Branch life

It’s gone a bit quiet here, hasn’t it?

On April the 6th, as you’ll doubtless recall, I started a series of posts called In Search of the Red Wall, in which I was sceptical of the thesis that Labour had lost in 2019 because, ultimately, we’d lost the old working class vote, and specifically because we’d lost a huge tranche of culturally conservative “heartland” seats in the North of England. Having traced the development of the concept – which followed a surprisingly tortuous and disjointed path – and shown how fatuous it basically was, I concluded by proposing to analyse what had actually happened in 2019.

This takes us up to the 21st of April. On the 28th I returned to the topic and began the explanation of what happened – and what didn’t happen – in December 2019, in a post ending with these pregnant words:

Something big happened to Labour’s vote in 2019, and it happened right across the country – and it wasn’t a swing to the Tories, despite the Tories benefiting from it in a big way.

But what was it?

Here we are in June – not even the beginning of June – and still no ‘part 2’. I will get to it, and I have got some idea of what I’m going to say – at least, I’ve got some numbers, and any amount of charts – but I’ve not found it easy to get around to, and not just because I’ve had other stuff on.

I suspect that one underlying reason is the reason why I didn’t do much to analyse the figures straight after December 2019: it’s just too damn depressing. And not ‘depressing’ in the ‘why I’d rather not watch Schindler’s List with my takeaway’ sense – depressing in the will-depleting, immobilising, what was I trying to do never mind don’t suppose it matters sense of the word.

Which is also, frankly, why I haven’t been having a lot to do with our local Labour Party. Last year – just pre-pandemic – I wrote about the ward AGM which had been due in the Autumn of 2019 and was postponed to February 2020. I went along, but I wasn’t hugely impressed:

several officers either stayed in post or moved sideways, and several posts were uncontested. … looked at from outside it might seem odd that, in a ward branch with a membership nudging four figures – the size of some entire CLPs – it’s only possible to find one person interested in any of the officer positions.

We met in the same place as last year, and I think we were pretty much the same people as last year; we were certainly in very similar numbers to last year, viz. around 70 … Which also helps explain the uncontested elections. Seven days (the notice period required when calling a branch AGM) is not a very long time – and membership secretaries don’t hand out contact lists to anyone who might want to do a quick bit of phone-banking. This is all according to the rules, of course, but these ‘home team’ advantages (and others created by officers’ role in the AGM itself) mean that the likelihood of anyone disrupting the orderly self-perpetuation of the dominant faction is pretty slim. … The result is a kind of political Sealed Knot, an annual reunion of the office-holders and their factional activists on one side and the diehards of the excluded group(s) on the other. They might as well take allegiances at the door, like ushers at a wedding, and declare the results straight away.

This year… sorry, it just looked too much like hard work. But it looks as if I’m not the only member locally who felt like that. The email announcing this year’s results opens

Thank you to the fifty members who attended our online Annual General Meeting on Monday 7 June 2021. It was great to see so many people. 

Oh, the people!

Viewed with a colder eye, even without the barrier to participation of having to turn out and sit in a church hall, attendance was down from 70 to 50 – which is to say, down from about one in 14 of the 2020 membership to about one in 20. (Although the 2021 membership may also be lower, of course.)

As for the business of the meeting, here’s a summary:

Chair: re-elected x1, former x4

Vice Chair: re-elected x1, former x3

Vice Chair: former x8

Secretary: re-elected x4

Treasurer: re-elected x3, former x1

Membership Secretary: re-elected x3, former x3

Women’s Officer: new

Political Education Officer: re-elected x1, former x2

Diversity Officer: re-elected x1

Delegates to the constituency party General Committee: 16 candidates, all elected unopposed (Chair, both Vice-Chairs, Treasurer, Membership Secretary, Diversity Officer, plus two delegates re-elected x4, four re-elected x2 and four new members).

“Re-elected” = re-elected to the post; x2 (etc) = re-elected for the 2nd time (etc); “former” = held one or more elected post in one or more previous year. (My data only goes back to 2016; the re-election counts for some of these candidates will certainly be too low.) Note also that last year’s GC delegates included five members from the Left of the party, none of whom stood this time – so the four new members are unlikely to add to the ideological diversity of the delegation.

It’s not, as they say, a good look. As I said in 2020,

what kind of membership are we building, if members keep seeing the same names in the same posts, or else (for a change) the same names in different posts? … I’ve always believed that uncontested elections and musical-chairs rotation of posts were signs of a local party in decline – not of one that’s going from strength to strength, as ours apparently is. Perhaps the problem is precisely the apparent absence of factions – or rather, the impossibility of multiple factions arising when a single faction dominates for long enough. Perhaps what we’re seeing is how unchallenged factional dominance sows the seeds of decline.

It’s certainly not motivating.

So, anyway – what happened in 2019? One contributing factor to Labour’s defeat in 2019, it seems to me, is that self-perpetuating cliques like the one I’ve just described threw away the enormous asset created by the party’s increased membership, because it wasn’t an asset that served their factional purposes – and threw away any slim chance to get a Labour government elected, because that wouldn’t have served their factional purposes either. In this they acted entirely logically – mobilisation of the membership would inevitably have threatened their position, and another 2017 (or better) would certainly have increased the demand for mobilisation – and really, all they can be blamed for is valuing local posts within a political party more highly than the possibility of a Labour government.

But that’s an impressionistic explanation, and one from a source that may not be entirely reliable (embitterment can do that). What else happened in 2019?

NEXT: another blog post. No, really.

Advertisement

What happened in 2019 (1)

What happened in 2019? This:

	2017		2019		+/-
Labour	40%	262	32.1%	202	-7.9%	-60
Conservative	42.3%	317	43.6%	365	+1.3%	+48
UKIP / Brexit Party	1.8%	0	2.1%	0	+0.3%	0
Lib Dem / Green / independents	9%	13	15.9%	12	+6.9%	-1

Any further questions?

To unpack that a little: Labour’s vote fell by a fifth, but the Tory and UKIP/BXP vote rose only a little; the main beneficiaries in terms of votes were the minor centrist (and pro-Remain) parties. The sole beneficiary in terms of seats was the Conservative Party, for reasons which both were and weren’t predictable: that they would benefit was predictable because of the two-party bias imposed by our absurd electoral system, but as for how much they would benefit, have you looked at our absurd electoral system recently? Another table:

	2010		2015		2017		2019
Conservative	36.1%	306	36.9%	330	42.3%	317	43.6%	365
Labour	29%	258	30.4%	232	40%	262	32.1%	202

Labour’s 2019 vote share is significantly higher than 2010’s, for less than 80% of the seats. Or you could look at the Tories’ 2015 vote: in comparison, Labour got 8/9ths of the votes, for 3/5 of the seats. We can even see this disproportion happening from one election to the next: both Labour in 2015 and (more dramatically) the Tories in 2017 increased their vote share and lost seats. (“All hail, Theresa May, who shall lead the Conservative Party to win its highest vote share since Thatcher, with more votes than Labour took in 1997!” The witches were having a laugh that day.) Really, the system’s a lottery; it’s amazing we take it as seriously as we do.

But that is the system we’ve got, and those are the figures it produced. And, speaking of disproportions, there’s something about the scale of the Tories’ gains from Labour, compared to the much more modest increase in votes, which seems to cry out for explanation. One candidate explanation, as we’ve seen – albeit a hazy and impressionistic explanation, as we’ve also seen – is the ‘Red Wall’. Perhaps it wasn’t a Tory wave but a Labour collapse. Perhaps the youth-powered bien-pensant liberalism of today’s Labour Party had drifted so far from the ageing demographics and conservative culture of the party’s traditional support base that some of its northern strongholds were ready to drop into the Tories’ hands (always bearing in mind that the word ‘north’ covers everywhere from Coventry to Berwick-upon-Tweed).

Well, perhaps. The trouble with this explanation (as we’ve seen) is that it only explains about a third of Labour’s losses. But might it be useful anyway, applied not to the seats we actually lost but to near misses? A good question, and one that calls for a map.

The nationwide trend for Labour was a drop of 7.9%, with the Tory vote going up by 1.3%; this adds up to a deterioration in Labour’s relative vote share of 9.2%. The deep purple constituencies on this map are the big losses: the ones that Labour lost with a drop in its relative vote share of 18% or more, roughly twice the national change.

The pale purple are all other losses – barring a few further south – and, as you can see, they outnumber the deep purple handily. What’s more interesting are the red seats, which are all those seats that Labour held with a drop in its relative vote share of 18% or more – in other words, the seats where the same factors that were at work in the deep purple group are (perhaps) lurking, storing up trouble for future elections.

In short, if there is a Red Wall, this is the map to show it – and, if there is a Red Wall, it’s partly in south Yorkshire and Derbyshire, partly north of Durham. There’s no denying that this is an interesting map, and one that highlights some problem areas for Labour (that stretch running from Pontefract down to Bolsover in particular). But do those red and deep purple areas tell us anything about “Labour’s heartlands” in general – or about how the election was lost? I can’t see it.

The other end of the scale is interesting too – and for this one we’ll be venturing south of the Wash. Two maps:

On these two maps, the red and orange areas are Labour holds, the blue Tory holds. The pale blue and orange areas are constituencies where Labour’s vote share relative to the Conservatives fell in 2019 by less than 4.5% (i.e. less than half of the national average). The darker blue and deep red areas are constituencies where Labour’s vote share relative to the Tories actually rose in 2019 (including one where I went canvassing – which is pretty much the first evidence I’ve seen that any of the canvasses I was involved in had any positive effect).

What’s interesting about the red and orange seats is not so much where they are (Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, recent wins Canterbury and Portsmouth South and of course the capital) as how few there are of them; the Labour vote just fell away, by a lot, right across the country. Or at least, right across the country in Labour seats: check out the duck-egg blue South-East. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that you can walk from Lewes to Aylesbury without ever entering a Tory constituency where Labour’s relative vote share fell by more than 4.5%; not very much, probably. Still, those washes of pale blue are at the very least interesting, particularly considering how many of those same seats saw a rise in Labour’s relative share in 2017.

One last map. Was this a victory for the Conservatives? Clearly it was in terms of seats gained, but see above, absurd electoral system. In terms of a big rise in vote share… not so much.

The purple and blue areas are constituencies where the Tory vote rose by at least 5% relative to 2017. The purple areas are seats lost to the Conservatives, as usual; the blue areas are Labour holds. Pale blue and pale purple show a rise of 5-9.9% in the Tory vote, dark blue and dark purple a rise of 10% or more. The beige areas, finally, are constituencies where the Tory vote didn’t go up by as much as 5%, but Labour lost the seat to them anyway.

It’s striking, relative to the beige areas, how few Labour losses are purple, and how very few are deep purple. It’s also striking, relative to the map as a whole, just how few seats are either blue or purple. Despite the huge shifts in relative vote shares in some constituencies (shown on the first map), there were only a handful of constituencies where the Tory vote share rose significantly. Conversely (referring to the second and third maps) it was only in a minority of constituencies – and a small minority of Labour constituencies specifically – that Labour’s vote share didn’t show a significant fall.

