Know Your Place

Edward Goldsmith, 1928 - 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:39:00 +0000

I was very sad to hear last week of the death of Teddy Goldsmith, one of this country's pioneering greens, and a man I knew personally and worked with for a time. It was Teddy who gave me my break at the Ecologist; a break which eventually led to me becoming its deputy editor in the days when it was still a magazine and not (shiver) a website.

Teddy Goldsmith was a curious paradox of a man. Very rich, very establishment, yet also fiercely anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-modern. A pioneer of environmental campaigning, Teddy was making the case against global capitalism before I was even born, and countering its global spread with a vision of his own: a romantic, conservative vision of small communities living 'stable' lives close to the soil. For a time Teddy tried to live this life himself, in Cornwall in the 1970s, where he would proudly boast that his stinking compost toilet turned away all but the hardiest visitor.

That tale was revealing, because if there was one thing Teddy enjoyed it was riling people. Part of him was desperate for his radical, well-researched and sometimes shocking ideas to be taken seriously. Another part of him was repulsed by the kind of people he also wanted to be taken seriously by. He was a perpetual outsider: eccentric, angry, brilliant, quixotic and sometimes frustrating. No-one ever worked with him without either shouting at him or wanting to, or without disagreeing, often very strongly, with some of his ideas. But no one ever worked with him, either, without developing a strong personal attachment to him, and a good deal of respect, for he was a kind, decent and humble human being.

Teddy's brand of conservative, even reactionary, environmentalism is out of fashion today, at a time when the green movement seems to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the political left. Many of today's young greens have probably never even heard of him. But without him there would be no Green Party in the UK, no Ecologist either, and the debates we are having would be very different ones.

Teddy's legacy will be his writings, which are collected here. I personally recommend the essay Development as Colonialism as essential reading for any modern green. His co-edited book The Case Against the Global Economy is excellent, and the Blueprint for Survival was pioneering and is still relevant today.

The Times has a nice obituary of Teddy here, and the Ecologist is republishing an interview I did with him a couple of years back. I don't think I've seen him since then, and I wish I had.

RIP Teddy.

Abeyance

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:11:00 +0000

I've noticed that many blogs seem to have a shelf life. They rise and flourish and then fall away, like everything. This one has been falling away for some time. There are many reasons, but I just don't have the time or the seeming need to write it regularly anymore. Hell, I don't even have the time to update my website properly, which I have been meaning to do for over six months. Sorry.

I'm not going to declare the end of this blog, but I think it's fair to say that it is currently in hibernation. I will doubtless still post things up here from time to time, but they will probably be irregular. One reason is that I currently have two other, much more active, blogs on which you can read my thoughts if you are that way inclined.

One is the Real England blog, which takes my latest book as its leaping-off point for explorations of the state of the nation. The other is the blog attached to my new initiative, the Dark Mountain Project, which I hope will turn out to be something quite special. Do keep an eye on those, and we will see what the future holds.

Come: climb the Dark Mountain

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:37:00 +0000

Well, I've been thinking about it for what seems like years, working on it for many months and hinting at it on this blog for God knows how long. Now, finally, it's just about mature enough to be exposed to the world.

Today, myself and my co-conspirator Dougald Hine are announcing an attempt to coax into being a new literary and artistic movement for an age of massive global change. We are calling it the Dark Mountain Project.

We live in insecure and unprecedented times. A collapsing economy and a collapsing environment are turning all our assumptions on their heads. Nothing that we currently take for granted is likely to survive the 21st century unscathed. Civilisation as we have known it is coming apart at the seams.

And yet hardly anybody - not politicians, not economists, not environmentalists, not writers - is really facing up to the magnitude of this. We are all still wedded to the idea that the future will be an upgraded version of the present. It is in our cultural DNA. Perhaps this is why, as the warning signs flash out ever more urgently, we still go shopping, or plan for more economic growth, or campaign for new energy technologies, or write novels about the country house or the inner city.

A civilisation is built not on oil, steel or bullets, but on stories; on the myths that shore it up and the tales it tells itself about its origins and destiny. We believe that we have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of 'progress', of the conquest of 'nature', of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.

I believe it is time for new stories, and it seems I am not the only one. The Dark Mountain project aims to foster a new movement of writers, artists and creative thinkers, a new school of writing and art for an age of massive global disruption. We are calling it Uncivilisation.

Here's the plan. Today, we announce our intentions to the world, and we hope to start attracting the interest of like-minded people. Then, within a month or so, we'll be launching the Dark Mountain Manifesto, as a hand-crafted pamphlet and on the web. At the same time, we will launch our full website, an online gathering-place for discussing and plotting and crafting a new way forward. If enough people seem interested, we then plan to begin publishing a journal of Uncivilised art and writing. Then ... who knows?

For the moment, though, we are looking for help, support, potential collaboration and expressions of interest. The Dark Mountain Project is not a prescriptive attempt to tell people how to write or think, but the raising of a flag around which we hope like-minded people will gather. So we are looking for people who might want to be involved: writers, artists, illustrators, designers, thinkers - anyone with whom this strikes a chord.

If you think you are one of them, or if you'd just like to be kept informed about what we're up to, visit our pre-launch website and register your interest. You can also, if you are so inclined, join our Facebook group.

