A neo-Jacobin

Brazilian cinema - Tropa de Elite

2008-06-05T16:53:00.003+01:00

The most talked about Brazilian film since Fernando Meirelles’ Oscar nominated masterpiece City of Gods. The director of Tropa de Elite, Jose Padilha, has already scoped the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival with this extremely violent and moving work based on semi-fictional accounts of Rio de Janeiro’s strategic para-military police force back in 1997, just before the visit of the Pope to Brazil. The film is an in depth exploration of want it takes to become a member of BOPE, or Rio’s Special Police Operation Battalion. It is also an exposé of systemic corruption within Rio’s police forces.

Few people will remember the Brazilian police authorities flying into Britain back in 2005, to humiliate the Metropolitan police about the folly of ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies following the tragic accidental shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Even then, I thought ‘hello, who are the Brazilian Police to lecture the MET about the fallacy of shooting first and asking questions later’? If anything, Tropa de Elite is cinematic proof that the police forces in Rio are real experts in lethal violence - and arbitrary torture.

Tropa de Elite graphically depicts what many of us in the West had already thought about the Brazilian authorities attitude towards policing in the slums of Rio – they train, arm to the teeth, and unleash death squads into Rio’s poor and lawless favelas. The central character, Capitan Nascimento (Wagner Moura) who narrates throughout the film coldly explains how BOPE, the ‘men in black enter the favela to kill – never to die’. Capitan Nascimento is Rio’s Beowulf, he is the good-looking archetypal heroic militarist, however, he’s also a hideous monster, and he knows it – that is one reason why he must leave this elite police squad. Moura’s delivers an impressive performance as the tough but flawed Capitan, which is truly first-rate. Tropa de Elite is no ordinary cops and robbers’ film - it is to all intents and purposes a civil war film. It’s a must see movie especially for the fans of City of Gods, or anyone who has any real serious interest in all things Brazilian.

Climate change: who's afraid of geo-engineering?

2008-04-16T16:57:00.008+01:00

When it comes to the debate about possible solutions to climate change, environmentalists are forever banging on and on about the fact that it is they who are 'armed' with nothing but the latest peer reviewed science. As well as that, how many more times have I got to hear that climate change is the most pressing crisis facing the whole of mankind - now war, poverty and disease have been relegated to second place? What is worse is the fact that when a solution (other than micro-managing humanity back to the Dark-ages, or worse, the caves) is put forward as a possible solution, it is green activists who are normally the first to poo-poo such solutions - and normally, in just one sentence.

This does make you wonder if environmentalists really do want to bring this climate change 'crisis' under control? Indeed, if humanity were to come up with a viable, reliable and peer reviewed scientific tool that could halt climate change, green activists would be put right out of business, they would affectively have their green rug snatched from right underneath them. Such is the emerging challenge that environmentalists appear to be facing from scientists involved in 'geo-engineering' plans and solutions. It seems that the greens would rather see the planet, and humans burn than support geo-engineering solutions.

For all the green talk about tampering with nature, human hubris, or how one environmental organisation based in Canada put it 'Gambling with Gaia', geo-engineering may very well offer some serious global solutions to climate change. Of course, it almost goes without saying, don't take my word for it, even the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller thinks the same, Teller argued that geo-engineering actually 'appears to be a promising approach'.

Ultimately, it is not the potential that geo-engineering has to halt climate change that is sneered at by most environmentalist, as far as most greens are concerned, geo-engineering does not address the core problem of climate change - for the greens, the core problem relating to climate change is in the domain of morality. The truth is, environmentalists do not really want to halt climate change, what they appear to want to stop, and attack, are all forms of overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation. What the greens would really prefer is humanity to suffer first - and stop people believing in the idea that humans might one day conquer the threat of climate change. The greens dare not imagine such a thing as putting an end to climate change, that would just rob them of their raison d'etre - would it not?

Zimbabwe: a state the West loves to hate

2008-04-06T20:55:00.009+01:00

It has become highly fashionable in the Western media to draw far fetched parallels between the architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler, and Zimbabwe's current incumbent, Robert Mugabe. Of course, such comparisons are complete fantasise which says far more about those who use such terminology to describe Mugabe, than it does about the current situation on the ground in Zimbabwe.

In the rush to demonise Mugabe, many have forgotten that it was in fact the white supremacist and former Rhodesian leader Ian Smith who first coined the phrase 'Black Hitler' to describe Mugabe and his national liberation movement - and many in the West have also ignored how the Great Western powers, their governments and fiscal institutions have played the most important role in bringing the Zimbabwean economy to its knees. Indeed, it has been the outside interference in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe that have twisted and distorted the countries economy.

It is difficult to imagine how back in 2001, The New York Times gave Zimbabwe the title of the 'worst government on earth' - yeah, right, as if - what, worse than China? Such statements actually betray the narrow and highly selective nature of criticism directed against Zimbabwe by its opponents in the West. Some Western observers (former colonials) seem to lose all sense of proportion when talking about Zimbabwe, for one writer of the The Times (London), what appears to be unfolding in Zimbabwe is nothing less than a 'silent genocide'. Even the organisation Genocide Watch rightfully argue that such claims can appear 'ridiculous' given the fact that there have been relatively few deaths due to conflict in Zimbabwe.

Much of what I see and read about Zimbabwe is no more than unsubstantiated junk propaganda. As the astute political journalist Brendan O'Neill kindly reminds us, there are a few honourable exceptions, like the US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who had the temerity to question received Western wisdom on Zimbabwe. McKinney rightfully argued that Zimbabwe is 'Africa's second-longest stable democracy', it is a country that has 'multi-party' elections, the opposition has 'over 50 seats in the parliament. It has an opposition press which vigorously criticises the government and governing party. It has an independent judiciary which issues decisions contrary to the wishes of the governing party'. That's more than can be said about Egypt, Rwanda, or the Congo. Yet all three of these countries are allies of the West who receive serious amounts of funding from the United States.

Zimbabwe, viewed from the perspective of Western colonial, 'Eton-educated' bi-focals appears more like a horrific symbol of African arrogance and cockiness. It is a point of view that cannot comprehend how 'our last white man in Rhodesia' Ian Smith was humiliated and forcefully jettisoned out of office, by a ‘Black Hitler’ to boot.

Artistic freedoms under attack in Britain

2008-02-15T01:01:00.013+01:00

Britain is not exactly a 'police state' as some on the left of politics would like to suggest - indeed, I would argue that such propositions say far more about the people who espouse it than it does about the state of freedom in contemporary Britain. However, when it comes to evaluating the extent of artistic freedom in Britain today, the charge of 'police state' is not entirely that wide of the mark.

Witness the treatment of Samina Malik at the hands of the British state - a second-rate Muslim poet (ok, I wouldn't like to massage Samina's ego), third-rate Muslim poet, who's only crime was to write terribly bad poems. Salmina, a 23 year old Londoner, aka the 'Lyrical Terrorist', wept openly when the jury at the Old Bailey found her guilty of 'possessing records likely to be used for terrorism', or in other words - her poems and a Mujahideen handbook.

It's true that Malik was a bit of an idiot with some far fetched nihilistic fantasies, but since when has it become a crime to be a wannabe nihilistic weirdy-beardy pin-up poster girl, with hateful thoughts and some seriously dodgy poems? To all intents and purposes, Malik was found guilty of harbouring some sick ideas, and some really bad poems. To lock someone up and waste the time of the Old Bailey just because we don't like someones poems is a far more dangerous trend than anything that Samina Malik could have thought of.

The attacks on artistic freedom in Britain goes much deeper than the case of Samina Malik and her 'dangerous' poems - over in petty authoritarian Brighton, the the powers that be are planning on banning any art exhibition, or revoking the licence of any music venue that exhibits or performs any work of art or piece of music that might provoke 'racist, homophobic or sectarian violence'. Failure to comply with the councils policy could lead to the closure of any art or music venue. Such draconian decrees are reminicent of the worst days of East Germany under Stalinist type dictators, it's the thin edge of a very ugly anti-freedom wedge.

In the name of protecting minorities, Brighton's licensing policy has become the cutting edge of the assault on artistic freedom. Brighton councils intentions may be good, but the consequences and long-term implications in interfering with the arts and artists are much more frightening. The council are effectively saying to artists that there are certain things you cannot express in your art, and if you want to exhibit or perform in Brighton you will need the councils nod of moral approval, or else.

