and the tweet would certainly appear classically racist.

However, I think there is an element of context that is missing here. When I read that later Abbott posted a clarification, claiming she was referring to colonialism, I was not surprised (her original tweet had a hashtag about colonialism, a fact not reported in the mainstream media). When she said ‘white people’ in the original tweet, I read it in precisely those terms. In the context of race relations and Black History I can see how ‘white people’ could (and should) be read as meaning The Established Elite. As such, when I read the tweet, I did not consider it directed at or referring to an avowed white person such as myself. Thinking about it now, Abbott could actually have written ‘men’ instead of ‘white people’ and I would have been similarly ambivalent, despite my also being a confirmed man, too.

In my head, I know that Abbott is being racist, because sweeping over-generalisations are the definition of racism. But in my heart, I am simply not offended. This might be purely because I am a particularly self-centred and over-confident individual, but I don’t think so. Instead, I think the answer lies somewhere in the fact that white people (or men, or tall people, or heterosexuals, or English people, or middle-class people, or Southerners, or any of the other politically favourable groups to which I am lucky enough to belong) are simply not used to being discriminated against in this manner.

The confidence that comes from being politically ‘privileged’ in this way, the confidence that comes from having pretty much every part of your identity affirmed and protected by the culture and the system, affords a certain immunity, on two fronts. First, and immunity to actually being offended. A mental block prevents the tall white middle-class heterosexual English man from considering the possibility that someone might be disparaging about him. “Surely there must be some mistake?” not “There they go again.”

Second – and this is the crux of the matter – there is a confidence that such sweeping generalisations will not actually harm me in any way. Being in part of the, shall we say, “preferred group” (which is not always a demographic majority), I know that the culture and the political system will ensure such ad hominems do not adversely affect my life, short term or long term.

This is therefore a difference between black-on-white racism and the more traditional white-on-black racism, or modern equivalents like, say, tabloid-on-Muslim racism. In the former case, the prejudicial statements simply aren’t as harmful. In the latter cases, they do much more damage because the society and the culture is not orientated to defend the subject of the abuse. Likewise with sexism, where the culture reinforces the narrative of male superiority. In this context, the ‘chav’ prejudice, so wonderfully described by Owen Jones, is extremely interesting. The targets of the racism are white, but it does have long term negative effects on the targets. Likewise with disparaging remarks about the Irish in decades past.

But I cannot ascribe a comparable vulnerability to the targets of Abbott’s ire, who are quite obviously elite. This is why I cannot bring myself, as a white person, to be offended. I cannot look into the souls of other men, but I suspect that many of the critics of Diane Abbott are actually less offended than they appear. The outrage feels distinctly faux to me, an opportunity for political point-scoring rather than a genuine defence of a vulnerable group. Do we really think that people will read Abbott’s tweet, and start treating white people badly? I would like to see a rebuttal to this from a disadvantaged white person who feels Abbott is harming them. So far, most of the outrage seems to be from distinctly elite MPs…

Glenn Greenwald, in an article eviscerating Hitchens’ unwavering support for the Iraq War, makes a distinction between the lives of political figures, who are famous precisely because of the policies they enacted while in power, and ordinary individuals.  The death of such a person (Greenwald cites Ronald Reagan) is precisely the right time to evaluate a person’s achievements and actions, both good and bad.

This week on Liberal Conspiracy, Sunny linked to a petition demanding that Margaret Thatcher’s funeral be privatised.  This is an odd request, as I don’t believe Prime Ministers are routinely offered State funerals.  Yes, Winston Churchill had one, and the Duke of Wellington had one, but these were leaders during a time of existential war. Margaret Thatcher, transformational though she was, does not qualify on by this metric.  Any suggestion that a State Funeral will be given to Mrs Thatcher is wishful thinking on the part of Tory fanboys – Not even the Queen Mother had a State funeral!

Rumours regularly circulate that Mrs Thatcher has died, and left-wingers speculate about how they will celebrate.  As Glenn Greewald reminds us, this would be to miss the point.  When Margaret Thatcher dies, the policies she enacted will still have happened, and the consequences will still be present.  Her death would be nothing like as symbolic as the demise of a leader in power (Kim Jong-Il and Colonel Gaddafi both died this year) or someone who is politicially active, like Jerry Falwell, where the negative effects of their politics and policies do actually dissipate as they pass away.

