Wednesday, April 03, 2013 

My swastika tattoo doesn't mean I'm a fascist. Honest.

Paolo Di Canio is not a fascist.  Nor is he a racist.  Just because he said he was a fascist in an interview in 2005 doesn't mean that he's still one in 2013.  Nor does that the fact he has a tattoo that says "dux" on his right arm, meaning leader or Il Duce signify anything.  I mean, we all have body art we regret nowadays, don't we?  As for all those instances where he gave the Roman salute to Lazio fans, including when they were playing local rivals with a left-wing political history, all he was doing was saluting his people "with what for me is a sign of belonging to a group that holds true values, values of civility against the standardisation that this society imposes upon us".  Who could possibly disagree with that?

Sunderland's owners seemingly thought no one would.  Quite apart from the stupidity of changing managers this late in the season (Harry Redknapp looks like being unable to save QPR from themselves, and he was appointed their manager back in November), they apparently lined up Di Canio as Martin O'Neill's replacement without so much as considering whether his past affiliation and gestures might cause controversy.  They certainly did at Swindon, when the GMB union cancelled its sponsorship deal after Di Canio was appointed manager there, even if that hardly received the same national attention his taking the job at Sunderland has.

As the students and historians of fascism have been so swift to tell us, it's certainly the case that we shouldn't confuse Italian fascism prior to Mussolini's alliance with Hitler with the ideology that emerged in Germany after the first world war, heavily influenced by the often eccentric nationalists of the day.  Nazism from the outset was virulently racist, whereas Mussolini's brand of nationalism only became overtly racist with the anti-semitic Manifesto of Race in 1938, by which point it was Hitler who was influencing the leader who, while not his mentor, had certainly been the one figure from outside Germany to most inspire him.

The emphasis on race is perhaps to miss the point a little.  While you certainly can be a fascist without being a racist, there are only so many ways you can hold an admiration for someone like Mussolini without either downplaying or completely ignoring certain parts of their legacy.  I personally find Stalin infinitely more intriguing a historical figure than any of the other totalitarian dictators of the 20th century as his path to power with the Bolsheviks is so extraordinary.  Pick up any recent biography of him and there is almost a consensus that despite being one of the greatest monsters in terms of the numbers who died as a result of his policies and paranoia, his role in the defeat of Nazi Germany is so significant that he can't be dismissed as Hitler or Mao often are.

In that sense, you can still be shocked, disgusted and overawed at how tens of millions died as they came under Stalin's yoke, while also being thankful that his leadership of the Soviet Union after the initial shock of the Nazi invasion helped to ensure that democracy and freedom in (most) of western Europe survived (and yes, obviously most of the respect should go to the sacrifices made by the Russian people and then to the strategies pursued by the Red Army's generals, but you can hardly ignore that Stalin, unlike Hitler, allowed his generals the freedom to plan and execute their manoeuvres, and towards the end of the war only really intervened to increase the competition between them).

With Mussolini, the case against him surely outweighs any positives.  His alliance with Hitler brought nothing but absolute disaster to Italy.  Certainly there are those that will cite the period prior to then as being more favourable, yet while there will always be some who are content with living under a one party system, very few are likely to say they would prefer to today.  
If Di Canio's politics are of the far-right without being totalitarian, which is rare, then that's one thing.  The point is though that fascism so much as it exists in 21st century Europe is almost entirely racist in nature.  While you can't really describe the British National Party as neo-Nazi when their most extreme racial policy (in public at least) is voluntary repatriation, Golden Dawn in Greece or Jobbik in Hungary have made no such gestures towards respectability as the far-right here have.  You can argue about whether groups such as the EDL hide their real intentions behind their campaigning against Islamic extremism (and I'd say they most certainly do, and they don't really even bother to hide it), yet the closest thing we now have to a party with mass appeal on the hard right is UKIP, which treads an extremely fine line between being anti-immigration and openly xenophobic.

Even if Di Canio is a fascist, albeit not a racist one, despite his denial today after he prevaricated yesterday, his political views shouldn't be held against him as long as he doesn't discriminate because of them.  Just as it's always been absurdly illiberal and discriminatory for BNP members to be barred from teaching when the idea they could indoctrinate children is laughable, no one should be refused a job based on their political beliefs.  The real reason this has become such an issue isn't so much down to Di Canio himself, although both he and Sunderland should have seen this coming and addressed it properly at the outset, or as soon as David Miliband resigned, but due to how racism remains such an issue in the English game, as demonstrated by the behaviour of some England fans at the San Marino game last week.  All this has also taken attention away from the real issue for Sunderland as a football club; whether Di Canio is the right man for the manager's job, and to judge from his time at Swindon, he almost certainly isn't.

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4/03/2013 09:07:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 

Do we have to go through this again?

There really isn't much to add to the entire furore over Gerald Scarfe's cartoon in the last issue of the Sunday Times.  No, it clearly isn't antisemitic, unless you think as the Israeli ambassador and the Board of Deputies of British Jews apparently do that you can't portray an Israeli politician and blood in the same image for fear of invoking the blood libel.  It doesn't matter that there is nothing in the cartoon that even begins to highlight the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is Jewish, or any suggestion that those encased in the wall are anything other than Palestinian, the majority of whom are Muslim rather Christian, it simply seems to have been down to how the cartoon was published on Holocaust Memorial Day that it's been so taken against.

At least when Steve Bell's cartoon of Netanyahu was accused of being antisemitic the only action taken was that the reader's editor suggested cartoonists shouldn't "use the of language of antisemitic stereotypes".  Considering the breadth of antisemitic literature and the hundreds of years of pogroms and prejudices, you can fairly easily find yourself completely unintentionally echoing old stereotypes, as Bell did by showing Netanyahu using Tony Blair and William Hague as puppets, or as Scarfe has now done through daring to suggest that Netanyahu might have some blood on his hands.  For the Sunday Times to essentially accept that it should never have ran the cartoon, purely because of the use of blood and because it was insensitively published on HMD, although Scarfe apparently hadn't realised that was the case, is utterly pathetic.

It's obvious though that this is both Murdoch's doing and the paper's new editor Martin Ivens having to follow where his master leads.  The paper at first rightly defended the cartoon as legitimate comment and as being typical of Scarfe's body of work, but this seems to increasingly mean nothing when it comes to the way some want to shut down debate.  On Newsnight last night Hugo Rifkind took issue with Steve Bell's bringing up of how Scarfe had also recently depicted Bashar Assad as drinking from a cup marked as containing children's blood, as though Assad and Netanyahu were comparable.  Clearly they aren't in the sense of democratic legitimacy. or the brutal methods they've employed, yet the point surely is, as always, that we expect more from those who receive massive amounts of Western aid and make great play of their being the only democracy in the Middle East, however out of date that claim now is.