I'm very much in agreement with the political journalist Brendan O’Neill, who rightfully argues that 'Brighton is doing so much more than simply messing about with its licensing laws: it is using its power to define what is socially responsible art, and to circumscribe the artistic imagination itself'. Indeed, some of the perverse consequences of the councils licensing laws are spreading further than Brighton's galleries, bars and clubs - now libraries, music shops and radio stations are coming under anti-freedom attacks.

The biggest lie we are constantly being told here is that there is apparently a very thin line between what artists say or think, and what other people might do as a consequence of being exposed to such thoughts or ideas. On the contrary, that line is very thick, and Brighton council, and the high courts of the Old Bailey have no right policing the publics taste of what is or what is not appropriate or acceptable art, music or poetry. I'll leave the last words to an artist and poet who really understood what freedom and art are all about, Victor Hugo, who argued that 'freedom in art, freedom in society this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive'.

Picture: Green Party Councillor Simon Williams displaying the music he wants outlawed in Brighton.

Environmentalism: bang goes thier nuclear arguments

2008-01-12T21:02:00.000+01:00

There may actually be a coherent and decent argument against building a new generation of nuclear power stations in Britain - but the British environmentalist movement have not come up with one single one so far. Indeed, environmental arguments against nuclear power are devised solely from myths and ill-founded jurassic prejudice against new technology, which they appear to fear for no good reason.

For example, one of the fiercest critics of the governments plan to build new nuclear power stations is Caroline Lucas MEP for the Green Party. As far as Dr Lucas is concerned securing Britain's future energy supply with state-of-the-art nuclear power stations is simply 'dangerous, irresponsible and costly distraction from the real challenge of tackling climate change' - but none of this is true.

Indeed, Western nuclear power facilities are the safest and the most economically viable form of electricity production known to mankind. Don't take my word for it - just take a good look at the French nuclear industry who have been producing safe and cheap electricity from the atom for well over 30 years. Far from being 'dangerous, irresponsible and costly', French nuclear electricity production has been an undeniable success story.

If anything, it is the likes of Dr Lucas that have been irresponsible, costly, and ultimately dangerous. Indeed, it is Dr Lucas who uses and abuses the politics of fear when she raises the spectra of international terrorism as a reason why Britain should not dabble with nuclear technology. It has been 30 years of such backward, environmentalist propaganda that has held back the development of nuclear technology in the UK. I think it is high time we put the greens anti-progressive and rubbish ideas where they belong, in the recycling dustbin of history.

Freedom: even for the thoughts we hate

2007-10-18T16:42:00.000+01:00

Before I start, I would like to make one thing very clear, I have no time, or sympathy whatsoever for racist scum like the British National Party and its supporters. Indeed, I would like to think of myself as a born free Englishman who has the right to say whatever I want, and as such, I must insist that under no circumstances should there be any restrictions on the rights of anyone to speak freely.

Unlike some left leaning political commentators in the blogsphere, who argue that they 'support free speech, but...' - my belief in the right to free speech is unconditional. That means there is no such thing as partial freedom of speech, or free speech for me, but not for them. As far as I'm concerned, free speech is not divisable - we either have it or we don't - and I say, we should have it all.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not arguing that we should go softly, softly on the obvious nonsense espoused by racists, Holocaust deniers, or West Ham supporters. I do not adhere to the notion that we should take their pathetic views seriously. On the contrary, my defense of free speech means that we should have the right to ridicule or hammer our opponents in open debate - indeed, this is the whole point. It now appears that the greatest threat to our right to free speech comes not from the misogynists of the BNP, or Holocaust deniers like the discredited historian David Irving, the fiercest critics of free speech come instead from those on the left.

The left appear to be having a hissy-fit over the Oxford Union debating society inviting the leader of the BNP and David Irving to their 'Free Speech Forum', but the debate about free speech is not about the BNP or Irving, it's about our freedom to judge for ourselves - it's about our liberty to be able to listen to a debate and all the arguments, whether they are dumb arguments or not, we need this liberty in order to judge for ourselves - it is this freedom that the left seem to fear the most.

The worst thing about this whole affair is that the BNP and its supporters can now occupy the high moral ground and claim it is they who are the real champions of free speech. So yes, seeing Nick Griffin and Irving standing on a public platform arguing that 'no one can take their freedom away' is enough to make me puke - but those on the left standing outside the Free Speech Forum with placards demanding bans are in mine eye, even more sickening.

Outstanding photography by Sion Touhig/Getty Images

Al Gore: belittling the Nobel 'Peace' Prize

2007-10-14T19:51:00.000+01:00

There was a time when the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to brave people and organisations who had put their own lives on the line in order to help the victims of conflicts, or it was the very peacemakers themselves who had won the award - but not anymore.

These days it appears that doom and gloom thinking is being awarded with no less than a Nobel award. Al Gore's powerful, precautionary and apocalyptic tale An Inconvenient Truth, has been put on par with the likes of the International Committee of the Red Cross (two times winner), Martin Luther King Jr, Amnesty International, Lech Walesa and even the Dalai Lama.

But how can it be, that a factually inaccurate, puffed-up PowerPoint display can be placed in the same league as someone who spent 27 years in prison and became the first democratically elected President of South Africa? Then again, the racist South African dictator F.W. de Klerk also received an award, so what can we make of these bizarre and grotesque choices of Nobel 'Peace' prizes?

It seems as if the Nobel Prize Committee's criteria is to hand out it's awards to people who in someway reflect the committee's very own dull and banal sentimentalism - and Al Gore is a perfect example of the Prize Committee's virtues. The Nobel Committee can no longer distinguish between those who want real peace in this world, and those who want to reduce the human carbon-footprint. That is why even an unelected, motley character like the U2 front man Bono was even rumoured to be given an award. The decision to award Gore has in fact belittled the real purpose of the prize in mine eye - in the future, I will be saving my round of applause to those who have the bravery and temerity to stick two fingers up (not in a victory sign) to the Nobel Prize Committee. Now, let's have a big round of applause for Le Duc Tho.

Teens: old enough to bear arms, but not smoke?

2007-10-01T10:07:00.000+01:00

It's hard to imagine what it's like to be 17 years old in Gordon Brown's petty authoritarian Britain - if you're 17 you can legally have sex, get married and start a family, you can even volunteer to join the army. At 17 you have the right to bear arms and be professionally drilled and trained in lethal fighting and killing techniques. Indeed, according to Matthew Happold, the author of Child Soldiers in International Law, under-18s 'were deployed during the first Gulf War, where nearly 500 British soldiers were aged under 18, and in Kosovo'. Yet, in Brown's Britain, these teenagers will not even be allowed to purchase a simple packet of cigarettes.

Oh, come on Courtney I here you say 'how on Earth can you oppose the raising of the minimum age to purchase cigarettes'? Don't you know that smoking is bad for your health and can kill you? Yes, I'm well aware of that, being a smoker myself, and I suspect like most other smokers, we don't smoke for the benefit of our health. And in any case, there is no law on Earth that can stop teenagers from smoking - none.

Don't take my word for it, professional health bodies from the Department of Health to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh publicly admit that 'there is no evidence that raising the age of purchase on its own will influence tobacco sales to young people'. Indeed, even the World Bank agrees that in wealthy nations like Britain 'such restrictions have not been shown to be successful'.

This doesn't mean that I'm in favour of more teenagers smoking, of course not - but the facts are, if teenagers want to smoke, they will, and there is nothing that New Labour, or anyone in the world can do to stop them - so why the new 'crackdown'? It appears that the British government have completely run out of ideas about how we should go about building the Good Society - instead, what we have is a Supernanny state that is addicted to anti-smoking - I think it's high time we stubbed them out.

neo-Jacobin special: against the Guardian

2007-09-18T18:08:00.001+01:00

A neo-Jacobin special essay - 50,000 editions of the imperialist, warmongering, hate-filled Guardian newspaper

By Murray Mcdonald

There have been 50 000 issues of what was then called the Manchester Guardian published since John Taylor founded it in 1821. Commemorating that anniversary current editor Alan Rusbridger has been talking about the paper’s radical record, since it first championed the victims of the Peterloo Massacre.

What the Guardian forgot to say was that Taylor launched his paper to undermine the working class leaders of the reform movement; or that Taylor refused to use either word ‘Peterloo’ or ‘Massacre’, thinking them too inflammatory (see 1. The Guardian and the Peterloo Massacre, below).

In fact the Guardian has never been all that radical a newspaper anyway, generally steering a middle course between popular opposition and establishment reaction. Recently critical of Tony Blair’s administration, the paper was his first and greatest cheer-leader (see 2. The Guardian and Radical Opinion, below).