Finally, we are working right now to raise money for the printing of our manifesto and for the construction of our website. We have set a target on this fundraising site, where we need to raise £1000 (well, $1500) in three weeks, through small donations. Every little will help, so if you feel you'd like to spend a bit on a good cause, please pop over there. If you spend more than $20 you get a signed, numbered copy of our manifesto, which I can promise you will be well worth the money!

I hope that this might be the start of something big. We'll see. I am holding my breath. I'd love to know what you think.

Some thoughts about that G20 death

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:19:00 +0000

I've just watched the video of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests, which is, rightly, headlining the news at the moment. It's always hard to judge from a film, especially a grainy, shaky one, what exactly was going on. We have perhaps thirty seconds of footage here, with little context to it. We can't hear what anybody says, nor do we know what happened before or after. We can't tell whether this contributed to Tomlinson's later death; though it surely must have had an impact.

What we do know, though, because we can see it clearly, is that a police officer in riot gear attacked this man, from behind, and knocked him to the floor. Perhaps Tomlinson said something to him to provoke him; perhaps he didn't. It doesn't matter. What matters is that this is a deliberate physical attack, by a masked, armed agent of the state, on an unarmed man who is offering him no physical resistance at all - indeed, is actually walking away from him.

What will happen now is clear already. Some activists will try to make a martyr out of Ian Tomlinson, as they did Carlo Giuliani, the activist who was shot dead at the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001. I was at Genoa, a few streets away when it happened. It was horrific. Nonetheless, I don't like the making of martyrs. Though Tomlinson (unlike Giuliani) was clearly not attacking anyone when he was assaulted, it does no-one any favours to create posthumous heroes to serve the political purposes of others.

It's also worth getting some perspective on policing at UK demos. There'll be a lot of talk of 'fascist' policing, but having been in Genoa and seen genuine fascists in riot gear - and we're talking open admirers of Mussolini here, with guns on their belts - and having seen what happens when they go ape, we have to admit that our police don't do demos as badly as many others around the world.

But what we also need to admit - and what ought to be heard loud and clear now as the Met and the cops who were there that day begin to lie, deny and cover up, and smear the dead man and the other protesters - is that our police are getting worse. When they police demos like this they do not do so to 'keep order' , protect citizens or see that the law is maintained. They do so to protect the interests of the state and the interests of property. They see protesters, demonstrators and dissenters as an enemy to be conquered. And increasingly they are giving up even pretending otherwise.

Tooled up in riot gear that looks more threatening every year, with their faces masked as they film those of other people, and armed with increasingly authoritarian powers from a government that seems determined to give them everything they need to prevent any dissent whatsoever, there is a real danger that the police in this country could get seriously out of control - particularly at big events like this. Watch that video and see if you can spot any evidence of the police protecting the people or preventing laws from being broken. What you see is a police officer blatantly assaulting a passerby, egged on or passively observed by his colleagues. It's clear whose side the cops are on here, and what they came out to do. This should probably not be a surprise, but I'll bet it's not a message the media will be putting out much.

Britain is not a police state. Yet. But we're not as far off as we think we are either.

All vote now ...

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:53:00 +0000

Odd things are happening to me on a regular basis right now. Fresh from my appearance on Richard and Judy, I have now been nominated as a 'Champion of England', in a nationwide contest to find and reward someone who is working in their own way to champion all things English.

Now, I'm not sure whether I would be a worthy winner or not, but it's very nice to be recognised. What happens now is that all the nominees are put before the public's stern gaze, and the one who receives the most votes is named, on St George's Day, of course, as the winner. Oh, and the beer company Bombardier, whose idea this all is, hopes that it sells more pints as a result.

I think this is a great idea and, myself aside, there are some great unsung people being nominated. I'd strongly recommend that you go to the website and vote for your favourite, whether it be me or anybody else. Press the buttons on your keypads now.

Intermission

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:35:00 +0000

By the end of this week, I hope to be able to announce on this blog the birth of something new, exciting and, who knows, maybe even world-changing, in its own small way. Keep your eyes peeled, because I'll be asking for your views, and maybe your help too. And no, this is not an April Fool.

In the meantime, occupy yourself with this recent episode of the excellent Stewart Lee's TV series, in which he excoriates the state of modern literature and batters Chris Moyles into a quivering pulp. Watch them in order for the whole episode. Truly, unashamedly, furiously excellent. Especially for writers.

I am for the woods against the world

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:35:00 +0000

And so another day begins and the world turns and all of us do more or less what we did yesterday and meanwhile the world is ending but this is not really our business and what can we do anyway and if you think I'm going to make any sacrifices for you or for anyone else you don't understand human nature.

And so it goes on, so we go on, living in the most comfortable, the most wonderful, the most physically desirable state any human has ever lived in, pampered, warm, full of chocolate and wine, moving without moving, travelling across oceans in hours and believing it is all quite natural and that it will last forever and not only last forever but keep getting better because we believe it will be so and so it must be.

This morning we read, if we read, that the Amazon rainforest will soon die. More than a two degree rise in global temperature will kill off 85% of the world's greatest repository of life. And more than a two degree rise in temperature is now inevitable, two hundred years of burning fossilised carbon has seen to that. Yesterday we read, if we read, that the chemical composition of the oceans is changing for the same reason and that this will help push us, as if we needed pushing, up beyond the six degree threshold, which is the point beyond which even our all-knowing lab rats have declared all bets to be off, forever.

