Well done Tunisia, I hope that next spring is Our Spring

I would like to begin my first blog in quite some time, by wholeheartedly congratulating the people of Tunisia, on their first free elections in at least 40 years. The election took place on Sunday, with 90% of those registered to vote turning out and queuing for hours to do so, freely, fairly, and without the involvement of men with guns telling people how to vote.

In results just announced this afternoon, the moderate islamist party Ennehda took 41.47% of the vote to secure 90 out of 217 seats in the assembly established to appoint a president, form a caretaker government and rewrite the constitution, following the peaceful revolution against the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, which kick-started the "Arab Spring", earlier this year. Second and third places respectively were taken by The Congress for the Republic party founded by human rights activist Monsef Marzouki and The Democratic Forum for Labour and Freedoms led by Mustafa Ben Jaafar. Ennehda leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, said today "We will continue this revolution to realise its aims of a Tunisia that is free, independent, and developing in which the rights of God, the prophet, women, men, the religious and the non-religious are assured, because Tunisia is for everyone."

Taking him on his word, those are sentiments that should indeed be praised, and I have little doubt that he will be held to them. Protests against the results of the election have already ocurred in the town where the revolution started, and if you ask me that is only to be expected. We're talking about a new republic in a country where any form of political expression was illegal, until the mass mobilisation of people onto the streets brought down a dictatorial regime and inspired further uprisings in Egypt, in Libya and arguably New York, London, and dozens of other cities around the world where the 99% movement is taking hold.

These are people who know the power of protest, if they weren't still protesting, I would probably say there was something wrong!

There is obviously much that can still go wrong, but secular liberals do not seem afraid that there is much danger of an islamic dictatorship taking hold, Ennadhi will have no choice but to work closely with the other parties to form a coalition, and is pledged to deliver a new constituion for Tunisia within the next 12 months.

These events do seem to have been overshadowed by the bloodshed in neighbouring Libya, but the remarkable achievements of the Tunisian people so far should not be dismissed. If they pull this off, they will have set an example that the whole world can follow. Regimes that are corrupt, anti-democratic and tyrannical can be overthrown without widespread conflict and NATO bombing raids, the 99% can take the power away from the 1% just by getting out onto the streets and refusing to go home until things change.

Protest is a powerful thing. The surprising thing is not that there are people camped out in our city streets right now demonstrating against greed, and inequity, pollution, war mongering and control of our governments by a tiny minority, when we read that the average salary for the director of an FTSE 100 company increased by 49% this year (and 55% last year), whereas wages for the average worker have not even kept up with rises in inflation, the surprising thing is that there aren't ten thousand times as many people out there as there are.

It is going to be a cold winter for #OccupyWallSt, #OccupyLSX and all the rest, but next spring could be Our Spring!

Phone Hacking: I Can Understand The Outrage, But Not The Sense Of Shock

or

Apocalypse NOTW

Two years ago today, the British newspaper The Guardian broke the story that journalists at the Murdoch owned tabloid, the News Of The World, had been illegally hacking into the voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians, and who knows who else.

Well two years down the line we are beginning to have an understanding of exactly who else was being hacked, as well as the high profile political figures, the British Royal Family, sports stars and TV personalities, they were also stalking the voicemails of murdered school girl Milly Dowler, the victims and loved ones of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks and the families of British service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Police are now finally, FINALLY, investigating allegations that more than 4000 people had their phones hacked in what could be the biggest invasion of privacy in media history.

This scandal which had been bubbling quietly in the background for years, erupted into a force 10 shit-storm against the backdrop of the takeover of BSkyB by Murdoch's News Corporation, which already owns 39% percent of Britain's largest pay-to-view television station and has just been given the green-light by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to take 100% control. On top of his 100% stake in the Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The News Of The World and publishers Harper Collins, this gives Murdoch a staggering amount of influence over the British media and the decision to allow the takeover has been received with incredulity by pretty much everyone outside Murdoch's sphere of influence, most notably The Guardian's Nick Davies, Labour MP Tom Watson and actor Hugh Grant.

This has already been described as the British Watergate, and truly exposes the insidious grip Murdoch's corrupt media empire has on our political establishment, and just how far those tendrils of control actually run. They certainly run deep into the Metropolitan Police, who appear to have done everything they could to slow down and mismanage the investigation they were supposed to be conducting into the News Of The World's activities, whilst their officers accepted over a hundred thousand pounds in bribes from the NOTW.

They appear to run even deeper into 10 Downing Street, Rebekah Brooks, who was the editor of the NOTW at the time and is now chief executive of News International, has been described as a close personal friend of Prime Minister David Cameron, whilst Andy Coulson, who succeeded Brooks as NOTW editor and was forced to resign in 2007 following the conviction of one of his journalists for phone hacking, immediately went on to become the Conservative Party's Director of Communications, a post he held through the 2010 General Election and into government, right up to 2011, when he was once again forced to resign over the phone hacking scandal.

Yesterday News Corp announced that this Sunday's edition of the NOTW, already the target of a hugely popular boycott campaign that has seen many companies remove their advertising from the "newspaper", would be its last, widely seen as further attempt to cover-up what their paper was doing and distract attention away from the BSkyB takeover, and this morning Andy Coulson has been arrested on allegations surrounding corruption and phone hacking.

"Kaboom!" Twitterbomb!

Right, that's enough of what I know, lets take a deep breath, poke that dangerously engorged spleen with a sharp stick and see what I think...

I think that over the last 30 or so years Rupert Murdoch, through his ever growing stranglehold on the British media, has presented a strong anti-democratic force in British politics. From Thatcher's use of the police to break the strikes in the Wapping Dispute of 1986, via 1992's "It was The Sun won won it" headline the day after the General Election, to the defection from Conservative to Tony Blair's New Labour prior to the 1997 General Election and the inevitable defection back to the Conservative Party, when Gordon Brown replaced Blair as Labour leader in 2007, Rupert Murdoch's editors have predicted and preempted changes of government so reliably one really has to wonder; does he change sides because he knows which party is going to win, or does the party in question win because Rupert Murdoch has changed sides? It is certainly fair to say that no political party has won a General Election in this country without the backing of Murdoch's media empire since about 1979, and you really have to wonder what a political party may be willing to promise in order to secure that support.

Is it worth pointing out at this stage that despite making billions of pounds in the UK over the last few decades, Rupert Murdoch has paid roughly, rounding-down, absolutely fuck all in tax?

In return for absolute unwavering support for the party in power, he has been allowed to get away with murder.

Figuratively speaking of course.

Probably.

Murdoch has notoriously exacted a great deal of personal control over his newspapers editorial content, his agenda is unflinchingly right wing, pro-war, pro-big business, pro-tax cuts for the rich, pro-Israel, pro-apartheid, anti-feminist, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-trade union, anti-NHS, anti-BBC, anti-welfare state and most certainly anti-anything that might restrict how much of the British media he is allowed to own. His newspapers bombard us with coverage of how disgraceful it is that one footballer or another has cheated on his wife, yes, the News Of The World that bastion of family values and morality that happily plasters half naked women across half its pages every week. His papers fill us to the point of obesity with tawdry scandal, celebrity drivel and sport, whilst downplaying anything of real note that can not be twisted to serve his own agenda. They make up the most vile rumours about people and hungrily leap upon the most thuggish of moral panics, feeding upon the pain and misery of the people whose stories they report, and whose causes they they claim to champion.

Abused children, terror victims and dead soldiers.

How can a newspaper claim to support "Help For Heroes" when they were amongst the loudest cheerleader for an illegal invasion and an unjust war that has killed hundreds of British service men and women? This for me was one reason why it was particularly satisfying to see the British Legion pull its advertising from this week News Of The World. If Rupert Murdoch was any more of a villain he would have to move News International's headquarters to a secret location on a tropical island, underneath a volcano, and conduct all television interviews whilst stroking a white cat.

One question that springs to mind is why is everyone so surprised to learn the lengths at which these tabloid grave-robbers will go to, in order to stir the pot of scandal or outrage? We know they have been caught raking through peoples dust-bins and tapping private conversations before.

Their choice of victims whose privacy they invaded is also unsurprising, their red-tops in particular have always capitalised on tragedy and disaster, both public and personal in order to sell their papers, why is anyone shocked that they would erase voice mail messages from the telephone of a teenage girl missing from home, in order to glean fresh tid-bits for their scandal-sheet from the new messages that could then be left. Why is anyone surprised that they would give Milly Dowler's family false hope that she was still alive? Misery and anger have been their bread and butter for years. Why is anyone surprised that they would shut down the News Of The World and put hundreds of employees out of work but refuse to fire Rebekah Brooks, in a move described on Twitter as being like a surgeon cutting away all the healthy tissue in order to save the cancer. Murdoch's reputation for having nothing but contempt for his staff goes back a long, long way.