Over the years, much of the newspaper’s venom has been reserved for opposition movements. The Guardian had a particular contempt for anti-imperialist movement, pouring scorn on Third World nationalists like Lumumba and Nasser, advocating military intervention across the globe (see 3. The Guardian and imperialism, below).

In particular, the Guardian was violently opposed to Ireland’s freedom fighters, supporting the occupation by British troops in 1969, internment without trial, and blaming the Civil Rights movement for the deaths on Bloody Sunday (see 4. The Guardian and the Fenians, below).

When Women Suffragettes fought for the vote, Guardian editor C.P. Scott denounced them as fanatics, just as the Manchester Guardian opposed giving the working classes the vote before (See 5. The Guardian and the Vote, below).

And when Abraham Lincoln fought a Civil War against slavery, the Manchester Guardian rallied to defend the southern Slave-Owners (See 6. The Guardian and the American Civil War, below).

Though it has become, in the words of one regular columnist, the newspaper of the New Establishment, the Guardian has always been the paper of the Middle Class (see 7. A Middle Class Newspaper, below).

The Guardian has been deeply hostile to the working class, especially when they have taken matters into their own hands (See 8. The Guardian and the Working Class, below)

That is all ancient history now, but it is interesting to reflect how in more recent times the Guardian succeeded in becoming the agenda-setting paper it is today. Its radical reputation today stems largely from the collapse of political opposition in the 1990s. As the political parties moved closer to the centre ground, the Guardian had grand ideas of becoming itself the focus of a new opposition. Above all, it was the campaign for military intervention in the former Yugoslavia that found the Guardian setting the political agenda. Reporting the civil war there, the Guardian honed the arguments for ‘humanitarian intervention’: demonising the enemy, talking up the humanitarian crisis, and pushing for military action. (see 9. The Guardian’s war against the Serbs, below).

Though it has balked at this government’s attacks on civil liberties, the Guardian pioneered New Labour’s caring authoritarianism. It was the Guardian that first made the case for greater government control of our private lives and opinions (see 10. The Guardian and Civil Liberties, below).

Of course, trawling through the archives to uncover reactionary editorials does not tells us much more than finding admirable ones does - but it does tell us that the Guardian’s radical record is a myth. Looking at the historical record only really reminds you that in the past, people had very different ideas from us, and that the
Manchester Guardian reflected the prejudices of its middle class readership.

After all, a newspaper’s editorial line is a lot less interesting than the quality of its reporting - of which the paper is rightly proud. It is only in our current, and odd political hiatus that the newspapers’ role as opposition could be given any credit - or that readers would put up with so many sanctimonious comment pieces.

Under the editorship of Alan Rusbridger, though, the Guardian has indeed become an influential voice, doing more than sum up the middle class prejudices of our times. It has become the self-appointed guardian of our morals. But looking at the paper’s record, it is hard to see why.

1. The Guardian and Peterloo

Celebrating the 50 000th edition of the Guardian, today’s editor Alan Rusbridger linked the paper to the outrage over the Peterloo Massacre of reformers at St. Peter’s Fields in 1819, which the first editor, John Taylor ‘helped to make a national scandal’. In fact, the Manchester Guardian was founded to defeat the radical reform movement in words, as the Cavalry had in deeds.

Eleven people were killed and 500 injured when mounted police charged the reform meeting in Manchester and John Taylor did cover the hearings in the new Manchester Guardian. But Taylor was no supporter of the reform movement.

Of the reform leaders Taylor wrote scathingly in the Manchester Gazette

‘they have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence. “The do not toil, nether do they spin,” but they live better than those that do.’ (Manchester Gazette, 7 August 1819, in Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p.20)

Pointedly, Taylor never used the inflammatory word ‘Peterloo’, except in a footnote, and even then in quotation marks; and he refused to use the word ‘massacre’, preferring the more neutral ‘tragedy’ (Ayerst, p.19). The dramatic catchword Peterloo was coined by The Manchester Observer described by a Home Office report as ‘the organ of the lower classes’ designed to ‘inflame their minds’.

The Manchester Observer was closed by the crippling cost of police prosecutions (Stanley Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians, 1974, p.53). Two months later a group of Manchester textile merchants grabbed the opportunity to take the political initiative out of the streets. Eleven subscribed £100 each (around £6,800 in today’s money) to start Taylor’s paper.

In its prospectus, the Manchester Guardian promised to promote the ‘just principles of Political Economy’. The intended readership was ‘amongst the classes to whom, more especially, Advertisements are generally addressed’. Such people would value ‘the commercial connections and knowledge of the conductors of the Guardian’ (Ayerst, p. 23-4).

The Manchester Guardian paid the stamp duty, putting it, at seven pence an issue, beyond the pockets of working people. Real radicals challenged the stamp duty, publishing papers that flouted the law, like Henry Hetherington’s, launched in 1830 and pointedly titled The Poor Man’s Guardian. The Manchester Guardian attacked rival papers that evaded the stamp duty.

The working class Manchester and Salford Advertiser dubbed the Guardian ‘the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners’ (21 May 1836).

2. The Guardian and Radical Opinion

‘His strongest claim is that he has systematically rethought the basis of Labour’s appeal and project in the light of modern imperatives and realities... In short: we think Tony Blair should be elected as Labour’s new leader.’ (The Choice for the Future, Guardian leader, 2 July 1994)

Today’s Guardian has been critical of Tony Blair’s shaky premiership. But it is easy to forget that the Guardian was the original ‘New Labour’ paper. Its success mirrored the growing appeal of Tony Blair’s Labour Party from 1994 onwards. When he won the election the Guardian editorialised ‘the moment when Britain at last gave itself the chance to construct a modern liberal socialist order and, by so doing, caught the mood of the troubled western world’ (2 May 1997).

Throughout much of the first Blair term, the Guardian was his greatest cheer-leader, over the Kosovo War, the Human Rights legislation and anti-harassment laws. According to one account, editorial meetings did not start until Number Ten Press Officer Alastair Campbell rung to tell Rusbridger what was going to be in the paper.

But then the Guardian always was a lot less radical than its critics thought. In 1982, a right-wing faction broke away from the Labour Party, the SDP (Social Democratic Party), protesting its drift to the left. The SDP was Blairism before its time. Three of the Guardian’s four leader writers joined the SDP, as did columnist Polly Toynbee, journalist Mary Stott, senior political columnist Peter Jenkin and labour editor John Torode. Most of them stood as candidates (and lost) in the 1983 election, or served on the SDP’s national committee. For a while the paper was divided between SDP supporters and a few token ‘public school trots’ (Guardian, 25 January 2006).

Of course, many on the paper had been influenced by the radicalism of the 1960s. But as battle lines hardened, most Guardian writers recoiled from ‘picket- line violence’ and northern Ireland’s freedom fighters. Increasingly, the paper’s radical credentials were earned with strident articles about far-away places like Chile, or South Africa - while cautious realism decided editorial policy on domestic issues.

In the 1950s the paper so loathed Labour’s left wing champion Aneurin Bevan ‘and the hate-gospellers of his entourage’ that it called for Attlee’s post-war Labour government to be voted out of office (Manchester Guardian, leader, 22 October 1951). When the left wanted a second front against Hitler in the Second World War, the Manchester Guardian opposed it on Churchill’s advice (he hoped Hitler would save him the trouble of defeating the Russians, David Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, 549).

The Chartists, the Suffragettes, the Irish Republicans, Abraham Lincoln and the General Strikers were all attacked in the pages of the Manchester Guardian. As much as it has made a reputation for criticising the powers-that-be, it has always been more afraid of popular opposition.

3. The Guardian and imperialism

Reading the Guardian today, one might get the impression that the paper is anti-war. But that is not true. When the bombing started in the first of America’s wars against Iraq in 1991, the Guardian adopted the tone of Winston Churchill:

The simple cause, at the end, is just. An evil regime in Iraq instituted an evil and brutal invasion. Our soldiers and airmen are there, at UN behest, to set that evil right. Their duties are clear ... let the momentum and the resolution be swift. (leader 17 January 1991).