To suggest there's been an awful lot of cant involved in this latest outbreak of accusations all but goes without saying.  Yes, it is indeed the case that there is a very fine line between antisemitism, anti-Zionism and vehement criticism of Israel, and it's also true that the apparent rise in recorded incidents of antisemitism is very worrying and has to be tackled.  The left does have a case to answer here, as that line has been breached in the past, and antisemitism when it comes to criticism of Israel has at times been tolerated when it would never be otherwise.  This said, it's also apparent there's an stark element of racism within Israeli society which goes under reported: in the past few months there's been reports of Ethiopian women being forcibly given birth control injections before being allowed in to the country, of fans of a football club campaigning against the signing of Muslim players, and most pertinently, Israeli politicians using disgusting language about African migrants.

This makes it all the more difficult to take when Daniel Taub effectively tries to halt an unpleasant but not unwarranted critique of his prime minister by crying racism.  People will always take offence and are perfectly entitled to, but when it's actual state actors that are attempting to close down legitimate debate it really is about time we sorted out this nonsense once and for all. 

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1/30/2013 09:33:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, November 26, 2012 

Sensitivity, anti-Semitism and Steve Bell.



Back in 2002, the New Statesman was quite rightly criticised after it ran the above front cover.  Picturing a Star of David pinning down the very centre of the union flag, while asking whether there was a "kosher conspiracy" involving lobbying from advocates of Israel, it invoked the most classic of anti-Semitic tropes whether that was the intention or not.  Editor at the time Peter Wilby apologised, and ran an editorial admitting that he personally had gotten it badly wrong.


10 years on, the readers' editor at the Graun has been moved to comment on the above Steve Bell cartoon, ran the day after the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari.  Mainly responding to a couple of letters to the paper from Mark Gardner of the Community Support Trust as well as online criticism, Chris Elliot concludes his piece by saying that in his view, journalists should "not use the language – including the visual language – of antisemitic stereotypes".  It is undoubtedly the case that Jews have in the past been caricatured as powerful puppet masters, although more usually as pulling strings rather than wielding politicians as glove puppets.

If the cartoon does then echo an anti-Semitic stereotype, however unconsciously, does that by definition make it anti-Semitic?  In this instance I would suggest it does not.  Bell states, and Elliot recognises that he has often depicted politicians as either puppets or subservient to others (Tony Blair was at times a poodle to George Bush's chimp), and Bell argues that on this occasion his intention was no different.  Bell says the whole point of the cartoon is Benjamin Netanyahu's cynicism and his manipulation of the situation leading up to the launching of Operation Pillar of Defence, with Blair and William Hague unwilling to criticise his actions despite this being a repeat of the tactics of past Israeli leaders as elections approach.

It's an argument I myself have made, and while I can see why the depiction of Blair and Hague as glove puppets will be seen by some as either lazy or offensive, taken as a whole the cartoon is clearly not anti-Semitic.  As Bell says, the entire cartoon is a take on a photograph of Netanyahu giving a statement to the media, where the backdrop was Israeli flags and there was a menorah on the lectern.  As often as there is a fine line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and it's one where the left at times accepts prejudice it would never tolerate elsewhere, the cartoon isn't even the former; it's an attack on a politician and how he presents himself, not a country or a racial group.  It does not, even obliquely, imply that Jews as a whole are "omnipotent conspirators" as the Jewish Chronicle quoted Jeremy Brier as saying, even if it can be argued it does fall into the stereotype of depicting a Jew as a puppeteer.

The irony will not be lost on some that the Graun is the paper most associated, rightly or wrongly, with political correctness, and has on occasion ran some utterly loopy pieces on perceived bigotry.  In this case it seems to have to a certain degree reaped what it has sown, while also falling victim to those groups that do treat any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.  While there is nothing wrong with going to great lengths in a bid to be sensitive, what should not be silenced is legitimate criticism of politicians of any race, colour or creed for fear that a stereotype might be touched upon, regardless of the medium through which it is made.

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11/26/2012 11:03:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, April 18, 2012 

"Give them the respect they deserve."

There really doesn't seem to be any great need to make lengthy comment on the trial of Anders Breivik. One of the great myths that crime writers and films have promoted is that serial killers are interesting, when the reality is that the vast majority of them are not. They tend to lead boring lives and have banal thoughts precisely because if they didn't they'd be caught much sooner: look at Dennis Nilsen, one of the most dull of his breed, who may well have escaped justice if he hadn't run out of places to store the bodies of his victims. There is the odd exception, like a Ted Bundy (and he's more intriguing than interesting), but they are very few and far between.

In these stakes Breivik could well be the dismal of them all. Anyone who writes a 1,800 page "manifesto" (if you can call an unreadable document largely made up of newspaper articles and blog posts quoted verbatim, as researched on Wikipedia a manifesto) as a justification for mass murder is instantly trying far too hard. At least the Unabomber had something vaguely original to say, even if it was nonsensical; with Breivik it's just the views of dozens of other like-minded individuals reproduced parrot fashion. Yes, we quickly realised that you're not much of a fan of multiculturalism, and that you blame cultural Marxists for its spread. What we're really interested in is why you decided you had to act, when all those other blowhards just continue to fulminate online at the how the West is committing cultural suicide.

An answer to which we simply aren't going to get. What we will get, as the week has so far shown, are those other traits associated with serial killers: sick-inducing narcissism, as when he claimed his actions were "the most sophisticated and spectacular political attack committed in Europe since the second world war"; the most pathetic self-pity, as when he cried upon viewing his own propaganda; and impenetrable delusions, like his insistence that his ridiculous Knights Templar organisation exists, and that it tried to "distance oneself sufficiently from national socialism because it was quite blood-stained". Just ever so slightly rich when his manifesto imagined a Europe-wide civil war where those he considered to be truly traitorous would be executed.

As much as the trial was supposedly meant to provide some sort of explanation to the Norwegian people, all Breivik has done so far is repeat his deeply unimpressive thoughts as released on the day. Writing last year, Simon Baron-Cohen stated that even if Breivik was a psychopath, that didn't begin to provide a reason for how his lack of affective empathy had led him to launch his lone act of terrorism. If the true point of the hearing is to establish whether Breivik is mentally ill or not, then there seems little reason for allowing him to turn the trial into a platform for spreading his own personal ideology when that can be achieved just as well behind closed doors. Indeed, the only reason for allowing him to attempt to justify his actions when other defendants would swiftly be silenced for being in contempt of court is that only the most maladjusted could possibly find anything admirable in his meanderings. Unfortunately, those are often the quiet, boring individuals that we still know so relatively little about.