But we have bigger things to think about than this. We are producing fewer cars, our banks will no longer give us free money, our houses are less expensive, our child protection services are sometimes inadequate and our gods are clashing again and all of these things constitute a grave crisis. We have no time for the world or what we are doing to it because inside the bubble of our civilisation things are creaking and cracking and they must be mended because human things must be mended before all other things, forever. Once we have mended the human things we may choose to turn our attention to the other things, to the forests and the oceans and the great skuas and the high-sided islands and the wide orange deserts, and we may choose to mend them too, but only if it suits us and only if we can afford it.

And it may yet suit us, for our environmentalists, safe too inside the bubble, have convinced themselves, through the use of their rational minds and a judicious explication of the relevant numbers, that they believe that if we can only coat the orange deserts in mirrored panels and the wild mountains in giant white turbines and the coasts with wave machines and the estuaries with concrete barrages and if we can only do this fast enough, so fast that no-one has time to think about it, if we can only do this we can keep the bubble from bursting. We can keep the radiators on and the cars running and the offices full and nothing will really change for the voters or the shoppers or the charitable donors, and the skua and the orang utan and the mahogany and the coral may live a small while longer, at least until we decide they are in the way of a greatly-needed new oil shale deposit or a biofuel plantation or are inhabiting a forest which we may sustainably harvest in order to create sustainable toilet paper for our newly-sustainable lifestyles.

Yet in the back of our minds, those of us who use them, in the back of our minds is something we will not face. It is something which winks at us, ever so quietly. It is something which says it is too late. It is too late, the bubble will burst and you will be faced again with the wild from which you come for the wild is taking you back and all your self-delusions with it. Your windfarms will not save you now for nothing will save you now and for the orang utan and the skua and the coral and the mahogany this is news to gladden the heart. For you stopped understanding what you are and where you came from and what you had the right to do and you believed, all of you, even those who thought that you did not believe it, that all things human came before all things other, and you were wrong and now you will pay and maybe, perhaps, maybe you will even learn something.

For a Coming Extinction
W. S. Merwin

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

Liberty bells

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:36:00 +0000

When even the former head of MI5 is worried that Britain is in danger of becoming a police state, you know there's a problem.

It's a problem that will be debated in ten days or so at the Convention on Modern Liberty, which brings together people and organisations from across the political spectrum to talk about - and who knows, maybe even do something about - the ongoing and ever-faster erosion of freedom in the UK.

I'll be speaking on a panel about the English tradition of liberty and the 'national question' (on which George Monbiot writes in today's Guardian, kindly mentioning yours truly), which may or may not be worth hearing. But I think that the day as a whole promises to be pretty useful.

Why I am a planet-raping fascist

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:41:00 +0000

On Tuesday I had an article published in the Guardian. It has, shall we say, caused a bit of a stir.

It's not often you get to provoke extreme reactions, especially from otherwise reasonable people. But these 800 words have led to me being dismissed as a 'romantic' and a 'nimby', called an anti-human snob, an elitist, a fascist and - surely worse even than fascism - a member of the middle class. I have been accused of putting humanity and the global environment at risk, helping fossil fuel companies in their quest to build more power stations and undermining the the global quest to Save the World from the terrors of climate change. Not bad for a day's work.

What could lead to such a torrent of extreme abuse - abuse which is all the more remarkable because, though some of it was from the kind of nutters who enjoy leaving abusive comments under articles on the web, much of it was from environmentalists like me? Had I come out in favour of mass species extinction? Was I advocating the enforced culling of the human population? Had I joined the Labour party?

Well, no. What I had done was written what I thought was a fairly measured piece, which made three main points:

1. Renewable energy technologies are not, despite some green claims to the contrary, always harmless. Some - those which are carried on on a massive scale - can actually be harmful. The harm is of a different measure to that caused by fossil-fuel burning; it's harm to the wild landscape. But it's harm nonetheless, and we should acknowledge that.

2. Wild places and the non-human world are important both for the biosphere as a whole and for human wellbeing. They should not be ravaged by human industrial intrusion. This goes both for motorways and inappropriately-sited windfarms.

3. Environmentalists should be able to talk about crucial but intangible things - like beauty, wildness, stillness, the soul-lifting power of mountains and forests - without feeling ashamed. They should talk less like economists and more like poets, because if they don't, the economists have won. And then we're really in trouble.

I won't be disingenous and say that I am surprised by some peoples' violent objections. I did write this piece to provoke a reaction, but I didn't do so for fun, or because I like being contrarian (actually, I quite like the quiet life). I did it because I felt, as an environmentalist, that some (though not all) strains of environmentalism were in danger of being almost entirely co-opted by the establishment.

I'm not going to repeat the arguments I made in the piece, but I do want to clear some things up. Some people have reacted to what I wrote by sending me angry emails asking why I have come out against renewable energy or wind turbines. I reply by telling them to go and read it again, and this time to pay attention to what I actually wrote rather than what they think I wrote. I am not against renewable energy. I like it. I think it's the way of the future. I run my house on it, and I would like, in the future, to be entirely off-grid; sun- and wind- and maybe even ground-powered.