In the lead-up to the war, the Guardian reported stories of grotesque Iraqi atrocities, atrocities that Matthew Engel agreed ‘in other circumstances would seem absurd, but here seemed all-too believable’ (1991). In fact they were just absurd, manufactured by the military. After the event, journalist Maggie O’Kane conceded ‘this is a tale of how to tell lies and win wars, and how we, the media, were harnessed like beach donkeys and led through the sand to see what the British and US military wanted us to see in this nice clean war.’ (Guardian 16 December 1995)

The first Gulf War was lauded as a re-birth of Great Power solidarity at the UN Security Council. Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait ‘has done more than anything else to reawaken the sleeping giant and galvanise the Security Council into action’ wrote Hella Pick. Pick deplored the fact that the Soviet Union had been allowed to veto the Great Powers’ military actions, giving too much power to nationalists in the Third World:

The liberal use of the veto, especially by the Soviet Union, has made a mockery of the council’s main task of maintaining peace and security. Its impotence opened the way for the Third World majority in the General Assembly to dominate the UN, exploiting the East-West divisions and imposing their own agenda on the world body. (The Gulf Crisis - the first Sixty Days, Guardian Collection, October 1990, p 57)

Hostility to Third World nationalism has been an enduring theme at the Guardian over the years. In 1973 they accused Middle Eastern countries of ‘using the Arab Oil weapon’ (Putting the West over a Barrel, 15 October). When Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 the Guardian was outraged. ‘It was a heavy day for the world when the canal that has for so long been an international interest passed under a violently nationalist government’ (Leader, 28 July 1956, probably written by David Mitrany).

‘The government is right to be prepared for military action at Suez’, because Egyptian control of the canal would be ‘commercially damaging for the West and perhaps part of a plan for creating a new Arab Empire based on the Nile (Leader, 2 August 1956). Helpfully, the editor suggested that there might ‘be a way of reconciling Egypt’s interests with the rest of the World by creating a new international authority for supervising the canal without ownership. It could collect revenues on behalf of the Egyptian government’ (Guardian, 31 July 1956).

The Guardian’s hostility to Third World nationalists could be crass. In 1961 the popular Congolese president was taken prisoner by United Nations troops who handed him over to his enemies. ‘Lumumba is not blameless for the problems in the Congo’ lectured the Guardian even as his corpse was being mutilated (Leader, 19 January 1961). More importantly, they lectured those ‘shouting slogans in Leopoldville’ that ‘Criticism of the United Nations Operation in the Congo and of the men in charge of it has nearly all stemmed from ignorance of the facts’ (Guardian Leader, 23 Jan. 1961). But it was the United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold who conspired to foment ethnic rivalries in the Congo leading to Lumumba’s assassination (Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, Verso, 2001).

The Guardian did support moderate nationalist regimes, and found it difficult to argue with the formation of the non-Aligned movement in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Still, anti-western rhetoric there was deplored, as were any ‘pious hopes’ (Leader, 26 April 1955). The suspicion remained that this was ‘a phoney non-aggression, designed to lull the countries of Asia until they can be organised as parts of a Communist empire’ (Leader, 18 April 1955).

In fairness, Manchester Guardian did have important reservations about the growing appeal of popular imperialism in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. It was a Guardian journalist who exposed the rifling of the Mahdi’s tomb by British troops in Omdurman, who stole his head (Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p 267). When British troops starved the families of the Boers in the world’s first concentration camps, in 1900, it was Emily Hobhouse who exposed the atrocity in the Manchester Guardian (Ibid., 285).

The reason that the Guardian was so out of step with Empire jingoism was only partly out of sympathy for its victims. Like many middle class liberals of the time it was the popularity of jingoism that really offended. One story that has entered the paper’s legends is that pro-war protestors surrounded the Manchester Guardian’s offices in 1900, while a brass band paid for by the Manchester Courier marched around it playing The Dead March in ‘Saul’ (Ayerst, 280). The Relief of Mafeking gave rise to a number of stories of ‘Mafficking’ mobs, many of them turning out to be apocryphal, but all sharing the common thread that common people get to insult their liberally-minded betters under the cloak of patriotism. Empire was a cause that won working class people to the Tories and away from the Liberal Party, feared the Guardian.

Much as it has decried popular nationalism in the Third World, the Guardian is uncomfortable with it in the first. It is better that military intervention is done in the name of the ‘international community’, so there is no danger of unpleasant Jingoism. The failure of the Coalition of the Willing to secure an international mandate made it difficult for the Guardian to endorse the Iraq war in 2003. But even if they had doubts about a military mandate, they still shared the prejudice that the problem in the Middle East was Saddam and his ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’:

‘It is not credible to argue, as Iraq did in its initial reaction to Mr Powell [at the Security Council], that it is simply all lies. ...Iraq must disarm.’ (Guardian Leader, Thursday February 6, 2003)

Of course, we now know that it was all lies, and Iraq could not give up weapons it did not have. When the war looked like a success, Guardian veteran Hugo Young wrote about Tony Blair’s gamble:

For a political leader, few therapies compare with military victory. For a leader who went to war in the absence of a single political ally who believed in the war as unreservedly as he did, Iraq now looks like a vindication on an astounding scale. (13 April 2003)

If the Guardian today is less appreciative of Britain’s role in Iraq, that has less to do with principled opposition, and more with the failure of the project.

4. The Guardian and the Fenians

If they had got to the obituary page, younger Guardian readers might have been surprised to learn that journalist John O’Callaghan resigned from the paper in 1972 in protest at its editorial support for repression in northern Ireland. ‘The Guardian leaders made excuses for internment,’ he wrote, and damningly:

‘If a couple of British papers and a broadcasting channel had shared the Sunday Times’s occasional scepticism about the performance of the British army in Northern Ireland, the slaughter in Derry on Bloody Sunday might have been averted.’ (21 April 2007)

Thirteen civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by the British Army on the day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, in northern Ireland. But the Guardian thought it was the Civil Rights activists who were to blame:

‘The organisers of the demonstration, miss Bernadette Devlin among them, deliberately challenged the ban on marches. They knew that stone throwing and sniping could not be prevented, and that the IRA might use the crowd as a shield.’ (Guardian, 1 February 1972)

Lord Widgery’s 1972 enquiry was widely seen as a whitewash - but not by the Guardian. ‘Lord Widgery’s report is not one-sided’, it led. Indeed they questioned Widgery’s view that trouble could have been avoided if the army had kept a low-key attitude: ‘To ask anyone to keep a low-key attitude if persistently stoned is to ask superhuman behaviour.’ (20 April 1972) The demonstrators had been protesting against the introduction of the internment of political prisoners without trial. The Guardian did not support their cause.

‘Internment without trial is hateful, repressive and undemocratic. In the existing Irish situation, most regrettably, it is also inevitable. ... To remove the ringleaders, in the hope that the atmosphere might calm down, is a step to which there is no obvious alternative.’ (Guardian leader, 10 Aug. 1971)

Indeed, the Guardian supported the initial decision to send British troops to northern Ireland, after Derry rioters succeeded in fighting of Ulster’s paramilitary police for days.

British soldiers could ‘present a more disinterested face of law and order’ (Guardian leader, 15 Aug. 1969), but only on condition that ‘Britain takes charge’ (Guardian leader, 4 Aug. 1969). The Guardian even offered some useful advice, in case the soldiers did not know how to put down the protestors: ‘a curfew in the troubled areas seems essential’ to ‘separate those determined to make trouble from those who are drawn in unwillingly’ (leader, 16 Aug. 1969).

In fact the Guardian always had a knee-jerk reaction against rebellion in Ireland. The paper rubbished the Fenians, patriots who fought to free their country from British rule in the nineteenth century as ‘silly and infatuated traitors in Ireland’ (Manchester Guardian 21 October 1848). It called for the introduction of Martial Law - ‘better than the midnight legislation of Tipperary’. Its editorials were so rabid that the Irish of Manchester organised a demonstration outside its offices (David Ayerst, The Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper, 1971, p 111)

When James Connolly and Padraig Pearse, heroes of Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916 were executed, editor C.P. Scott wrote: ‘it is a fate which they invoked and of which they would probably not complain’ (4 May, 1916, quoted in Ayerst, The Manchester Guardian, 1971, p.392)

The paper did support the more acceptable, constitutional nationalism of the Home Rule movement in the 1880s. Similarly the Guardian’s current, Republican-sympathising line was only adopted after Sinn Fein leaders broached an end to the armed struggle.

5. The Guardian and Suffrage

The Guardian’s attitude to democracy has always been conditional. Certainly readers of today’s Guardian Women would be surprised to read editor C.P. Scott blaming the Suffragettes for sabotaging David Lloyd George’s efforts to win women the vote:

‘Yet this is the moment chosen by every great suffrage society to employ every engine of misguided fanaticism in order to wreck, if it be in their power, the fair prospects of their own cause.’ (Manchester Guardian leader, 18 November 1911)

Scott’s anger rose because he had tried to broker a compromise with Lloyd George to get some women the vote - though history records that the Prime Minister was not prepared to compromise until after the Great War (see Diane Atkinson, Votes for Women, Cambridge University Press, 1988). Still Scott clung to the belief that Lloyd George would have given women the vote already, if they had not taken direct action.