Something big happened to Labour’s vote in 2019, and it happened right across the country – and it wasn’t a swing to the Tories, despite the Tories benefiting from it in a big way.

But what was it?

Reflection

10th June 2020

“Had we introduced lockdown a week earlier we’d have reduced the final death toll by at least half,” [Neil Ferguson] told MPs on the House of Commons science committee. “The measures, given what we knew about the virus then, were warranted. Certainly had we introduced them earlier we’d have seen many fewer deaths.”

Official figures on Wednesday show the death toll from the virus already stands at 41,128, suggesting that if Ferguson is right, more than 20,000 lives could have been saved by taking more draconian action earlier. …

Johnson declined to express regret that the government did not act sooner, saying the data is not yet available to make a full assessment.

23rd December 2020

Introducing a national lockdown in England one week earlier could have saved more than 20,000 lives during the first wave of coronavirus, a new study has concluded.

Experts from Imperial College London looked at the transmission of coronavirus across England and how effective restrictions brought in to suppress the virus were. The study said: “Among control measures implemented, only national lockdown brought the reproduction number below 1 consistently; introduced one week earlier it could have reduced first wave deaths from 36,700 to 15,700.”

A government spokesperson said: “Every death from this virus is a tragedy and our condolences go out to everyone who has lost a loved one. … We have been guided by the advice of scientific experts and our response helped to ensure the NHS was not overwhelmed. As new emerging evidence has come through, we have constantly adapted our approach and have taken swift action to stop its spread.”

15th March 2021

“There was a genuine argument in government, which everyone has subsequently denied,” one senior figure tells me, about whether there should be a hard lockdown or a plan to protect only the most vulnerable, and even encourage what was described to me at that time as “some degree of herd immunity”. … real consideration was given to whether suppressing Covid entirely could be counter-productive.

On 3 March, when the prime minister set out the government’s plan, the focus was on detecting early cases and preventing the spread. But on 12 March, with journalists crammed into the state dining room at No 10, he told the public that the country was facing its worst health crisis in a generation. Anyone with symptoms was told to stay at home for a week. …

On 13 March, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) committee concluded the virus was spreading faster than thought. … Then, one official says, everything started to move at “lightning speed”. … On 16 March, the public were told to stop all unnecessary social contact and to work at home if possible.

9th January 2021

I’m pretty sure I know where and when I was infected and indeed who passed it on to me. In late March, a day or two before the first lockdown came into effect I walked into York city centre with a bravado that turned out to be hubris. … This was before masks in shops became mandatory and before people really started to wear them. While queueing in Boots I noticed, too late, that the cashier had a nasty cough. I was too embarrassed to leave the line before it was my turn to be served …  She must have known this was a symptom of covid and, for that matter, her store manager must have known it too – she should have been told to self-isolate and supported on full pay. I can’t be 100% sure I got the virus from her, but it seems highly likely. Sometimes I wonder if the elderly woman who was behind me in the queue is still alive.

6th July 1954

“But we didn’t feel hardship at all, we believed that tomorrow would be fine and beautiful: a sun red as blood and before us, a great road filled with light, a beautiful garden”.

The voice of Pin Yin reaches us from that nightfall into which – at what speed in miles per second of the turning world? – our friends and our most certain allies have gone and continue to vanish. If nothing else, civil war will have the best of justifications.

(Sources: Heather Stewart and Ian Sample (Guardian), Shaun Lintern (Independent), Laura Kuenssberg (BBC), Ed Rooksby (1975-2021), Guy-Ernest Debord.)

Something really fishy: 2. Outside

Exegi monumentum aere perennius [I have created a monument more lasting than bronze]
– Horace, c. 13 BCE

The heart’s filthy lesson falls upon deaf ears
– David Bowie, c. 1994 CE

[Author’s note: the factual details in this post are derived almost exclusively from Chris O’Leary’s indispensable Rebel Rebel and his Website Pushing Ahead of the Dame. The speculations are all mine, though.]

While Leon clearly isn’t a finished work – apart from anything else, Bowie never finished it – I think it does have a certain weird coherence; it is possible to ask what it does, what ideas it plays with, what it’s about. One way in is to ask what Leon‘s not about. The only elements of Leon which saw the light in officially sanctioned forms are those that appear on 1. Outside – so what’s that about, to the extent that it’s not Leon? What are the non-Leon elements of Outside – which songs, and which themes, either predated the Leon improvisations or post-dated them and arose separately?

More of 1. Outside falls into these categories than might immediately be apparent. As well as the six character “segues” (five of which first appeared in Leon), both “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” and “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town” are clearly based on Leon characters and plot strands (“The Hearts Filthy Lesson” even opens with a reference to the “Laugh Hotel“). In fact, the two tracks rather neatly bookend the Leon story – or at least the 1. Outside version of the Leon story. The story ends with “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town”, which provides a brisk summary (“Baby  Grace is the victim, she was fourteen years of age”) before cutting back to the wrongly convicted Leon Blank, in prison, deprived of an artistic (or any other) career, working on his appeal and counting the days as they pass. “The Hearts Filthy Lesson”, meanwhile, sets the stage for Leon by introducing the central character – “Detective Professor” Nathan Adler, specialist in “art crime”, who we hear making increasingly stressed voice notes for a colleague called ‘Paddy’. (Shades of Agent Cooper and the unseen ‘Diane’ – not the only respect in which the Leon story echoes Twin Peaks.) The final, spoken, words are crucial:

Paddy – what a fantastic death abyss! Tell the others.

(The words are unclear in the album version, but there’s a bootlegged studio runthrough which clearly shows that ‘death abyss’ is the phrase – as well as showing how distinctive the rhythm of the final version was, with its casual combination of slamming heavy metal and springy syncopation.)

Why would an art specialist be a connoisseur of the ‘death abyss’? Also, what is the heart’s filthy lesson – and why does it fall on deaf ears (a phrase which I have just mistyped as ‘death ears’ for the second time in succession)? The quotation from Horace points the way. The heart’s filthy lesson is simply that the heart is just that, a heart – a very complex lump of muscle, but a lump of muscle for all that, and as such not something that can be relied on to go on functioning indefinitely. The heart’s filthy lesson, in other words, is that we’re all made of meat and we all die – and it falls on deaf ears because artists have spent the last 2,000 years staging increasingly elaborate denials of this inescapable fact, despite themselves falling victim to it at about the rate you’d expect.

And enter Nathan Adler: how would it be, Bowie asks, if art did a 180-degree turn, from denying the meat body and its death to embracing these things – making them art’s central theme? Considering Chris Burden (one of the sources for “Joe the Lion“), considering (allegedly) self-mutilating artists like Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, considering Damien Hirt’s bisected cadavers, might it be that this pivot was already happening – and might the growing sense of pre-millennial tension make it happen faster and with more extreme effects? Instead of building palaces of ideas on the denial of the “death abyss” which lurks beneath all human achievement, might art critics and theorists switch to staring into the abyss – and seeking out more and better abysses to stare into?

The Leon story – or at least a Leon story – starts right there, just as it comes to a dead stop in Leon Blank’s prison cell. These two tracks and the six ‘segues’ apart, however, 1. Outside material is surprisingly hard to locate relative to Leon. The male singer of “We Prick You” is enduring an aggressive interrogation and fantasising about sex by way of escape; it may be Leon Blank, but then again it may not. The paired tracks “I’m Deranged” and “No Control” express Bowie’s new-found interest in outsider art – and his longstanding fascination with the relationship between creativity and mental illness – but no connection is suggested with the deranged or out-of-control artist at the hidden heart of the Baby Grace story. Indeed, in another case the artistic theme and the Leon narrative seem to have been mutually exclusive rather than complementary: supposedly Bowie scrapped the Leon-related lyrics to “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” in favour of an alternative set of lyrics about English landscape artists, and had to be persuaded (by Reeves Gabrels) that this wasn’t a good idea. (One such artist was David Bomberg, whose name at least made it into Leon.)

Then there are another four tracks which rework earlier material. “Hallo Spaceboy” derives from an improvisation by Reeves Gabrels and a lyric by Brion Gysin; “Strangers when we meet” first appeared on the (unjustly neglected) Buddha of Suburbia album; the title track “Outside” dates back to Tin Machine; and “Thru’ these architect’s eyes” is one of the two new compositions on 1. Outside which had been begun before the Leon improvisations, and is in any case about architecture (the visual arts again).

So: six Leon character pieces, three songs set in the Leon-verse (stretching a point for “We Prick You”), three songs about art (including “Architect’s Eyes”); and three assorted reworks. But that’s not all; the album (which is rather long, let’s be honest) also includes another four tracks, or two pairs of tracks – or, more precisely, one pair and an overlapping group of three. The second new composition begun before the Leon sessions is “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)”, whose ungainly title seems to both state and obscure the dark central theme of the Leon/1. Outside story. We’re looking into a created “death abyss” again, but we’re looking through the eyes of the person creating it: somebody driven by a compulsive fusion of an artist’s desire to create and a sadist’s desire to cause pain, resulting in torture and murder experienced (by the artist) as the creation of an artwork. The murderous artist announces and defines himself in “The Voyeur”, after which we hear him at work in the deeply unsettling “Wishful Beginnings”:

Please hide
For the pain must feel like snow
You’re a sorry little girl
Sorry little girl

“Wishful Beginnings” can also be seen as one of a group of three tracks, together with “The Motel” and “A Small Plot of Land”. Following on from the cover version of “Nite Flights” on Black Tie White Noise, these three tracks represent a renewed engagement with Scott Walker – an influence who would continue to fascinate Bowie at least until The Next Day (cf. “Heat”). As of 1994, it should be noted, Scott Walker hadn’t released an album in ten years. Bowie was thus embarking on the Quixotic – or Pierre Menard-like – project of following in Walker’s footsteps, in the knowledge that Walker had moved on in the mean time.

When recording on 1. Outside was finished, Scott Walker did in fact release another album – 1995’s Tilt; it sounds nothing like these songs. That said, the project of treading in Walker’s imagined footprints was surprisingly successful – sonically on the eerie “Wishful Beginnings”, lyrically on all three. Consider:

Poor dunce
Swings through the tunnels
And claws his way

And the silence flies
On its brief flight
A razor sharp crap shoot affair

We flew on the wings
We were deep in the dead air
And this one will never go down

These are extracts from three different songs, each of which includes much that’s more prosaic and less unexpected, but they do suggest that Bowie had put in some serious listening. From the album Nite Flights on, Walker had a unique style – at once declamatory and evasive, lyrical and brutal, epigrammatic and disjointed – and this is, if not that, very much in its neighbourhood.