And finally, why is anyone surprised that our politicians in government and opposition, with a tiny number of notable exceptions, have done absolutely nothing to oppose him until now? Or why the Metropolitan Police sat on their hands for so many years? Rupert Murdoch was the second person to enter 10 Downing Street after David Cameron was elected as Prime Minister in May 2010. Ed Miliband was at a party thrown by Rupert Murdoch two weeks ago and has admitted he made no criticism, and raised none of the issues he is raising now. Between the Times, The Sun and the News Of The World, Murdoch has long been able to destroy the career of virtually anyone he chooses to turn his dogs loose on, and who knows what he knows about whom, after years of secret phone hacking? Senior politicians and police officers have been described as "terrified" of Murdoch's influence. If Glenn Mulcaine did uncover anything of genuine public interest from phone hacking, not sleazy gossip or stolen moments of private anguish, but something of actual political importance that the people had a right to know, the chances are that it would have never seen the light of day, if it could instead be be kept aside to increase Murdoch's influence over British politicians.

Perhaps we are at the point now where the NOTW has become so toxic that nothing he could now reveal about them can possibly be worse than the effect of continuing to publicly defend it?

Or perhaps not, because despite everything that has been said and despite a petition signed by over a 150,000 people in 72 hours, David Cameron is still refusing to freeze the News Corp takeover of BSkyB.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been absolutely marvelous at showing exactly how outraged the British public is about all of this, and I really hope we manage to keep up the pressure and insist on full and timely public judicial enquiries, that heads will roll and this story does not get kicked into the long grass to be ignored until after the next election. The pressure on advertisers to withdraw from the NOTW came from the public campaign for a boycott, that is a tactic which can be extended to the rest of the Murdoch empire, we should boycott The Sun, The Times, Sky Sports, the fucking lot, and when The Sun on Sunday inevitably rears its ugly head as the newest sphincter in the Murdoch news-arse, we should boycott that too.

And if we dont, if Murdoch is allowed to get that much closer to a monopoly of the British media, I am sure that David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and the rest of them will certainly reap their rewards.

Do You Want Fries With Your Bilderberger?

The BBC chose to mark this weeks 59th meeting of the Bilderberg Group , held in St Moritz this year, with a magazine article asking "Why do people believe in Cabals?"

On the one hand this could be interpreted as the usual dismissive pat-piece, striving to label anyone with an interest in what is going on behind the closed doors of the conference centre as a conspiracy theory fantasist, either wide-eyed and credulous half-wits filled with fevered speculation, or fanatically frothing at the mouth with barely concealed anti-Semitic hatred and paranoia.

On the other hand you might chose to read the article, which was the only actual reference to the Bilderberg meeting I could find on the entire BBC news site, as a cunningly concealed satire, parodying itself and answering its own rhetorical question with the unspoken answer: "perhaps people believe in cabals because groups like Bilderberg insist on meeting every year without publishing an agenda, confirming exactly who was in attendance or what was decided upon, and without letting any representatives from the global news media inside to have a look!"

The Bilderberg Group have been meeting since 1954 but it is only in the last ten years or so that it has passed out of the realm of myth and become something that, although still secret, is publicly acknowledged to exist outside the seedy web pages of the conspiracists. The journalist Jon Ronson was the first to introduce me to the topic, with his excellent book "Them: Adventures with Extremists" (Picador 2001), and the rise of the bloggosphere and the alternative media have done much to raise Bilderberg up into slightly more mainstream discourse. Charlie Skelton of The Guardian has been reporting back this week, ankle deep in muddy water, on what snippets of information he can glean by camping-out outside the conference centre in Switzerland.

A full "official" list of this years attendees was published here, but as ever there have been surprise last minute guests, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Anders Rasmussen, the Secretary General of NATO. As you can see the list includes our own George Osborne, attending in his official capacity as Chancellor of the Exchequer, once again rubbing shoulders with Lord Mandelson, although not aboard a Russian oligarch's yacht this time.

So the man in charge of the British economy has met with high ranking politicians from Europe and the US, with heads of state and top members of international organisations like the European Council, and with senior members of half the major banks and corporations in the western world, during the biggest financial crisis in world history, against the backdrop of widespread revolution in the Arab Spring, and we are supposed to believe that they were not in fact doing business?

It is vaguely possible, I suppose, that all those hugely powerful and influential men and women were gathered together in one place just for some kind of rich-fuckers jamboree, to eat big dinners, drink nice wine, maybe have a sauna and enquire politely after each others families, golf handicaps or if they are going anywhere nice on holiday this year. Game of "bingo" anyone? It is also possible, however, that they were meeting in absolute privacy, to discuss and make decisions on matters of vital global importance, completely outside the scrutiny of the media, and without having to report any of it back to the people who voted them into their positions of power and influence in the first place, whether they be the electorate of one nation state or another, or the shareholders of an international corporation.

Personally, I do not think it is even remotely possible for so many of that calibre of people to gather together in one place without talking "shop", and when the "shop" in question includes some of the most powerful governmental and economic institutions on the planet, Bilderberg meetings highlight a fundamental flaw in our concept of democracy. We elect people to make decisions for us, and we should expect those people to make those decisions in light of what we want, of what is in our best interests and, most importantly, in an open and transparent way so that we can properly judge what they are doing and whose interests they are actually representing. When our elected leaders, the people who set our social, economic and military policies meet in secret with the representatives of the wealthiest people on Earth, you can not help but worry that it is a bad day for democracy.

Realistically, the news media should be going absolutely mental over their exclusion from the conference. If 140 of the worlds foremost footballers and pop stars were meeting together in the same hotel for a weekend, the place would be an all singing, all dancing, three-ring media feeding frenzy; the G20 and G8 summits are huge events in the global media calendar with embedded journos, live interviews and press releases galore, but Bilderberg is almost completely dismissed by the mass-media, and anyone with the temerity to wonder what exactly they are up to in there is treated as if they have just donned a turquoise track-suit and claimed to be the son of god-head.

I must point out that I do not think it is physically possible for any one group to secretly "control the world" in the way that the most rampant of conspiracy theories suggest, I would even go so far as to suggest it is wishful thinking on their part, that they somehow find more comfort in the idea of someone evil being in control, than they do in the frightening possibility that no-one is actually in control.

On the other hand, the idea that various groups with common interests may align with each other in an ATTEMPT control the world, or at least to exert enough influence over it to ensure they stay ahead of all the other groups who also wish to control the world, feels like simple common sense to me, and Bilderberg looks very much like the Annual General Meeting of one such group. If Bilderberg genuinely is a harmless social club, that in no way works to subvert the democratic process of decision making, then all they have to do to dispel the "myth" that they are in some way an elite cabal ruling us in secret, and setting policy that suits their interests rather than the interests of vote casting masses, is open their doors to full public scrutiny.

Or at least publish the minutes.

And until they do I will continue to feel absolutely zero embarrassment in suspecting they are up to no good.

The drug laws don't work, they just make it worse...

The Global Commission on Drug Policy; which includes such noted hippy ne'er-do-wells as Kofi Annan (former UN Secretary General), Ernesto Zedillo (former President of Mexico), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (former President of Brazil), Cesar Gaviria (former President of Colombia), Paul Volker (ex Chairman of the US Federal Reserve), George Papandreou (President of Greece) and Sir Richard Branson (billionaire entrepreneur), has reported that the "War on Drugs" has failed, calling for certain drugs to be decriminalised and for an end to the practice of treating drug users as criminals.

They argue that despite the many billions of dollars spent and countless lives lost on the global fight against the drugs trade, the use of opiates has increased by 35%, cocaine by 27% and cannabis by 8.5% worldwide between 1998 and 2008, claiming that:

"Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won,"

With no small amount of irony, the report also marks the 40th anniversary of the United Kingdom's Misuse of Drugs Act (1971), against which the national drugs charity Release have launched a new campaign with an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, published in today's Guardian (02/06/11). The letter, signed by Bob Ainsworth (former Drugs Minister), Paul Whitehouse, Francis Wilkinson and Tom Lloyd (former Chief Constables), Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC, and celebrities including Dame Judi Dench, Julie Christie, Mike Leigh and Sting, points out that current drug policy is doing more harm than good and calls for an immediate and transparent review.

Now to me, this was obvious even before I graduated in criminology back in the late 1990s, although as a teenage student at the time my opinions were perhaps more selfishly motivated than they are today.

Put simply, if the point of drugs legislation is to control the supply and prevent the use of mind-altering substances, they have blatantly, incontrovertibly, failed. Drugs have never been more readily available, never been cheaper and more people are taking them than ever before. Demand for them is increasing year on year, as are the negative consequences of their use upon individuals and society at large, and the enormous financial costs of tackling a problem with a policy which clearly does not understand it, and legislation that simply is not fit for the purpose of dealing with it.