Emily Wilding Davison - who afterwards died in a protest trying to stop the King’s Horse in the Derby - wrote to the Guardian defending direct action. In his reply, Scott turned the truth on its head to make Lloyd George the champion of suffrage, and the Suffragettes its enemy:

‘The really ludicrous position is that Mr Lloyd George is fighting to enfranchise seven million women and the militants are smashing unoffending people’s windows and breaking up benevolent societies meetings in a desperate effort to prevent him.’

Scott thought the Suffragettes’ ‘courage and devotion’ was ‘worthy of a better cause and saner leadership’, and ‘to compare that with any great popular uprising of the past is too absurd a plea to require refutation’ (quoted in Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p 353).

But in fact the Guardian had usually opposed popular uprisings of the past, right back to its beginnings campaigning against the reformers of St. Peter’s Fields (See 1. The Guardian and Peterloo, above) preferring moderate reform. It was not just the campaign for votes for women the Manchester Guardian opposed. It opposed votes for working class men, too, attacking Chartists, Socialists and reformers alike.

In 1848 the Guardian explained the shortcomings of Louis Blanc’s provisional government in France:

‘If the obvious intentions of the government were fully accomplished, the influence of property would be destroyed ... a change of relative positions to which men of property will not submit’. (Manchester Guardian, 22 March 1848)

In November of 1830 the Guardian anticipated the coming reform act. The qualification for a vote ought to be low enough, wrote editor John Taylor:

‘to put it fairly within the power of members of the labouring classes by careful, steady and persevering industry to possess themselves of it, yet not so low as to give anything like a preponderating influence to the mere populace ... the right of representation is not an inherent or abstract right, but the mere creation of an advanced condition of society. Its single object is to promote good government.’ (Manchester Guardian 4 December 1830)

The Manchester Guardian’s 1831 New Year’s message to readers warned: ‘hurried and extreme changes’ are ‘dangerous to the maintenance of public order’; ‘at present there is a degree of excitement’ which ‘has evidently a revolutionary tendency’ but it is impossible that these changes ‘should ever be carried into effect without a civil war.’ (Manchester Guardian 1 January 1831)

6. The Guardian and the American Civil War

When in 1861 the southern Confederacy rebelled against the Union to avoid the abolition of slavery the cotton manufacturers liberalism was exposed as a sham. Their dependency on slave-picked cotton tempted them to support the South. The Manchester Guardian was no exception. They were embarrassed enough to disguise their support for slavery as an endorsement of the Confederacy’s right to self-determination.

Still the Manchester Guardian repeated Confederate propaganda against the liberator Abraham Lincoln, writing that ‘it was an evil day both for America and the world when he was chosen President of the United States’ (10 October 1862). Even on the news that Lincoln had been assassinated, the Manchester Guardian said ‘of his rule, we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty’ (27 April 1865). Among Lincoln’s acts so abhorrent to the Guardian was the Proclamation of Emancipation, 1 January 1863.

By contrast, the Manchester cotton workers set aside their immediate interest in cheap cotton to champion the wide cause of human liberty. In 1862 they filled the Free Trade Hall to support a resolution to that effect (penned by Karl Marx). The Manchester Guardian complained that ‘the chief occupation, if not the chief object of the meeting, seems to have been to abuse the Manchester Guardian’ (quoted in Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p155). In fact, the cotton operatives had nobler ambitions, it was just that they knew who their enemy was.

7. A middle class newspaper

‘I write for the Guardian,’ says Sir Max Hastings, ‘because it is read by the new establishment.’ (New Statesman 21 Feb. 2005)

Sir Max’s estimation is right. Under Alan Rusbridger’s editorship the Guardian has become the most important voice of the New Labour establishment. In fact it helped to create New Labour (see 2. The Guardian and radical opinion).

But Rusbridger remembers that long night of Conservative rule, from 1979 to 1997, when ‘Guardianistas’ were ‘taunted for their beards and sandals’ (Guardian, 9 June 2007). Then, under Peter Preston’s editorship, the middle classes deserted radicalism to vote for Margaret Thatcher, leaving the Guardian in the doldrums and on the defensive.

Still, the Guardian has never been a Tory paper, always getting its critical stance from the middle classes who were squeezed between the working class mob on one side and the establishment on the other. Founded by textile traders and merchants the Guardian had a reputation as ‘an organ of the middle class’ (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Progress, 1973, p 109), or in the words of C.P. Scott’s son Ted ‘a paper that will remain bourgeois to the last’ (Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p.471).

Today the Guardian Media Group is proud of its ‘unique’ ownership structure, the Scott Trust, securing the Guardian’s editorial independence in perpetuity But the Scott Trust was originally created to secure the dynastic succession and protect the family investment from death duties (Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971). Even today the implied meaning of the Scott Trust is that it is still a family business in an era of corporate raiders. In fact the paper behaves like any other capitalist business, and a fairly successful one at that.

8. The Guardian and the Working Class

Nowadays working class militancy is an exception, or even just a memory. The Guardian often reminisces about such lost causes, though when those causes stood a chance of winning, the paper recoiled in horror. In the 1970s the paper blamed militant trade unionists, not bosses, for the problems of the low paid. Labour moderate Reg Prentice was quoted approvingly to the effect that socialist planning ‘demands of us a measure of sacrifice of our immediate gains sometimes for the greater good’ (Guardian leader, 2 Oct. 1973).

As so often, it was direct action by ordinary people that upset the hacks at Grays Inn Road in the seventies. When the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupied their yards the Guardian warned ‘this experiment in workers control will have to be abandoned quickly’ (Guardian leader, 2 Aug. 1971).

Back in 1926 C.P. Scott was instrumental in brokering the deal that wrecked the General Strike, getting the Trade Union General Council to sell out the miners for the vague hope of a better deal from Parliament (David Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p465). An editorial explained the Guardian’s hopes for an end to general strikes:

‘Will not the general strike cease to be counted henceforth as a possible or legitimate weapon of industrial warfare? May not the very idea of treating industry as a theatre of warfare come to be regarded as barbaric?’ (Manchester Guardian, 14 May 1926)

The Guardian deplored the way ‘some people like the excitement of it all; they see themselves in command, giving rapid decisions that determine the destiny of nations, making history’ (Leader 4 May 1926). Such a challenge to established authority was unacceptable, and ‘the Government must use all its powers to maintain the major public services ... the army and navy are available’ (Leader, 6 May 1926). As an employer himself, Scott identified with the established order and was particularly
offended that newspapers were granted no special exemption by the strikers (Ayerst, p 486). As to Scott’s promises that Parliament might do better by the miners than the General Strike: ‘The general strike has been called off, but the aim for which it was declared in unaccomplished’ (Manchester Guardian, quoted in Ayerst, p 467).

The Guardian did support moderate trade unionism, especially in the late nineteenth century, when hopes that organised labour could be rallied to support the Liberal Party were high. Like many middle class radicals (see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Impact of the Dock Strike’, Outcast London, 1971) the paper welcomed the 1889 Dock Strike because they preferred the working class under respectable leadership to a mob. Defending strikers against the charge of ‘socialistic agitation’ the Guardian thought ‘the cohesion of the men’ was ‘a triumph for the spirit of trade combination which is a very different thing’ (2 Sept. 1889) and preferable to the dock owners’ casual employment contracts: ‘by their present system the dock companies get an inferior class of labour’ (Manchester Guardian, 27 Aug. 1889).

As cotton merchants, the Guardian’s original backers were generally hostile to labour’s claims. Of the 1832 Ten Hours Bill the Guardian doubted whether in view of the foreign competition ‘the framing of a law positively enacting a gradual destruction of the cotton manufacture would be a much less rational procedure’ (28 Jan. 1832). The nineteenth century Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of outside agitators - ‘if an accommodation can be effected the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone. They live on strife.’ (26 Feb. 1873). Wigan Miners on 35 pence a day

‘would be richer men if they earned less money; and considering what is the degree of culture and what are the approved pleasures of their class, we doubt greatly whether higher wages would be any benefit to them’. (Manchester Guardian 10 April 1873)

It seems as if the wheel of history has turned full circle. As organised labour lost its power, the Guardian shed its industrial correspondents. Today its coverage of the working class is oddly reminiscent of its coverage back in the nineteenth century: the masses are a problem because of their excessive consumerism, and the threat the represent to social order.