Some of David Bowie’s best and most interesting work arose out of a collision between different themes or strands of work – which generally indicated that Bowie had got bored with one thing (and/or felt he’d mastered it) and picked up another. Diamond Dogs is the “unwritten 1984 rock opera” album, but that only accounts for three tracks (four if you include the unreleased “Dodo”); it’s also the album on which Bowie takes on contemporary dystopian SF (the opening narration, the title track and “Skeletal Family”); and responds to Lou Reed, who’d just released Berlin (the “Sweet Thing” suite and the alternative “Candidate“); and meditates on being a rock star and the gap which now existed between him and his fans (the two central tracks, “Rebel Rebel” and “Rock and Roll With Me”). Thematically it’s a mess, in other words – you could just about say that “Rebel Rebel’, “Sweet Thing” and “Diamond Dogs” are all ‘street’, while “Diamond Dogs” and “Big Brother” are both ‘sf’, but really, those are three very different streets (and two very different forms of sf). (And I haven’t even mentioned the music, which at one point goes from Isaac Hayes to Jeff Wayne in the space of two tracks.)

Something similar seems to be true of 1. Outside: it’s an album with a group of Leon tracks and a couple of new tracks inspired by Leon; it’s the album where Bowie “did” Scott Walker (“The Motel”, “A Small Plot of Land”, “Wishful Beginnings”); it’s the album where he put some of his thoughts about art and artists, outsider artists included (“I’m Deranged”, “No Control”, “Architect’s Eyes”); and it’s also the album where he parked some other material that he wasn’t finished with, and/or that didn’t seem to belong anywhere else (“Outside”, “Strangers”, “Hallo Spaceboy”). (No wonder it’s so long.)

The question then is where we put “The Voyeur”, taking into account that it was begun before the Leon sessions – and in particular whether we consider it, and “Wishful Beginnings”, to be part of the Leon group. As told in the 1. Outside booklet, the Baby Grace story features an unnamed artist who carries out some form of ritual murder and desecrates the corpse in the cause of art, but I wonder if this represents a later fusion of the story told in Leon with the artistic concerns of 1. Outside. If we put “The Voyeur” and “Wishful Beginnings”, along with “The Hearts Filthy Lesson”, into the “thinking about modern art” section of 1. Outside – “thinking very dark thoughts about modern art”, specifically – and assume that Leon didn’t originally tell the story of a “ritual art murder”, where does that get us? Does taking the ‘Minotaur‘ out of the picture make Leon harder to understand – or easier?

Something really fishy: Leon

David Bowie’s 1994 sessions produced anything up to 30 hours of recordings, most of which has never been released either officially or unofficially. Three segments totalling about 70 minutes have been leaked, under the fan-assigned name “The ‘Leon’ Suites”; some elements of this are familiar, having been reworked and incorporated into 1. Outside, but most – the great majority – isn’t. This, in fact, is the missing link (or one of them) between Eno’s multilingual future space-jam and Bowie’s pre-millennial art-ritual murder plot. Among other things.

Here (as far as I can tell) are the lyrics to the Leon Suites. Apart from regularising the spelling and punctuation, and correcting mishearings in a couple of places, I’ve only made a couple of departures from the texts a couple of people have put online. There are no breaks or track titles in the leaked material, so I’m treating the whole thing as a single piece of work. I haven’t incorporated the (sometimes speculative) character names, for similar reasons. I have set most of the spoken-word passages as prose (no line-breaks) and in quotation marks. I also admitted defeat on the final song of the third suite, which rapidly degenerates into what may be patois – or indeed Wolof – but is probably just nonsense syllables. (Phonetic transcriptions are available, but they’re not very enlightening.) Rather than spend half an hour deciding what to put down – for example, whether Bowie was singing “sun-dressed Cecil” or “sun-drenched shizzle” (neither of which makes any sense at all) – I’ve just labelled the whole passage as “[incomprehensible]”. This does mean that the Suites end on a bit of an unsatisfactory note – but then, they do. The running order of the Suites comes courtesy of an unknown bootlegger; nobody knows, or indeed ever will know, what Bowie would have preferred – other than what he did prefer, which was to forget about the whole thing and work on something new instead. Which was, after all, his established approach, ever since the time that Tony Hatch failed to make him a star with a song that sounded a lot like “Downtown”, and he decided to model himself on Anthony Newley instead. But he left some intriguing material behind as a result and a few outright mysteries – and there isn’t much more mysterious in his catalogue than the “Leon” suites.

But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

THE “LEON” SUITES

“25th June, 16th, Wednesday, July 6th, 2001 midwinter, June 6th, Wednesday, August 18th, 9th, 1999, 12th, Michaelmas, August, 13th, October 13th, afternoon, in view of nothing, 2001, Martin Luther King Day, 12th, August 13th, 17th June. 19th January, midwinter”

The first time that I felt your grace
A tear [pronounced ‘tare’] ran down my cheek
The first time that I saw the boil
Put it on the neck…

“I never see English anymore. Last time I saw him he was standing by a pile of cantaloupes under the lamplight. I look up at the blood-red sky and I saw the words ‘Ramona A. Stone’. As sure as you can see the nose on my face, or the graze on my arm, or the boil on my neck, or the foot on my ankle, or the car in my garage, or the wife in my kitchen, or a cloud in the sky, or a cow in a field, or the sun and the moon. Holy sun!”

We go through the crowd,
In Oxford Town
Moving on the sidewalk,
Faces to the ground

Oxford Town, Oxford Town
Oxford Town, Oxford Town…

“You got a breath-filled crowd here tonight, Eli!”

“Someone once said that beauty is only a deep skin. Why, it’s always been a stone in my flesh, I’ll tell you that for nothing. You’re better off without it. I mean, who eats the hard skin now? It ain’t Ramona A. Stone, that’s for sure. That don’t-wanna bitch is hanging around with cannibals, producing shots of white babies fastened to the arms of blind heifers.”

All the babies left home
The babies left home
And the sky’s made of chrome
A breath-filled sky and it’s made of chrome

It was the night of an OK riot
She swanned along the street
With her waving hair and her research grants

OK riot, OK riot
It was an OK riot
With waving hair
OK riot
It was an OK riot
OK riot
With waving hair

Choc-a-bloc babies in the heart
A block of black decay in the room
O what a room it was, O what a room
What a womb, what a tomb it became
I’d rather be an OK riot
I’d rather be chrome
Yeah I’d rather be chrome
I’d rather be chrome
Yeah I’d rather be chrome
Yeah I’d rather be chrome
Than stay here at home

Don’t go near the bones
Leon can you hear?
Get away Julie, don’t go there,
There’s really a lot to fear

A breath-filled crowd
They might be super loud
They eat the hard skin and they sit on lamplight
They’re white and black and loud

I’d rather be chrome
Yeah, I’d rather be chrome
I’d rather be sitting on a cloud
I’d rather be eight foot loud
I’d rather be chrome
I’d rather be chrome

Well, I’ll bitch slap her home
I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be
Gonna, gonna, gonna be chrome
Gonna be chrome
Beauty is a stone
I wanna be chrome
I wanna be, wanna be chrome

“Friends of the Trust, you’ve been a breath-filled crowd tonight. You’ve been positively fly boys. We are surely on our way upon that superhighway of information. As far I’m concerned, you are all number one packet sniffers! So sing with me:”

We’ll creep together, you and I
Under a bloodless chrome sky
We’ll creep together, we’ll creep together,
We’ll creep together, you and I

We’ll find the small things, you and I
We’ll just have small friends, you and I
We’ll be small together, we’ll be small together
We’ll be small together, you and I

We’ll end together, you and I
We’ll end together, you and I
We’ll end together, we’ll end together
We’ll end together, you and I

“Huh! As far as I was concerned, There was always the slime end of the silicone chip biz. It seems that Ramona and Leon had just spiralled down into the cesspool. Like I always say, a person who loses a name feels anxiety descending. But hey, if I heard it right, she was always behaving like some don’t-wanna bitch. She was a well-blind woman, he was a well-intentioned man; this makes for a bad end. As I always said, it would end in chrome. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.”

O Ramona, can you hear me?
O Ramona

I am with name, I am with name
I am Ramona A. Stone
A night fear female
Good timing drone
I am with name, I am with name

I am with name, I am with name
I am Ramona A. Stone

“And she should say:”

Twitch and scream, It’ll end in chrome
The night of the female good time drone
I am with name,
I am Ramona A. Stone

“And she should say:”

“A person who loses a name feels anxiety descending – left at the crossroads between the centuries, a millennium fetish.”

I am with name, I am with name,
I am Ramona A Stone
I am with name
Night fear female
Good timing drone
I am with name
I am Ramona A Stone

“And she should say:”

I am with name
I am Ramona A Stone

“Anxiety descending, anxiety descending…”

I won’t eat me, it will hide me
He should take them, I won’t tell it
She can’t take them, it will do less
He said tell it, he said smell this
He should do this, he should be there

She can’t hide me, he said do less
He said tell it, I won’t take them
She can’t eat me, he said kill that
He said take them, he said be there
I won’t kill that, it will be there
She can’t eat me, I won’t hide me

It will tell me, he said hide me
I won’t be there, he said hide me
He said be there, I won’t hide me
They won’t smell this, he should hide me
I won’t kill that, it will take them
They won’t tell it, she can’t be there
They won’t hide me, he should hide me

They won’t hide me, she can’t be there
It will hide me, he should eat me
He should take them, he should take them
I won’t kill that, they won’t be there

They won’t tell it, I won’t take them
I won’t eat me, I won’t eat me, I won’t eat me

They won’t do less, he said tell it
They won’t take them, it will hide me

It will smell this!

They won’t kill that, he should hide me
I won’t hide me, she can’t be there

I won’t tell it, I won’t eat me
They won’t tell it, he should smell this,
He said be there, he should kill that
I will take them, they won’t eat me

She can’t eat me, I won’t hide me
They won’t do less, he should eat me
He should hide me

They won’t smell this!
She can’t tell it!
I won’t be there!
He should eat me!
He said tell it!
He said tell it!
He said tell it!

Smell this…
Smell this…

“Old Touchschriek was a domain name server, suspected of being a shoulder surfer or finger hacker. This old guy didn’t know from shit about challenge response systems – he was way back in the age of cellular clones. We knew that Ramona A. Stone was selling interest drugs and magic cookies; she got males all hung up on her mind filters. She was a router and a swapper – she was, if you don’t mind me saying so, a fuckin’ update demon. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to when it all began.”

“I was Ramona A. Stone. I started with – with no enemies of my own; I was an artiste in a tunnel. But I’ve been having a MIDI-life crisis and I’ve been dreaming of sleep and apemen with metal parts. I’ve spat upon deeply-felt age – come to life, goddess! I’ve hid my hearts in under a freckham sky. I’ll get the funny-coloured English… Oh… we’ll creep together, you and I. We know who the small friends are. My, this is a crazy world. At this time, you could think of me as a ‘syllannibal’: someone who eats their own words.”