What I am against is the raping of wild places with massive energy mega-projects like the Severn Barrage. And what I am intensely, grindingly, frustrated by, is that people who call themselves environmentalists are simply, in many cases, unable to engage in discussions about the actual, physical, real environment - and our personal relationship with it.

Here is the excellent Robert MacFarlane, writing a few years ago about the now thankfully rejected Lewis windfarm, a vast mega-project which would have destroyed the peat wilderness of Lewis in the Hebrides:

The Lewis project is a salutary case study. It reveals that an American-Puritan error - that wild land is waste land, there to be put to industrial use - is rearing its head. Wild places, it has come to be understood, are the "uplands" of civilisation: landscapes that can renew, console, and lift us in unique ways.
Lewis's situation also reminds us of the spiritual, aesthetic, historical and ecological values that are put at risk when extraordinary landscapes are industrially menaced. These values are harder to measure, and harder to articulate than the hard numerical wattage of the turbines. But they are, unlike the wattage, non-transferable.

The green movement today is in danger of committing that 'American-Puritan error' on a large scale. Greens as a whole now have one focus and one alone: stopping climate change. This is entirely understandable. There is nothing wrong with it. Getting rid of coal and oil is urgent and important. Renewable energy is a much better idea. But if a single-minded focus on 'emissions' overwhelms every other urge that made us green to begin with, we are in troubled waters, and when we find ourselves pushing to destroy nature in order to save nature, then we need to stop, step back and take a deep breath. When we, as greens, find ourselves attacking our opponents as 'nimbies', dismissing arguments about landscape value and the non-human wilderness and smearing those who disagree with us as 'fascists' or 'deniers', then we need to ask ourselves some hard questions: how did we get here? Where are we going? And what are we for?

The new windfarm on the once-desolate moors at Rochdale, near Manchester,
is being touted by the Green Party as a triumph. Laugh or cry? You decide.

One of the key responses to my article has been a question: what's your solution? It's predicated on an imaginative error: that we have x years to 'save the planet' by stopping climate change, and that a rapid push for renewables - almost any renewables - will do that. Put like this, it's hard to even listen to anyone who objects to this - because they are, surely, standing in the way of saving the world. They are helping, by default, the profiteers and the planet killers. They must be silenced.

Well. I have written here before about my problems with the current climate change narrative. If we really have 100 months to save the world, then the world is already doomed. But we don't: in reality, the narrative is not about the planet; it's about human civilisation. Start this discussion with anyone and this soon becomes clear. What we are really talking about when we talk about rapidly creating a carbon-free economy is the desire to maintain human civilisation at its current level of comfort. If that requires us to carpet wild landscapes with industrial superstructures, then that is, apparently, a price worth paying.

I am all in favour of moving rapidly away from fossil fuels, and towards renewables. But we need to get real. The frantic scrabble to save our current lifestyles from the eco-crunch is like the scrabble to save the banks from the credit crunch: pointless, and too late. The crunch is already here. Now we have to learn to live with it. There is no technology, or group of technologies that can keep us in the fossil-fuelled style to which we have become accustomed. The best way to at least ameliorate the worst effects of climate change - it's too late to stop it now - is for society to scale back, scale down, get back into contact with real, actual, everyday nature, and rethink its values. Environmentalists ought to be thinking about ways to do this, not working on ever more intricate ways to help capitalism rejuvenate itself once again, only to begin anew the ravaging of the Earth.

I'm not suggesting this is easy. Hell, maybe it's not even realistic - in the climate change debate, very little is. But it is right. We are overstretching ourselves, and it seems to me that we are still in some denial about to what extent things are going to change. Nature is calling in a debt and the landing is going to be hard.

The root cause, in my view, of the environmental crisis is not technological or economic: it is imaginative. We imagine that we are separate from something called 'nature' - an optional accessory which we may like or not like, but do not really need. When environmentalists dismiss reactions like mine or MacFarlane's, they are as complicit in that error as any banker or oil company boss. They are missing the point, because they want to miss the point, because the alternative seems so much harder to contemplate. But contemplate it we must. It's something that has to be faced.

Civilisation as we know it is over. The question now is what comes next.

Back in time

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:10:00 +0000

2009 sees fifteen years since the Solsbury Hill road protest saw the trees around Bath festooned with nets and tree houses, and its soils wormed with tunnels full of stubborn protesters refusing to come out until the government promised not to build a bypass through the hillfort above.

Those were the days: the first stirrings of environmental direct action in this country, when I was still young enough to take part unironically. Those who were there too, or those who weren't but would have liked to have been, or those too young to remember - including those whippersnappers currently clogging up the airports with their climate change protests - should buy this new book by photographer Adrian Arbib, which documents everything that happened at Solsbury. It's brilliant, as is the accompanying website, a historical document in itself.

Some exciting news

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:37:00 +0000

I've been writing poetry since I was a student. Most people write poetry as a student, but most then go on to sensibly give it up. I didn't, and have been labouring under the delusion that I am a Proper Poet for fifteen years. Over that time, some in Poetry Authority have encouraged me in that delusion by publishing my work in magazines and even giving me the occasional prize.

Well, maybe it wasn't such a delusion after all. Today I received the very exciting news that a publisher has accepted my debut collection for publication. Salmon, Ireland's leading poetry press, will be publishing Kidland, if all goes well, late next year.