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4/18/2012 05:27:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, April 12, 2012 

"It is unrealistic, in my opinion..."

Not in doubt is that some Arab newspapers, both state and privately owned, print articles and cartoons which are vehemently anti-Semitic and racist. Not as well known is that Israeli newspapers, in this case the biggest selling tabloid Yedioth Ahronoth publish material which is just as vile (via Angry Arab):


For all whose goal is to bring stability to this region, it is important to understand the rhetoric of those who oppose Israel as part of their religion. Understand that we are dealing with people who celebrate being detached from reality as part of their worship of Allah.

...
It is unrealistic, in my opinion, to believe that we can turn the Arabs into a society that truly embraces western concepts and values - like facts and sticking to truth. It makes much more sense to understand that fantasy and stretching the truth are very deeply embedded in the mindset of the Muslim and Arab culture. I do not mean to say this as an insult, but to suggest that we accept it as a fact, take it as it is and move on.

You won't be surprised to learn that the author, David Ha'ivri, opposed the Gaza pullout and advocates the annexing of the West Bank.

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4/12/2012 09:25:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, March 20, 2012 

Not racially aggravated then.

The racially aggravated public order offence charge has then duly been dropped against Azhar Ahmed, who a couple of weeks back expressed in his own unique way that the sanctimony and mawkishness surrounding the deaths of the six soldiers in Afghanistan was just a little stifling. Well, OK, that doesn't quite cover it: he actually said all soldiers should die and that we should think just as much of those who've died as a result of our actions in the country. Was it offensive to some? Yes. Is it something he should be imprisoned for or really receive anything other than a warning, not even a caution? No.

Nonetheless, it was obvious that his status update on Facebook wasn't as expressed racially motivated in any way. Whether the initial charge when looked at in the cold light of day couldn't be upheld and the CPS realised this was the case, or whether some of the criticism online had an influence we will most likely never know. He does still face a charge under the 2003 Communications Act, which he has plead not guilty to, so hopefully he might yet be acquitted.

You do still have to wonder exactly why it is that Ahmed has been subject to the full force of the law for his outrageous statement, while those who responded to him have apparently faced no such inquiry for having used clearly racist language, just as it seems odd that Facebook have apparently no problem with continuing to host a page which originally called for Ahmed to be killed. Still, if nothing else it has provided a wonderful insight into the mindset of the English Defence League, who were outside the court protesting with signs calling for jail for those who insult troops: for those apparently professing to defend the honour of England, they seem to have forgotten that one of the values we genuinely do share is the belief in freedom of speech. The idea that soldiers can't defend themselves or alternatively are incredibly offended and saddened by the odd person with extreme views is also nothing short of hilarious.

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3/20/2012 05:35:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, March 14, 2012 

Aldous Huxley was right. Sort of.

The quote from Aldous Huxley at the top of this page is, unsurprisingly, not one I fully subscribe to. He did though have a point, and while we can hardly blame inventors and designers for how their creations are subsequently used by our far from good selves, it's not so long back that we wouldn't have so many inconsequential things shoved down our throats due to the technology involved not existing. Think back to that terrible day when it was discovered that a woman had put a cat in a bin, a story literally followed around the world. Even if I'd owned the cat, I wouldn't have posted the video of this hideous crime being committed on Facebook: what's the point?

Much the same goes for the "my tram experience" video posted at the end of last year, featuring a clearly drunk woman being gratuitously ignorant and bigoted. Why record someone who is clearly not in full control of themselves unless, and this is a big unless, you're going to hand it over to the authorities as evidence that this person is potentially endangering their child by being sloshed in public? Don't put it up on the internet as evidence of how racist Britain still is when it shows nothing of the sort, especially when you ought to know full well that the person behind the obnoxious views is then going to be subjected to what might be called the full force of hate from keyboard warriors. It's very doubtful that Emma West will be raped or killed as a result of her inebriated ravings, as so many suggested she should be on forums and social networks afterwards, but the whole incident was simply unnecessary and avoidable.

Azhar Ahmed should then have known when he wrote his status update on the reaction to the deaths of six British servicemen last week that his shall we say forthright views were likely to offend. What he couldn't possibly have known was that he would be arrested, charged with a racially aggravated public order offence and then bailed to an address outside of West Yorkshire as a direct result. While I'm one of those who believes free speech should mean just that up to the point of inciting hatred or murder, I should imagine that had Ahmed given similar vent out in the street he could well have been arrested for breaching the peace. Where though is there anything that could be considered racial in his statement, at least as far we've seen through screengrabs? He doesn't make any reference to soldiers being British, being white or any other colour; he simply says "all soldiers should die".

The charge simply doesn't seem to make any sense. This has inevitably been explained in some quarters as obviously being down to the fact that Ahmed is Asian, and so therefore a Muslim, and so his comments must be either racially or religiously motivated, leading to the charge. More likely is that his remarks, even if not racist in tone, do resemble somewhat the line taken by groups such as Islam 4 UK, especially the line about women being raped, a point they often dwell upon regardless of their failure to come up with any examples of Iraqi or Afghani women being raped by foreign soldiers. It's not completely beyond credence that Ahmed has some links to such groups, or alternatively that the police decided that his remarks were so similar to their spouting that it justified the racial element.

Alternatively, there might be more to it than what we've so far seen. Harry Paterson relates some of the responses Ahmed's status received, some of them moving from the personally abusive into the realm of racism. Did Ahmed then respond in kind to some of these, with the police deciding that since he had started the discussion they would overlook the racism from the others and just deal with him? It certainly seems possible. Or have the police simply overreacted, seen something that isn't actually there, and will as a result have to drop the racially aggravated part on March the 20th?

Regardless of such concerns, Ahmed has nonetheless been subjected to much the same treatment as Emma West was. Deserving of being called an idiot as he is, the comments and responses go far beyond that. The best example is the Azhar Ahmed Scumbag!!! page over on Facebook, which until a few hours ago had as its description

"Azhar Ahmed need to be killed for what he wrote on facebook the scum! people like this should not be in our county if their not going to support it! out with the scum!!!"

Apart from being severely lacking in grammar, this goes further than Ahmed did. He merely said all soldiers should die; he didn't say they should be killed, or "need to be killed". With numerous people apparently reporting the page not just to Facebook but to the police, the description has now been subtly changed to

Azhar Ahmed need to be put away and never let out for what he wrote on facebook the scum! people like this should not be in our county if their not going to support it! out with the scum!!!