We’ll creep together
We’ll creep together, you and I
We’ll creep together, you and I
Just a trip of the tongue
From a slump male
A mumble slouch unreal

“Maybe a true remark”

We’ll creep together, you and I
Way back in the Laugh Hotel
I’ll reel out the window
You die for diamonds
But you won’t live for love

She’s a don’t-wanna bitch
Behaves like a don’t-wanna bitch
She’s a don’t-wanna bitch
But she is all I’ve got
I am with rose, I am with babies
I am with chrome
I am Ramona A. Stone
I am Ramona A. Stone
It’ll end in chrome
This is the chrome, this is the chrome
My friends, the chrome

“Then there was nothing left to do but to bring on the Nut Soldiers, round up the packet sniffers and clear up what remained of that sensational mouth. It’s sensational, her mouth – just a little untight. Excuse me while I wax poetic. The ashes that ran, fleshy debris and silicone chip-bits, electrocutes the evil and smells. Thank you. For me, it’s like plain chaos, and I am the fixer.”

“Thank you very much… Well, thank you very much… Well, you asked for them, so here they are – The Leek Soldiers!”

Twist, fly boy, twist, fly boy,
Brace for me, twist, fly boy
Wrecked, flexed, heaven erect,
Brace for ready,
Twist, fly boy, twist, fly boy!

Twist hardware, twist hardware,
Push the ziplock, twist hardware,
Melt them, wreck them, break through
Melt them, go for the flare
Fly boy, fly boy, fly boy, fly boy…

“At this time, before you could say boo to the goose, Leon was up on that oh-so-heavy party stage, with a kris-kris machete. He could not wait for 12 o’clock midnight. He slashes around, cuts a zero in everything – I mean, a zero in the fabric of time itself. I says to myself, Whoa! Quelle courage! What nerve!”

They won’t kill that, it will hide me
He should take them, I won’t tell it
She can’t take them, it will do this
He said tell it, he said smell this

He should do less!

He should be there, she can’t hide me,
He said do this, he said tell it,
I won’t take them, she can’t eat me,
He said kill that, he said take them,
He should be there!

He should do less!

“Some day the Internet may become an information superhighway. Some day, some day. Some day the Internet may become an information superhighway. Don’t make me laugh! A 19th century railroad that passes through the badlands of the Old West. Someday the Internet may become an information superhighway. Do not make me laugh!”

“It was a great conversation.”

“Hey Bunny, say goodnight”
– Say goodnight
“Say goodnight Bunny”
– Goodnight Bunny
“Say ‘goodnight’, Bunny”
– Say ‘goodnight’, Bunny
“No no, say ‘Goodnight’, Bunny”
– Say ‘Goodnight, Bunny’
Say ‘goodnight’, Bunny’
– Goodnight, Bunny
Say goodnight, Bunny
– Say ‘goodnight Bunny’

“Hey hey, here we are back at the Laugh Hotel! I was sittin’ there at the Laugh Hotel the other night looking for window demons, when in comes this Leon in a jungle weed, a mumble slouch unreal, maybe a triple-lock, a trip of the tongue from the slump male…”

“I’m Mr. Touchshriek of Touchshriek Mail Over and Fantasy, and I sell egg shells off the she-sore and empty females. I met Leon once. Bit of a dark spiral with no end, I thought. Sunday mail-over with his deeply felt grace.”

“What are you in terror of? Life needn’t step on baby fingers. The minutes fall, and the demons find their ways unencumbered, half dead, poisoned by their own fatal art. Each dirty tune produces its own nobility of form; each pays a different piper – a daft pauper. O machine, how did we fail thee? I guess I feel like a machine that cannot be cranked any more. My gathers are broken and bent, like a wall strangled by ivy -”

“I remember a dame called Ivy – drove around in a hearse. Some way south on Oxford Town, near the mosque. Graffiti, cappuccino, you name it – they had it all. Those were the days. In those days everyone was psycho-balletic – not the humbug packet sniffers they are now. Take Leon… please!”

“I think we’re stuck in a web. A sort of… nerve net, as it were; a sort of… nerve Internet, as it were.”

Red dog, red dog, scum, red dog, scum, red dog, red dog, scum, red dog, scum

“We might be here for quite a long time – here in this web… or Internet, as it were”

And, and, and, and, and, red dog

Got to get away, get away, got to get away
Got to get away, get away, got to get away
Got to get away, get away, got to get away

“The editors have done an excellent job. The selections are generous, the notations are scrupulously scholarly. To believe that the quality of a CD-ROM can be conveyed through translation may seem presumptuous, but I believe the enterprise is greatly successful.”

“This is a magnificent achievement, a major triumph of Wolof music; a truly precious addition to the sum total of Wolof in English.”

“The editorial apparatus of this CD-ROM leaves nothing to be desired”

“The editorial apparatus of the CD leaves nothing to be desired”

It leaves nothing to be desired
Nothing to be desired!
Nothing to be desired!
Nothing to be desired!

Mind changing
Mind changing
Change your
Mind changing
Mind changing
Change your mind changing
Mind changing
Stand by
Mind changing
Mind changing
Stand by
Mind changing
Mind changing
And there’s nothing to be desired!
Nothing to be desired!
Nothing
If not dishy

Nothing to be desired!
Nothing!
Nothing to be desired!
It’s your mind changing
Mind changing
Change your mind changing
Mind changing
Change your mind changing
Mind changing
Change your mind changing
Mind changing
Change your mind changing

“In far off California, there is no natural plan. Its mighty branching and its preponderant boughs weigh heavy on a Sontag morning.”

“Test, testing, testing. This… Grace is my name. And, and there was… It was a phot… a fading photograph of a patch, a patchwork quilt. And they’ve put me on these… Ramona put me on these interest drugs, so I’m thinking very, too, bit too fast like a brain patch, like I’ve got this… this soul brain patch, and it’s got… I got the shakers on it with this neuro-transmitter. And… they won’t let me see anybody except the breeders in the enclave and the check players, and I can still hear some…. if I want to sometimes and I ask I can still hear some pop… popular musics and aftershocks. And they say what… they say what were… what were you doing? what was I doing when I saw the small friends? And I said that I’ve been watching a television of, a television of Jeffreys In the Press, about the British revolution and something about the second Protector, who was a news coaster in the homelands – yes, the new homelands. And then I recognized the small friends because one of them was a very infamous, and he was a grand visionary, he was the grand visionary, the one who was on a television, who made soul patches the law, and… that’s all I can remember. And now they just want me to be quiet and to worship the lot, and I think something is going to be horrid.”

“Hello Leon. Would you like something really fishy? Hello Leon. Would you like something really fishy? I gave up flogging in Oxford.”

The enemy is fragile!
The enemy is fragile!
Who has seen this furious man? Who will rid me of this shaking head?

“Hello Leon. Would you like something really fishy?”

“It was just a fading photograph, slumped on the black leather sofa, glass fronted, forgotten by the last tenant.”

Who will rid me of this shaking head? Who has seen this furious man?
The enemy is fragile!
But he has no, has no
The enemy is fragile!
The enemy has always been here.

“You could have been fighting to the death, but no! Well, wrap up and we’ll go dancing, Leon! Dance fishing?”

Something in her mouth.
There’s something in her mouth,
Something mysterious.
There’s something in her mouth
Between patois and Beckett.
I bet it is a speech.

“Sample techniques, exponents of the greatest Wolof band of the 21st century. Phase techniques, and rich 21st century Spanish incantations.”

You are – a permutation
You are – a patois
You are – Chinese poetry
You are – something mysterious
You are – speed through delay
You are – patois and Beckett
You are – fighting to the death
You are – flogging
You are – something really fishy
You are – whispering
You are – warning

“My name is Mr Touchshriek, of Touchshriek Mail Over and Fantasy. I sell egg shells off the shesores and empty females. I’m thinking of leasing the room above my shop to a Mr Wolof Bomberg, a reject from the world-wide Internet. He is a broken man; I am also a broken man. It will be nice to have company; we could have great conversations. Possibly, just maybe, after a nice cup of tea, from a trip of the tongue we’ll creep together down a memory lane, and then we’ll be young and full of bubbly ambition, instead of the slump males that we are. Looking through windows for demons, watching the young advancing, all electric… A small shop on the corner is really no more than a dark spiral with no end. I’m in a street behind the Museum of Modern Parts. The buildings are close together, no more than ten feet between one side of the street and the other. There’s not much in the way of daylight, but at least we don’t get the rain, which is a blessing. Some of the houses still have inhabitants in them; I’m not sure if they’re from this country or not. I don’t get to speak much to anyone, or that sort of thing. If I had another broken man – oh, I dream of something like that. Not sure if they’re from this country or not…”

“I mean, who am I supposed to be driving?”

“A snapper with a foetal heart who resents all stupid questions, Ramona A. Stone put her arms around a boy – the golden boy with a lion’s heart, the boy who lives outside, an urchin among immortals. Leon! Lift up your eyes! The very stars are calling! Your name is Leon, Leon is your name! Murder you will do!”

Leon, lift up your eyes!
[incomprehensible]

On left antisemitism

This from Dave Renton is a fascinating post on the issues posed by the possible return to the Labour Party of ex-MP Luciana Berger, and in particular on the abuse suffered by Berger from the Left.

I hope Dave doesn’t mind if I set up this post with a couple of comments from the blog, one mine and one his. Me first:

We do tend to forget that what Berger charged Corbyn with didn’t involve guilt by association or the reinterpretation of words which also had a more innocent meaning or the expression of political views which (while legitimate) may cause offence, or any of the other more or less strained ways in which charges of antisemitism have been weaponised. It was inconvenient for us, God knows, but she had Corbyn bang to rights – he was self-convicted of unthinking tolerance of straightforwardly antisemitic tropes. (Why this happened and what lessons we should have drawn from it is another matter; suffice to say I don’t think it rose to the “Corbyn must go” level, but “Corbyn must do something” should have got through a bit more clearly.) We also forget that Berger had a record of calling out left antisemitism of precisely this kind (use of antisemitic tropes for emphasis) dating back to before she was an MP.

Having said all of which, I don’t think she’s any friend of the Left – and I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to readmit somebody who sat in Parliament as a representative of Change UK and the Lib Dems.

Dave’s reply:

Agree on your first half, Phil. On the other points, a friend on facebook pressed me and I ended up writing the following: One of the ways I’ve often thought about this is – imagine I was going to someone’s home and ask them to take part in an anti-fascist demo, and I realised they were Jewish, and mainstream, middle of the road Jewish, i.e. someone who backs Israel against Palestine, the Labour right against the left, etc. And they said, Why should I support your demo when I remember how the left treated Berger? I’d want to be able to say I remember that, and explain what I did, without feeling any shame. So, the first part of the conversation would have to be Yes, I remember that and saw it. (Seeing is a big deal). Then – in order to feel proud in that situation, there might be different things you could say. EG when I realised what had happened, I didn’t stop criticising her. Why should I, when she was criticising me and my politics? But I tried to think of her with respect. EG, when I criticised the people who left with Change UK, I never singled her out, I never treated her as worse than the others. I never used her name as a shortcut for all of them. I never spoke about her with derision or used insulting words. I knew that she’d become a symbol in people’s heads, and that process of turning her into a symbol was itself a problem. And when I saw other people doing the same, I had words with them. I continued to disagree with her, but I always treated her as a whole human being.