For me, this is incredibly thrilling stuff: one of those things you dream about but never expect to actually happen. I'm over the moon.

More on this as the day approaches. For now: a drink, I think, to celebrate.

New Year's Revolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:31:00 +0000

I like snow. Snow is good. It's snowing here. I just have a feeling it's going to be a good year.

The feeling was intensified this morning when, on a trip to the newsagents, I discovered that pickled onion Monster Munch have reverted to the form in which I knew them as a child.

Ah, that's better. What with bank nationalisation, the ongoing collapse of neoliberalism and the long-overdue banishment of small, fiddly, nancy-sized Monster Munch in stupid post-modern packets, it seems that some small degree of sanity may be returning.

Then, this afternoon, I discovered George Carlin, whose caustic take on environmentalism I find, I must say, rather appealing.

Any regular readers out there, if such people exist, might remember me ranting on a year or so ago, in a Carlin-esque fashion, about the need to move beyond such things; about the pointlessness of the media, and the need for a new publication to challenge both human solipsism and media triviality. In a foolish and heated moment I vowed to go away and start such a thing myself.

I can now report, with some astonishment, that this is actually happening. Great things are afoot. I'm quite excited about them. Watch this space for more. And I may be needing your help, so don't leave town, will you?

How capitalism works, pt 94

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:14:00 +0000

Let's hope for some audacity

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:45:00 +0000

Well, that's a relief.

It takes a lot to melt my cynical old heart, but I stayed up most of last night, and Obama's victory speech was genuinely moving, and genuinely impressive. The simple fact of having an American president who can string a sentence together without looking like a constipated baboon would have been improvement enough, but here's a guy with poetry in his soul. Here's a genuinely impressive man. Maybe he could even become a great one. I can't remember ever being impressed by an American president but, for now at least, I'm impressed by this one.

After a night like that, of course, the inevitable disappointment will only seem worse, so it might be worth reminding ourselves now that there's no such thing a a radical American president. I suspect that those who are expecting some huge step change in America's attitude to the world will be disappointed. And there are some cynical voices out there already; some of them quite funny.

But never mind, at least for now. Obama is Not Bush, and in a world of such chronically low expectations as we currently live in, that's a good start.

A final thought: we have heard ad nauseum, and will continue to hear, about the significance of Obama as 'America's first black president.' But of course, Obama is not black, he's mixed race. I don't say this in a pedantic or sneery way: quite the oppposite. Speaking as a whitey, I actually think that a mixed-race president is possibly more significant than a black one - though I wouldn't deny the massive significance of this for African Americans - because what it demonstrates above all is that ethnicity is not fixed, that race is not immutable, that ghettoisation is not inevitable and that competition between 'cultures' and races is neither necessary nor natural.

It demonstrates to me that we can not only all live together, but that we can love each other too. Hell, we can even marry each other and produce brilliant mixed-race babies who go on to inspire the world. That, more than blackness or whiteness, is the real message of hope for me in this. Here's to less ethnic retrenchment, and more colour-blind human mixing.

Chicken counting

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:25:00 +0000

I'm finding it fascinating how everyone is assuming that Barack Obama is already the next president of the USA. Today I have a piece up on the Granta website which, perhaps foolishly, works on the same assumption - though with the odd note of caution.

It would certainly take an earthquake for him not to win, it seems. But earthquakes happen. If he doesn't, I'll be saving this piece to show my grandchildren. 'The moral of this story, young 'uns', I will say, as the fire glows beside my bath chair, 'is that your grandaddy didn't really ever know what the hell he was talking about. Strangely, people published him anyway. Hell, sometimes they even paid him.'

Mad Mel

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:45:00 +0000

Is it just me, or has Melanie Phillips just crashed across the ill-defined boundary between hysteria and actual certifiable insanity?

I can't wait until this election's over.

Full circle (again)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:10:00 +0000

All of the work I have done over the last couple of years, and everything I have read, is convincing me that we are leaving one political age and entering another. Specifically, we are leaving the post-1990 world of triumphant liberal capitalism - the age of globalisation, which was the subject of my first book. We are leaving it because it has failed. And we are entering an age of populism, in which many things will become possible, many of them nasty.

I touched on this in a post a couple of weeks back. In one sense we are seeing a semi-repeat of the 1930s. Liberal capitalism failed then, too: the elite project that was the 'market economy' created, then, as now, vast amounts of material wealth but at the same time a growing gap between rich and poor and - perhaps more significant - between elite and mass. Then, as now, majorities of the population grew to distrust or even despise their politics, leaders and representatives. They seemed like a cosy cabal, who ignored the real concerns of 'the people'.

Today, across the democratic world, this is true again. In the UK, for example, people are angry about any number of things. Travelling England recently, to research my latest book, I came across this growing sense of a people feeling increasingly disillusioned with, even betrayed by, their representatives. On issues as diverse as immigration and climate change, the EU and the Iraq war, Post Offices and crime, people feel their views are being deliberately and coldly ignored in the interests of elites, corporate and political, whose agendas direct the hands of supposedly 'democratic' governments. However much politicians and their tame journalists protest, this impression is not too far from the truth, which is why it is gaining currency.