First of all, I want you to set aside any questions on the moral rights and wrongs of drug use/abuse, as they are not really that relevant here. Let us deal in practicalities...

If you are anti-drugs, what that normally means is that you are opposed to the negative consequences of drug use upon yourself, your family and the society that you live in. You do not want drug dealers on your streets, trying to sell them to your kids. You do not want people stealing from you to fund their habit. You do not want disease being spread around. You do not want to have to step over the dessicated corpses of overdosed addicts on your way to work in the morning. You do not want to have to spend so much tax-money enforcing laws that are not doing anything to eliminate these negative consequences. You may even have concerns about the effects of western drug use in other countries, the abuse of the peasant farmers who grow them and the poverty they live in, the environmental damage of processing the raw ingredients, the global organised crime syndicates making trillions of pounds on the trade in heroin and cocaine, the brutal and bloody front lines of the war against drugs in countries like Mexico and Afghanistan, where violent conflict between gangs and authorities kills thousands of people every year.

If you are pro-drugs, you also want them to be safer, cleaner, and of better and more consistent quality. You may be perfectly law abiding in every single other respect, and concerned that you run the risk of being imprisoned and labelled as a criminal for life every time you smoke a joint. You may feel that if you become addicted to one substance or another, you should be seen as someone with an illness who needs help and treatment, not as some kind of criminal deviant who needs to be punished. In fact you probably share most of the same concerns about the negative effects of drug use as those in the anti-drugs camp.

In short, whether you are pro-drugs or anti-drugs or anywhere in-between, it should be quite apparent that our current approach to controlling drugs just isn't working. We can not eradicate the demand, essentially because so many different types of people want to take so many different kinds of drugs for such a vast array of different reasons. Taking drugs can be dangerous, just like mountain climbing, playing rugby and riding motorbikes can be dangerous, but people still want to take them. In the UK drug possession can get you a large fine or sent to prison for life, but people still want to take them. In other countries drug possession can get you a death sentence, but people still want to take them. In certain cultures the use of intoxicants will result in your immortal soul being condemned to hell for all eternity, and guess what? People in those cultures STILL want to take drugs. In Britain getting off our collective face, one way or another, is practically our national sport. The rich want to drink, smoke and take drugs, the poor want to drink, smoke and take drugs, they always have, and they always will, so forget any idea that we can magically eradicate the demand for drugs in our society.

In the face of such a demand, there will always be enterprising free market capitalist types who are more than happy to meet it. It is impossible to stop them getting into the country, every high profile seizure represents the tiniest tip of a huge pyramid of drugs entering the country, or being home-grown right here. It has proven impossible even to stop drugs getting into the prison system, which suggests that even if you you enforced the most draconian laws and turned the entire country into a prison, you would STILL have a drug problem.

The alternate proposal is that you decriminalise certain drugs, like cannabis and ecstasy altogether, and decriminalise the possession of hard drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin whilst still prohibiting their sale.

So if you are diagnosed as a crack of heroin addict by your doctor, your doctor will provide you with a clean, measured supply of the substance you are addicted to on prescription, whilst monitoring your health, constantly stressing how bad it is for you and making sure every possible treatment programme to help you overcome your addiction is made available. Levels of petty theft, burglary, shop-lifting and robbery would fall as addicts no longer needed to steal to fund their habits. A properly managed policy of decriminalisation would deprive organised crime of an enormously profitable revenue stream and hopefully put them out of business altogether. Soft drugs such as cannabis, available from properly licensed retailers, could be mass produced, heavily taxed and still be priced to undercut the black-market. You stop wasting police time chasing after and prosecuting drug users, giving them more time to catch illegal suppliers, you also stop imprisoning drug users, at huge expense to the public. Cleaner, safer, standardised weights and measures of drugs would reduce the number of overdoses, and as users could be properly educated on the health risks involved and provided with sterile equipment, the risk of infection with HIV and hepatitis would also be dramatically reduced. The burden and the cost of care on the health service, would therefore also be dramatically reduced.

You may think that this would simply result in drugs being more widely available, and in more people taking them? Well take a look around, even in a rich country with some of the most stringent anti-drug laws in the world, drugs are ALREADY widely available, and ANYONE with the inclination and the money to buy them can already get hold of them very easily indeed. I really do believe that a policy that approaches drug use from a health and human rights perspective, rather than a criminal one, will ultimately result in a society with fewer drug addicts and fewer drug abusers. No matter how radical the proposal may sound, and considering that it is simply a return to the drugs-policy we followed in this country up to the mid 1960s, before the drug-problem exploded onto our streets, it really isn't all that radical, it can not realistically cause more harm that the policy we follow at the moment. It will result in less crime, lower costs for our criminal justice and health services, and in healthier, safer drug users who are more far more able to beat their addictions and reintegrate into society.

Returning to the report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy and the Release campaign, it is interesting to note that practically every politician or public figure who has put their signature to it, is an ex-this or a former-that, presidents, chief constables, government ministers, people who were all once in incredibly influential positions ideally placed to really get something done on the issue, but waited until they retired, or were voted out before they actually said anything about it. Why do you think that is?

I have enthusiastically devoured numerous conspiracy theories on the matter of why drugs are "really" illegal, each only slightly more or less entertainingly ludicrous than the next, but one that seems to have a little more substance is the one that Howard Marks settled on in his book Mr Nice. In Britain, and most particularly in the United States of America, and lets face it between the two of us we consume more illegal drugs than the rest of the planet combined, we are still afflicted by some kind of puritanical throwback to the 17th Century which states we must be punished for every single pleasurable experience we enjoy. They clearly couldn't give two shits about the hardships and degradations that people at home and abroad endure because of the trade in and the abuse of drugs, because our policy seems almost deliberately calculated to exacerbate every single one of them, so it must be about the pleasure people get from drugs instead.

There is a large knee-jerk conservative voting block out there in Western Europe and North America, and whether they be on the right or the left of the political spectrum they all seem to hate nothing more than the idea of someone having a better time than they are. So any politician who offers them a policy that will (a) greatly reduce the harm caused to the individual and to society by the use of hard drugs, (b) reduce the burden on the tax payer by not wasting billions on the counterproductive war on drugs, (c) reduce crime, (d) reduce disease transmission and death from drug abuse BUT will also mean that (e) people can use soft or "recreational" drugs more or less to their hearts content... will quickly find themselves facing the political equivalent of being hung, drawn and quartered.

That, I think, is why no matter how good an idea it is, no currently serving politician will ever put their name to it for fear of it immediately ending their career.

Which, when you get down to it, is a bit of a fucking tragedy.

I Think I've Raptured Something...

There is this theory about something called a self fulfilling prophesy.

The idea goes that if someone believes a predicted event will happen strongly, fervently, enough, they can actually make it happen just through the unconscious influence their belief has upon their behaviour. A parallel can perhaps be drawn here with the placebo, and nocebo effects, and with the concept of learned helplessness, but they are all a little too dry and rational for my tastes this morning...

So lets talk about the end of the world!

An octogenarian evangelical preacher from the USA has calculated that today, Saturday 21st May, will witness Judgement Day. The happy day when the Lord Jeebers will return and lift the chosen, bodily, up into heaven in the Rapture, there to look down on all the worthless sinners, left behind to suffer the time of tribulations before the end of the world. It's supposed to happen sometime this evening just after Dr Who, which is disappointing as its a two-parter and looks quite good.

The rational humanists of the world have been falling all over themselves, laughing their arses off about it all week, but worryingly, there are actually a vast number of people who not only believe it's going to happen, they actually want it to happen. In a 2004 article for the Guardian newspaper, George Monbiot reported that between 12 and 18% of the US electorate belong to churches which preach the rapture as fact. It's what they've all been waiting for, the day they will be swept up to heaven to receive their eternal reward. They want it to happen.

For them, the apocalypse = Winning!

So if enough people want Armageddon strongly enough, and believe it in most zealously, is there actually a danger that they might make it happen? Well, its worth remembering that those guys just had their man in the White House for 8 years and lets face it, they're never that far away from the big red button that says "Nuke em all, and let God sort 'em out!" First of all, however, certain events have to come to pass including, according to the rapture prophesy, a massive religious war in the Middle East and the arrival on earth of the Anti-Christ.

Hmmmmmm, so far so fucked.

I don't believe in the rapture, and pretty much everything else in the book of revelations sounds like the sort of story anyone would come up with, after wandering in the desert for forty days without a hat or adequate sun block, but I have to admit the thought of anyone who holds those beliefs having even the slightest influence on American foreign policy gives me a really bad case of the screaming heebie-jeebies!

So enjoy rapture day, Twitter has already turned it into a global event for us all to share a patronising chuckle over, but for as long as there is a large supply of the kind of people who spent the week looking around for atheists to care for their pets after they've been carried up, to sit amongst the angels and have a good laugh at all the suffering down on earth, the end of the world is surely not something we should stop worrying about altogether.