And back to me (this began as a comment but has clearly grown to the length of a blog post in its own right).

I think one of the things that makes this so difficult to talk about is that people feel they’re being accused of a kind of active, deliberate antisemitism – in other words, accused of being primarily motivated by hatred of Jews; as if nobody on the Left had the slightest problem with Berger until they realised she was Jewish, and as if any Jewish member of the party would have attracted the same kind of hostility. And when I say “people feel [etc]”, it’s more that people on the Left are being accused of this kind of brute antisemitism, by opponents and enemies from Margaret Hodge on rightwards. It’s an outrageous, hurtful and (almost always) entirely baseless slur, and people get defensive; it’s understandable if, when people try and raise the issue of antisemitism within the Left, they feel that they’re being accused of it all over again, and shut down as a result.

It’s understandable but it’s also idiotic, and demonstrates a worrying lack of understanding of antisemitism – a failure to treat it in the way that we’ve always claimed to treat it, as just one form of racism among others. What kind of defence against a charge of anti-Black racism or Islamophobia would it be if we angrily insisted that we didn’t bear Black people or Muslims any malice, and then refused to hear any more? It’s like something from the 1980s – nobody on the contemporary Left would suppose that that kind of defence was adequate if they were told their words or actions expressed racism, or homophobia or sexism or even class prejudice.

Antisemitism is different somehow. The old line is that racism equals prejudice plus power; at one time I remember Alexei Sayle extending that logic to argue that the British working class was relatively powerless in comparison with BMW and Nissan, ergo anti-German and anti-Japanese jokes weren’t really racist. I suspect the reason why antisemitism of any but the most blatant kind tends to get overlooked is similar – British Jews aren’t systematically deprived or marginalised, and on average they’re doing OK, so where’s the structure of prejudice backed by power? But if you think about it, racism doesn’t have to actually be backed by power every time a racist statement is spoken or decision made. It is prejudice plus power (I think that’s still a useful formulation), but in the sense that it expresses the desire to bind power to prejudice. To put it more straightforwardly, if I use racist (or sexist, or homophobic…) language as a put-down, I’m saying that I want it to be a put-down. I’m saying, in that moment, that I want to live in a world where being identified as non-White or Jewish (or as a woman, or gay, or…) is bad for you – because it would be bad for you, in a way that it isn’t for me. Racism is power plus prejudice, even when – pace Alexei Sayle – there is no power involved: racism goes beyond prejudice because it invokes the power that I want the prejudice to have. But not everyone is going to grasp that – particularly when grasping it involves asking yourself some hard questions.

If this explains why people on the Left might overlook or tacitly tolerate antisemitism, it doesn’t explain why they might express it themselves. To understand that I think we need to go back to the 80s again: to the argument (which I’m pretty sure I heard in more than one workplace) that (a) being bullied by the people in charge was normal and (b) those people would use anything for the purpose – including any stereotypical or prejudiced attitude that might apply to you – without themselves being bigots. Why did they do it? They did it to get under your skin, to put you on the back foot – nothing more than that. No harm intended; it was just part of the working life (so toughen up, bloody toughen up…). So now, in a battle for the soul of the Labour Party, what do you do when you want to get the Right on the back foot? You hit them with whatever you’ve got – and if that includes insinuations about paymasters and puppetmasters, well, they should bloody toughen up.

I’ve explained one thing that seems incomprehensible (leftists using antisemitic tropes) with another (leftists being bullies). But this is progress: all we’ve got to do now is explain why leftists might want to be bullies – and, for a bonus point, why more leftists might, perhaps, want to be bullies now than at other times. It comes down to that old – and deceptively difficult – question, “is your hate pure?”. I know from introspection that I feel an unquenchable hatred for everyone I know to have played a part in undermining Corbyn’s leadership (see leaked report for details). I also know from introspection that an unquenchable hatred is an uncomfortable thing to live with, particularly when there’s never likely to be any way to express it.

Now, a feeling adjacent to that hatred but quite different from it – and in a way offering relief from it – is the furious anger that builds up and discharges (often on Twitter) when it seems like somebody’s taking the piss or overstepping the mark. What they’ve actually done doesn’t need to be that bad – it certainly doesn’t need to be anywhere near bad enough to incur unquenchable hatred, for instance. They just need to have been really stupid, or shown their true colours, or let their guard down; they just need to have made themselves available as a target. Because then you can rage, and you can let them have it, and you can feel a bit better for letting your hatred out. But it’s not a pure hatred; it’s disproportionate and vindictive. It’s bullying, in fact, or it would dearly like to be – in that moment, you want to make somebody squeal.

I’m afraid one of the disservices Corbyn did the Left was his eternal “they go low, we go high” policy, which in practice meant that the hatred and anger we – inevitably – felt (what with being kicked around and mocked by the Right and their mates) was repressed. And we know what happens to negative emotions when they’re repressed: they return, with added righteousness and lack of proportion. Combine that with the Left’s reluctance to take antisemitism seriously and we’re in trouble. There’s also a willingness to turn a deaf ear to antisemitism which can come with the territory of Palestinian solidarity, purely because you can’t engage with Palestinian opinion for very long without hearing from people who sincerely and unreservedly hate Jews; I don’t think this is a big factor for many people, but it may be for some – Corbyn himself included.

Put all of that together and you can see how a weird and toxic emotional pathway gets built: how sincere and principled anti-racist leftists, wanting relief from getting shafted by the Right, can end up venting borderline antisemitic abuse against people who scarcely even deserve to be a target of their anger. Perhaps.

Says who?

1. Gedanken für das Experiment

Let me be the first to say that I’ve got absolutely nothing against Catalans. Although, of course, my saying that immediately creates precisely the suspicion I want to dispel. Really what I want to say is that there’s no reason why anyone should imagine that I’m anti-Catalan in the first place – although even saying that…

Start again. I don’t remember the Catalan influx, of course, but my parents told me some quite vivid stories. When what was euphemistically called ‘Unification’ finally absorbed Cataluña into Franco’s Spain – extinguishing a republic that had been approaching its third centenary – Britain was commendably quick to help. (To help the refugees, at least. The government in exile found that its relationship with our government rapidly went sour; for Britain to take a stand against the Generalissimo was not on anyone’s menu.) The Catalan nationality rapidly became Britain’s second largest minority community after the Irish, a position it has held ever since.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, particularly to begin with. A particularly unfortunate incident involved a Catalan man who drove through a red light, and who told the court in mitigation that he was colour-blind. If you’ve ever wondered where all those jokes that hinge on Catalans being colour-blind came from – and if they had any factual basis – there’s your answer. Catalan men were also thought to be effeminate, I’ve no idea why. And, of course, the Catalan language has often been the butt of what can loosely be called jokes, often from people who don’t consider themselves racist or anti-Catalan at all. (Yes, they use the letter X a lot, including at the beginning of words. Big deal. “Shall I get us some ksurros to go with the ksocolate?” Grow up.)

But in the last 30 years or so, anti-Catalan prejudice hasn’t really been an issue, by and large; by the 1970s British Catalans had suffered the ironic fate of all minority communities who are accepted by the majority, effectively disappearing from view. (If you ever have the misfortune to see an old episode of Love Thy Neighbour, keep an eye out for the couple who live next door to Jack Smethurst’s racist suburbanite, on the other side from Rudolph Walker: the characters are called Pau and Joana. In one episode they go up to London to celebrate Republic Day, but that’s about it.) You do occasionally hear suggestions that so-and-so’s Catalan name had held him or her back, but generally they’d be talking about somebody who’d got three-quarters of the way to the top instead of all the way – and usually the institution where they’d been held back was one that you’d expect to be unusually socially conservative (the Army, the Daily Express, the Conservative Party…) I’m not saying – it’s not my position to say – that everything was fine, but I think anti-Catalan racism was a long way down most people’s lists of pressing social issues, until very recently.

The other piece of background that needs to be filled in, of course, is Second Start. If you see a news item about the Catalan community, nowadays, the chances are it’ll mostly be about the Second Start Ministry of New Beginnings in Christ, to give the church its full name. It’s worth remembering that this association hasn’t always existed. It goes back to the successive waves of religious enthusiasm which briefly lit up the second and third generations of the Catalan community, and which led to some unlikely links being forged with the US evangelical Right. I don’t just mean Billy Graham, who played to a wide range of audiences (I saw him once myself); I’m talking about the likes of Jim and Tammy Bakker, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart. They didn’t leave so much as a scratch on the surface of mainstream religion in Britain, but in the British Catalan community they were a sensation.

And that prepared the soil in which Second Start, in turn, would grow. The survey data is phenomenal: the church claims the allegiance of approximately 4% of non-Catalans in Britain – and 92% of Catalans. I’ll leave it to sociologists of religion to explain why a heterodox offshoot of the US Southern Baptist Convention could be just what the British Catalan community had been waiting for, but there’s little doubt that that’s what it has been. Everyone who is anyone in the Catalan community – including the Ambassador himself – is a member; listen to anyone who’s asked to speak representing British Catalans, and you’ll almost certainly hear someone representing Second Start. Listen to an anti-Catalan racist, on the other hand – and yes, there are still a few – and you’ll almost certainly hear attacks on Second Start, or at best a ludicrously distorted portrayal of the church.

Which is how I – a Catalan speaker with Catalan colleagues and friends, and a lifelong anti-racist – now find myself accused of anti-Catalanism; credibly accused, to judge from the number of people who do in fact believe the accusations. I’m a Catalanaphile, but I’m also a secular leftist; I know the history of the British Catalan minority, but I also know the history of the US evangelical right. It hasn’t always been pretty. (Look up some of those names.) I see the faith British Catalans have put in Second Start, and I see how little they’re getting back for it. I see the social and political conservatism preached from Second Start pulpits, and I wonder how it can be doing the British Catalan community any good. And I see the money (not to put too fine a point on it) flowing out of the British Catalan community into Second Start, and I see how little of it stays in Britain, let alone among the Catalans.

Let’s be frank: I hate Second Start; I think the church is a noxious influence on the Catalan community in Britain and always has been. I think the wave of criticism the church is now receiving is long overdue – and the idea that it’s all down to a resurgence in anti-Catalanism is absurd. If I attack Second Start – if I critique its politics or question its funding – this is in no way an attack on Catalans…

…or is it? 92% of British Catalans are in Second Start, remember, along with hardly anyone else. What do journalists writing about the Catalan community write about? Second Start. What do representatives of the Catalan community see as a key British Catalan institution? Second Start. What’s been part of the cultural furniture for a generation of British Catalans, for all their lives? Second Start. And what do anti-Catalan racists attack? Second Start.

