Extremely Unfortunate

MOD spokesman Reginal Grazma writes...

Hello. Yes, dreadful business about the civilians, wasn't it? Deep regrets and all that.

Still! Can't be helped, eh? I'm afraid there aren't any nice ways to occupy other countries and kill people, and with the tools of death being what they are these days (which is awfully impersonal, I know, but if the stuff's there, got to use it, haven't you, no point in HMG spending all that money on top-notch gear if you don't), sometimes it simply isn't possible to get a better look at the blighters out in the theatre, check for non-combatants and everything. And anyway, civilians should know better than to consort with Taliban types, especially with marauding foreign robots roaming the landscape.

Such is modern warfare, I'm afraid. Nothing to be done about it. Of course, I'm sure some of you are asking, right now, but why do it at all? Why invade countries on spurious pretexts, with nebulous aims? And to that I say, I don't know. I just do what I'm told. This is what happens in the world today, this is how things get done.

Because, you see, we - all of us, you, me, our grandparents, Queen Victoria, God rest her corrupt soul - have conspired to create a society which seeks to suppress our better - or at least, less harmful - instincts, while simultaneously exploiting our worst. We at the MOD merely operate within these parameters. We haven't the power to define them. Who does? Who knows! If there is, somewhere, a man sitting at a control panel, who could change the way the world turns at the flick of a switch, we don't know who he is. And if we did, would you really want us to have a quiet word with him? Just think! From this filthy mess of blood and oil, these stinking fumes of charred flesh and burning hair, all of your nice things come. This thrusting, modern world of plenty that you all seem to believe you live in, all a product of brutality and oppression, I'm afraid.

And so, until all this changes, for better or worse, I'm afraid we have no option but to continuing blasting people - enemies, terrorists, civilians, humans, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters - apart like china dolls with the raging fire of inscrutable, irrational machines - a cold, barren face of aluminium, the Reaper itself, just imagine it, peering at you through the heat haze in your few remaining seconds, then the inferno, then a trauma the like of which your fragile human body has never known, which none could survive - your ribcage implodes, your head pops like a pumpkin on a firing range, your limbs break loose and seek freedom at the four corners of the earth like wild things, thwarted only by gravity - elsewhere in the world, people love you; here, you're barely real... What happens when we die? What happens afterwards? Is there a heaven? Is there void? Or do you remain trapped in your final moment, your experience of reality frozen forever at the point of death, like a photograph, for eternity only your violent demise, a holiday snapshot of your pointless struggle against unfeeling fate as it drives its brown, bloodied fangs into you, eyes as dead as your own?

None shall know until their time comes. Until then, rest easy in the knowledge that your friends in the Ministry are doing everything they can to make the world a safer place for innocent people like yourselves. Innocent, British people. Goodnight.

Act II, Scene 1: Chorus

What with the clamour of the whole AV shitfight there, and the resurrection of liberal interventionism, and the summary execution of a suspected terrorist, and the death of Henry Cooper, it may have escaped your attention that local elections had been taking place in England. Which is a shame, because these local elections - which voters used to punish the Lib Dem leadership's betrayals by ousting a load of blameless Councillors - were about as significant nationally as local elections are ever likely to get. But what right have I to whine about that? Especially when I'm about to ignore them myself and write about the AV referendum, like every other blogging prick in the country has been doing.

Not being an actual, fully qualified god or free-roaming, all-seeing consciousness of the extraworld or anything, I can't lay claim to any great insight into Nick Clegg's inner workings. So whatever my suspicions, his true motives are a mystery to me. Is he an enthusiastic Tory, as so many have him pegged? Or is he a cynical, apolitical careerist? Or just a naive, idealistic fool who got in over his head? Hard to say.

Whatever he may have hoped to gain from the referendum, he had a lot riding on it. That once-in-a-generation chance of electoral reform was the Lib Dems' big sticking point in their negotiations with both the Tories and Labour last May, and they sacrificed a lot to get it on the agenda. It was just enough at the time to appease the party's grassroots. And after that fiasco of an election and the formation of the coalition itself, the public's hunger for change was palpable.

But that was then. Now people are losing their jobs and benefits, watching libraries and Sure Start centres close, growing tired of waiting for cataract operations that their PCTs weren't willing to pay for last year. Wondering how you're going to eat for the next 10 days leaves very little mental energy for thinking about constitutional matters.