As an interesting sidenote, I scanned through quite a few news sites for references to today as the beginning of the end. Admittedly I did not find a whole lot on any of the more reputable news agencies, just a joking article here or there about how crazy the religious right can be or how annoyingly sarcastic those pesky atheists can get.

But I still found more references to it than I did to the tens of thousands of people currently camped out in the centre of the Spanish capital Madrid, protesting against their governments planned public spending cuts, and emergency laws banning legal forms of protest that the Spanish government brought in to prevent them.

It's a funny old world isn't it?

Old Money, New Money, No Money

Well, Alternative Voting appears to have crashed and burned out of this months referendum, so lets have a look at the idea of political parties and see where the 70% "No" vote to electoral reform leaves us. First, we need to take a quick ramble through history.

Once upon a time, all wealth and power was derived from the ownership of land, and we had a simple "one man, one vote" political system.

That man was the king, he owned all the land, and he had the vote.

When King John had his run in at Runnymede in 1215, I believe that the feudal baron's who forced him to sign Magna Carta, a charter limiting his powers and protecting their own privileges, where the first political party in our history to represent the interests of the people. Well... the interests of people with wealth, power and noble lineage anyway, and we remained as a one party state for the better part of half a millennium.

Over the following centuries, people developed new ways of generating wealth that didn't stem from the ownership of land, sheep and peasants. Advanced manufacturing techniques created new goods to be traded, shipbuilding and navigation technology gradually opened the whole world up as a market in which goods could be bought and sold, and a new class of people came into being. They had wealth, and they had some power, they may not have been the scions of aristocratic bloodlines but quite frankly, they didn't care. This created a division in the political classes of Britain that ultimately led to "the divine right of kings" taking a bit of a tumble, along with Charles the First's head, in March 1649 during the English Civil War. In the aftermath of revolution and restoration, Britain emerged as a two party state.

On the one hand you had the Tories, the successors of the Cavaliers who sided with the king during the war and, arguably, the descendants of the feudal baron's who imposed Magna Carta. They represented the upper class.

On the other hand you had the Whigs, the political offspring of the Roundheads; the merchants, dissidents and non-conformists who had sided with parliament against the king. They represented the middle class.

At that point, the first past the post electoral system pretty much made sense, and British politics remained a two horse race over another two hundred and fifty years of more or less radical social change.

There followed an Enlightenment, a scientific revolution, an agricultural revolution and then an industrial revolution. Also an American one and a French one too.

By the 19th century, England was the heart of a military-industrial super-power, capitalism had replaced feudalism but little else had really changed, other than in name, the Whigs having mutated into the Liberal Party at some point along the way. Some of the the middle classes had grown as rich and powerful as the nobility on manufacturing and export, on international finance and on the slave trade, whilst the peasants, who had moved to the towns and cities when the agricultural revolution threw them off the land, had transformed into the industrial working class.

They still went off to die in the nation's wars of conquest and empire. They still lived in abject poverty and squalor, working 18 hours a day, six and a half days a week, from the age of 5 upwards in dangerous and back-breaking conditions. If they lost their job and became destitute there was the work-house, if they became too elderly or infirm to work, there was death in the gutter. The difference was that whilst it had been extremely difficult to organise large numbers of illiterate peasants who were scattered across the length and breadth of the English countryside, the industrial working classes were all crammed together in the towns and had much stronger social networks, some of them could even read and write! They could be organised by the factory gate, in the pubs and in the streets, messages could be spread between them very effectively and they could be quickly gathered together in huge numbers.

They protested, they rioted, they went on strike and, in due course, the got the vote.

If the Tories were the party of "Old Money", and the Liberals were the party of "New Money", then the Labour Party, founded to represent the newly emancipated working class, were the party of "No Money".

Dragging ourselves back to the 21st century, kicking and screaming into the post New Labour years, we should be starting to realise that our current electoral system does not take account of the plurality of interest groups within our society. It encourages a bi-polar split between parties that represent old money, and new money, Tony Blair and co having started the cannibalisation of the Liberal Democrat vote that David Cameron's Conservatives, still very much the decedents of those civil war Cavaliers, are now completing with great gusto. We are becoming once again a two party state, with the Liberal Democrats having been virtually subsumed by their Conservative coalition partners and the Labour Party rushing into the vacuum created in the centre.

There is now much talk of creating something called Blue Labour, of the labour party adopting more conservative policies and moving to the right on social issues, in an attempt to win the votes of the "squeezed middle classes" and win back the votes of working class votes alienated by issues such as immigration and crime. Support for this idea of a cross-class consensus, comes from the way the super-rich of the upper class keep getting richer and more economically distanced from middle class workers, even when you include doctors, solicitors, teachers, civil servants and directors of small to medium enterprises.

With the rejection of electoral reform, even if AV was a pathetic little compromise, I suspect that a collapse back to a two party system is now inevitable and the Liberal Democrats will no longer exist by the time of the next General Election, with one party, the Conservatives, to represent the interests of the wealthiest elite, and another, Blue Labour, to represent those of the ordinarily well off. In effect we will be transforming our political landscape into something similar to that in place in the United States, with the Republicans on the right, the Democrats in the middle, and no one at all on the left.

One of my biggest fears about this is the prioritisation by Tories, Lib Dem's and Blue Labour alike of social mobility over social equality. By putting the emphasis on a system that values the ability to move up the social scale over the eradication of differences between different points on the social scale, we set in stone the idea that there will always be the working poor.

The people who do all the dirty, menial, laborious, boring, unglamourous jobs, with the longest and most antisocial hours, that pay minimum wage with minimum paid holidays, no sick pay, pension or benefits, where you end up with no savings, pension or property, broken down and old way before you reach a retirement age that keeps being moved upwards. The people who are more likely to get heart disease and more likely to get cancer, who get the worst health care and die the youngest, who are more likely to be the victims of crime and are more likely to go to prison. They are the most likely to be hit with long term unemployment and they live in neighbourhoods where their kids have a choice between a school that is failing and a school that has failed, and the one that is failing is already full up. They are not "doleys" or "scroungers", they are the people who work hard but ultimately do not get a better quality of life than they would have if they had been on state benefits all their lives. And without free education, the chances of their children ever having anything more than them are rapidly diminishing.

So personally I am opposed to two party-ism, and opposed to Blue Labour. I favour a Proportional Representation electoral system, and a society with a multitude of political parties that are free to represent the interests of everyone in society, not just of the people with the money, whether it be old or new.

Emmanuel Goldstein is Dead...

It was a fantastic week for manufacturers of patriotic novelty souvenir flags, firstly because of the British royal wedding lining the streets of London with a sea of red, white and blue union flags (anyone possessing flags of any other colour having been arrested the previous day, just in case) and then with a surprise last-minute bulk order for the stars and stripes coming in on Monday, following the news that U.S.special forces had found and killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Yes, a good week for the flag sellers indeed, whether you were waving them, or burning them, they really couldn't care less.

So it was clearly a good week for President Obama too, despite Fox News taking full advantage of what will probably not be their last opportunity to make their favourite "accidentally on purpose" captioning mistake. (see picture).

What isn't so clear, however, is pretty much everything else. I guess that is unsurprising really, considering that the man himself was twisted up inside half the currently active conspiracy theories on the planet, but surely you would expect that the Americans would want to make this one look as above board and by-the-book as possible? Considering they have invaded a couple of countries, killed tens of thousands of people and spent trillions of dollars in the process of supposedly looking for the fucker?

Well, the very first thing I heard about it was that they had killed him and almost immediately dumped his body in the sea. Which sounded mightily convenient to me. I always at least half suspected that Bin Laden had died of kidney failure sometime in early 2001, admittedly making him responsible for releasing more post-humous material that Tupac and Biggie combined but it made a lot more sense than an old man on a dialysis machine running around the Afghan mountains giving US Special Forces the slip.

Things went from curious to curiouser with the news that the pictures of a dead Bin Laden released through the media were actually photoshopped fakes, followed hot on the heels by news that the US would not be releasing any pictures confirming what happened because of the potential for "negative consequences", not that it stopped them from televising Saddam Hussein's last drop. Meanwhile the western worlds media outlets was absolutely on-fire with all kinds of gloating, crowing and sick jokes guaranteed to have the negative consequence of reaffirming to half the planet why the USA is indeed the Great Satan.

The official story seems to have mutated every single time someone has asked a question about it. First it was a mission to capture or kill Bin Laden that met with fierce armed resistance in which the target was shot during a prolonged firefight. Then it transpired that the special forces teams actually met very little armed resistance (one armed guard) and Bin Laden was unarmed when he was gunned down in what may sound quite a lot like an assassination, but wasn't an assassination at all, oh no, not according to the White house.