I, and others like me, can attack Second Start from the secular Left, and feel quite sure that we’re not making a racist attack on British Catalans. But a British Catalan – many, many British Catalans – can hear an attack on Second Start, even from the secular Left, and be entirely sure that it is a racist attack on British Catalans. And who are you going to believe? When it comes to recognising racism against British Catalans, who’s the authority?

2. What you is is what you are

Can you be mistaken about how you feel? No.

Can you be mistaken about how you feel about somebody else’s speech or conduct? For example, can you be mistaken about whether you’re offended or not? Again, no.

Can you be mistaken, if you’re a member of a minority, about whether somebody else’s speech or conduct offends you as a member of that minority? No.

If the other person claims not to bear you any ill will, should you cease to be offended by what they said or did? No – “no offence” is the oldest get-out clause in the book, and probably the weakest.

The moral of all these questions is, what you feel is what you feel. If you’re offended, you’re offended.

Now: if you are offended by somebody’s speech or conduct, does that mean the speech or conduct is offensive? And, following close behind: if you’re a member of a minority, and somebody else’s speech or conduct offends you as a member of that minority, does that mean that the speech or conduct is offensive to that minority?

This is where I think we need to start treading carefully. “I feel offended” and “this is offensive” seem to go together as naturally as “I feel hot” and “it is hot”, and perhaps they do – but the reason they go well together is that both pairs of statements are elliptical, omitting key pieces of information which can be assumed in any actual speech situation. “I feel hot”, if we took it at face value, would tell us that the speaker habitually feels hot, wherever and whenever. The meaning of the phrase is “I feel hot [in this room/bath/crowd/etc]”. Similarly, “it is hot” omits a key piece of information, even if we replace ‘it’ with the particular setting: who’s saying that the experience of being in this room/bath/crowd is hot, and where are they getting the information? In short, the grammatical inverse of “I feel hot [in this setting]” is “it is hot [to me]”. Similarly, we’re never just ‘offended’, and nor is anything absolutely, always-and-everywhere, read-it-off-the-dial ‘offensive’; the grammatical inverse of “I feel offended [by this]” is “this is offensive [to me]”. Now, you can hang your hat on that – what you feel is what you feel; what offends you, offends you; what’s offensive to you, is offensive to you, and other people should care about that. But generalising from “I feel offended” to “this is offensive”, without more, seems to me to be going too far.

Offence is something that people should care about; offence caused to members of a minority, in particular, is something that non-members of that minority should take very seriously. If someone tells me – and especially if a lot of people tell me – that they, as members of a minority, are offended by some statement of mine that I myself find unproblematic, it’s incumbent on me to take that seriously and consider what I’m saying carefully: it’s strong evidence that I may be mistaken. But it’s not conclusive evidence – and there may be evidence to the contrary.

As for what would constitute evidence to the contrary, consider part 1 of this post. In that world, how would we evaluate a vocal critic of Second Start? I’d say that someone who was highly critical of Second Start but had never previously shown any interest in evangelical religion, and who attacked an institution dear to Catalans and avoided socialising with Catalans, might well be motivated by anti-Catalan racism. Someone – like my narrator – who’s highly critical of both Second Start and other evangelical churches, and who attacks an institution dear to Catalans but has Catalan friends… probably not.

In this world… well, I’m not going to point any moral; I’ll leave that for yourself.

 

 

Calm down

I don’t entirely disagree with Simon when he warns

Corbyn is currently creating the conditions in which a new [centrist, pro-Remain] party could enter, and survive for long enough to cost Labour the next election.

As he says,

When Brexit happens there will be a lot of bitterly disappointed people around questioning where to go from here. … Unfortunately Corbyn has done virtually nothing for members and voters that closely identify with Remain. Hopes have been kept alive by Keir Starmer and occasionally John McDonnell, but neither attended Corbyn’s recent talks with the Prime Minister. The overriding impression given by the leadership and its supporters is that they do not want to antagonise Labour Leavers, and Remainers have nowhere else to go

But I think that – as so often – there’s a huge risk of confusing the trends that are making the news in a small, contained, well-informed and hyper-reflective group with those that are making the running in the country. And this is the case even where that small group consists largely of people whose intelligence, wisdom and public spiritedness is unimpeachable, such as the Parliamentary Labour Party (quiet at the back there)

Simon again:

As the vote of no confidence by 80% of Labour MPs after the referendum result showed, Corbyn is at his most vulnerable over Brexit. The 2017 election result may have wiped memories of this painful period, but to say that it shows the vote of no confidence didn’t matter goes too far. Unfortunately Labour still lost in 2017, as their powerlessness over Brexit shows. How do we know that the perception that Labour MPs were deeply unhappy with their leader did not cost Labour in 2017 the crucial votes that prevented them forming a government?

The trouble with this argument is that it conflates one, relatively trivial kind of vulnerability (being unpopular with Labour MPs) with another more important kind (losing the public). Labour’s polling averages before and after the Brexit vote were as follows:

April 2016: 32.5%
May: 32%
June: 31.5%
July: 30.5%

It’s a slow decline, which continued for the rest of the year – and indeed until the following April. It’s a continuous trend with very little variation – it doesn’t seem to show any obvious reaction to any political event: not the vote of no confidence, not Argh!, not Owen Smith, not even the Brexit vote itself. It’s very much what you’d expect to see if the same influences were continuing to be applied to Labour’s support in much the same way – press hostility, BBC hostility and hostility from the party’s own MPs.

As for Labour’s – regrettable – failure to win the 2017 election, look at these figures:

1997: 13.5 million votes
2001: 10.7
2005: 9.6
2010: 8.6
2015: 9.3
2017: 12.9

Raw figures are affected by population growth over time and differential turnout between elections, so they can be misleading – although it certainly looks as if Corbyn got three and a half million more people to vote for him than Ed Miliband had managed a couple of years earlier. So here are the same figures as %s of votes cast:

1997: 43.1%
2001: 40.5%
2005: 35.4%
2010: 29%
2015: 30.3%
2017: 40.3%

And, for completeness, as %s of the electorate:

1997: 30.6%
2001: 23.9%
2005: 21.6%
2010: 18.8%
2015: 20%
2017: 27.8%

As I mentioned above, Labour support ebbed away throughout 2016; by April 2017 the party was averaging 26% in opinion polls. The election campaign took the party from those mid-20s lows to 40% of the votes cast, in the space of a month and a half: Corbyn’s first General Election, sprung on him (and us) three years ahead of time, saw Labour’s vote share at its highest level since 2001, and its share of the electorate at the highest level since 1997. To look at that campaign[1] and ask why it went so badly isn’t just ungracious, it’s downright perverse. Corbyn’s leadership, and the movement it mobilised, achieved a share of the vote – and a level of turnout – that was far beyond the party under Miliband, or Brown, or even Blair (after 1997, once the country had had a proper look at him). May was only saved – indeed, the Tories since 2010 have only been saved – by the collapse both of the discredited centre and of a far Right left beached by the achievement of its flagship policy. Those are certainly successes for the Tories – I’m reminded of how Italy’s Christian Democrats drew a galaxy of minor parties into their orbit, drained them of voters and ideas, and left them shadows of themselves. But in the nature of things, those successes are unrepeatable: the former Lib Dems and the ex-Kippers are both in the Tory vote bank now. The next round will be a more even contest. (Unless some ill-advised centrists choose this moment to sabotage the Labour Party, of course. Mutter mumble useful idiots of the Right mutter…)

If the new party pledges to fight for staying in both the Customs Union and Single Market after we leave the EU, that will tempt Remain voters, because Labour only speak of a close relationship with the Single Market. There is a world of difference between being close and being in: ask any trading firm why. Staying in the Single Market requires Freedom of Movement, and this would allow the new party to attack Labour on immigration, where its recent actions have also made them vulnerable from the perspective of liberal Labour voters.

I agree that there’s a chink in Labour’s armour labelled “Single Market membership”. Exploiting that has two problems, though. One is that the various right-wing MPs and has-beens who are most likely to break away from Labour are more likely to play to the anti-immigration gallery than not. (The story in the Observer at the weekend cited ‘immigration’ as one of the ‘key issues’ on which they differ with Corbyn, but didn’t specify how.) Secondly, there are good political reason for Labour’s logic-chopping on the Single Market, painful as it is to follow sometimes. Rightly or wrongly, Single Market membership is widely seen as Brexit In Name Only, or even as a step towards not leaving the EU at all. Personally, I’d be delighted if that was how things worked out – but it will needs to be sold as the only possible way forward, advocated by a party unencumbered by Remain baggage. The ground still needs to be prepared: something else that polls tell us is that “repudiate the referendum result” is not a strong seller, and “hold a second referendum (so that we can get the right result this time)” doesn’t do much better.

What that means is that, if a centre party attacked Labour on this flank, it’d be pitching for the votes of two groups: Remain-sympathising Labour voters who are sufficiently well-informed to know what Single Market membership does and doesn’t mean; and Labour voters whose commitment to Remain is strong enough for them to be open to the idea of reversing the referendum altogether. Filter that through the reality of a majoritarian constituency-based electoral system, and you’re left with two subsets of those (already small) groups: those who have a candidate with a believable chance of getting elected (i.e. a centre-party-defecting MP whose personal popularity is credibly sufficient to get them re-elected against Labour opposition); and those who know that their vote will be wasted, while their withdrawal of support from Labour will tend to assist the re-election of May’s Tories – the party of Brexit itself – and who are willing to do it anyway. So that’s the “David Owen vote” and the “self-destructive fit of pique vote”. Good luck, as they say, with that. (Number of Labour MPs who joined the SDP in 1981: 28. Number re-elected in 1983: 4. Tory majority in 1983: 144 (up from 43).)

All of this will be academic if – as has been rumoured – Theresa May chucks in the towel and calls a June election, requesting an extension to Article 50 to allow the new government to get its feet under the table. This doesn’t seem terribly likely, admittedly, but that’s the rumour. Besides, I’ve thought for a long time that the government’s wildly irresponsible approach to Brexit could be explained on the assumption that May doesn’t intend to be in charge when it actually happens, any more than Cameron did; jumping out of the cab immediately before we go over the cliff would be very much in character.

But whatever happens and whenever the next election comes, the likelihood of a new centre party playing a major part in proceedings seems overstated – as is the vulnerability of the Labour Party to hardcore Remain attacks. I think the main thing we on the Left need to do at the moment is hold our nerve. Starmerism of the intellect, Corbynism of the will!

*A word which – as Simon himself has commented before now – is shorthand for ‘period of partial immunity from anti-Labour propaganda’.

A song of the past

Glen Newey died on the 30th of September, unexpectedly and far too soon (he was 56). Glen and I were acquaintances at best – our contacts between 1982 and 2017 amounted to one brief email exchange and a vague commitment to meet up when it was possible. I didn’t know him particularly well before 1982, come to that.