9. The Guardian’s war against the Serbs

Before the US and Britain waged war on Iraq in 2003, the Guardian had supported military intervention against the Serbs in Kosovo in 1999. Trying to disguise the fact that the United Nations’ Security Council did not support the attack, the Guardian insisted that ‘The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force’ (Guardian, Leader, 23 March 1999). Or more bluntly, Mary Kaldor headlined her piece ‘Bombs away!’ (Guardian, 25 March 1999).

Hugo Young warned ‘armchair critics of Nato’s strategy in Kosovo’ what was at stake: ‘the defeat of Nato by Yugoslavia is a prospect that cannot be contemplated’ (Guardian, 27 April 1999). The moral certainty about Nato was mirrored by a similarly low opinion of the country they were fighting over: ‘a god-forsaken, dirt-poor, hate-ridden blot on the map of Europe’, according to Polly Toynbee (Guardian,18 April 1999).

Plainly, the Guardian’s visceral hatred of the Serbs has a history. It dates back to the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s. The Guardian took sides with the ‘defiant people of Dubrovnik’ (28 Oct. 1991) against ‘Mr Milosevic’s turbulent hordes’ (5 November) in Yugoslavia’s 1991 civil war. They asked Tory historian Norman Stone to explain that Western civilisation was at stake, because Dubrovnik

‘was a funnel for the European enlightenment to enter the Balkans. Now the Balkans, in a semi-savage sense, are getting there own back, wrecking the city and setting back the level of their own civilisation by 50 or 60 years.’ (13 Nov. 1991)

The Guardian editor felt it necessary to explain to Serbs that ‘Blowing limbs and heads off people is wrong’. ‘So is beating up and terrorising civilians.’ (21 Nov. 1991) Unless, that is, the terrorised civilians are themselves Serbs: The Croatian Army’s invasion of the Serb-enclave Krajina, in which 200 000 were made homeless, thought the Guardian, should be ‘welcomed as a hold on Serbian aggression’ (5 August 1995).

When fighting broke out in Sarajevo, the Serbs were ‘bestial’ (Guardian, 8 June 1992). In a leader headed ‘The need to fight to make the peace’, the Guardian explained that the UN Security Council will ‘have to confront the need for force’ (25 June 1992).

Of course, force was just the beginning. We need an ‘open-ended occupation’ (Woolacott, Guardian, 14 September 1996) or a ‘benign colonial regime’ (Borger, Guardian, 7 September 1996).

When Bosnia’s rival ethnicities were made to submit to rule under a United Nations’ Protectorate, the Guardian did not welcome a return to democracy. ‘The West’s mistake was to set too much store by holding the elections in Bosnia long before the conditions were ripe... The West allowed Bosnia’s politicians too much power over the last three years’ (Guardian, 1998, quoted in Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, p. 164).

When war returned to the region in 1999, the Guardian published Daniel Goldhagen’s view that the Serbs are ‘legally and morally incompetent to conduct their own affairs’ (‘Why Nato must take Belgrade’, G2, April 29 1999)

The Guardian’s anti-Serb crusade is so engrained now that it has become a self-contained universe of belief that could never really be dislodged. It is not unique to the Guardian - the cause was actively adopted by quite a swathe of the liberal intelligentsia, and its prejudices have filtered into the mainstream.

The Yugoslav war was important for the Guardian because it was a cause that saw the paper step out of mere reporting to lead radical opinion in a way that seemed actually to shape government policy. It also helped to outmanouever the more cautious militarists of John Major’s Conservative government. Maggie O’Kane demanded that Number 10 Press Officer Alastair ‘Campbell should acknowledge that it was the press reporting of the Bosnian war and the Kosovar refugee crisis that gave his boss the public support and sympathy he needed to fight the good fight against Milosevic.’ (Z Magazine, August 1999)

The Guardian’s campaign against the Serbs was, indeed, the original blueprint for ‘humanitarian intervention’, the policy adopted by Tony Blair when he came to power. All of its basic tenets - action on behalf of victims rather than for national interests; the demonisation of the enemy; war crimes tribunals - were set in play in the war against Iraq in 2003.

10. The Guardian and Civil Liberties

In a G2 article about the rise in petty regulations and intrusive warning signs, Stuart Jeffries sets out the problem well: ‘the presumption from our sign tsars is that Britons must have every last thing spelled out because we are uncivilised scum raised by wolves’. But it is an insight he cannot sustain, giving up the argument moments later on the grounds that ‘there is good and bad bossiness’: ‘In our anti-social, post-Thatcherite Britain, in which many people do selfish things in public without expecting to be told to stop, bossiness can be a good thing’. (19 June 2007).

Jeffries’ confusion typifies the difficulty that the Guardian has standing up for civil liberties. They worry about ‘bad bossiness’, like ex-Home Secretary John Reid’s Control Orders on terrorist suspects, because it is political repression. But they want to keep the ‘good bossiness’, like bans on hate speech and on harassment, and intrusive advice on health and diet. What the Guardian has never understood it that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bossiness alike both come from the same low opinion of ordinary people: ‘Uncivilised scum raised by wolves’, or in other words ‘anti-social, post Thatcherite selfish people’. Whichever way you say it, it means that the people are not to be trusted, and the state must take charge.

Quoting Labour’s Douglas Jay - approvingly - the Guardian concluded: ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people than the people themselves’ (Leader, 3 July 2007).

Guardian columnists, like David Aaronovitch always objected to the catch phrase ‘political correctness’. They only heard right-wing columnists like Richard Littlejohn making excuses for racism. It never occurred to Aaronovitch that there might be something wrong with empowering college authorities or employers to decide what was and was not acceptable personal interaction.

‘What’s so terrible about the nanny state, anyway?’ asked Anna Coote, surely everyone believes in public health (Guardian, 26 May 2004). When it became clear that the Department of Health had wildly exaggerated the dangers of AIDS among heterosexuals in its campaign to scare young people off sex, Mark Lawson had no problem with that: ‘The government has lied and I am glad’ (Guardian, 24 June 1996). A nervous distrust of what their fellow men and women were doing, or just thinking about doing, was matched by naivety about the authorities. ‘Should we get upset if the police ask us for identity cards’, asked David Walker, only to answer: ‘No’ (Guardian 19 October 2001).

More recently, the Guardian has begun to have doubts about the Home Office’s attacks on civil liberties, represented by the draconian Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, or the anti- terrorist Control Orders. But the difficulty that the Guardian has tacking the government over civil liberties is that it shares all of New Labour’s underlying prejudices about the need to constrain ordinary people. Indeed, the Guardian helped to draft New Labour’s original assault on Civil Liberties, back in the 1990s.

In 1993, after the murder of a toddler Jamie Bulger by two older boys, Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair defined his policy of attacking civil liberties. He would be ‘tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime’. According to the Guardian, Blair ‘rightly berated the left for putting too much emphasis for the cause of crime on social conditions, and too little on individual responsibility’ (22 February 1993). In the mid-nineties, when New Labour was just formulating its new authoritarian agenda, the Guardian shared many of the same fears of social breakdown.

Then Melanie Phillips was the Guardian’s chief commentator on social affairs. She specialised in blood- curdling tales of the collapse of community. The Jamie Bulger case, she conceded was wholly exceptional, but still it was ‘a death of our times’ (Guardian, 22 January 1993). Developing the rhetorical devices that would make
Guardian readers wince when Home Secretary David Blunkett adopted them years later Phillips explained

‘Only the ivory-tower middle classes with a bad case of Utopian myopia could delude themselves that juvenile crime isn’t an immensely serious problem... Reality suggests that juvenile offending is up, not down. Community anxiety is understandable. The term ‘“moral panic’“ is misplaced.’ (Bring Back the Voice of Authority, Guardian 5 March 1993)

Nor was Phillips anticipation of New Labour’s ‘social breakdown’ agenda exceptional. In the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, David Rose lauded Jack Straw’s ‘holistic and often imaginative’ approach on youth crime, his commitment to ‘restorative justice’, to ‘rehabilitation not purely vengeful justice’ (4 May 1997).

When the government legislation on Anti-Social Behaviour Orders went through, the Guardian supported it. Arguing that similar legislation had led to a fall in crime in the US, Neil Addison wrote in the Guardian’s Law section: ‘Let’s hope anti-social behaviour orders will do the same for our own hell-like neighbourhoods’ (30 March 1999). Only when the authoritarian measures were obvious to all did the Guardian worry that children had been made into ‘the hooded enemy to be Asbo’d’ (Polly Toynbee, 4 July 2007).

The Guardian’s default distrust of ordinary people and its assumption that state authority is for the good makes it hard to sustain a coherent defence of civil liberties today.

