Not, unfortunately, Ed. Labour MP Graham Allen has written a very interesting post suggesting some out-of-the-box perspectives on British democracy. I agree with a considerable amount, if not all, of what he said but that’s not why I’m linking it. Continue reading
Apologies to all British readers for reminding them of a truly dire series of BT adverts. Over at GeekaChicas A Nonny Mouse has been talking about the city travails of Bozeman, Montana. In brief; a major local employer who also happen to be the city administration and therefore publicly funded, decided that all job applicants must submit username/password data for their internet community sites, including Facebook, Livejournal and email sites. The purpose of this remarkable “background check” was to verify that servants of Bozeman should be “of the highest moral fiber”. Continue reading
This is a rag-bag of things worth noting that happened, or were written about, while I was down. I didn’t feel comfortable titling a 1250-word post ‘… in brief’ though, so this is what you got.. Starting the day with the continued strengthening of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg clearly had someone competent on his design staff this week. [1] The campaign is one I like; the credentials of the leader promoting it are as close to unimpeachable as you can get, and there’s someone working on it who understands cadence. All good things.
Our story so far: in a thrilling series of bold acquisitions and mergers, occasional plague- or famine-related downsizing and aggressive management restructuring rounds, the human race has managed to invent, in approximate sequence: banditry, tax, cities, bureaucracy, capital wealth, relative wealth, underclasses, social revolutions, writing, statist/hierarchical models of governance and universities. [1] This brought us to the point of answering the initial query: “Just what is it that centralised, statist/hierarchical models of capitalist civilisation are better at than all of the competitor systems human ingenuity has suggested?”.
The answers are scaling, and technological boot-strapping
[ Editor’s Note: 8.6.09:- I have only just got around to answering questions by Eithin, posed below, about where my source data and civilisation models come from. I have replied in two parts below, but want to include the basic details here.
The Emergence of Civilisation, Charles Maisels 1990
Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, Michael Roaf, 1990 ]
One can tell that the Great Machine series were not planned that way because this would probably have been post one, if they had been. However, I should be able to fix that by offering a different reading order on the Series page.
As an illustration of a point I was making about ideology, I discussed in detail why both ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’ do not necessarily mean what you think they mean. The functional definition of ‘capital’ that I arrived at is “accumulations of unused wealth”; implying that capitalism is any social system in which it is possible to accumulate and defend unexploited wealth. In the same article I also posed the question “What is it that statist/hierarchical systems are good for?”
I have expressed before my frustration with ideologies. As I understand the term it is a functional equivalent in politics to the expression ‘dogma’ in religion; a group of ideas that someone famous held which hereinafter must be adhered to as a group. I have several problems with this, not least being that it means people who think ideologically write off what I’m saying without ever stopping to understand it. If I agree with someone famous (e.g. Lenin) about $idea, and the famous person was wrong about $idea2 (which I don’t agree with them on anyway) I can be safely ignored by ideologists, who write me off as ‘a Leninist’. Or ‘a post-modernist’, or a whatever-the-hell-else-ist. I’m really not an anyone-ist. I’ve learned from lots of different thinkers: I can operate within someone else’s paradigm when I need to, provided their paradigm is internally consistent and coherent. But when I’m thinking as me, I have a set of paradigms derived by standing on the shoulders of giants yet not uniformly adherent to any of my source paradigms. I don’t believe there is a single influence on my thinking who I don’t also argue was wrong about something.
Liberal Democrat [ MP. –Ed ] Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.
Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.
— The Guardian
You know, I’m beginning to wonder about this journalistic integrity thing. It’s a bit odd for me anyway, since I’m an historian. As a discipline we’re inclined to the long view; we’re inclined to use a lot of caveats about data and provenance thereof, and we’re inclined to be very careful to leave room for new data to change our interpretation. It was in this spirit that I wrote the Feast of Fools and Culpability series; I kept seeing things in eye-witness reports which I either cited very carefully, noting that eye-witness reports were unsubstantiated, or left out altogether because there wasn’t enough data and I genuinely hoped they weren’t true.
Having gone truncheons to tasers in a generation, I also have to wonder what purpose the current Police Service has been built for? […] It looks like we have been built to violently confront and overcome people. I am not saying that is our mindset, but it is without doubt what we are equipped to do. Once people get over the quasi military kit, we are mostly approachable and pleasant people, it’s just that we dress like Imperial Stormtroopers.
— NightJack, Winner of the Orwell Prize for Blogs, 2009
I’m going to repeat, at this stage, something I’ve said a few times through this fiasco but which I don’t think can be repeated often enough. I am not angry with constables as a class. I think there are some specific individuals who broke the law (the chairman of the IPCC agrees with me, btw) and need to be tried and jailed. I think that there is a policy from the highest levels which is flawed, arrogant, short-sighted and dangerous; but I do not and will not blame coppers for how they’re trained, briefed or ordered. The blame for those things lies squarely and solely with senior officers, the ACPO and the last four governments.