So is all lost for Clegg? Well, I have to wonder whether the result of the referendum really matters to him as much as the fact that it happened. He can still justify his decision to get involved in the coalition. He gave us the choice. That we still have a clumsy electoral system is down to us. Not the weak Yes campaign, nor the Nos' dirty tactics winning them wall-to-wall media coverage in the last crucial weeks, nor the timing of the referendum. Us. It's all our fault and Clegg has come through with his conscience just about clear enough to deflect any calls for his resignation and still sleep the sleep of the fucking just.

If that is the case, though, then he really is naive. The fact that he managed to secure a referendum that few evidently wanted, on an issue that few evidently care about, and then lost it anyway, is not going to save his credibility. So his problem now is justifying the Lib Dems' continued involvement in the coalition.

In banking everything on a failed bid to secure reform (hand-in-hand with its heavy losses in local government, the one area in which it wielded any real influence), the party has squandered what little political capital - not to mention self-respect - it had before Friday. The Lib Dems are now little more than the back end of a pantomime horse, with no control over the government's future direction, no choice but to follow, and nothing more to look forward to for the next four years beyond getting their noses deeper into Tory arses.

One response could be to withdraw from the coalition and weaken the Tories' majority. Not likely, though, is it? Instead, Clegg's phase two strategy is to put some distance between his party and Cameron's, highlight the differences, fuck shit up a little. He did that yesterday by shitting on Andrew Lansley's NHS reforms.

But how meaningful a departure could it be when the content of said shit had already been agreed with Cameron? That pantomime analogy was bob-on. Well done, me!

Obligatory March 26 Post

Pity Liam Byrne. Who here can truthfully stand up and say they've never left a sarcastic note for a successor at work, only to watch in horror as it becomes the chief justification for an incoming government's ruthless policy of bleeding the poor and vulnerable until they're nothing but sheets of human jerky? No wonder Labour were so slow to respond to George Osborne's cuts programme.

Another reason stood about 50 miles in front of me on Saturday afternoon, a tiny, vulnerable figure floating above a sea of heads and placards. Ed Miliband is a cautious, academic kind of man, more political scientist than polemicist, seemingly incapable of making any kind of statement without immediately qualifying it.

Even if you can overlook his innate lack of gravitas, Miliband's speech at the TUC's March For The Alternative was a masterclass in how not address a political rally. The PA is a different art to the despatch box, and Miliband (who began his political career as a researcher for Labour, completely bypassing the activist route) clearly hasn't got the hang of it. Worse, the man who's going to restore Labour's position as the party of the people apparently thought it would be a good idea to stand in front of hundreds of thousands of them all fired up against cuts and tell them that yes, he thinks some cuts are necessary. That shit won't fly at a demo. Save the nuance for a guest editorial in the Independent or something.

He drew a few jeers in his short time at the mic, but the mood in Hyde Park was otherwise friendly. This was the mainstream of what was being touted as a mainstream event, the official site of the protest, attended by a broad cross-section of people, from the very young to the elderly.

Not so elsewhere. No, elsewhere London burned! Groups of anarchists (whose entire political philosophy is founded on a desire to destroy absolutely everything for no good reason whatsoever) and those thuggish bastards in UK Uncut (whose entire political philosophy is founded on the idea that people should meet their legal tax obligations, the swines) went mental and trashed the place! A whopping 0.1% of the most conservative estimate of the turnout was arrested! And I'm sure someone will produce some evidence of UK Uncut's orgy of violence in due course!

I didn't see any of this, though, and nor did a lot of people. The media's always the common denominator at the more violent fronts of protests. You have to wonder at that, like the trail of death that mysteriously followed Miss Marple wherever she went. I hear Sophie Long looks amazing in a keffiyeh.

I don't doubt there was some senseless violence. Protests always attract twats. Twats get everywhere. But twats aside, I have to admit to some ambivalence towards 'non-peaceful' action. Barring violence against other people, is it automatically a bad thing?