MurrayMcDonald1@googlemail.com

Darfur: when 'peacekeeping' means colonialism

2007-08-27T19:13:00.000+01:00

It's true that an image can be worth a thousand words - just take a good look at the image above. It's a photograph of two UN Belgian troops who were caught trying to roast a Somali boy, yes, you got that right, ROAST him! This was an atrocity committed during the UN operation unfortunately entitled 'Restore Hope'. And what did these two 'peacekeeping' paratroopers receive for such a hideous crime? A month in prison, and the loss of a week’s wages.

Such crimes by UN troops in Third World countries are not isolated incidents, indeed, UN 'peacekeeping' forces, throughout the world are notorious for establishing such patterns of abuse. This is in fact a natural situation that foreign elite 'peacekeeping' forces find themselves in when confronted by events on the ground they cannot really begin to comprehend.

Of course, the boy in the photograph will never receive any real justice for the crime committed on him; this is mainly because UN forces are totally unaccountable to African people. The road that led UN troops to his home in Somalia was paved with so many good intentions by liberal interventionist in the West - all because such UN missions are deemed to be a good thing even if a 'few' Africans are brutalised on the way - this is what the people of Darfur have to look forward to.

Read on:

Darfur: colonised by ‘peacekeepers’. Spiked Online. 2007.

U.N. 'peacekeepers' rape women, children. World Net Daily.

U.N. suspends peacekeepers amid sex abuse charges. CNN.com/world. 2007.

New Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers in Africa. The New York Times. 2007.

Save Darfur: a Chatterati's wet dream

2007-08-23T23:04:00.000+01:00

The cause of peace in Africa can never be served by self-righteous liberals in the West who constantly make events on the ground in Africa sound far worse than they really are. These liberal interventionists honestly believe that people will only care about Africa if it can be presented to us in the most horrific way they can imagine.

George Clooney has been one of the worst culprits of only presenting Africa to us in the most lurid, and in many cases, the most inaccurate way possible, it doesn't seem to bother Clooney, who is by no stretch of the imagination an expert on African civil wars, seems to think his hot air on Darfur is beyond criticism and interrogation.

Clooney, and the rest of the Chattering classes in the West have cynically adopted Darfur as 'Our Righteous Cause'. They insist that the civil war in western Sudan is just a simple case of savage Africans trying to wipe out another set of African victims. The propaganda they use is to over exaggerate the scale of the suffering because it suits their morality tale, which is ready-made for simpletons. Indeed, Clooney has nothing of real substance to say that can actually clarify what is precisely going on in Darfur, his constant labelling of the civil war as a genocide is meant to flatter the listener and their sense of self-serving anger. It simply hasn't occurred to Clooney that his demands for Western military intervention in Darfur comes at a time when there was, and still is, a marked decline of armed conflict in the Darfur region.

The Chatterati like Clooney have got what they wanted, 26,000 heavily armed UN personnel roaming around Darfur, telling the Sudanese what to do in their own country. As far as I'm concerned, this is just as cynical as the Bush administrations military adventures in the Persian Gulf. Activists that support the latest UN interventions in Darfur are really no more than western apologists for militarism as a final solution in someone else's country, and to someone else's civil war, all just for their own moral self-gratification.

Save Darfur activists appear actively to distort public understanding of the complex debates that surrounds the question of Darfur, worst still, the relentless good victim verses the evil/Black Nazis presentation of the conflict is in fact having perverse effect on the ground. Indeed, an official from the American State Department back in 2004 told the world's press that instead of standing up and fighting the Khartoum government, the rebel faction the Justice and Equality Movement; "are doing everything possible to keep it going. The S.L.A. has never stood up to the army the way the S.P.L.A. did in the south. Instead, they’ve been very content to sit back, let the village burnings go on, let the killing go on, because the more international pressure that’s brought to bear on Khartoum, the stronger their position grows".

Mahmood Mamdani is an expert in African political affairs, he is also professor of Government at Columbia University, and author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror. In a recent essay he explores how Save Darfur activists have slowly transformed the Sudanese civil war into a platform for self-righteous moral posturing. I agree with much of Mamdani's sentiments regarding Save Darfur activists - for they have managed to systematically reduced a complex African civil war, that involves many armed factions and government troops fighting over land, water and grazing rights, down to one single word - 'genocide'. As far as Save Darfur activists are concerned, Darfur can only be described in lurid and exaggerated terminology. Mamdani talks about how newspaper 'writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence’, he adds that liberal interventionists are 'fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (“race”) and, if not that, certainly in “culture”.

Mamdani rightfully calls this the 'pornography of violence', it's for hardcore Save Darfur activist who think nothing of exaggerating the facts about how many people have died in Darfur. Take for example the Save Darfur Coalition who also work closely with Clooney, and all their international campaigns on TV, in the cinema, and their full page adverts in the press, have thought nothing of exaggerating mortality rates in Darfur. The worst thing about all of this, is that very few people will be 'aware' of how Sudan is literally being prostituted by Western interventionists, who appear hell bent on trampling over any Third World countries national sovereignty.

Original source material from here.

Let's celebrate the freedom of flight

2007-08-16T23:56:00.000+01:00

At a time when hundreds of miserable anti-flying protestors are descending on Heathrow airport at it's most busiest time of the year, hell bent on causing disruption - I think it’s high time we start to combat such eco-puritanism by celebrating our freedom to fly

As far as I’m concerned, what I’ve always found completely astonishing, is the fact that a machine of such size, weight and power, can transport me over great distances, at such high speeds, in the most inhospitable environment, with such safety, and at such a cheap price - that, in mine eye, can never be 'unethical', on the contrary, to me, that is nothing short of a miracle.

I’m constantly struck by how blasé most people appear to be when it comes to aviation safety, coupled with their low prices. I was at Heathrow airport only a week ago waiting for my £54 return flight to Shannon airport in Ireland with my fiancée, we always grab a coffee at the Costa Coffee, then sit by the windows so we can read, or watch the planes land. I’m constantly astounded each time I see one of those giant machines come swooping down from the clouds and touching down so smoothly on the runway.

I always find it heartening to know that modern flying has developed into the safest form of mass travel known to mankind. Indeed, the Executive Director of the European Aviation Safety Agency, Patrick Goudou reassured his audience at a recent EU/US International Aviation Safety Conference in Prague that ‘aviation remains the safest mode of travel’. The latest safety report from the International Air Transport Association also confirms that when aviation safety is concerned, Western-built jets are amongst the safest in the world with only one accident per 1.5 million flights – that is certainly a tremendously low accident rate by any stretch of the imagination, especially for something as complex as flying.

Even after having to endure all of Heathrow’s strict and tedious security procedures, nothing it seems can be more thrilling than the moment when your jet arrives at the runway, the engines are put into full thrust and you accelerate to a speed of 160 mph in three seconds flat, and off you go. Even though I might only have a rudimentary understanding of the science involved in flying, I still find myself astounded by the sight of the disappearing ground at Heathrow, and the rapid approach of the clouds – I think it’s about as close to miraculous as it will ever get.

Happy holidays to you all!

The Earth dies screaming, so pass the Courvoisier

2007-07-07T21:58:00.001+01:00

The Live Earth concerts is proof that the politics of environmentalism are rooted in middle-class hypocrisy.

I have yet to see many, or any seasoned environmental campaigners fully endorse the Live Earth 'extravaganza', indeed, even openDemocracy's very own green guru Oliver Tickell concedes that the 'whole cult of celebrity can be stomach-turning'. Well, if you ask me that is putting it mildly to say the least. We all know that celebrities like Madonna are opportunistic when it comes to worth while causes, one day they are for something, the next day they drop it and move on to yet another global event or cause. Tickell also points out the glaring contradictions of A-list celebrities like Madonna telling the little people how they should live their 'carbon-neutral' lives - yeah right, Madonna.

John Buckley of the CarbonFootprint.com told the Daily Mail how 'Madonna's Confessions tour produced 440 tonnes of CO2 in four months of last year. And that was just the flights between the countries, not taking into account the truckloads of equipment needed, the power to stage such a show and the transport of all the thousands of fans getting to the gigs'. The truth is, the real message of the Live Earth concerts is it's absolutely acceptable to be a millionaire pop-star, just so long as they get on a stage once and a while and tell the population how they should reduce their carbon footprint - breath-taking hypocrisy becomes socially acceptable.