I have really only just scratched the surface of the convoluted contradictions surrounding what happened on the 2nd of May, and have not even touched upon the ramifications of where Osama was found - not in an underground lair, complete with doomsday device and shark-tank, deep in the Tora Bora mountains, or even in the disputed tribal regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in a villa in a suburb of Abbotobad, home of the Pakistani equivalent of Sandhurst where their military elite are trained.

To be honest, almost every single aspect of this story stinks!

If Bin Laden had died years ago and this was just an opportunity for President Obama to score a much needed propaganda smackdown, then I am fairly sure that George W Bush would not have failed to take up that opportunity himself, some time before the end of his own administration. If they had captured Bin Laden alive and without a fight, you would think the obvious thing to do would be to put him on trial for the numerous acts of mass murder he has taken credit for - truth, justice, the American way and all that? Or maybe they would want to ask him a few questions about this global terrorist organisation he was apparently the mastermind in direct control of?

So maybe, just maybe someone decided they wanted the best of both worlds?

Did they capture him, and then rather than put him in a position to spill all kinds of inconveniently-juicy-secrets which may potentially have found their way into the press, they only said they had killed him and then spirited him off to some secret prison in a third-world hell-hole, and had the electrodes attached to his testicles before you could say Camp X-Ray? That way they could torture the hell out of him for as long as they wanted and then kill him at their leisure, without all the pesky inconvenience of having to put him on trial and convict him first, or of giving him a burial place that could become a pilgrimage for fanatical nutcases from all over the world.

That sounds like common-sense to me.

I am by no means an apologist for cunts like Osama Bin Laden, but our Governments in the USA, UK and Europe really do try to represent us as "the goodies" in the war against terror, we are supposed to be the the ones fighting for peace, liberty, freedom and democracy. Aren't we supposed to do the right thing? If they had the opportunity to bring him to trial for the things I am pretty certain he did, such as the murder of 3000 people on September 11th 2001, then surely that is exactly what they should have done? Not bumped him off and then disposed of the body like in some kind of mafia style gang-land execution.

Personally I would have liked to see him spending the rest of his days sharing a prison cell with Slobodan Milosovic (former president of Serbia responsible for anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars) I'm sure they would have gotten along famously, but unfortunately, one way or another, people who commit the really huge crimes never seem to come to trial.

Perhaps some people are scared that it might set a precedent.

So instead we are left with this murky, unsatisfactory, fundamentally confused conclusion where the body of Osama Bin Laden may well be dead (by now anyway, I'm not sure how long a 54 year old man who must have had a kidney transplant at some point in the recent past would last under CIA enhanced interrogation) but the idea of Osama Bin Laden is still going strong.

So I guess we'll just have to wait for the WikiLeaks on that one!

To AV or not to AV, that is the question!

On the fifth of May the UK goes to the polls once again, not only to elect our representatives into local or devolved government positions, but also to chose between the Alternative Voting system (AV) where voters rank the candidates in order of preference and if no overall winner emerges second and then third choices come into play, and the First Past the Post voting system (FPTP) which we currently use. This is only the second UK wide referendum in British history, and the first ever where the result will be legally binding rather than just consultative, as with the 1975 referendum on Britain's continued involvement in the European Economic Community.

So in that sense at least, it is a truly significant event in the history of our democracy.

We should all be very excited.

Hmmmmm...

I have to admit to being slightly perplexed on this one myself. It has taken me this long to form any kind of a clear opinion on it at all, and unfortunately, it isn't a particularly good opinion.

The referendum came about as part of the negotiations between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats last May, as they were coming together to form the coalition government. The Liberal Democrats are very much in favour of electoral reform and wanted a change to Proportional Representation (PR), a third voting system where seats in parliament are allocated to parties more accurately according to the national share of the vote. The Conservatives, virtually by definition, are fundamentally opposed to electoral reform so anything as radical as a change to PR did not even get a look in, but they did need to offer something to get the liberal Democrats into bed with them - considering that Conservatives and Liberals are not supposed to be natural allies, remember they are the natural descendant of the two sides which fought each other in England's civil war.

After what I imagine must have been a great deal of fairly sleazy political solicitation, they settled on AV, which Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is quoted as calling "a miserable little compromise". A phrase that pretty much sums up the Liberal Democrats whole position within the coalition government if you ask me, miserable little compromises seem to be fine so long as they garner the Lib Dems a little more political power, but I digress...

So the Conservatives are completely opposed to AV, perhaps because they perceive they will lose seats because of it, and the Liberal Democrats who stand to gain the most from the introduction of AV are of course extremely enthusiastic. Labour have no official position with MPs free to vote as they please, although party leader Ed Milliband is in favour of AV there is also the fear that constituency boundary changes contained within the referendum bill will favour the Conservatives, and amount to gerrymandering. Other key Labour party figures supporting a Yes vote include Alan Johnson, Peter Hain, Hilary Benn, Sadiq Khan, Tessa Jowell, Alistair Darling, Diane Abbot, Lord Mandelson, Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn, whereas John Prescott, David Blunkett, John Reid, Lord Falconer, Margaret Beckett, Hazel Blears and Lord Winston are all opposed.

Amongst the popular press, The Guardian, The Independent, the Financial Times, and the Daily Mirror all support AV, whilst The Sun, the Daily Mail, The Times, the Daily Express and The Telegraph are against it.

Celebrity figures and campaign groups have also taken sides, with Eddie Izzard, David Mitchell, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Helena Bonham Carter, Benjamin Zephaniah, Steve Coogan, Polly Tonybee and Joanna Lumley all pro-AV, lined up against such luminaries as Esther Rantzen, Peter Stringfellow, David Gower, Darren Gough, and Ross Kemp in the "No" camp.

Having written all that, I am starting to wonder why I was so torn on the matter, the Yes campaign seems so full of the kind of people I generally regard as cool (apart from Lord Mandelson that is), while the No campaign appears to be well stocked with dinosaurs, bigots, loonies and Tories (and Rupert Murdoch obviously, who counts as all four).

Perhaps it's because AV seems set up to deliver more of the type of coalition governments we are presently encumbered with?

Perhaps it's out of a desire to see the Lib Dems fail in the one thing they actually stood to gain from entering a coalition with their political opponents (aside from a little taste of power, of course)?

Perhaps its because although we clearly need political reform in this country, the bullshit rebranding exercise that is AV just doesn't come close?

I think a successful "Yes" campaign will cause real political headaches for all of the senior Tories, and I do think it will at least count as a thumbs up to the general principle of political reform. On top of that I do not think, in all conscience, that I can side with the Conservative Party and the right wing Murdoch press in voting against AV, not without spontaneous human combustion becoming a real and present danger anyway.

So I will most likely be voting yes to AV in the referendum next Thursday, but that isn't the opinion I promised earlier in this article.

It is a cynical opinion, but I believe that if the choice of voting system we use had even the slightest chance of changing the political status quo in this country, we would not be getting any say in the matter whatsoever! We have been granted the opportunity to vote in our first UK wide legally binding referendum only because the matter at hand is a trivial irrelevancy. We did not get a referendum on ratifying the Treaty of Lisbon for instance, or on the decision to remortgage the country to bail out banks that were considered too big to fail, and the decisions to invade Iraq, and more recently to attack Libya, were already made long before the choice was even put to our parliament, let alone to a referendum.

Too many of the important decisions affecting us, particularly in economic policy and foreign policy, are made at a level above that of our elected representatives, by bodies such as the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, NATO and the UN Security Council. Without genuine political reform that recognises the changes globalisation has brought to the world, and updates our democratic systems to maintain transparency and accountability to the people at every level of decision making, the choice between two methods of electing our MPs is little more than a distraction.

We're damned if we do, they're damned if we don't...

The continuing tragedy of our illegal invasion of Iraq, is that we have no moral authority to demand action when we should!

Colonel Gaddafi has proven beyond all shadow of a doubt that he is a brutal and murderous tyrant, prepared to use troops, tanks, heavy artillery and war planes against the people of the country he ruled for 30 years. Western governments have now finally begun to recognise the "rebels" in Libya as the legitimate government, even as Gaddafi's "war against his own people" intensifies. Foreign journalists have been taken and tortured by Gaddafi's forces which raises serious concerns at the treatment Libyan revolutionaries who have been captured must be receiving, or what horrors await the people of Libya in the bloody aftermath if Gaddafi is able to crush this uprising.

Every humanitarian instinct in me is screaming out that we should already have sent in the RAF to provide air cover for the rebels, and that international forces should be enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, preventing the regime from using its helicopter gunships, fighters and bombers on towns and cities held by the rebels. These people are rising up in the name of democracy and freedom, they deserve and need our help, and although they are understandably opposed to the idea of British or American ground forces in Libya, they have made increasingly desperate requests for a no fly zone to be imposed.