Conventional wisdom has it that it taints the public's perception of your cause. The thing is, protest movements are usually easy for the mainstream press to demonise because they often appear fundamentally unsympathetic to the average suburban Tescoshopper. They're alien, other, hippies, crusties, weirdy-beardies, anarchists, lefties, greenies, trade unionists, blacks, gays, disableds, grumble grumble. So when readers of shit newspapers are already hostile, it doesn't take a lot of bad behaviour to elicit disgust.

But the cuts are a mainstream concern. Everybody who isn't minted to the eyeballs relies on the support of the state in some way, particularly in health and education. Consequently, there was a slight but tangible shift in tone during the coverage of the student protests in late 2010. Where usually the press would be happy to focus entirely on the violence, this time there was as much acknowledgement of the peaceful majority and their reasons for being there as there were cool photos of people wrecking shit. Some of the coverage of Edward Woollard's stint in court following his over-excited fire extinguisher adventure even seemed to isolate the incident from the wider context of the occupation of 30 Millbank, as though the break-in were the peaceful protest and Woollard the idiot that spoiled it for everyone else.

And does the public necessarily always deplore violent action? However events may be reported in the media, history often reframes them. Although tens of people died in them, we don't condemn the LA riots, we condemn the systemic racism their participants were railing against. Similarly, the poll tax riots seem to us now a justifiable expression of rage at the end a decade that fetishised wealth.

While the last decade's banking crisis and resurgence of the far right in Europe prove that its lessons are far from permanent, history can make monsters of certain things for those old enough to remember, at least until those young enough not to start to run ting. That can be useful. The recent protests, their scale and the anger behind them will cling to Cameron and Clegg as surely as Iraq clung to Blair, and the poll tax riots to Thatcher.

But I'm not suggesting you take up your pitchforks. There's a strange alchemy at work in these things, and a formula that clearly nobody's nailed yet, involving timing, the whims of the popular imagination and straight dumb luck. What matters now is where the British public decides to pin the blame. The seemingly baseless bad-mouthing of UK Uncut suggests guiding hands are at work.

Haig

Jamminess is not a concept we usually associate with the post of British Foreign Secretary. Let's not shed any tears for anyone who's held it down for long enough to get their fingers bloody, but it is a shit gig.

Not only do you cop flak for every tiny little human rights violation committed by your global strategic and business partners, but if you take your eye off the ball for one moment, you might quickly find yourself friendless both at home and abroad. Look at poor old William Hague. You leave a few of your own people stranded in the middle of a brutal suppression...

But you can't blame him for letting his concentration slip. He must have been a bit tipsy on them celebratory hand shandies. Ten months into the job, and before his rescue fail, it seemed he'd inherited himself a happy little situation. Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe not so much. But things have definitely been looking more favourable a little further to the west, where several of the Middle East's corrupt old orders are conveniently disintegrating, and doing so early enough into Hague's tenure that none of their shit has had the chance to really stick to his trousers.

Not that he was smelling entirely of roses before Rescuegate. The initial uprisings saw him hedging his bets, walking a pathetic tightrope between the established order and a potential, radically different future. When Tunisia and Egypt went off, all he had to offer was his cautious acknowledgement of an "opportunity" for the two countries, qualified by a fear that the unrest might derail the Middle East peace process (or, if you like, increase oil prices and fill the world with more mad Islams).

As things hotted up in Egypt, there was no telling who would win out, and Hague - like many of his counterparts in the west - was visibly torn. Should he position himself as a friend of the revolution from the start, or stay loyal to the Mubarak regime? Whichever side he supported, he risked alienating the future leadership of a key trading partner. Tough choice.

As it turned out, we were treated to something like the pitiful sight of a man trying to size up two potential shags simultaneously without giving either any clue that he was interested in the other. Only when Mubarak's position became untenable did western powers begin to throw their weight behind the protesters, and even that briefly looked a bit rash when he decided to cling to power for a few more days. It paid off in the end, though, and Egypt is now a military junta. Hooray!

On Tuesday, meanwhile, the Prime Minister broke off from his ill-timed mission to sell more guns in the region, in order to deliver a speech at the Kuwaiti National Assembly.

Trying to appear as if he knew all along that brown people were modern and sophisticated enough to reject totalitarian theocracy, he condemned Britain's prior willingness to rationalise the old Middle-Eastern tyrannies with the idea that "Arabs or Muslims can’t do democracy – the so-called Arab exception. For me that’s a prejudice that borders on racism."