Still as lacking in grammar, and still over the top, but at least it no longer incites murder.

Hopefully we'll receive more details next Tuesday as to exactly why the charge against Ahmed is racially motivated and not a simple public order one. Until then it would be lovely if we could get things in perspective, and realise that regardless of whether we're saying it out loud or typing it, saying without irony that someone should die or be killed simply for something they themselves have said never adds much to a debate.

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3/14/2012 09:31:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, January 05, 2012 

Another depressing passing frenzy.

Sigh. Honestly, are we going to carry on in this way until the end of time? People in other countries use social networking sites to help launch and organise revolutions; we apparently use them to flay alive those who say or do things we don't like. No one's safe, whether it's 13-year-olds with dreams of stardom, clearly drunk women mouthing off on trams, an ageing, jeans-wearing man who likes cars cracking a joke about impartiality, BBC news editors who light-heartedly included a panda in their list of women of the year, not expecting that over Christmas there would still be thousands of humourless people on Twitter, or as today's shown, an MP being careless in their choice of words.

I didn't really even want to write about this, but thought I had to after yesterday's post. And let's make this clear, as plenty of people have wrongly drawn equivalence between Diane Abbott's comments and Luiz Suarez's argument with Patrice Evra. There is simply no comparison between a footballer, who when asked by his opponent why he kicked him said it was because he was a negro, repeats the word a further six times, and then denies he's done anything wrong until he issues a feeble general apology months later rather than address it personally to the man he said it to, and a politician who was quite clearly not seriously implying that *all* white people love playing divide and rule when replying to a critique of the idea of there being both a "black community" and "black community leaders".

This said, Abbott's subsequent attempts at explaining her tweet have not been fully convincing. Yes, as the hash-tag in her original makes clear, she was defending the idea of there being a black community when in the past both the establishment (overwhelmingly white) and colonial powers have tried to prevent any such leadership from taking shape in order to keep black people in "their place". Politics is though inherently all about dividing and ruling, as this government is more than ably demonstrating, and Abbott should have known that generalising it to "white people" was a simplification way too far, even for 140 characters. She then compounded this by not fully explaining just what she meant, rather going for the age-old excuse of it being taken out of context. If she had done that to begin with and apologised immediately for any offence she may have caused, she probably wouldn't have received the public dressing-down from Ed Miliband, or prompted an onslaught from those who jump at any chance to launch an assault against the "politically correct" lobby on the comment sections of websites.

Sad to say, there is also more than an element of truth to their accusation that if a politician had made a similar blanket statement about black people (although you can't exactly turn it directly around in this instance) then it's more than likely they would be out of a job now, even if an apology was made or there were similar nuances involved. It's worth remembering that Patrick Mercer was ridiculously made to resign from his shadow cabinet position by David Cameron, supposedly over how he repeated the stereotyping used by drill sergeants (although it always seemed more likely it was to do with how he dismissed out of hand any suggestion that there might be racial discrimination in the army), a decision also likely made as an attempt to ensure that his "detoxifying of the Tory brand" was in no way undermined. It would be lovely to imagine that all instances of racism could be treated the same regardless of the colour of the skin of the person involved, but this itself is difficult when some on the left continue to believe that it is only those with white skin, or those in a position of power who can be racist. This needs to be seriously challenged and to change.

It would also help wonderfully if the media, rather than looking for constant controversy and jumping straight on the back of a Twatterstorm could instead continue to reflect on how the last couple of days have demonstrated that British society has been changed for the better by the courage, tenacity and dignity of two people who simply wanted justice for their son. They were helped along by both natural and unnatural allies, including those who made their own individual breakthroughs, like Diane Abbott. Moving on to the next passing frenzy was especially crass in these circumstances.

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1/05/2012 09:39:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, January 04, 2012 

Liverpool, Suarez and the football bubble.

At the best of times, it often seems as though football, or at least top-flight football operates within a bubble. This can indeed be a source of strength: long may it continue to be the case that at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon the problems of the outside world can be temporarily forgotten about, the sheer artistry of 22 individuals on a field overwhelming everything else. At the same time, it's impossible to do so when those outside problems are mirrored on the pitch itself. Thanks to the work of groups such as the Kick it Out campaign and others, racism has for the most part been eradicated both from the pitch and terraces. There is still work needed to ensure it doesn't return, as well as to raise the overall level of respect both players and fans have towards one another, at least within reason, but for the most part the situation has improved massively over the past two decades.

This is why the incidents between Luiz Suarez and Patrice Evra, and John Terry and Anton Ferdinand have cast such a pall over the game. Most of us thought we'd got beyond the point where massively paid international footballers, regardless of how a minority have conducted themselves off the pitch would ever think it acceptable to racially abuse one another on it. While Terry is innocent till proven guilty, and it must be said it is thoroughly regrettable that the police have become involved in his case, the case against Suarez has been overwhelmingly proved. Even so, everyone has rightly been at pains to point out that regardless of what Suarez has been found to have referred to Evra as in the heat of the moment, no one is even beginning to suggest that he is a racist. The FA has stated they do not believe him to be a racist; the independent regulatory commission found in its exhaustive report that he was not a racist; and more to the point, Evra himself said in his evidence that he does not believe Suarez is racist (paragraph 232 of the report).

Both Suarez and Liverpool as a football club seem to have completely ignored this crucial point: that making a racist comment does not instantly make the person who made it genuinely prejudiced, let alone a supremacist or as both seem to fear, a potential pariah. Ever since Evra made his complaint, both have dug themselves ever deeper into a hole when all that was really needed was for Suarez and his club to recognise that he had breached, perhaps even through ignorance, the FA's rules, accept the charge and make an apology to Evra. The FA would have taken this into account and most likely given a less harsh penalty than the 8 game ban and fine of £40,000 that he's received, as they did in the case of Reading's John Mackie, who had 5 games of his ban suspended. Instead, and to what should be their shame, they've contested the charge with such a vigour that they've brought both themselves and the game into disrepute.

From the very outset, when Dalglish's second comment on being called to see Andre Marriner and Phil Dowd after the game was to ask hadn't Evra "done this before" (paragraph 145) it seems as though their strategy, rather than being to recognise Suarez might have gone beyond the pale was to stick to him blindly, and far more ignobly, accuse Evra of making the whole up. Evra has not, despite common belief, made accusations of racism before; when he was involved in a ruck after a game at Chelsea with a groundsman it was Mike Phelan and United's goalkeeping coach who claimed the word "immigrant" had been levelled at the player.