In the meantime western leaders appear to be making the right noises whilst sitting on their hands, and the cynic in me suspects that they are just waiting to see how our own interests in this oil rich state can best be served before we intervene. My own reluctance to insist that my government takes immediate and forceful action against the Gaddafi regime in these circumstances absolutely sickens me! If we are to have armed forces then surely this is the kind of situation where we should have no doubt that these people need and deserve our help, but I quite simply do not and can not trust our leaders enough to demand that they go to war in our name, simply to find that we have annexed another nation in the name of democracy only to seize control of their natural resources.

This is the legacy of Bush and Blair's "war on terror", and yet another reason to pile condemnation upon them for robbing us of any moral legitimacy to use force when it is absolutely necessary.

Now please excuse me but I think I need to throw up.

See If They Care!

Yesterday's by-election in Barnsley Central was a fairly predictable landslide to the Labour Party, with the Conservatives pushed into third behind UKIP, and Liberal Democrat Dominic Carmen losing his deposit and being relegated to the part of the table usually labelled "others". What is really fucking worrying to me though, is that only 36.5% of those eligible to vote actually bothered to do freely, what people in other countries literally risk life and limb to do.

Its pretty obvious that if more than 60% of the population can't be arsed using a right that generation after generation of their very recent ancestors fought to win them, then whoever does end up in charge of the country has a green light to do more or less whatever they fucking please for five years. Privatise the health service? Triple tuition fees? License arsenic as a children's medication? Why the fuck not? They obviously don't give a shit! Why the fuck should a politician give a damn about keeping their manifesto promises, when the majority of the population couldn't even tell them what those promises were?

Don't give me any of that "not voting is an act of protest" bullshit either. Turning up and wiping your arse on the ballot paper would be an act of protest, and at least they have to count soiled ballots. Not voting is an act of pure bloody bone-idleness, in some ways I hate them more than lifelong Tory voters and they should be ashamed of themselves! No, actually, shame would be a kind of an opinion, and when you refuse to take part in the democratic process you give up the right to have an opinion, on anything important anyway. Perhaps they should just piss off to some country where they don't expect you to slightly inconvenience yourself by walking half a mile to the local polling station once a year, like Saudi Arabia perhaps, or North Korea.

A slightly more practical solution, and one that would also help us cut the deficit, is a 25% tax hike for anyone who doesn't vote, a "Didn't-Poll" Tax if you like. Chances are that those affected will be too busy watching "My Big Fat Gypsy Talent Factor" to notice and even if they do, who gives a fuck? If they couldn't be arsed voting they're unlikely to sign a petition, let alone put in the effort required to start even a medium sized riot.

So fuck 'em! Cut all their public services, tax the hell out of them and give it all to fat cat bankers, turn their elderly relatives into soylent green and sell their kids into slavery.

See if they care!

Rant ends.

Still Not In My Name (Part Two)

OK, so on a purely personal level I am glad that I joined that march back in February 03 simply to have experienced it first hand, because the experience was like the best music festival I've ever been to, combined with the best football match I've ever been at, with a whole load of street theatre and a lifetime subscription to Private Eye thrown in for good measure. The thrill of adding your voice to a million others and hearing your words echo around the streets of the nations capital for a day, is not to be underestimated!

Have you ever been involved in anything anywhere near that big that wasn't sponsored by a piss-weak lager brand or a multinational bank? I am pretty sure that the vast majority of people who were there felt it too, that sense of exhilaration, and of affirmation, and I strongly suspect a lot of them would really, really like to do it again. Its definitely the kind of thing you could develop a taste for, and I think the March for the Alternative ticks all of the boxes for being the next "big one".

February 15th was an educational experience for me too! I'm part of a generation that spent its childhood watching the police beat up rioting Brixtonians, picketing miners, poll tax protesters or England fans on BBC Newsround with John Craven - I thought I knew how those things went! When riot police go looking for trouble, they never seem to have much trouble finding it. That day was different, it was well organised, well stewarded, mind-bogglingly well attended and thoroughly well behaved! It was also extremely heavily policed, and at times that was a little intimidating, until I realised that "we" outnumbered "them" by hundreds to one and that this brought about a fundamental shift in the relationship between police and protester. It was clear that confrontational tactics would be of no use to anybody that day. In any crowd there will always be black clad hotheads and fanatics of all varieties, but this was a family event and they were on their best behaviour too. The graffiti artist Banksy had been at work along the route with tape and barricades stating "Polite Line - Do Not Get Cross" and far as I could tell, nobody did.

There was passion for sure, many questions, much anger, and a kind of collective mass incredulity that they could possibly expect us to swallow this bullshit justification for a war. An invasion we knew would not liberate anybody, would not bring democracy, would not make the world a safer place, would kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, destroy the lives of millions more, would further destabilise the middle-east and would be an all singing, all dancing, recruitment campaign par excellence for radical extremism at home and abroad. We knew no that no WMDs would be found, we knew it was all about oil, we knew it was about selling the bombs to raise the country to the ground then making billions on the no-bid reconstruction contracts. We knew that measures taken in the name of security ran the risk of robbing us of the very freedoms we supposedly fought to uphold.

And we were right!

Tragically, history has born us out on almost every single point!

But did we actually do any good?

We didn't Stop The War of course, but I think most people there saw the invasion as a foregone conclusion anyway. It was pretty obvious that we were as inextricably tied to America's crackpot foreign policy as it later turned we were to their crackpot financial practices. What is impossible to say though, is how much worse things might have been if instead of a global day of action with record breaking mass protests in dozens of cities around the world, everybody had just stayed at home and carried on moaning about it? In a way its almost heartening that they bothered even trying to sell us their justification for oil, sorry I mean justification for war. We should take the fact that they even felt the need to lie to us about freedom, and democracy, when in the days of empire all they ever felt the need to say was "they've got it, we want it, they can't stop us from taking taking it, it's our god given right" as a sign of how much things have changed in the last hundred years or so.

It is my opinion that our political leaders, whatever their party, will try and get away with just about as much as they think the population will let them get away with. A population tuned in to whatever prime-time Z-list-celebrity phone-in talent show is clogging up my news feed at the moment sends them a very clear message that they can get away with pretty much anything they like. A city full of hundreds of thousands of protesters sends a very different message altogether. I believe quite firmly that in the absence of a concerted anti-war movement, the horrors in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been worse, the inhumanities taking place inside Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghraib would never have been exposed and our civil liberties at home would have been eroded even more quickly than they have been.

Now at the time of the Iraq invasion the Blair government had a solid majority in the House of Commons, a majority the likes of which it would never enjoy again in fact. David Cameron does not have a majority, no one voted for this Coalition of the Shilling (they represent old money) and they have no clear mandate for the radical and extreme changes to our society that they have initiated. More to the point, while Stop The War asked people to protest about the plight of strangers in a foreign land, a high-flung idealistic principle at the best of times, the March for the Alternative asks people to protest against against public spending cuts, and the political ideology behind them, that directly affect the majority of the people in the country. People whose jobs are being destroyed, whose pay is frozen while the cost of living creeps inexorably upwards, whose services are being cut and whose social security is being taken away. People whose educational aspirations have been dashed on the rocks while their futures are stunted by the burden of paying off debts incurred bailing out bankers who have increased their own wages and still paid out bumper bonuses. The March for the Alternative asks people to protest essentially out of self interest, because this government does not have the interests of any one but their own privileged elite in mind.

The Conservatives campaigned for change in May 2010, but all they have delivered are the same old policies they devastated this country with back in the 1980's, privatisation and public spending cuts, tax breaks for the rich and wage slavery for everyone else, the demonisation of public sector workers and the scapegoating of immigrants and ethnic minorities. All they've done is call in a slick Etonian PR executive to re-brand it and hope that most people are too distracted, too apathetic and too dumbed down to notice.

But we have noticed 　

That is why I suspect the March for the Alternative on the 25th of March is going to be a record breaker, and hopefully, a government breaker.

If you have kids, if you are a student, if you are approaching retirement, if you are old, if you or someone close to you works in the public sector, the NHS, the fire brigade, the police or the armed forces, if you depend on the NHS, if you are at risk of redundancy, if you are worried about crime, if you think that selling off the forests AT A LOSS is a bad idea, if you care about other people and are concerned that the people running the country are millionaires who only care about other millionaires, you should be on this march! If you or anyone you care about has a disability you should be on this march. If you think the governments plan to boost the economy by making it easier for your employer to dismiss you and harder for you to take them to court if they do it unfairly is a crock of shit, you should be on this march. If you think its a bit rotten that we will subsidise foreign banks, but we won't subsidise our kids higher education, you should be on this march.If you think its wrong to make major structural changes to the NHS when, prior to their election, the Conservatives promised not to make any major structural changes to the NHS, you should be on this march.