Which is a sentiment I wholeheartedly applaud, though I'm not sure quite how it squares with his speech at the Munich Security Conference three weeks ago, in which he blamed multiculturalism for religious extremism and seemingly presented us with a binary choice between bland cultural homogeneity and terrorists on every street corner.

But the world's a different place now, eh?

Spirit Of Enoch

Let's say you're a pseudo-liberal cockwipe. And let's imagine that sometimes - in those lonely, twilit moments when, for want of anything better to do, you start digging deep, confronting the ugliest corners of your confused soul - you're forced to admit to yourself that, in all honesty, you're not really that big a fan of people who aren't white. Now let's pretend that, hard as you try to keep this feeling buried, it's so powerful that you're occasionally forced to give vent to it, like an addictive but deeply dubious sexual fetish, the sort that would get you put on the sex offender's register. What do you do?

One such pseudo-liberal cockwipe is David Cameron, who used his platform at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday to hold forth on every closet racist's favourite theme: The Failure Of Multiculturalism.

Attacking multiculturalism is a great way to indulge your bigotry without using the nasty language of bigotry. Instead of saying, "I don't like them coloureds," you can say, "I don't believe multiculturalism works." And instead of saying, "I don't like it when they talk in all like forrin and that cos they might be slagging you off," you can say, "multiculturalism has failed to create cohesion in the UK, having allowed some groups of people to remain on the fringes of British society."

It's what the social theorist Slavoj Žižek calls 'reasonable' racism: a safer, more acceptable form of prejudice and a naked play for the liberals in the house, circumventing one of their natural sympathies with an appeal to another (someone might say, for example, "it's legitimate to condemn Islam, because some people use it to justify female oppression"). More cynical people might also call it a play for some of the voters you lost to the BNP.

In his case, Cameron was riffing on integration, and the extremism that supposedly springs up in its absence. And he's not blaming the forrins for failing to integrate, he's blaming the architects of Britain's multicultural 'experiment' for failing to make the forrins integrate. (The fact that he chose to make such remarks on the day of the English Defence League's biggest rally yet raised eyebrows. You know you've done something daft when Jack Straw accuses you of poor judgment on a race issue.)

But is it not wilfully disingenuous to claim terrorism is a direct result of a perceived (imaginary?) breakdown in racial cohesion? Would it not be more instructive to ask whether both are, in fact, symptoms of something else? Say - ooh, I dunno - UK foreign policy, and Britain's constant meddling in the affairs of the Middle East, facilitating tyrannies, creating tyrannies, bullying, displacing and murdering innocent people? Just a wild stab in the dark, like.

And how do you make integration just happen, anyway? More than that, how do you make integration just happen according to your own precise, romantic vision? Well, I ain't no societologist or nuthin, but I'm guessing that, probably, you can't. Multiculturalism isn't so much an ideal as a natural function of an open, liberal democracy, and any attempt to create integration is pretty much doomed to have the opposite effect, especially when it involves holding public-funded Muslim groups to ransom, or forcing newcomers to play a more active part in the host society - more than is expected of its natives, in fact (many of whom themselves are not above moving to other countries and refusing to integrate).

It can take generations for different peoples to find their respective places in a multi-ethnic society, and you only have to look at Britain's cultural output over the last 50 years for evidence that we've been doing just that since the first wave of post-war immigration. This may not mean everyone helpfully absorbing a government-approved set of values and mores, and the values that Cameron holds up - of tolerance and mutual respect - are all very fine, no doubt, but I'd question just how many 'indigenous' Britons genuinely and wholeheartedly subscribe to them.

I'd also call them civilised human values, rather than specifically British ones, but that's just me.

Skratch Pickles

Here's a statement so blindingly obvious it'll insult you, your ancestors and every future generation of your family until the Fall:

This government sure done broke a lot of pledges.

They're all at it. The Tories have done nuff handbrake turns on David Cameron's election promises, while the Lib Dem leadership has turned its back on almost everything it once claimed to believe in, gambling the party's soul on the chance of a vote on the possibility of a referendum on electoral reform (proportional representation since downgraded to the less proportional alternative vote, with some Tory-favouring boundary changes tacked on to the bill, currently moving like treacle through the strainers of some Labour peers in the Lords).