If the hope was that through rigorously contesting Evra's evidence it would be found wanting, then the approach failed miserably: over a quite incredible 115 pages, almost every part of Liverpool's case is destroyed. If the FA had really wanted to be vindictive, they could have said that one player calling another a negro was by itself completely unacceptable in the English league; instead, the commission instructed two independent experts, both of whom painstakingly go through all the linguistic connotations and found that if Suarez said what Evra says he did, it would have been offensive even back in Uruguay, while if it was the other way around, it wouldn't have been (paragraphs 167-202).

Most remarkable of all is that Liverpool have kept up this pretence even after Suarez told the commission that he wouldn't be using the word "negro" again (paragraph 454). Their statement yesterday, making clear that they wouldn't be appealing the judgement, is typical of the bluster of football managers when they want to cover over a poor performance. Everything according to them was subjective, even when time and again it's clear the commission went out of their way to be fair to Suarez. It's true that their decision was made on the balance of probabilities rather beyond reasonable doubt, but this was always going to be the case when the evidence they had to decide upon depended so much on how their individual accounts stood up. It could be that United coached Evra better, and that he made a better impression as he gave his evidence in English while Suarez's had to be translated, yet it's also the case that both Damien Comilli, Liverpool's director of football, and Dirk Kuyt thought that Suarez had told them he had used words he subsequently denied saying (paragraph 376).

Rather than it being the FA that has damaged Suarez's reputation, as they charge, it's been the approach of the club and Suarez, both denying everything that has led to this point. Little more would have been said had he accepted he was in the wrong to begin with; far more damaging in the long term is not that he strayed beyond a line through genuine ignorance, but that then he subsequently gave unconvincing evidence about it. On yesterday of all days, someone ought to have read the statement they put out, especially the mealy-mouthed part that follows the accusations against the FA, of how they're not continuing "a fight for justice in this particular case" as it would only obscure their support for putting an end to any form of racism in English football, and decided to strike it all out and make as low-key an announcement as they could, even if they still didn't accept guilt.

The greatest shame of all is that while everyone has come to expect unfettered, unapologetic arrogance from Manchester United, such is the way Alex Ferguson has long conducted himself, the team we didn't begin to imagine could react in a similar fashion has gone completely off the deep end. And as an Arsenal fan, and someone who has long admired Liverpool, it deeply pains me to find that if only this once, it's United that have been on the side of righteousness.

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1/04/2012 04:53:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 

Footballers! Put up with racism!

(h/t to both Tabloid Watch and Angry Mob.)

If nothing else, Steve Doughty displays an interesting thought process in his quite remarkable article for the Daily Mail's RightMinds blog (edited by Simon Heffer, who just so happens to be Enoch Powell's biographer). After a couple of weeks in which it's been claimed that Premier League footballers have racially abused each other, Doughty does the sensible thing and relates how massively things have improved even since the 70s and 80s. He writes about how "it has been a long hard road" for black footballers, as indeed it has. He even relates an anecdote about how a man in front of him and his elderly mother at Highbury (before Arsenal moved to the Grove) racially abused Kanu, afterwards turning round and apologising for letting such an unacceptable sentiment just "slip" out.

An indication to how after all this there's a bizarre conclusion is in the aside about John Terry, accused of calling Anton Ferdinand a "fucking black cunt". Terry's explanation is that he was in fact saying to Ferdinand, after a confused encounter, that he didn't say he was a "fucking black cunt", although it seems Ferdinand hadn't realised in the first place Terry had said anything of the sort. According to Doughty, that Terry might have said such things is not that surprising "given Terry's general level of conduct". I'm not a Chelsea fan, but the newspapers have for a while now seemed to have it in for Terry: tales of him urinating at the bar in a club, showing businessmen round Stamford Bridge for a fee, the outrageous entrapment of his father and finally the more than possibly untrue story of his affair with Vanessa Perroncel would rile anyone. Even if all of these accusations were true, it's fatuous to claim that they make the allegations of racism more likely.

Having then set out how much worse things used to be, and how there are also "worse things to complain about", Doughty's advice to any players racially abused is to "put up with it and get on with the game". Yes, Patrice Evra, you should put up with opposing players repeatedly calling you a "nigger"; after all, those who blazed a trail before you had to. As for you Anton, well, you didn't even know about Terry's comments before you heard about it later, so what's the problem? Of all the absurd arguments to make, this has to be one of the most ridiculous. The sheer fact that it was fans who were so vociferous about Terry's alleged comments gives the lie to the idea that players, knowing the progress that has been achieved, should now keep quiet. The obvious truism is that if the players themselves are treating each other in such a way, then it hardly sets an example to the fans. All the more reason for players not to tolerate it.

Understandably, the Show Racism the Red Card campaign is "appalled". Leroy Resenior, who works for the campaign, put it far more brutally when asked about the situation in general:

My son is a footballer and he has not experienced racism on the pitch, but he is of mixed heritage. Those who say that black players have to toughen up haven't got a clue and shouldn't be the ones our kids listen to.

Quite.

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10/26/2011 09:58:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, August 01, 2011 

One rule for them...

Melanie Phillips has written another piece (this might be the only time I ever use a istyosty link) in response to her being included in Anders Breivik's 1,500 page manifesto. It's the usual Phillips attack as defence strategy, and also as usual exaggerates criticism into something much worse, with Sunny Hundal's "singling" her out among other notable writers a "smear".

Sunny himself deals well with most of it, such as how she argues we don't how know far Breivik's political views motivated his massacre, only somewhat undermined by how he uploaded the manifesto just before he went out to commit his atrocity, but there are a couple of parts which are worth a further degree of examination:

But in Breivik’s 1,500-page diatribe, I was mentioned precisely twice. The first time was a quote from an article in this newspaper about family breakdown.

The second was another article about the revelation by a former civil servant that the previous Labour government had kept the public in the dark about a covert policy of mass immigration.

What Phillips omits to mention is that Breivik later refers back to this second piece in the supposedly "hypothetical" part of the manifesto detailing what Knights Templar warriors should do to avoid detection and who they should target. Breivik describes the Mail's reporting and Phillips' article on Neather's comment piece in the Evening Standard as

add[ing] to the documentation which proves that a relatively large multiculturalist network on all levels of European politics: political activists, journalists, politicians, NGO leaders - locally, nationally and on EU level have a deliberate plan to destroy European cohesion, identity, our culture by implementing multiculturalist doctrines and allowing mass Muslim immigration (page 806).

He goes on to conclude:

The common factor between all variations of multiculturalists is that they all believe they are doing the right thing, so they all have good intentions, at least according to themselves. But this can also be said about Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. They were all idealists in their own twisted way. Regardless of their twisted intentions they are all mass murderers and must be treated as such.