Hell, if you've never had the pleasure of going to London, and finding that they've closed roads across half the city so that you, and hundreds of thousands of your friends can walk down them as if you own the place...you should be on this march.

It promises to be quite an exhilarating experience!

Still Not In Our Name (Part One)

With the "March for the Alternative" just weeks away, I want to share my memories of the last time I joined a protest on a scale that this one promises to reach, back in February 2003, during the build up to the invasion of Iraq, when tens of millions of people thronged the streets of cities around the world to deliver a single clear message to another coalition, the "coalition of the willing" - NOT IN OUR NAME!

The fraudulent election of George W Bush in 2000, and the tragic events of September 2001 had already extinguished any sense of optimism that the start of a new millennium may have heralded. Even people with little or no interest in world events were left with an encroaching sense that the world had taken a new turn towards something dark, dangerous and frightening - with terror alerts, anthrax attacks and patriot acts. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 saw the birth of the Stop The War coalition and, even though the perpetrators were known to be of Saudi Arabian origin, and it was quite obvious that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, or even with Al Quaida, and that any weapons of mass destruction we might have sold him in the 1980s had been used up or destroyed during the 1990s, it was becoming increasingly clear that Iraq was next.

The Daily Mirror had run a campaign promoting the march in London on Saturday the 15th in a positive light, but by and large the news media was filled with hysteria at the cost of all the police who were being drafted in to control what they called a "rent-a-mob of demonstrators", veiled accusations that our protest was unpatriotic, was unsupportive of "our boys", that it played into the hands of a brutal dictator like Saddam and was an obvious target for a terrorist "dirty bomb" attack. The Murdoch press in particular did everything they could to scare people away, but nevertheless, people were headed in their hundreds of thousands towards the nations capital. My brother Andy and I were even interviewed and photographed (looking distinctly red-eyed) by the Bury Times at a service station on the way down, and a quote from me was used as the headline for the papers coverage of the demo - "It's time to stand up and be counted!"

And stand up we certainly did!

Octogenarian nuns, tiny children in prams, world war two veterans in their wheelchairs, CND, Socialist Worker Party and Trade Union activists, members of the Women's Institute, students, church groups, anarchists, communists, conspiracy theorists, people of all races and denominations, old and young, imams, rabbis and at least one Church of England bishop, hippies, crusties, the people who you always expect to see at that kind of event and many, many thousands of people who had never even thought about their right to protest before, whole families from the middle and working classes alike, doctors, teachers, barristers, numerous politicians and celebrities - it was easier to find a group that wasn't represented that day than list all those that were, we filled the city to capacity, we took over the streets and the atmosphere was absolutely breathtaking!

It was like a politically charged marde gras, jubilant, exuberant, enthusiastically defiant but overwhelmingly positive and peaceful, funny, humane, extremely colourful and above all, deafeningly loud!

It seemed like everyone there was equipped with something that made lots of noise, a whistle, a bell or a drum, turning the protest into the worlds biggest spontaneous guerrilla samba band, clapping hands and united voices, mobile bicycle powered sound-systems toured up and down blasting out music, megaphone powered chants were taken up and passed around gleefully, and periodically drowning out this cacophony there was what can only be described as a Mexican roar. It could be heard approaching from miles away like street thunder, surging back down the massed line of people towards us, voices raising into a deafening crescendo of freedom and resistance, engulfing us as we added our own voices to the uproar then fading off into the distance as it passed us by, only to return half an hour later, just as loud, going the other way back down the line. The entire length of the march was a dense forest of waving flags, banners and placards, a riot of colour and witty improvisation, "No War" and "Bliar" placards were everywhere, others exclaimed "Make Tea Not War" or condemned "The War Against Terror" in cheeky foul mouthed parody of Bush and Blair's modern crusade. A piece of paper stuck to the back of a little girl's coat as she was carried through the demonstration on her fathers back proclaimed "I'm not a terrorist, and neither is my daddy!"

Yes, that was exactly what the newspapers, the Sun in particular, had called us - terrorists and supporters of terror.

The police presence was immense, all leave had been cancelled, reinforcements had been drafted in from across the country and they were out in force, but the day was ours, and it and entirely peaceful with only a handful of minor arrests reported. There were undoubtedly people with extreme views in the crowd, and people who were of course extremely angry, but they were diluted to near homeopathic levels by the overwhelming majority of ordinary people, protesting peacefully against an invasion we all knew would lead inevitably to bloody tragedy for the people of Iraq. It was difficult to visually gauge exactly how many people were there, although the news and police helicopters patrolling the skies above us must have had a pretty clear overview, but although it was impossible to see how many people where there, it was impossible to ignore that the turn out was simply staggering. We may not have been able to see the forest for the trees, but we could feel it all around us and as Hyde Park began to fill for the rally, the procession of people heading there still stretched for miles, snaking back through the packed streets of London.

I believe that the rally was fantastic, with speeches from Tony Benn and George Galloway amongst many others, but we never actually made it there in time. My group, like hundreds of thousands of others, remained embedded in the mass of protesting humanity, most memorably in Piccadilly Circus where the separate strands of the demonstration met like the confluence of two mighty rivers. It wasn't a kettle as such, although some of the exits to the square where certainly blocked by dense lines of police, leaving only the route down Piccadilly open to us, and it took what felt like hours to clear the choke point. The guerrilla samba band went into carnival overdrive and kept us dancing on the spot the whole while, teaching the Met's finest a few lessons in crowd control. It was surreal, like something out of a dream. Overhead, waved by a protester stood on top of one of the booths where tourists normally queued to buy tickets for open-top bus tours, flew an enormous flag depicting a dove made up of the word "peace" repeated over and over, whilst off to one side a group of extremely angry sounding bearded men chanted something in Arabic.

The organisers of the demonstration say that there had been nearly two million people protesting in London. The police claim that there were only 750.000 has been widely derided by anyone who was there, and even if you split the difference between the two, as most of the news agencies appear to have done, there were still something like a million and a half people out on the streets of the capital that day. It was incredible, it was glorious, it was a wonderful day, a day that will always remain fresh in my mind and that I will always be proud to have been a small part of.

And now we have the opportunity to do it again, protesting against a different coalition this time, against a ConDem coalition government who are making the most savage cuts in the history of public spending, for their own ideological reasons and without any electoral mandate for the worst of them, including what amounts to the privatisation of the NHS. We protested against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we must now protest against this war of the wealthy against the middle and lower classes in our own country.

They will tell us that we are foolish, and that we are somehow criminal for using our legal right to protest, they will tell us that it is dangerous at worst and pointless at best, and I will address each of these criticisms in my next article, but for the time being I will be content to say that if you do not take this opportunity to join something huge, powerful, peaceful and above all for the common good, to walk through the streets of your capital city as if you really do own the place, you may well regret it for the rest of your lives.

Join the March for the Alternative on the 26th March.

Facebook is 98% Chimpanzee!

The impact of social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter upon our lives, and upon society in general, is an incredibly hot topic right now, with the recent announcement that Facebook alone has five hundred million registered users, that's half a billion people, clearly highlighting how quickly online social networking has taken hold on a global level. If you live in the developed world, the chances are that even if you don't use a social networking site yourself, then you know plenty of people who do, you might even be in photographs they have posted on them. Even my grandmother, whose grasp of Information Technology pretty much ends with the landline telephone, is vaguely aware that there is this thing called Twitter out there.

A debate ignited with the advent of social networking sites (SNS's), and has only been getting hotter as their proliferation through mainstream society accelerates: are they a valuable new tool that is revolutionising human communication for the better, or are they transforming us into a tribe of isolated, dumbed down, social incompetents with split-second attention spans capable of communicating only through the medium of a back-lit touch screen? News bulletins are filled with stories inspired by social networking sites, whether it be a scandal over something contentious tweeted by some politician or celebrity, panic over sexual predators finding and grooming their victims online, alarm at the US government demanding twitter hand over the details of everyone involved with WikiLeaks, outrage at the latest controversial group promoting its cause with a Facebook page or just amusement in an "and finally..." kind of a way at some silly picture or video that is spreading virally through the web. Stand up comedians have quickly incorporated them into their routines, books have been written about how they are revolutionising this or fundamentally altering that, chart topping movies have been made about their creators, advertisers have found a whole new market place for selling their goods and services, political groups of every stripe are enthusiastically finding exciting new ways of communicating with, and organising, their members while the security services discover new ways of keeping tabs on everyone with equal enthusiasm.

Barack Obama is the first Black(berry) President of the USA and, according to some commentators, we have already seen the first wave of Twitter "revolutions" in Iran and Tunisia.

Well, I'm here to argue that this is not really a new revolution, its just the latest turn of a debate that was already ancient when one prehistoric ape-man daubed a painting of a woolly mammoth on a cave wall, and another prehistoric ape-man made his own little mark to say he liked it, then a more cynical third ape-man commented that "It isn't the same as sitting around the camp fire and just talking about the hunt, I don't like this pictographic representation malarkey, what's wrong with hooting and grunting like everyone else?"