“Police brutality is not new”, say the right-wing blogs. Well, no. “Police brutality is worse elsewhere”, say the trolls. Well, yes; so what? We’ve been doing this Enlightenment thing longer than any other continuous democracy: we’ve had more chances to learn from our mistakes, and therefore we as a people cannot be excused from civilisation because we forgot to do our homework. So if police brutality is neither new, nor local, what has changed in the last ten years? After all, the police started a riot at Gleneagles and then violently subdued it, and there was none of this fuss.
The previous two posts have laid out a disturbing impression of police policy and culture. The culture and direction from senior officers is explicitly encouraging the avoidance of accountability, which is scandalous in armoured riot troops. Officers are systematically misusing the law, engaging in deliberate intimidation through the assumption that the public can’t follow the law, and engaging in both disingenuous and frankly laughable attempts to turn the innocent into an excuse for violence. These things are true of British policing across the country, all the way from football fans in Manchester to middle-class anglers in the Home Counties. The question I want to examine based on the Climate Camp report is whether there’s more to it than that when it comes to the policing of dissent specifically.
There was a man in trouble in 2001 called Richard Clarke. He was Clinton’s head of cyber-security and anti-terror, and the Bush regime hadn’t got round to replacing him yet. That meant he was an outsider in the neo-con halls of power during several very sensitive, euphoric days for the staffers there. He reported that he was on his way to the Oval Office when he encountered a Bush staffer coming the other way, and looking equally pre-occupied. The staffer had a conversation with him, in which a reference was made to shopping lists: “Every list every agency has had on a shelf these last ten years [ The Clinton presidency. — Ed ] is getting dusted off. We can get anything we want!” [1]
What they got was the Patriot Act.
It has been apparent since the second of April that the rioting police in the Square Mile had hoist themselves upon their own petard. I heard a man had died circa one in the morning, via a mobile phone conversation one of my housemates had with our on-scene source. By the time the Guardian broke the first video of Tomlinson’s death, we had already heard rumours of police obscuring their faces and deliberately obfuscating their ID numbers. The video confirmed that it was one of these bizarrely secretive officers who had assaulted Mr. Tomlinson. I was not alone in wondering if the lack of easy accountability had contributed to the apparent culture of excess in the Met and their TSG units.
We have one specific request, which may seem a minor request but we believe it is an essential foundation for policing in which the public can have confidence. It is vital that police officers in riot gear have their identification on their fronts and back at all times in extra large font so it is clearly visible. There is currently no legal requirement for police officers to display their identification. This needs to be rectified as a matter of urgency.
— Climate Camp Legal Team report, 18th April 2009
I’ve now read the report in detail but will take a little longer to formulate appropriate responses to some of the things I read in it. Some of the data is, however, sufficiently important that I want to highlight it now.
Strange and eldritch [1] things happen on the Dark Continent. This has been well known for centuries. I experienced one in 1992 when I was at a boarding school in Africa. One of my teachers, who we’ll call Mr. Albert, was a remarkable, quiet, careful and thoughtful man in his late 30s. He’d been a career policeman in the north of England. He eventually left the force, in part because of rampant Masonry [2].
That summer, a young man who’d recently left university came to join the staff at the school for some months. He was a Scouser, a burly, laughing lad and a hell of a footballer: let’s call him Robert. They were the only two young single men teaching at the school so they were allocated a flat together within the staff housing system.
I came upon Robert sitting under a tree crying. I was young enough that it hit me very hard; adults don’t usually do that without a good reason, but he wouldn’t talk to me and asked me to leave him be, so I did. I went to find his room-mate, to ask what was wrong. He was crying too. They had just had the conversation where they realised that Robert had lost a toe and two friends at Hillsborough and Albert had been part of the thin blue line.
This time they’ve killed one of their own: an innocent Square Mile worker on his way home. The police policy of squeeze-then-crush has led directly to the death of a man who wasn’t even protesting, let alone a violent or vandalistic thug.
The system will protect the politicians. That’s what it is there for. But we, the people, will not forget Mr. Tomlinson, nor will we forget whose arrogance killed him.
There are days when I hate being right.
The Guardian have produced footage demonstrating that Ian Tomlinson was batoned from behind by a police officer before dying on Wednesday night. He may or may not have been directly killed by the assault: that’s how the authorities can create some wriggle room to defend themselves. But even if they claim his death was not caused by being hassled and assaulted by paramilitary units on his way home from work, then surely it is inescapably obvious that it was caused by the tactics, policies, paranoia and (ultimately) arrogance of our political masters?
My sympathies are with the family and friends who have just seen evidence that their loved one was killed by the British state. My rage is aimed at, not the trooper on the street, but the men who hired him and in particular whoever was in a monitor-filled control room with a radio and who gave the order to use violence against a legitimate protest. And my question is this:
Will the British people have the courage to set aside partisan bickering and stand together, with one voice, to call the Establishment to account for the death of an innocent man?
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The view across the bar. 