It doesn't matter that there was of course no plot or plan to impose multiculturalism or use immigration as a weapon against the right, as Neather himself later said, criticising the Mail and the likes of Phillips for claiming this was the proof of Labour's nefarious intentions; it was however just the sort of "evidence" Breivik was looking for to confirm his prejudices. This puts his use of Phillips' arguments clearly above the dozens of other writers he liberally quoted from or mentioned, not necessarily always with approval. This is still not causation, obviously: Phillips was no more responsible for Breivik's actions than anyone else; it's not however anything approaching a smear to point this out.

As with any number of Phillips articles, she then concludes by contradicting much of what she's just wrote:

The claim that ‘blood is on my hands’ can so easily translate into someone seeking my own blood. Heaven forbid that should happen — but if it did, there would be a direct causal link with those who have whipped up this wicked firestorm.

So, err, even though the link between Breivik's words and his actions hasn't been substantiated, if someone was to now kill Phillips there would be a "direct casual link" between the murderer and those suggesting she ought to at least re-examine some of her writing. It seems then that while there will never be any link between extreme right-wing political thought on Islam and multiculturalism and violence in pursuit of the goals of that movement, anyone who has even so much as criticised Phillips should feel responsible if someone mugs her tomorrow. One rule for them and another for me doesn't even begin to cover it.

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8/01/2011 09:42:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 

Anders Breivik: a fascist?

(This is the reply I've posted to Unity's excellent Breivik and fascism - a lesson from George Orwell. As it's long enough and I'm feeling slightly lazy I'm reposting it here, with a few slight additions and tweaks, as well as links and citations.)

Much as I agree with the vast majority of this, I think the main problem with accurately labelling Breivik is that as yet we haven't come up with a convincing catch-all term for the new far right which on the surface eschews racism but which underneath is just as virulent in its hatred of those with brown skin as the fascists and neo-Nazis we're all familiar with. Scratch beneath Breivik's anti-racist façade and you find the same old tropes, i.e. as in the way he exclusively blames "Muslims" for the crime in Oslo (page 1392 of his "manifesto"), just as the EDL and those associated with it have banged on about "Muslims" being in control of the drug trade in various cities, as if religion has anything whatsoever to do with it.

This is why I think he personally has more in common with Tim McVeigh than any previous European terror group or individual. McVeigh was a fan of the Turner Diaries and a known racist, but he was further radicalised by the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges. Coupled with the then highly en vogue "new world order" conspiracy theories, he decided to strike back against the US federal government.

Breivik instead found his inspiration mainly from the hysterical far-right, convinced that pure Muslim demographics mean that Europe is doomed. He combined this with the utterly bizarre conspiracy theory that the Frankfurt school of Marxist social theorists have somehow managed to influence politicians of both mainstream right and left into imposing state multiculturalism and political correctness onto their people without their consent. Into the mix also came the "anti-jihadist" bloggers and other assorted right-wing figures, both American and European, Pam Geller and Geert Wilders (page 1407) to name but two, all of whom he came to believe were simply not going to achieve anything through democratic politics, so convinced of the control the "cultural Marxists" have over everything. Only he, or rather his almost certainly imaginary group, can start off the war by killing not Muslims, although he includes them in his list of "prioritised targets" (page 921), but instead hitting the multiculturalists themselves. In this he shares the "awakening" belief of many other terrorists before him, that through one spectacular act he can both raise awareness among those of like minds that they can personally do something, and also hopefully provoke the authorities into so overreacting that they make things worse, the same trap the West walked into after 9/11.

While I won't demure from the fact that his dream Europe would be a very old-fashioned totalitarian place, with the media controlled and patriarchy mandated (heh), he also proposes the on the surface completely incongruous idea of "liberal zones" (page 1168), where those who wish to live "Sex and the City" lifestyles can do so, as long as they are cut off "ideologically" from the rest of society to avoid "cultural contamination". Not many fascists would be willing to offer an apparent safe haven from their policies, especially when so many would obviously consider things to be far more pleasant there.

Apart from being a mess of contradictions then, he's a fascist of the very latest school, albeit one who unlike the EDL has fully pseudo-intellectualised his actions and gone from viewing all Muslims as being bent on world domination, even if indirectly, to killing those he believes are enabling them. The wags over at Blood and Treasure suggested, with tongue firmly in cheek, that he could be viewed as the military wing of Melanie Phillips. In my view, he's best compartmentalised as a 21st century European white nationalist, who while others talked decided to act, by murdering the "friends" of his enemies. And with that, we perhaps ought to stop considering the ravings of a lone lunatic, however much insight he might give into current far-right thinking.

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7/27/2011 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, July 25, 2011 

Anders Breivik and "cultural Marxism".

When it comes to terrible, immediately unattributable terrorist attacks like the ones in Oslo on Friday, the best approach would be to take a step back before jumping to conclusions. The impossibility of doing so in the era of 24-hour-news, Twatter and everything else means that criticising those who are (mostly) being asked to do so knowing only what everyone else does, i.e. very little, isn't always entirely productive, even if Charlie Brooker does it very well.

It's certainly rather more justified when those who are in a hole then refuse to stop digging. Strangely, those associated with the Labour Uncut website seem more affected than most. Dan Hodges writes that this tragedy shouldn't be turned into a simple issue of solidarity, even after he admits it was a "targeted attack", while Tom Harris, having first pointed the finger at al-Qaida or its associates as so many others did, compounds the error. The left should not imagine that because this particular terrorist is white and indeed, killed teenage left-wingers, it absolves them from failing to acknowledge or adequately condemn jihadists.

Hodges does have a point however when he raises the comparison of Gabrielle Giffords and Jared Lee Loughner, if not with the implication that "the left" was blaming Sarah Palin and Tea Party before he'd even been charged. It was Giffords herself who said there were potential consequences to Palin putting her location in a gun sight, and it was certainly the case the political rhetoric in the US was raising to ever more ridiculous and potentially dangerous heights, even if the reaction now seems a little overblown. Loughner as it turned out did not have any associations with right-wing Republicans like Palin and Michele Bachmann or their supporters, to name but two: instead, the best explanation so far for his actions is that he was a mentally ill young man with conspiratorial tendencies, who having felt slighted by Giffords in the past decided to target her.