However, we were at the same Cambridge college for the same three years, and he did make an impression on me then. He certainly stood out. I remember thinking he looked like something out of Cold Comfort Farm – big-boned, raw complexion, blank, unyielding stare – and being surprised to hear through friends that he was one of the brighter and more hard-working students in his subject group, almost certainly heading for a First. To talk to he was reserved and brusque; he didn’t say much or invite small talk. (To talk to he was hard work, to be honest. Mind you, so was I.) He told me once he’d grown up in Guernsey. What was it like? I asked. “A shithole,” he said, then gave a small smile.

It was fourteen years after leaving Cambridge when I saw Glen’s name again, in the letters column, and subsequently in the main body, of the LRB. From his earliest review – of Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms – he had a distinctive style, a kind of punk donnishness. This isn’t just a matter of interleaving tightly-worded argument with references to Harry Secombe and the Great Train Robbery (“eligible conceptions of the good are unlikely to include those of Ronald Biggs”); Terry Eagleton would do as much. Glen went further, as in his reminiscences of a trip to Berlin:

In deference to the BSE brouhaha, posters in every public eatery in town vouchsafed that the dead quadruped on offer was rein deutscher Herkunft – of pure German origin; grim photos in Der Spiegel showed British bovines being shoved into Topf-style incinerators. Irony, or even memory, was at a discount.

The relentless tastelessness of the Nazi allusions here was very Glen, as was the combination of circumlocution and brutality with which it was delivered. When a reader from Frankfurt complained a couple of issues later, Glen declared himself “happy to make with the smoking calumet”, continuing:

I count Germans among my closest friends, some of whom I stay with when in Berlin. My Significant Other herself hails from the tribe – indeed, her mother is a proud alumna of the Hitler Youth’s female branch, with memorabilia which she showed off to me when I was first presented for her approval.

He then pointed out the flaw in his correspondent’s logic. He had fun.

A few years later, an article on the royal family – memorably headed “About as Useful as a String Condom” – gave Glen’s punk-donnish style free rein. Some correspondents found it a bit much, and I was inclined to agree. Well, sort of.

Letters, 20 February 2003
You describe Glen Newey as a reader in politics rather than Reader in Politics (LRB, 23 January). From this, and from his cheerful pee-po-belly-bum-drawers prose style, I infer that he is a first-year undergraduate shaping up for a career as president of the students’ union. It’s not too soon for him to learn some useful lessons.

First, to label a columnist more talented than yourself as ‘drek’, and a political journalist more serious than yourself as vacuous, may not convince your readers that you yourself are free from these defects. Second, it is a long time since anyone believed that abolition of the monarchy necessarily guaranteed the achievement of a democratic and egalitarian society. [continues]
– Anne Summers

(Along the way, Glen had characterised Jonathan Freedland as ‘vacuous’ and Julie Burchill as ‘drek’. Seems fairly mild, to be honest.)

Letters, 6 March 2003
I can set Anne Summers’s mind at rest on one point (Letters, 20 February): Glen Newey served his time as a first-year undergraduate several years ago, in a cohort including such eminences as Anatol Lieven and myself (parsing that last clause is left as an exercise for the reader). Like Summers and others, I found the style of Newey’s piece on the monarchy distracting; it suggested a sustained and ultimately rather laborious attempt to disguise his native tones as those of an intellectual Richard Littlejohn. Ars est celare artem, of course, but another time I’d rather have more of Glen’s own voice and less from his ars.
– Phil Edwards

I know, it’s dreadful. (Even the formulation is wrong – logically it should be ‘and’, not ‘but’.) By way of context, I was 42, I was midway through my doctorate, I was supporting myself as a freelance journalist – mainly writing opinion columns in computing magazines – and applying for interviews for academic jobs, none of which I got. So when the opportunity presented itself to demonstrate that I, too, could put a Cambridge education to the service of being rude in ornate language, of course I jumped at it. Not that it did me any good, and I’m not sure how I thought it would. Sympathetic magic, really; might as well flag down a flying saucer.

And that’s almost all I can say about Glen Newey. He went on writing for the LRB and became an established presence on the LRB blog. (And hey, I’ve written for the LRB blog too! Twice!) He did dial it down – a bit – but never lost that relish for épater le bourgeois, and épater la galérie while he was about it. It was seldom gratuitous. He knew that sometimes – more often than you might think – people need a bit of a shock to see things how they are; sometimes – more often than you might think – telling things how they are is shocking. Our paths crossed briefly a few years later, when he was at Keele and I was applying for a job there; we couldn’t arrange to meet on the day of the interview, though, and I didn’t get the job, so that was that. No ending; the story just stops.

---

Brian Barder died on the 19th of September. Brian started blogging in 2003; he was in his late sixties and a retired diplomat. When I started the forerunner of this blog, a couple of years later, Brian’s was one of the first I added to my blogroll. Back in the glory days of blogging (circa 2006-8), I commented regularly on his posts and he occasionally on mine, sometimes pursuing our debates through email. I agreed with him strongly on the merits and limits of the international legal order, in particular its lack of support for interventionist adventurism; I also shared his Old Labour loyalties and his heartfelt disdain for the New Labour crew, then very much in power.

We disagreed on other things; in particular, Brian took (what I would call) the conventional view that “terrorists” are beyond any conceivable pale, and that for states to take terrorist actors into account in any way when pursuing their own interests would be tantamount to succumbing to blackmail. I argued the opposing position at some length – pointing out, for example, that if an organised crime syndicate has recently started operating in a certain country, that country’s government will naturally take account of this fact when deciding whether to grant new casino licences, if only by managing things so as to frustrate the crime syndicate. Brian was immovable: the only principled response to terrorism was to say “I see no ships”. (And I’m not saying that he was wrong, necessarily. Certainly organised crime syndicates don’t set out to influence governments in the way that terrorist groups do.)

I was twenty-six years Brian’s junior, as well as having neither qualifications nor experience in a field where he had both; I’m sure he sometimes found my questions and comments impertinent or gauche. For all that, I found him almost invariably wise, thoughtful and kind, and was hugely gratified when he endorsed my readings of international law (most recently in 2013, with regard to R2P and Syria). If there was sometimes a touch of de haut en bas graciousness in there, he carried it off well.

Some time in the late 2000s, the glory days of blogging ground to a halt. When the music stopped I found that, as well as posting a lot less often, I was reading and replying to an almost completely different group of bloggers. So, farewell then, James C-M, Justin McK and Jarndyce; hello, Rodent, WbS and Splinty. A few bloggers from the first group made it into the second, and Brian was one of them. Brian last commented here in 2016, while my last comment at his place is as recent as June this year.

By then, however, a new and more serious disagreement between us had arisen. Old Labour though he was, Brian was never especially left-wing, and he had no time whatever for Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. As well as distrusting Corbyn on foreign and defence policy – no small matters for a former diplomat – I think Brian simply couldn’t be doing with Corbyn as a politician; for him, I think Corbyn’s failure to control the PLP betrayed lack of power, charisma or both, while his personal scruffiness and penchant for mass meetings were the mark of a dilettante extremist.

I myself had opted for Corbyn even before I thought he had any chance of winning the leadership, and hadn’t seen any reason to waver in my support since then – certainly not since the election, in which Corbyn’s leadership was genuinely impressive. Given another couple of years I think even Brian might have been won round. Sadly, he didn’t have another couple of years. I’d known since earlier this year that Brian was suffering from a life-changing illness, but it barely even crossed my mind that the outcome might be worse than that. 83 is what we used to call ‘a good age’, but it doesn’t make the news of his passing any less of a shock. He leaves a gap in my life, even though I never met him, and I can only commiserate with all those who knew him much better than I did.

NB I didn’t ‘Sir’ Brian in life – entirely with his approval – and don’t intend to start now.

To you, with regard

So what have I been writing about, these last couple of months (to a lack of interest which has, frankly, exceeded my low expectations)?

Well, I’ve been thinking about death; about the way that death affects us and appears to us; and about what we can infer from that about life and how to live it. Just the big stuff, then.

In post 1 I talked about the impassable, indescribable devastation that is being bereaved, before mentioning a curious experience which I and others have had after losing a loved one, and which seems oddly to be evoked in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. As I said in post 3, it’s as if for a moment someone is telling us “it’s all right”; let’s not beat about the bush, it’s as if they’re telling us “it’s all right”. I talked about this in more depth in post 8, suggesting a possible psychological mechanism for it while also accounting for my sense that it’s an essentially benign, constructive experience.

More broadly, what’s interesting about experiences like these is what they tell us about how we imagine personal survival, or rather how we imagine personhood: that intuitive sense of individual identity as something essential and even indestructible. I talked about this sense of there being an irreducible core of individual identity – the soul, roughly speaking – in post 2, with a bit of help from Neil Hannon. In post 4 I contrasted Emily Brontë’s frankly panpsychist articulation of her own sense of irreducible identity with Robyn Hitchcock’s frankly materialist version; I discussed these, together with George Eliot’s unsatisfactory but intriguing attempt to square the circle (eternal life, but not for people), in post 5.

As well as being a useful corrective to the mystical individualism of Emily Brontë, George Eliot’s social perspective – her sense that we may live on through our influence and our contribution to the continuing life of the human race – connects with another intuition: the sense that, if we are each an individual with a unique identity, it is possible for us to develop those identities while living together. The sense, in other words, that it is possible for humanity, as a whole, to be humane; to be kind. I pursued this sense in post 6 through some of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, as well as relating it to the person-centred psychology of Carl Rogers (Rogers and Vonnegut are a good fit).

All of which is a kind of backdrop for the thought-experiment which I’d been carting around since last December, which I revealed to the world in post 7 and then debunked in post 9. Post 7: suppose that we survive eternally after death, our identities formed by the life journey we completed before dying. Wouldn’t we find ourselves suddenly in the benign presence of everyone there is – our worst enemies included? And doesn’t this give us the strongest incentive to live at once the fullest life and the best, kindest life we possibly can? (See the post to have it set out in detail.) Post 9: suppose, conversely, that our life journeys come to a full stop when we die and our unique identities are mercilessly snuffed out; doesn’t this indescribable, impassable devastation find its repressed reflection in fantasies of eternal, harmonious, individual survival? And doesn’t the ridiculous horror of death actually give us an even stronger incentive to live a fuller and a kinder life, while we can? Again, see the post to get the detail (and for a rebuttal of the Atheism Fallacy of which I am rather proud).

On a personal(!) note, I started this series rationally convinced that the Heaven fantasy I’d come up with was just that, a fantasy; all the same, I found it a very appealing fantasy, and did wonder if dwelling on it over several weeks was going to induce some sort of conversion experience. I’m glad I risked it; here at the end of the series I’m more certain than before that this life is all we get. If we want a moment worth waiting for, we’re going to have to make it.

 

Woke up sucking a lemon

Adapted from original material by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood

I’ve now written four follow-up posts to this post on David Goodhart and Eric Kaufmann. I think by now I’ve said all I want to say on the subject. (I hope so, anyway – I’ve written 18,000 words already.) As a final postscript, these are some notes on reactions to the original post.