The financial crisis, and the bailout of the millionaires, has only helped focus this opinion (don't assume, by the way, that this disillusion is just confined to 'the West': jihadism and Al Qaeda are populist reactions to the power of unresponsive elites in the middle east and Asia). The result will be a turning-away from mainstream politics and all things associated with it, and a rise in support for those who offer easy answers and easy targets, all couched in anti-elite langauge. This kind of populism can come from left and right, but at the moment, with 'the left' virtually non-existent in any serious sense, it's far more likely to be the latter.

In the UK, this may manifest in immigrant-bashing and a rise in support for the BNP - though luckily for us, the BNP are so fanatically racist and dumb that their appeal is probably limited: they are strictly unintelligent populists. In the world's sole 'superpower', meanwhile, Sarah Palin and the neo-Nazis who even now are plotting to kill Barack Obama may be, rather than a blip on the chart, the true future of 'democracy' in that once-radical nation. Chris Hedges wites about this possibility chillingly here. And here's a video of the fire being nicely fuelled at a recent McCain/Palin rally:

A year or two ago, suggesting that this might be on the cards might have seemed far-fetched. But the world is moving very fast right now, and many things that seemed insane when the world was more comfortable now seem worryingly possible - even likely. Keep your eyes open.

Immigration: truisms vs cliches

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 10:50:00 +0000

The latest little spat about immigration in the UK is revealing - not just about the issue itself, but about the confusion of those who take a position on it. Especially, in my view, the increasingly vaguely-defined collection of people who nowadays call themselves 'the left' (or, if you read the Guardian or are American, the 'progressives' - sounds so much less threatening, don't you think?)

Here's the news: new immigration minister Phil Woolas has, for the first time since Labour came to power, publicly declared that immigration levels are too high. He has linked this to the economic downturn - because there will be fewer jobs, he says, the government should make sure more of them go to British people. Also, and significantly in my view, he has linked immigration, again for the first time, to our rapidly rising population. The UK's population is currently almost 61 million. But it's predicted to rise to a staggering 77 million by 2051 if current levels of immigration continue. Immigration is the main cause of population increase in the UK; nearly two thirds of a million people arrived here last year alone.

I don't know what's going on in the Labour party at the moment. It seems as if the financial crash has given them permission to excitedly start slaughtering all their sacred cows. Suddenly it's all bank nationalisation, 80% climate change targets, Keynesianism on the international stage and even - who'd a thunk it? - a public discussion about immigration.

Not before time on any of these things, in my opinion. On immigration itself, whatever your view on the matter it is hard to deny that the way it has been handled over the last decade has been deeply undemocratic. The number of people expressing concern about immigration has shot up in the last decade; coinciding with the largest rise in immigration in British history. Call them all racists if you like (though it would be lazy, and wrong), but if you call yourself a democrat you have to question the right of any government to carry out, over such a long period, a policy which results in such significant social change, against the wishes of its people. Still, that's British 'democracy' for you.

It's worth noting the stunning hypocrisy of Labour's volte-face on this one. For a decade they have engineered a situation in which public discussions about immigration are taboo, by hinting darkly at the motivations of anyone who tries to hold them. Not uncoincidentally, BNP support has shot up to record levels over the same period. You can blame the government directly for that. Over the same period, too, pressures on housing, schools, hospitals, roads and even entire towns have become in some places extremely significant as a result.

Why is this happening? For the same reason that immigration always happens - people move to make a better life for themselves. Nobody can complain about this - we'd all do it if we had to, and some of us already have. But that doesn't mean its wider impacts are always harmless. The government has actively encouraged immigration into the UK, but not for humanitarian reasons. It has encouraged this because the logic of globalisation requires it. A corporate economy needs cheap labour. Where do we get it? From elsewhere, now that British workers are no longer willing to be exploited.

Hence we have a Labour government - a Labour government - shipping in millions of cheap foreigners ripe for exploitation in order to keep the markets happy, at the same time leaving the indigenous working classes - who, remember, founded the bleedin' Labour party in the first place - high and dry and thinking of voting for the BNP. Nice one, New Labour. Very humanitarian. Very internationalist.

But the wider left - and you'll excuse a few generalisations in pursuit of a deeper truth - seems equally confused in its response. For a long time now, the left's position on immigration has been one of the reasons it has become so cut off from popular sentiment, and largely irrelevant in what were once its heartlands: the working class areas of Britain, where immigration is extremely unpopular. That position has always been pretty simple: racists don't like immigration. Therefore, people who don't like immigration are racists. Therefore we are against them and in favour of all immigration, at all times.

For a few decades this seemed to get them through. They didn't bother following the logic any further. But things are reaching a crunch point with the current crash, and we're going to have to do better than this. Particularly when many of the people most opposed to new immigration are, er, Britain's ethnic minorities.

The predictable reactions to Woolas's statement have highlighted some of the contradictions. Let's have a look at what some of those reactions say about the politics of immigration:

1. This is 'pandering to the right.' So says annoying former minister Denis McShane. 'At a time of economic downturn Britain should be a welcoming country for foreign investment', he says, ignoring the fact that this is precisely not about investment, it's about cheap labour for the investors. And 'pandering to the right'? A better way of doing that is to keep doing what Denis and his ilk have been doing for ten years - trying to shut down any discussion about the impacts of immigration. That way, the BNP, UKIP and even the Tories get the votes of frustrated people who are genuinely concerned about the impacts of immigration but keep being called fascists by McShane and his chums when they dare to mention it.