The shear hypocrisy, and all of the glaring contradictions are neatly summed up by Live Earth's highly irritating little book entitled Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook. The author of the book is the multi-millionaire David de Rothschild from the same hyper-rich Rothschild banking dynasty. The book is packed full of unbearable ideas that pussyfoot around the problem of climate change - like for example, we are told to grow our own tomatoes, and if your cold at home, wear a jumper instead of turning the heating on. The book is, to all intents and purposes, a green version of our very own Holy Bible - the only difference is the Live Earth Global Survival Handbook is produced by a guilt-ridden, plummy-mouthed aristocrat who thinks he can tell the little people how they ought to live.

Global warming: two word argument for doing sweet FA

2007-06-29T07:20:00.000+01:00

The current debate surrounding global warming and climate change is enough to cause steam to come out of my ears - indeed, these days, the very mention of the words 'global warming' is more than enough to make me go out and buy a second-hand Colt 1911, with extra clips.

What I really hate is the fact that when any eco-worrier utters the words 'global warming' what they really want is the whole of humanity to just stop everything it’s doing - what the greens really desire is for everything to be put on hold, or worse, to be frozen to a stand-still. For example, every time we need to build new roads, the miserable greens shout 'No - what about global warming?' Every time we need to expand our airports, again we hear 'No - what about global warming?' Every time we need new power stations, 'oh no - what about global warming'? Every time we need new desalination plants, 'err no - what about global warming'?

The self-righteous crusade to fight global warming has become the number one argument for doing next to nothing - however, even if the greens are scientifically correct (which is still highly debatable), humanity cannot hope to solve any of it's problems simply by being in a state of stasis - if anything, history shows us that growth and rapid development equips humanity so it can, at the very least cope with anything that is thrown at it.

Genocide: and the tyranny of modern secular 'heresy-hunters'

2007-06-27T08:05:00.000+01:00

"Of certain Accusations that require particular Moderation and Prudence. It is an important maxim, that we ought to be very circumspect in the prosecution of witchcraft and heresy. The accusation of these two crimes may be vastly injurious to liberty, and productive of infinite oppression."

Quote by - Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. From The Spirit of the Laws 1748.

Montesquieu was forced to publish his treatise on political theory anonymously because his works were subject to harsh censorship by the Catholic Church at the time. Nevertheless, despite being on the churches list of prohibited books, Montesquieu's works had a huge influence on the work of others, most notably, the founding fathers of the United States Constitution.

These days the Inquisition by the Catholic Church is utterly discredited - however, today's secular heresy-hunters are obsessed with the construction of new, secular taboos, like for example the questioning of the Holocaust. Indeed, a 10-year prison sentence awaits those who deny the Holocaust, or worse, if you refuse to oppose it in countries such as Austria, or Germany. The Holocaust is fast being hijacked and prostituted by all sorts of campaign groups and self-righteous individuals. There are many campaigners who are transforming the Holocaust into an all purpose brand, but the flippant use of the word Holocaust belittles the one and only true Holocaust committed by the West last century - indeed, the continual manipulation of the Holocaust metaphor turns the historic German/Western made tragedy into a mere caricature.

How many times have we heard about the 'Holocaust in Rwanda', or the Bosnian/Serbian Holocaust, or what about the 'African-American Holocaust'? Other campaigns have gone much further in belittling the murder of some 6 million Jews by Germany during WW2 - animal rights activist constantly talk about the 'Holocaust of chickens', or the 'Holocaust on your Plate'.

The Holocaust and genocide have become an all purpose brand for persuading people to back any two-bob campaign. Such campaigns insist that those who question their orthodoxy or version of events should be treated the same way that Austria treats Holocaust deniers - censored, criminalised, then put into prison for many years. Even in 'liberal and free' France, anyone who dares deny the Armenian genocide can be punished by imprisonment - so much for the liberty of free speech. Campaigners against denial have become the modern equivalent of heresy and blasphemy hunters. Indeed, some people can no long distinguish between two differing opinions any more - lazy, self-righteous campaigners simply shout that 'you are in denial'. The moment someone is charged with being in 'denial' whether it's about Rwanda, Darfur, or Global warming, there usually follows demands for 'deniers' to be censored as if they were heretics.

Of course not all secular heresy-hunters want their opponents silenced - what they want more than anything is to punish those who have the temerity to question conventional wisdom and truths. Just as today's Holocaust deniers are punished by imprisonment, so some campaigners talk about 'eco-crimes' for global warming deniers, or 'abetting genocide' for those who question the existence of genocide in Rwanda or Sudan.

As far as I'm concerned, it can never be legitimate to criminalise freedom of thought or free speech.

I'll leave the last words to people who truly understood the meaning of free speech, the French National Assembly of 1789. Who stated;

"The free communication of thought and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man. Any citizen can therefore speak, write and publish freely."

Also read:

Denial. By Frank Furedi. Spiked Online. 2007

Lee Jasper: the multiculturalists go insane

2007-05-25T09:58:00.000+01:00

This story starts back in early 2004, when a former High Court judge Sir John Blofeid, led an investigation into the death of David Bennett, a black schizophrenic patient. Blofeid's inquiry concluded at the time, that the mental health services were nothing but 'a festering abscess' of institutional racism. From then on, anyone and everyone seemed to agree that a strategy of 'leadership' and anti-racism was needed in order to combat what was perceived as 'institutional racism'.

So there it is, in a nutshell - the reason why people of Caribbean and African origin are over-represented in Britain's psychiatric wards is simply because psychiatric hospitals are akin to something like the British police force - institutionally racist. From this perspective, it stands to reason that what needs to be done is to drastically reduce the rate of ethnic minorities being detained in psychiatric hospitals.

Into this steps Lee Jasper, the anti-racist, mental health advisor to the Mayor of London, who told the BBC's Newsnight, that we are currently witnessing 'racism on an industrial scale' in psychiatric wards up and down the country. For Jasper, the Blofeid report and the subsequent national census entitled 'Count me in', are proof that mental health services are profoundly racist. Indeed, Jasper confidently asserted only 2 years ago at a national conference for professionals and carers that the national census 'confirms once and for all that mental health services are institutionally racist and overwhelmingly discriminatory. They're more about criminalising our community than caring for it'. This all sounds very alarming, however, there is no real need to be alarmed, mainly because Jasper is sadly wrong on these issues.

It doesn't seemed to have occurred to the national census 'Count me in', Judge Blofied, or New Labour's Jasper, that the reason why there seems to be a disproportionate amount of ethnic minorities in the mental health services, might be because there is a disproportionate amount of mental illness amongst ethnic minorities, especially in urban areas. The truth is, ethnic minorities in Britain are just as likely to suffer from a mental illness more than their white counterparts - this truth appears to shock many on the Left who find the notion unbelievable. Indeed, Jenny Daniells, a mental health worker told the Socialist Worker back in 2005 how shocking it was to 'walk into any secure mental health unit in London', and only to find out 'it will be full of young black men' - the truth can indeed be disturbing for some people

I agree with professor Swaran Singh - a respected consultant psychiatrist who argued that the constant labelling of psychiatric hospitals as a festering abscess of racism is not only erroneous, it's far worse than that, it's counter-productive. As professor Singh tried to explain to Newsnight, that the high prevalence of psychosis in ethnic communities and high rates of detention 'are not a result of racism'. So now it appears as if there is a huge reality gap - there is the reality of multiculturalists like Jasper who see 'racism' everywhere and anywhere he turns his head. In fact, for Jasper, there can be 'no other credible explanation' other than institutional racism he says. Yet, the reality according the latest research by the Institute of Psychiatry reveals a rather different story altogether.

For example, the latest AESOP (Aetiology and Ethnicity of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses) study talks about 'remarkably high rates for schizophrenia and mania in both African-Caribbeans' - and that the 'findings held true for both men and women and were evident across all age groups'. The truth is, official anti-racists like Jasper are actually ignoring the real causes of why black people are over-represented in the mental heath services, and in doing so, he puts our community and patients lives at real risk. In fact, mental health tribunals are so frightened of being accused of institutional racism, that they release dangerous black mental health patients back into the community, in order to shake off such charges and basically hope for the best.

The research points to the fact that migrant communities, no matter where they come from, suffer from more mental health problems - and this applies to all migrant communities around the world. Indeed, white Britons who migrate to Australia are just as prone to suffer from high rates of psychosis as black people who migrate to Britain. The institutional racism/multicultural agenda is in fact insane because it makes matters worse for those who really need treatment.

Those who question the notion of institutional racism in the mental health services are perceived as being in denial of racism - but if you ask me, official anti-racism and multiculturalism are making the problem worse. Indeed, those who argue that mental health services are racist are doing the black community in inner cities no favours whatsoever.