‘The Death of Mrs Thatcher’ discussion is a hardy perennial, and every time it is discussed it makes Left Wingers and Liberals look bad, and allows Tories to take on a sanctimonious air.  I wish we would learn not to take the bait.

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Newt Gingrich is from the planet Trantor, a fictional world created by Isaac Asimov in his classic Foundation series about galactic empire. Newt’s master plan for America does not come from a Republican Party playbook. It comes from the science fiction that he read in high school. He is playing out, on a national and global scale, dreams he had as a teenager with his nose buried in pulp fiction.

I haven’t read the Foundation series, but I gather it involves grand master plans for the whole galaxy, put into practice by a dedicated bunch of benevolent intellectuals. I know this, because series has been cited as influential on another ideologue – Osama Bin Laden. The phrase ‘Al Qaida’ literally means The Base, or Foundation…

On the surface, the most improbable explanation of the name is that Bin Laden was somehow inspired by a Russian-born writer who lived most of his life in the US and was once the world’s most prolific sci-fi novelist (born in 1920 in Smolensk, Asimov died in New York in 1992). But the deeper you dig, the more plausible it seems that al-Qaida’s founders may have borrowed some rhetoric from Foundation and its successors (it became a series) and possibly from other science fiction material.

Now, I am not for one moment suggesting that there is an intellectual link between Osama Bin Laden and Newt Gingrich. To make that connection would be to unfairly libel Issac Asimov. However, the fanatical American Right are usually happy to make tenuous links for political smears (Sarah Palin’s quip that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” the most high profile example). So part of me would love to see Gingrich hoisted by that petard!

First, Chris McGrath, author of “The Attempted Murder of God: Hidden Science You Really Need to Know” took blogger Vaughan Jones to the High Court over a review that Jones posted on the Amazon website, of all places.  The judgement on whether this case can proceed is expected today.

Historian Niall Ferguson was similarly upset by a negative review.  His book Civilisation was eviscerated by Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books (a much more credible and prominent platform than Amazon’s product review pages).  Ferguson felt he had been defamed as a racist.  However, in contrast to Chris McGrath, Ferguson chose a different forum to express his grievance and demand satisfaction – the letters page.

This approach – fighting words with more words – is precisely the kind of counter-speech I advocated in my ‘Way of The Blogs‘ piece for the Guardian a couple of years ago.  It offers a form of redress to the aggrieved person, while avoiding censorship, and it is also much cheaper.  I think it is a much classier way of dealing with critics, than hauling them down to the Royal Courts of Justice.

Not before time. I’ve argued previously, on several occasions, that the existing law enshrined sexism at the heart of our constitution. In my opinion, this has been settled consensus since women were given the right to vote in the 1920s.

Sadly, in many other countries and cultures, the “we wish you were not a girl” sentiment still persists. The Japanese system does not allow women to ascend to the throne at all and elective abortions of female foetuses have skewed the gender balance in India.

Anti-fascist poster

My inaugral post on Labour List (cross-posted here) elicited a few responses which highlight some subtlties in the ongoing discussion around the limits of free speech – specifically, the point at which it is appropriate for the state to ban political demonstrations.

First, this from Ben Singleton:

I have no problem at all stopping the EDL marching. Ever heard of Cable Street? This is nothing new. When it comes to fascists the response has to be No Pasaran!

I do however agree that the argument about costs is a bad argument and leads us into dodgy territory. The EDL march should be stopped because they are a bunch of violent racists, not because policing is costly.

While this appears to be quite bolshy and uncompromising, it does draw an interesting distinction – between what it is appropriate for the police to do, and what it is appropriate for other citizens to do.  There is something about the fact that Cable Street was not an act of state censorship, but of citizens standing up to repell the fascists, that makes it feel somehow morally better, and I think this is the reason why it has become part of modern folklore.  However, this is purely an emotional feeling, and its a bad philosphical argument.  If we adopt Robert Peel’s idea that the police are in fact just a particular and peculiar type of citizen, then there seems to be very little distinction between the police stopping a march, and An Angry Mobb doing the same.  The question of “At what point do you step in to stop the march?” still remains, something I’ll return to in a moment.