2. This is basically racist. So says Labour MP Khalid Mahmood, who reckons this is really just code for preventing more South Asian immigration. This ignores Woolas's explicit statement that unlimited immigration, rather than immigration limits, is most likely to cause ethnic tension during a downturn (I suspect he's right about that). Others have claimed that Gordon Brown's famed 'British jobs for British workers' position is somehow an outrageously far-right sop. I can't see why. British workers employ (by voting for) the British government, and pay for it. What's outrageous about that government, in return, looking out for their economic interests before those of non-voters and non-taxpayers? If it doesn't do that, what's the point of the British government at all? On what foundation is our democracy based? Answers on a postcard, once you've actually thought about it.

3. This is bad for the economy. According to the Immigration Advisory Service, we need immigrants because Britons are not prepared, or even allowed, to do the really shitty jobs. Note how almost everyone, from opponents to supporters of the government's position, frames the issue in terms of that mythical beast 'the economy.' Remember: 'the economy' runs us, not the other way round. Therefore if 'the economy' needs a million new migrants a year, it should get them. Never mind the wider consequences - of which the Immigration Advisory Service curiously has nothing to say at all. Listen to their chief executive arguing that immigrants are needed to debone our fish or pick our vegetables and ask yourself what kind of 'humanitarian' argument that is? Here is a prime example of the left using neoliberal arguments if they happen to suit its cause. Very principled.

4. We can't stop the population growing. This is the one that really gets my goat - and it's a great example of where the left's cannibalising of the environmental movement is coming a cropper. Population growth is a disaster for Britain. We are already, in my view, overcrowded and overdeveloped - especially in southeast England. The idea of allowing, or encouraging, the population to grow by almost a million a year in the name of propping up global capitalism is a painful joke. If you are in favour of unlimited immigration you need to be able to explain where all the new houses and roads will go. And the new schools, hospitals, power plants, superstores and call centres. You need to be able to explain the impact on our climate change targets. And what the country will look like at 77 million and rising. Environmental arguments are always predicated on the existence of limits. What is the limit here? When should population growth - and thus immigration - stop? If you can't answer that, you are wasting our time.

Personally, I think Woolas is onto something - as I thought Frank Field was earlier this year. I am in favour of immigration - I think it has certainly made the country a more interesting and more open place. Some critics are obviously right to point out that immigrants often get scapegoated during hard times - and we need to ensure they don't. But we also need to make sure that understandable caution about fanning the flames of xenophobia does not translate - as it has for too long - into a refusal to even discuss what has become a big issue; especially since refusing to discuss it tends to fan, rather than dampen, those flames in any case.

But while I am in favour of both immigration and the judicious use of language, I am also in favour of preventing further population growth, and I'm in favour of moving away from an economic system predicated on endless growth and providing for corporate 'needs.' Thus, in my view, immigration and emigration should be pretty much balanced. This means a big cut in immigration from the present numbers - perhaps less hard than it sounds now that many Eastern Europeans are returning home, where their economies may end up doing better than ours (do we even have an economy? Discuss).

We need to take things more slowly and - crucially - to understand that the current immigration debate is couched almost entirely in the terms of the demands of a rampant neoliberal economy; and that the wider left have fallen for it hook, line and sinker, because they haven't bothered to ask where their positions will ultimately take them.

Inevitable end of capitalism postponed until next time

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:49:00 +0000

Not that I want to be putting a downer into the pint glass of every piece of potentially exciting news - and much as I would love to see the collapse of the global economy - but Simon Jenkins has interesting things to say this morning about why the 'credit crunch' probably won't, in the long term, affect capitalism very much at all.

Meanwhile, almost to illustrate his point - and in the same paper - young Master Freedland is still talking balls. It seems that in order to be a Labour-supporting Guardian columnist you need endless reservoirs of hope and a striking ability to deny reality. I guess that's what they pay them for.

Still, there is some good news. Over in America, Barack Obama is apparently going to steal the election. A little bit late, but justice postponed is better than nothing.

Barack, Bill and the importance of not getting carried away

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:19:00 +0000

I've always been an election-head, so I've been eating up the news from the US relentlessly for weeks. This despite the fact that I know 'democracy' in the US, and across the 'developed' world is a sham: a thin cloak of populism worn by a corporate oligarchy whose approved candidates will never be allowed to seriously frighten the horses.

Still, this election is meant to be world-changing, right? After all, here's the USA, 'superpower' for over sixty years, going down spectacularly. Trillions in debt, much of its industry owned by China, fighting two hated and useless wars, the gap between its rich and its poor growing fast, millions of its people without health insurance, its ageing infrastructure polluting the planet at a rate even we can't match.

And here is its choice: a desperate, decrepit 'war hero' whose PTSD is still on clear public display, backed up by a terrifyingly ignorant far-right populist who thinks that children rode dinosaurs and sunspots cause climate change.

And then: Barack Obama.

Ah yes: Obama. A hero to us all. Young, slim, good-looking, cool. With his deep timbre and his cotton shirts, his brilliant rhetoric and his message of change. As times grow increasingly desperate, Barack is our hope: possibly our only hope.