Most of the shit the coalition's been doing would be a hard enough sell even if it didn't directly contradict many of the promises that failed to win either party the election. "We can't help it, it's the mechanisms of coalition government," they protest. "Grown-up politics." "Economic realities." "We just don't give a fuck."

But what if you can get someone else to break your pledges for you? That's a popular trick at all levels of government, from Westminster's slimy nest of sentient turds right down to the dustiest town hall offices.

It certainly seems to be the coalition's preferred MO. Andrew Lansley, for example, has effectively transferred responsibility for NHS cuts to the NHS. (Except they're not cuts. The government will be spending more on the NHS, year on year. It's just that the spending increases will be below inflation. But look! Headlines! Spending!)

Similarly, local authorities have found themselves forced to self-inflict their own harm, with no specific cuts being imposed upon them from above. They can carry on exactly as they were - with even greater freedoms, in fact! - they just have to do so with less money. In some cases, a lot less. (While in other, richer, predominantly Tory-controlled cases, not so much.)

Still, it should be enough to give Cameron and Osborne some wriggle room on their oft-repeated assertions that the cuts would be fair, and society's most vulnerable protected from their dirty, rusty edges. And some wriggling has taken place, very recently.

In the run-up to the general election, Riven Vincent, who cares for her severely disabled daughter, met Cameron and extracted personal reassurances that he'd be looking out for families like hers. But on Wednesday, she posted on Mumsnet that she'd had to ask for her daughter to be placed in a residential home after South Gloucestershire Council told her they were unable to provide any more than the six measly hours of respite care she's been getting each week.

Cameron's office told the Guardian that this was "a local council issue."

Or to put it another way, it's your local government that's denying you access to the care you and your daughter need, love. We done nothing out of order.

Although it's not as simple as that, because the coalition has actually lifted what protection was once in place for the seriously disadvantaged. Communities secretary Eric Pickles last year removed restrictions that separated councils' two main streams of funding. This has been sold as freeing local authorities from the shackles of big government, allowing them greater control over their spending. But the temptation to divert money from the neediest, most vulnerable sections of the community towards sexier, more visible, more popular schemes and developments will be hard to resist, especially in these broke times.

With unemployment rising, budgets cut and that ringfence gone, there'll be great, stinking gulfs of inequality opening up all over the country. And the greatest and stinkiest will inevitably be in the authorities with the most deprived areas. It's the rat torture on a grand scale. And while your council may well be playing the part of the rat, the coalition can't truthfully deny that they've provided both the bucket and the poker.

Ten Quid

It's still true! That "cut" can be interpreted any number of ways. 'To cut' may mean 'to axe', to get rid of altogether. In which case, the NHS isn't being cut at all, just having bits torn off it.

And even that's an over-simplification. Health secretary Andrew Lansley's NHS reforms don't represent an ideological assault on an essential public service. No, they represent OPPORTUNITY. Imagine! A sexy, market-driven NHS. Less Holby City, more Grey's Anatomy. Or Scrubs, if you prefer. Whatever does it for you. I won't judge.

But in the spirit of even-handedness, I'm going to play devil's advocate here and throw out the forbidden question: what if it doesn't work?

Sounds crazy, but hear me out. For instance, a number of primary care trusts are already holding back on 'elective' procedures (hernias, gallstones, cataracts, that kind of nonsense) for the rest of this financial year because of budgetary constraints.

Doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to construct a possible vision of the future from that, does it? With Lansley pointing to the Royal Marsden hospital - which derives up to 30% of its income from private patients - as the model for his reforms, what guarantee do we have that these currently verboten procedures won't remain unavailable to patients unable to pay for them? So far, none.

But maybe I'm being melodramatic. After all, this twat at The Market Oracle calls the cuts "NONE Existant", and the NHS wasteful and inefficient, bloated on the endless wads of cash recklessly thrown at it during the Labour years. For him, the coalition isn't going far enough.

He doesn't say whether he's ever set foot inside an NHS hospital, but if he has, then I can only assume there was too much electricity in it for his liking, or perhaps not enough blood on the walls, nor dying patients haphazardly strewn about in puddles of their own sick.

I wouldn't worry about that happening, though. They're only poor.