The mention of Cable Street reminds us of Skokie, Illinois, site of a controversial march by American Nazis in 1977. A correspondent of mine e-mails to say:

[The EDL march] resembles the classic Skokie march in America. The issue there was whether or not the fascist marchers should be allowed to wear the swastika: did this constitute ‘fighting words’, which even the first amendment does not protect?

The politicians opposed to the march aren’t saying that the EDL should be banned, or prevented from meeting; they’re against a manifestation of its members beliefs which could constitute ‘fighting words’. It’s a really interesting area of first amendment law. Fighting words are different from incitement, because they are calculated to inspire a reaction, not an action.

I think this reveals my position in the Labour List article as being quite close to absolutist about Free Speech.  Could such a position work in the real world?  Well, with concepts such as Satyagraha and Christian non-violence (Luke 6:28, for example) in the mix, I do think it is possible to resist the urge to react to ‘fighting words’.

In suggesting this as a way out, there will be those who who accuse me of gross naiveity, but I think that just shows a lack of imagination and political ambition.  It expects very little of human beings.  For example, ‘A Cleo’ says:

Tower Hamlets is a complex and peaceful community with a lot of pride. If it is provoked by a bunch of thugs, it wont take it lying down. How can it?

This implies that the people of Tower Hamlets are no more than circus animals, incapable of not reacting when insulted.  But the easy or obvious response, the one that surrenders to base emotions, is never the only course of action.  Moreover, when a group reacts violently to ‘fighting words’, it always means they lose some of their moral high ground and offer a propaganda victory to the provocateurs.  By contrast, there is nothing more politically powerful than dignified non-violence.

George Orwell said:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist

I don’t think that refusing to react to ‘fighting words’ is the same as pacifism.  There is nothing in what I suggest to say that the EDL (or any other far-right group around now, or in history) should be just left to get on with it.  A counter-demonstration, a physical presence, is essential – it signals to the communities they seek to intimidate that their views are not shared by ordinary people.  And it breaks the ‘epistemic closure‘ suffered by the far-right themselves, offering an alternative viewpoint they cannot turn their eyes from.

Nor is there anything wrong with offering your fists, if and when your community is physically attacked.  But – and it is a big ‘But’ – you only retain the moral high ground and win public opinion if you do this after the other side have taken the step from ‘fighting words’, to actually ‘fighting’!

So what we are left with is a form of Brinkmanship, Chicken, Who Blinks First, Eschaton.  It is tense and it costs money to put the police in between the two sides, and we all wish we didn’t have to bother. But to my mind, it is essential to the political project of repelling the far-right, that they be given precisely the right amount of rope to expose themselves as the thugs they are.  Pre-empting this, however good and just it feels, will only be counter-productive.

English Defence League / Unite Against Fascism protest, by Matthew Wilkinson on Flickr

Here’s a post first published earlier today on Labour List (a new venue for me).  I hope there will be comments to which I can respond in a follow-up post.

The riots seem to have brought out the worst in our politicians.  You would think our political class would be well aware of the perils of knee-jerk responses and short term expediency, but apparently not.  First, a few Conservative MPs (the Prime Minister among them) have called for social networks to be interfered with in times of crisis – an astonishingly cynical and hypocritical idea, given our condemnation of the Iranian and Egyptian regimes when they did the same thing.

Not to be outdone, a group of Labour politicians have now put opportunism and short-term thinking above the principles of good democracy.  The leaders of thirteen London Boroughs, together with John Biggs AM and MPs Rushanara Ali and Jim Fitzpatrick, called for a proposed EDL march in Tower Hamlets to be banned on account of the cost of policing, which they say “would simply be too great”.

The potential cost of policing the march wass half a million pounds, which is be no small sum to remove from London’s clean-up effort.  But the costs of banning the EDL march will be much higher in the long term.  It will fuel resentment among those wishing to march, and award them the status of ‘free speech martyrs’ that they crave, but do not deserve. Their warped view of immigration and their fantastical idea of what constitutes ‘true’ British culture will remain unchallenged once again.  This will only lead to more tension and conflict that the police will have to spend time and resources to contain.