I've lost count of the times I've heard this sort of thing over the last few months, from people who should know better. For a certain segment of the middle class intellectual left, Obama is their wet dream. He's coolly liberal, but not too threatening. He can speak like an angel without actually saying much. And, of course, he's black (well, sort of): and let's not pretend this doesn't hit the right buttons for a guilty white lefty.

I don't want to sound like McCain, but who knows what or who Obama is or will be? The new Lincoln or the new Clinton? The reality is that we have no idea. What we do know is that huge hopes are being loaded onto him, and that much of what people believe about what he will do to save/liberate/rescue America is based not on what he has done already in US politics (not very much) or what he believes (actually quite hard to tell) but what people want him to be. After eight years of Bush there is a desperate yearning for an archetype that represents something better, and millions have bought into the idea that Obama is that archetype.

This is tough on him, because he will never be able to live up to these projected expectations. I remember something similar happening when Blair was elected here back in 1997. It sounds hilarious to say it now, but people thought he was our young, cool, liberal saviour too. And then there was Clinton - triangulator, deregulator of banks, begetter of NAFTA, the man who is at least partly responsible for the current economic mess. Have a look at this video of Clinton debating during his 1992 election campaign.

See how cool he looks compared to the hopeless Bush: see how he packages peoples' hopes and carries them on his shoulders. See how he 'connects'. He's brilliant (and better at it than Obama, incidentally). People had high hopes for him too.

A little more circumspection is in order. Obama is just a man. He's a fearsomely ambitious young politician who's never run anything, but whose timing is perfect and whose fortune is to represent a number of things that people seem to want, even though they may not have known it until now.

Let's not get carried away here, people. There's probably nothing to see.

Here we go again?

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:11:00 +0000

I remember, four years back, being at a seminar on 'life after capitalism', at the European Social Forum. It was one of those optimistic events, in which activists of various stripes, from anarchists to economists (they're never the same thing, funnily) laid out their stalls. There was general eagerness for capitalism to end, so we could all get down to putting something wonderful in its place.

On the panel was the economist Susan George, who has done more than most people to suggest alternatives to the current charade. She chose to inject a usefully sober note into the debate. It's worth reproducing what she said, because it seems interestingly prescient:

There is a serious possibility that this unstable global economy could actually collapse. We could then be faced with a Weimar-type situation. We could experience war, dictatorship, instability and military takeover. Remember that life after capitalism could be worse than what we have now. This movement has got to get serious in thinking about how we could avoid this outcome. We have got to take capitalism as seriously as it takes itself, because it is relentless.

I thought of this when I was watching footage of a John McCain rally descending into something not a million miles away from a 21st century Nuremberg. Listen to those chants of 'USA! USA! USA!' and tell me you don't feel nervous. There are a lot of very furious Americans out there, and an Obama presidency is only going to make them even more furious. When capitalism goes down it almost inevitably throws up someone, or something, which rides on the back of promises to take control - serious control - of the mess for the good of the country. This article looks at how this might yet happen in America. It's worth a read.

There is no evidence of a human-induced financial crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:47:00 +0000

It's true. Don't believe what they tell you. It's a plot by middle-class Luddites to deprive you of your well-earned lifestyle. See?

I'm back - again; I know - after too much time away. With everything collapsing everywhere, I can't help thinking that the world needs me.

Very soon I will have a lot to say about the American elections. Probably tomorrow. Certainly not in four months time. I'm just brushing off the dust.

Emerges blinking into the rain

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:08:00 +0000

Hello again.

It's been a while, but I am back; without fanfare but re-engaged nonetheless. I might be a bit slow getting back up to my previous blogging form. It's high summer, I have another blog to commandeer and, most interestingly for me, I am about to start seriously researching my long-planned novel. I've been meaning to do this for months. Well, it starts tomorrow.

Distracting me from this purpose have been various book-related events, of which there will be many more over the next six weeks (have a look at the updated list of my speaker engagements). Plus, on the back of the book, people keep asking me to write things for them. This is very flattering - although it has rather undermined my previous avowed intent to stop writing journalism. Oh well. A lot of what I've had to say has been on the subject of liberty versus the Machine, inspired of course by Mr Davis. Here's what I think of him, and here's what I think of the Machine.

Anyway, I must go and add three months worth of articles to this site. But I will be back soon, and I won't wait so long this time.

Hiatus

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:31:00 +0000

Apologies for the on-off nature of this blog recently. Work on the book has left me with little time for anything else, so I can only plead overload.

It's likely this will continue for a while and this, plus a planned holiday soon, means there may not be much going on here for a month or so. I thought I should warn you so you can make other plans.

I will be back though - and in the meantime there is still liveliness in evidence over at the Real England blog.

See you when I surface.

It's the only language they understand

noreply@blogger.com (Paul) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:26:00 +0000

Sorry for the absence of posts recently. Lots is happening on the book front (look out for an extract in the Guardian this Saturday), plus I am dividing my time between here and the Real England blog. There's only so much a man can write.

I do, however, want to share the heartening news that Alastair Darling is being barred from pubs across the land, following his dastardly tax hike on beer in the budget, which will doubtless see even more locals close for ever. Personally I think this is all pretty timid stuff. I would prefer to see him strung up from a lamp post by his fingertips, next to Jack Straw and Ed Balls. That's not really anything to do with beer taxes, though. It would just be for fun.