Anders Breivik by contrast couldn't really have been more clear in setting out the justification, such as it is, for his actions. His 1,500 page manifesto, which quotes liberally from dozens of writers, has an entire, supposedly hypothetical section titled "a declaration of pre-emptive war" (page 766 onwards). In it, his group, named hysterically the Knights Templar, which seems to consist of one Anders Breivik, offers a full pardon to the "Western European multiculturalist regimes" as long as they capitulate by 2020 to the Templar's military forces (page 785). Presuming that this pardon is quite unreasonably not accepted, he goes on to explain that all multiculturalists, whether they are "hardcore Marxist, cultural Marxist, suicidal humanist, career cynicist or [...] capitalist globalist" are essentially the same, and that the punishment for such high treason is also the same (page 806), although further on he only mentions execution as the penalty for "category A and B criminals" (page 930), while "category C traitors" can be considered legitimate targets "in larger operations where WMDs are involved". He also elucidates what the prime targets should be for a "Justiciar Knight Commander" (page 921):

Concentrate on massive and compact buildings that are vulnerable to a “single source” blast/assault. We must ensure that a maximum number of category A, B and C traitors are hit with a minimum of civilians. Specified targets fit that profile:

Prioritised targets:
- MA100 political parties - cultural Marxist/multiculturalist political parties. Prioritised targets include HQs or annual meetings of MA100 political parties

Breivik's influences for his personal ideology are writ large throughout. He most admires "Fjordman", the pseudonymous blogger who's written for a number of far-right sites, and cites numerous anti-jihadist blogs, such as Gates of Vienna, Jihad Watch, Atlas Shrugs and others. Those looking closer to home will quickly see parallels between Breivik's belief in what is essentially a conspiracy between mainstream political parties to institute political correctness, or what he calls "cultural Marxism", leading to mass Muslim immigration and eventually the disintegration of democracy and the triumph of Eurabia, and the world view of groups such as the English Defence League, with which he's alleged to have dealings with, although they've never begun to aspire to his lofty pseudo-intellectual heights. Melanie Phillips, who has long despaired of the "suicide of the West", having found herself being quoted by Breivik has quickly pointed to his scattergun approach. As her blog seems to have collapsed under the weight of the traffic her defence piece brought in, all we can currently go by is her tweet, which says the "atrocity ignites left pathology".

One story which Breivik returns to throughout his manifesto (first appears on page 365) is this comment piece by Andrew Neather, seized on by the likes of the Daily Mail and Telegraph as the "proof" of a plot by Labour to recreate Britain as a fully multicultural society, where the party would forever remain in power backed by the votes of grateful immigrants. The only problem was, as Neather later responded, there was no plot and the minister he wrote the speech for was later removed from her position. Breivik not only quotes from Phillips' comment piece which more than misrepresents Neather (page 368), he uses Neather's supposed revelation as part of his explanation as to why "political activists, journalists, politicians, NGO leaders" should be treated as "traitors" (page 806) and ultimately, executed.

As much as Breivik has appropriated or indeed, admires al-Qaida's approach, as Will McCants and Spencer Ackerman have both noted, it's fairly apparent he has most in common with Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, although even Ted, who wrote a 35,000 word essay detailing his belief system, would have blanched at the excessive detail and personal information Breivik has left in his far longer tome. McVeigh, whom Breivik refers to on a number of occasions (page 950, 967) including once in his diary on the making of the bomb, exclaiming he now understands "why Mr. McVeigh limited his manufacturing to 600kg" (page 1466), was a believer in the now almost passe conspiracy theory of the "new world order" and was so angered by the heavy-handed raids on Ruby Ridge and Waco that he decided to strike back. Breivik doesn't even have a government "atrocity" to fall back on: his simple belief that Europe will be overrun by Muslims down to a mixture of demographics, immigration and "cultural Marxism", as easily debunked as any notion of a Zionist occupied government, was fuelled by paranoid hatred from far-right bloggers and nominally mainstream writers who make a living out of such alarmism.

The Heresiarch delicately considers whether, seeing as such individuals have long denounced non-violent Islamists and even ordinary Muslims for either enabling or tolerating the jihadists, it's possible that they've done the same with Breivik:

To some extent, Melanie Phillips and the others are now getting a taste of their own medicine. They have been far too quick in the past to elide the distinction between Islamist opinions and violence, and also between Muslims in general and Islamists in particular. The spread of hardline Islam is largely a phenomenon within Muslim communities, and poses the greatest problem to other Muslims (female Muslims, gay Muslims, Ahmadi Muslims...). If "Islamophobic" writers are now being tarred with the same brush as the appalling Breivik... well, perhaps it will give them pause for thought.

Well, it might. It will almost certainly temporarily lead to some soul-searching, such as that of Mark Humphrys, who goes through Breivik's writing looking for where their opinions went their separate ways, although he seems erroneously to conclude that Breivik suddenly decided upon violence last year, when it's apparent that his manifesto by his own admission has been years in the writing. At best it could lead a toning down of the rhetoric. On the other hand, it may well embolden some: already the EDL, while denouncing the attack has suggested that it shows what could happen in this country if their petty thuggery and attempts at riling up Muslims aren't given more political attention (surely if their case for a crackdown on Muslim extremists and Sharia law isn't addressed? Ed.)

Far more plausible though, and regardless of how Breivik's ideology was nurtured and encouraged, is that he's a one-off. So much of his manifesto appears to be utter fantasy, such as the sections dedicated to the medals and ribbons of his Knights Templar organisation (page 1075) (members likely to be one, despite his claim as to there being two other cells), not to the mention the sexual proclivities of his friends and relatives (page 1171), or his time as the biggest hip-hopper in west Oslo (page 1388) that it suggests someone, despite the intelligence necessary to produce such a document, that is simply not in full touch with reality. Others would have failed or given up at various stages in the planning process. It was a mixture of pure luck and Norway being unprepared for such an assault that led to his success. While some should be at the least examining their consciences, the rest of us can be fairly secure in knowing that there are most certainly not others waiting to launch further attacks on the "cultural Marxists".

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7/25/2011 09:09:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, November 26, 2010 

In which I admit getting it wrong twice in two days.

Among the more puzzling seeming attacks on Elwyn Watkins featured in Phil Woolas's election literature was the one featured on the page containing his personal address to Oldham East and Saddleworth's voters. In what I foolishly imagined to be something approaching a joke, Woolas's pseudo newspaper promised that next week they could read Watkins' plans "to scrap the Geneva convention".

It says something about the battle being joined in the constituency that rather than being an attempt at a light-hearted jibe at their opponent, Watkins in fact did respond when asked that he'd rip up not only the Geneva convention, but also the European Convention on Human Rights if it would mean that he'd be able to deport asylum seekers back to "their oppressive country" if they'd broken the law here. Asked by members of his own party to clarify his views, he finally got around to responding to them today:


Clearly there are other considerations in the case of people who have been granted asylum because it is likely their lives would be seriously endangered if they return to their home country.