Citing costs as a reason to deny political or artistic expression is a classic argument used by despots abroad to suppress internal opposition.  Of course, there is no comparison between our democracy and their tyrannies… but that’s an argument that carries zero weight when you’re campaigning for human rights in those places.  Cameron’s suggestion that we censor social media, and the Labour call for the banning of this EDL event, will hamstring the fight for free expression elsewhere: “You do it, so why shouldn’t we?”

Worse, this excuse also puts the power of censorship into the hands of the mob.  For example, in 2004, a small and unrepresentative group of youths were able to stop performances of Behzti at the Birmingham Rep Theatre (which they found offensive), by threatening to cause chaos that the police were unable to stop, on grounds of cost.   Six years later, another theatre had to fight tooth-and-nail to ensure that the police would guarantee the safety of performers in another play by the same playwright.  If this precedent persists, then we give extremists like the EDL, the BNP, or Islam4UK an ongoing permit to shut down any gathering they disagree with.  Already we’ve seen local councils bullied into withdrawing Moonfleece, a play that challenges far-right extremism… because those same extremists threatened ‘trouble’!  Arguments that seek to ban the EDL, however well-intentioned, slide inexorably into the banning of others, and eventually, banning everyone.

When the riots erupted across our cities earlier this month, we rightly saw them as a threat to our way of life.  We demanded the police throw all their resources at the problem, regardless of the cost in these austere times.  The right to freedom of expression must be protected by the police with equal vigour, and it’s odd that our London councillors have forgotten this.

To argue that the EDL must be allowed their right to march is only the beginning of the discussion.  Those who advocate the right to free expression have a moral obligation to challenge those who preach hate and division.  No one is arguing that an EDL march will not exacerbate tensions in Tower Hamlets, but these can be diffused without trampling on the right to association and assembly.  This is where we need leadership, from those very same elected Labour representatives who signed the letter in the Guardian on Monday.  I met and campaigned with Rushanara Ali and Jim Fitzpatrick when I lived in Tower Hamlets – They are both deeply respected in their constituencies.  They, together with the Mayor of London and the Metropolitan Police, have both the wit and the standing to co-ordinate and lead a peaceful response to the EDL.  Why did they not playing a central role in the Unite Against Fascism counter-protest?  So far it has only garnered support from the unions and the mosques.

It is down to our politicians to present the contrast between the thuggery of the far-right, and the vibrancy of multicultural inner-city life, all while respecting free speech.  Granted, this is not as simple as just banning the march. But we elect our Members of Parliament and Councillors to take on these difficult tasks, not to engage in easy, knee-jerk letter-writing.  Time for Labour to lead.

Police prepare for an EDL march in Leicester. Photo by robotswanking on Flickr

Here is the audio of my segment [6 Mb].

On the UCB’s Facebook page, a few people raised dissenting views.

… surely the human rights of the Norwegian students and there families should be held in higher esteem the Anders Behring Breiviks. He gave up his rights the moment he blew up the building in Oslo.

I think this is just a confusion of the concept of human rights.  Of course rights such as free expression may be lawfully removed, but its wrong to say that a killer or any other hated person in society can forfeit their rights in this way.  If that were the case, we would call them ‘privileges’ not ‘rights’.

Another common sentiment:

But I would caution against publishingg such material. Not everyone has the wisdom or intelligence to be able to read it. God forbid but what if there was to be a copycat killing because of publishing this?

To this, I am reminded of Bronwen Maddox writing in The Times, discussing the ramblingsof another killer, Cho Seung Hui:

The accusation that the NBC broadcasts may provoke copycat attacks — the most serious charge against the network — appears to rest on a notion of severe mental illness as contagious, common and predictable.

UCB is a Christian radio station, and as such there were a few comments invoking the more nebulous concepts of God and Satan:

He had his foot in satans kindom, he is a freemason wich is v evil ,he also listend 2 chantin an playd demonic games on computa,he gave the devil an entrance 2 his mind.ther so much ocult activities that warp the mind an insesetive the value of life

I don’t think this is helpful.  Evil and even satanic Anders Breivik may be, but these are adjectives to describe his end state of mind, not the process by which he became like that.  Explaining a good or a bad act as being the work of God or Satan is a way of avoiding hard thoughts and (maybe) a difficult truth.