If you will follow my reasoning, I will argue that whether you like it or not, social networking sites serve a need that dates back to the very beginnings of human intelligence, and that their invention, although they surely will bring about marked changes in how we interact with each other, is really an adaptation to social and economic changes that were already well underway, before anyone started blogging about them on the Internet.

Facebook is 98% chimpanzee, and is just the latest step of a transformation that began 2 million years ago, with the birth of our species.

According to evolutionary science, for a new physical characteristic to evolve there must be some kind of evolutionary pressure selecting it as advantageous. So a mutated gene will randomly manifest itself as, say, a new colouration of a moth's wing. The selection pressure is the need to need to not be noticed by predators, and if the new mutated wing colour means you are more likely to be seen and eaten by a bird, then those genes are less likely to be passed on to the next generation. If on the other hand the new colouration means you are a better camouflaged moth as a result, the genes are more likely to be selected for by the pressure of needing to not get eaten, you will have more offspring than your non-mutated siblings, you pass on the selected-for characteristic to your offspring, and the process of evolving into a brand new species of moth is underway.

The defining characteristic of humanity is clearly our intelligence, which has given us the adaptability to spread into and dominate every extreme of environment on the planet, and ultimately to being the only animal that has ever managed to leave the planet and travel into space, of its own free will anyway. Which, despite our many and obvious failings, is still a pretty amazing thing for us to have done, I'm sure you will agree. So what was it that selected for our intelligence in the first place, what was it that molded us into smarter apes rather than, say, bigger, stronger, armour plated killer apes? Some have argued that a climate shift thinned out Africa's dense forests and replaced them with vast, open grasslands, forcing our ancestors to come down from the trees and begin walking upright, and that it was this raising of our horizons and expansion of our mental map which stimulated our intellectual development. Others say it was the evolution of the opposable thumb, which allowed for much greater use of tools that encouraged the evolution of human tool using intelligence.

The argument which I favour, however, is that human intelligence is essentially social in origin.

Human beings are a social ape, and our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, the bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas, are also social apes. Millions of years ago our common ancestor struck upon the idea of living together in groups as a way of surviving. You have someone around to watch your back, you help each other when gathering food, you keep an eye on each others kids, you have a larger range of past experiences to base future actions upon and by working together you can secure a much bigger territory than you ever would on your own. It makes perfect sense and it was an excellent strategy, but from that point onwards one of the key evolutionary selectors driving the development of our intelligence was "how do we live together in such close proximity without killing each other?" The group is made up of individuals, we tend to fall out, we fight, we compete over food and mates, we have differences of opinion, we have our own agenda, we tend to get pissed off at each other quite a lot of the time in fact, but if the group breaks down, the survival chances of all the individuals within the group is greatly diminished. It was the necessity to be able to maintain group cohesion that selected for the rise of intelligence, and primate politics was born.

In the vast majority of animal species that live together in large groups, the group leader, the dominant animal, is almost always the biggest strongest animal. In packs, herds, flocks and schoals - might is generally right and any differences of opinion within the group are settled with a good old fashioned head-butting contest, but the great apes are different. The lead or "alpha" animal within a troop of chimpanzees is not the biggest chimp, but rather the chimp who manages to keep more of the other chimps "on side" than any of the others.

Or to put it another way, the chimp with the most friends!

Chimps build and maintain friendships primarily by sharing food with each other, and by grooming each other, that is by sitting together and going through each others fur, picking out things that have become tangled, knots of fur and of course fleas. They respond to changes in each others moods and can recognise when a friend needs cheering up, they always act in accordance with quite a strict social hierarchy, meaning it would be something of a faux pas to groom an inferior member of the group before the alpha has had his turn, they spend the most time grooming the chimps they like the best and they will snub each other if one chimp does something to piss the other chimp off. It is an interesting fact that the upper size limit of a group of chimpanzees also appears to revolve around grooming, once a group gets so large that it is no longer possible for each chimp to spend enough quality grooming time on a regular enough basis with each of the other chimps in the group, the group will split in two and go their separate ways.

So chimps who build the best social relationships within the group become leaders, and leaders who make bad decisions can quickly find themselves on the outside of the group with a flea in their ear. Group dominance brings breeding rights, and the alpha male of a group will always father the majority of the groups babies, meaning the most socially intelligent chimp will be the one to pass his genes on to the next generation, providing a clear mechanism for the evolution of more intelligent apes - and basically, that's us!

To be able to think socially like this is much more complicated than it actually sounds. First it requires that an animal be able to recognise itself as a distinct individual, to have a sense of self, and to-date only humans, chimpanzees and dolphins have been demonstrated to have this ability. Secondly the animal must be able to recognise that other animals are also distinct individuals who are like you, but different, and what is going on inside their head, is not necessarily the same as what is going on inside your own. Those of you with young children will probably recognise the point at which "peekaboo" stops being a fun game, well that's the point where a babies brain has developed enough to figure out that "just because I cant see you, doesn't mean that you cant see me." We develop a mental model of the people we know, a simulation of others inside of our brain, that is based on what we know about them, and allows us to to predict how they will respond in various hypothetical situations. Try and think about the psychological processes you go through in the act of telling someone a joke, that process of figuring out if this joke is appropriate for them, and if it will make the other person laugh, is actually rather sophisticated, even if the joke is not. Once again those of you with little kids will probably recognise the fits and starts that a child goes through, before they can successfully ask you what you get if you cross a sheep with a kangaroo.

It has been suggested that it is this faculty of "mind sightedness", the ability to figure out what is going on inside someone elses head, that is faulty in people who suffer from autistic spectrum disorders. Interestingly, those who are best at science, and particularly mathematics, often test very highly for autistic spectrum disorders themselves, and enough of us are familiar with the stereotype of someone who is a total genius in many respects, but is otherwise completely socially inept, for me to suppose that perhaps one comes at the expense of the other, because they both stem from exactly the same faculty within the human mind.

So human intelligence evolved in order for us to be better at dealing with the complex relationships within a social group, but once it had evolved, we found we were suddenly better able to figure out complex relationships between all kinds of different things, and allowed for the development of language, art, music, writing, mathematics, science, engineering, technology, the printing press, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, the television, computers and eventually, the Internet.

Which brings me back to Facebook.

It is my opinion that 98% of what goes on on Facebook, is directly equivalent to chimpanzees sitting around and picking fleas out of each others fur, and although it may sound like it, I do not mean that in a disparaging way.

It would appear that being able to tell a joke, and for our friends to laugh at it, or to put up pictures of your holidays or your kids so your friends can go "Ooooh!" and "Awwwww!", being able to play a song and say "I like that", and for your friends to say "I like that too!" is actually of immense psychological importance to us. It makes us happy, and these small interactions are the glue that binds our social groups together. All that Facebook is, is a new way of doing it.

I think it is fair to say that our society has changed more in the last two hundred years or so, than it did in the thousand years before that, and more in the last ten years than in the whole of the past century. We have gone from living in extended family groups clustered together in small villages and rarely, if ever, travelling more than twenty miles away from home, to living in a genuinely global culture where we may have friends on every continent. Due to the need for economic mobility we may not live anywhere near our parents or our oldest friends, maybe not even in the same country, and due to the way our economy is organised we often spend far more of our time with people that we never chose as our friends, than we do with the ones that we actually love. Our family groups are also smaller than ever before, the extended family gave way to the nuclear family which has now gone positively sub-atomic, and our kinship networks are much more likely to contain good friends rather than blood relatives.

We also live together in cities, in much greater numbers and population densities than at any other time in human history, but it appears that there is still an upper limit to how many social relationships we can keep track of at one time, this figure is estimated to be about 150 - 200 which, coincidentally or not as the case may be, is the same as the average number of friends that a facebook user has on their account. One final interesting fact to report here is the recent study, published in Nature Neuroscience, which reveals that people with busier social networks than others have an enlarged amygdala, the part of the brain linked to the retrieval of memories of emotional responses - suggesting that the amygdala may have evolved to help deal with human beings increasingly complex social lives.

In short, human society has changed radically, but the basic social needs of the human animal have not, and social networking websites have emerged and grown as quickly as they have to compensate for this. I do not believe that a technology which gives us virtually unlimited access to information, and allows real time communication with people on the other side of the planet just as easily as with someone who only lives next door, can be held responsible for "dumbing" us down or for making us more isolated - modern western society was already doing that to us and online social networking is simply an attempt at reconnecting us in a "data rich" but "time poor" world.

*****

With thanks to Guy Heaton for the Cartoon, and my apologies to Professors Richard Byrne and Simon Baron Cohen for (probably) grossly misrepresenting their theories.