Nonetheless, the position of the minority who abuse asylum is a genuine concern for local people, many of whom have raised it repeatedly with politicians of all parties.

It is not good enough to sweep these concerns under the carpet as Labour have done for 13 years. To not discuss these issues openly when they are of genuine concern to many local people allows extremist parties to get a foot in the door, and that’s something none of us want.

I welcome the coalition government’s commitment to a Commission to investigate a British Bill of Rights, with the express intention of clarifying how our commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights, the Geneva Convention and other international agreements best operate within British law and to ‘promote a better understanding of the scope of these obligations and liberties’.

Which, as many will note, is almost exactly what Woolas himself has argued. By not saying that we'll deport asylum seekers back to their home country if they break the law, regardless of concerns for their safety, we'll allow the British National Party to take advantage. Or put another way: unless we adopt the British National Party's policies, we'll lose votes to them.

Watkins' attempt at outdoing Woolas from the right seems sadly to have been unsuccessful first time round, as the Liberal Democrat vote in the constituency fell by almost 300 ballots on their 2005 performance (doubtless they would claim as a result of Labour's dirty tricks), with the Tories and UKIP the main beneficiaries. The BNP share of the vote increased by 0.8%, but it was still way down on what they achieved in 2001, the year of the riots. Quite whether Liberal Democrats will come out and support someone who hasn't retracted his views when (or if) the by-election eventually takes place should be fascinating.

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11/26/2010 10:03:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, November 09, 2010 

Disgraces and mutinies.


It would be nice to think that there's some sort of principle underlying certain sections of the parliamentary Labour party's support for Phil Woolas. Something approaching fairness, perhaps, one of those values which is meant to be hard-wired into the party's soul. And it's true, there are some making legitimate arguments, even if their case overall is dubious. In their eyes, Woolas has been hung out to dry by the party, not allowed to appeal against a ruling which could have huge implications for the democratic process, summarily suspended and all but told by the party's deputy leader that even if he had the ruling overturned he can't return as a parliamentary candidate.

The problem is that those making such arguments are the minority. Instead, what's really going on is a febrile mixture of pique, loathing for the Liberal Democrats, flagrant disregard as well as contempt for both judges and a system which is enshrined in the Representation of the People Act, and the continuing feeling amongst the older generation of MPs especially that having reached Westminster should give them some sort of protection against the things that everyone else in the country has to endure. The pique is not solely centred at those who are living under the misapprehension that telling lies about your opponent during a general election isn't the done thing, but also at the party's leadership itself, some of the feelings being held over from the hard line taken during the expenses scandal when similar action was taken against miscreants. Add into this how some are still grieving about Ed Miliband winning the party leadership thanks to the unions with his brother being vanquished despite winning the overwhelming support of the parliamentary party, and it's not that surprising that at the first possible opportunity there's been something approaching a mutiny.

More understandable is the feeling that Liberal Democrats have in the past on many occasions played dirty when it's suited them, especially in by-elections, only to now decide to take matters to the courts. Such feelings would be justified if this was just a case of the Liberal Democrats complaining unjustly, yet even a slight knowledge of the campaign which Woolas ran shows just how far he was prepared to take things in a desperate effort to cling on to the seat. It's not just the leaflets distributed on polling day itself which were blatantly misleading and told lies about how extremists wanted Woolas out because he was tough on immigration, it's the extraordinary 8-page newspaper (linked from this post) which his campaign produced which from cover to cover was a tissue of attacks on Elwyn Watkins personally, the vast majority completely unsubstantiated. It was how despite being the immigration minister and representing a constituency hit by riots only 9 years early he was prepared to play the communities off against one another, in his faux-newspaper even claiming that the approval of a mosque which he accepted was needed was a return to the old politics that had stoked the violence. To give a further flavour, in what was probably meant to be a joke, on the page where Woolas set out why he should be re-elected in his own words, beneath the headline was the legend:

Next week we hear from Elwyn Watkins for the Liberal Democrats about his plans to scrap the Geneva Convention.

For Graham Stringer to then decide that he's not in a position to pass judgement is ludicrous - these weren't just white lies and the usual election to and fro, these were actions which should have resulted in Woolas being reprimanded or even suspended at the time for bringing the party into disrepute.

As Justin notes, it's only when MPs or their hangers-on find themselves being investigated or harried by the police that their true colours show. The arrest of Ruth Turner during the loans for peerages scandal resulted in heavy criticism of the Met by some in the Labour party despite the police only following what was standard operating procedure, going to the home of someone they wanted to talk to in the early hours when they were most likely to be there. In this instance we have the just as puffed up Dave Watts, the right honourable member for St Helens North declaring that Woolas was found guilty by a kangaroo court, which is a strange description of what is essentially the High Court in a different guise. Woolas whilst immigration minister, lest we forget, said with a straight face that some of those working on behalf of asylum seekers were giving "false hope" through their actions, working to overturn rulings which could have led to their clients being sent back to face the mistreatment and potential death which they'd fled from.

It's not difficult to see this as a continuing hangover from the expenses debacle. For one thing, it shows an extraordinary lack of awareness of what ordinary public opinion is like: overwhelmingly when asked ordinary voters describe MPs as liars and cheats, fairly or not, and where else do they need to look for evidence than this case? Not only is one exposed as having deliberately lied about his opponent, but his pals at Westminster are objecting to him being thrown out of the party for doing so, whilst complaining bitterly and muttering darkly about judges deciding what is and isn't an "acceptable" untruth. Rather than doing something for their constituents, like providing a decent opposition to a government which is hell bent on pushing through badly drafted and hasty legislation, not to mention brutal austerity measures, they seem more concerned about as usual, standing up for themselves. Fundamentally, it shows, as Liberal Conspiracy has it, an utterly warped lack of judgement.

Finally, it's incredibly short-sighted in another obvious way. The chances of the Liberal Democrats putting in a performance as strong as they did back in May are dubious to say the very least. With a fresh, untainted Labour candidate running against Watkins, now forced to defend the record of his party in government, the odds must surely be for an increase in Woolas's notional majority of just 105. By continuing to support Woolas they're just prolonging the agony and further disgruntling the constituents who are without an MP for the foreseeable future. Those backing such a busted flush couldn't be doing a better job of showing exactly why the wider party remains unelectable in its current form.

Update: See this post for a rather lengthy take on Watkins' support for scrapping the Geneva convention.

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11/09/2010 10:41:00 pm | | | links to this post

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