There was quite a lot of reaction to the post, and almost all positive; it was endorsed on Twitter by Frances Coppola, Declan Gaffney, Peter Jukes and Jonathan Portes, as well as being mentioned favourably on Stumbling and Mumbling and the Cedar Lounge. (Not a peep out of Wren-Lewis, though. Maybe another time.) I didn’t link to the column I was quoting, or name its author, the researcher he quotes or the latter’s institution (David Goodhart, Eric Kaufmann and Birkbeck respectively); I liked the idea of challenging (and hopefully demolishing) DG and EK’s arguments without actually giving them any publicity. Nevertheless, within 24 hours the post had come to both their attention, and I had my first critical readings – both from the authors and from their Twitter followers, although the latter didn’t say much about the post. (They were a charming bunch. One @-ed me in on a tweet telling DG I was a loon ranting into the void and advising him not to bother with me; he had an egg avatar and a timeline that seemed to consist mainly of insulting public figures and then complaining that they’d blocked him. I tweaked him a bit, asking who he was and how he was so sure I was a ranting loon. In reply he insulted me at some length, so I blocked him.)

The reactions from EK and DG were interesting. If you look at the original post you’ll see that I’ve retracted one point and expanded another quite substantially; each of these amendments was necessitated by a brief tweet from EK, and one which (in both cases) didn’t sink in until a couple of hours after I’d first read it. I still think his report’s dreadful, but on the detail level EK is clearly not someone to trifle with. DG’s response was interesting in a different way. When I accused EK of purveying unreliable stats, he reacted to the accusation by looking at my underlying argument, spotting the flaw in it and pointing it out to me; hence the retraction. When I accused DG of making a claim that’s straightforwardly false (In several UK cities, the white British are now a minority), he said nothing at all. He did respond to me, but not on that point, and not to very much effect. He challenged my point about the supposed rights of minorities, albeit rather feebly (as we saw earlier), but that was about it in terms of references to the post. Other than that, he accused me of facetiousness, pedantry and point-missing; he subtweeted me twice (that I know of), lamenting to his followers that he was having to argue with people who didn’t believe there was such a thing as ethnicity and/or believed that mentioning ethnicity was racist; and he repeatedly accused me of calling him a racist, and (for good measure) of calling “about 90% of Brits” racists. (This led to some short-form sermonising from one of DG’s followers about all these Lefties calling people racists all the time.) Needless to say, I hadn’t called anyone a racist. I tried to keep up the pressure – although most of the time it was more a matter of trying to keep him on topic – but it was a singularly unedifying series of exchanges. DG eventually cut it short, after replying to his egg-shaped follower and agreeing that I wasn’t worth bothering with.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning one other response – if it was a response; it may just be a curious coincidence. There’s a guy out there called Stuart Russell, who was formerly employed as press spokesman for the BNP; in that role, for reasons best known to himself, he went by the name of ‘Phil Edwards’. Russell seems to be rather proud of having a doctorate, as (unlike most PhDs I know) he uses his title routinely; his friends even seem to call him ‘the Doc’. I don’t know anything about this doctorate, and I’ve got no reason to believe it’s as fake as his pseudonym. I do know that if Russell was ever an academic it was a long time ago; company listings show him running a fireworks company in the early 90s, apparently alongside his father (search “Stuart Harling Russell” if you’re curious). Naturally the doctoral affectation carried over to his pseudonym, so Dr Stuart Russell became Dr Phil Edwards. Some years ago I tried to get the Guardian to refer to the man by his real name – instead of referring to him by my real name – but without much success. Anyway, Russell left his post (voluntarily or otherwise) when the BNP imploded in 2007 – and he was 64 then – so I hadn’t given him much thought for the last few years.

What should appear in my inbox, just as the DG/EK post was trending, but an email from “Dr Stuart Russell”, with some links to a purportedly libertarian site set up by Kevin Scott, formerly of the BNP (or “Kevin Scott BA Hons” as the site refers to him; they do like their credentialled intellectuals over there). A few hours later somebody else – a regular commenter on Chris Dillow and Simon Wren-Lewis’s blogs, whose name I’d last seen attached to a pro-DG comment on one of Chris’s posts – mailed me, claiming “Kev Scott asked me to send you the attached un-PC article in the Financial Times“. The attached article, of course, was the one by DG that started all of this. The question is whether my correspondent thought he was writing to Russell, a.k.a. ‘Phil Edwards’. (He clearly didn’t realise he was writing to me.) But if so, who did Russell think he was writing to? Has he retired and handed over to a new ‘Phil Edwards’, à la Dread Pirate Roberts? All very odd. What’s interesting, of course, that people in the ex-BNP area approve of DG’s column; if DG is sincere in wanting to hold the line against racism, it seems that racism is now so extreme that even fascists oppose it. Or rather, it seems that ‘racism’ defined as something distinct from ‘racial self-interest’ – which is the only form of racism that DG wants to oppose – is so extreme that even fascists are happy to oppose it.

In the mean time, someone identifying only as “Stu” (surely not?) has popped up in comments on the most recent post in the series, arguing strenuously and at some length against free movement in the name of workers’ rights. I may develop my own position on this one more fully another time; then again, I may not (there are other things to write about, after all). All I’ll say here is that one can champion the interests of the workers of one’s own country without being any more left-wing than Otto Strasser. When I see it asserted that “Socialism in a national framework is the only vehicle for positive progressive change“, I don’t think further debate is going to be particularly productive.

In another part of the nationalist field, Pat Kane put this interesting question to me:

.@flandyke, where does SNP/Green-supported Scots #indy fit here? Isn't their centre-left civic nationalism @johnharris1969's template? https://t.co/goqWnuBeHJ

— Pat Kane (@thoughtland) April 9, 2017

As you’ll remember, my take on Harris’s calls for Labour to tell a “national story”, replacing nostalgic dreams of full employment with “ideas of nationhood and belonging”, wasn’t positive. In reply to Kane, I don’t see it as civic nationalism, because I don’t see that political forces in England are operating in a context where civic nationalism has any work to do. Civic nationalism, as distinct from ethnic ditto, comes into play when you’re building a new state and new institutions, and in that – necessarily short-lived – context it can be a powerful, transformative force. Once your state’s there, though – as the English state effectively already is – civic nationalism is a force for conservatism, for the preservation of the status quo. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily – it’s not a force for reaction, as ethnic nationalism so often is – but it’s not radical, progressive or creative. In fact, the danger with civic nationalism is that after a while it’s not anything, and its structures and tropes get taken over by the angrier and more energetic forces of ethnic nationalism (federal Yugoslavia and Serb nationalism, Britain and English nationalism). That’s not to say that ethnic nationalism is inherently a bad thing, either. It’s not a bad thing when it’s in the hands of powerless and/or minority groups, used to combat political exclusion and repression; as such it can be a force for justice, or at least for the disruption of injustice. But, by the same token, ethnic nationalism in the hands of the boss nationality is poison. Which is precisely why DG and EK’s legitimation of majority-group ethnic nationalism – White racism, in other words – is so dangerous.

Oh, Mr Tony Blair

There were a couple of interesting tweetstorms today discussing the record of the New Labour governments, sparked off by Ken Loach’s article in defence of Jeremy Corbyn. Here’s one list of New Labour’s achievements, reassembled from Tweets by @iamhamesh :

introducing the national minimum wage and establishing the low pay commission, the human rights act, more than doubling the number of apprenticeships, tripled spending on our NHS, 4 new med schools, 42400 extra teachers, 212000 more support staff, scrapped section 28, introduced civil partnerships, doubled overseas aid budget, sure start, lifted 900000 pensioners out of poverty, good friday agreement, tax credits, equality and human rights commission, reduced the number of people waiting over six months for an operation from 284000 to almost zero by 2010, 44000 doctors, 89000 nurses, beating the kyoto target on greenhouse gases, stopped milosevic, winter fuel allowance, climate change act, decreased homelessness by 73%, free eye tests for over 60s, 16000 more police officers, extended the opening hours of over three quarters of GP practices, free prescriptions for cancer patients, removed the majority of hereditary peers, free part-time nursery place for every three-four yo, paid annual leave to 28 days per year, paternity leave, doubled education funding, increased the value of child benefit by over 26%, food standards agency, equality act, FOI act, increased university places, helped end the civil war in sierra leone, crossrail, paid annual leave to 28 days per year, paternity leave, doubled education funding, increased the value of child benefit by over 26%, food standards agency, equality act, FOI act, increased university places, helped end the civil war in sierra leone, crossrail, rural development programme, EMA, free bus passes for over 60s, devolution, banned cluster bombs, ban on grammar schools,£20bn in improvements to social housing conditions, longest period of sustained low inflation since the 1960s, heart disease deaths down by 150000, cancer deaths down by 50000, removed the minimum donations limit from gift aid, reduced the number of people on waiting lists by over 500000, waiting times fell to a maximum of 18 weeks (lowest ever levels), oversaw the rise in the number of school leavers with five good GCSEs from 45% to 76%, young person’s job guarantee, pension credit, cut long-term youth unemployment by 75%, doubled the number of registered childcare spaces, disability rights commission, free school milk & fruit, raised legal age of buying cigarettes to 18, banned tobacco advertising in magazines, newspapers and billboards, free entry to galleries and museums, 2009 autism act, new deal for communities programme (£2bn), electoral commission, halved the number of our nukes, free television licences for those aged 75+, EU social chapter, free breast cancer screening, record low A&E waiting times, reintroduced matrons, hunting act, banned testing of cosmetics on animals, department of international development, reduced class sizes, 93000 more 11-year-olds achieving in numeracy each year, London 2012,10 years of continuous economic growth, NHS direct, healthier school meals, access to life saving drugs for HIV and AIDS, points-based immigration system, equalised age of consent, smoking ban, public interest test, crime down 45% since 1995, and wrote off up to 100% of debt owed by poorest countries.

Well, that’s just hard to read. Let’s see if subheadings can make it any clearer.

Employment and welfare

introducing the national minimum wage and establishing the low pay commission, more than doubling the number of apprenticeships, sure start, lifted 900000 pensioners out of poverty, tax credits, winter fuel allowance, decreased homelessness by 73%, free part-time nursery place for every three-four yo, paid annual leave to 28 days per year, paternity leave, increased the value of child benefit by over 26%, young person’s job guarantee, pension credit, cut long-term youth unemployment by 75%, doubled the number of registered childcare spaces, disability rights commission, new deal for communities programme (£2bn), free television licences for those aged 75+, EU social chapter, rural development programme,  free bus passes for over 60s, £20bn in improvements to social housing conditions

Health

tripled spending on our NHS, 4 new med schools, reduced the number of people waiting over six months for an operation from 284000 to almost zero by 2010, 44000 doctors, 89000 nurses, free eye tests for over 60s, extended the opening hours of over three quarters of GP practices, free prescriptions for cancer patients, heart disease deaths down by 150000, cancer deaths down by 50000, reduced the number of people on waiting lists by over 500000, waiting times fell to a maximum of 18 weeks (lowest ever levels), free school milk & fruit, raised legal age of buying cigarettes to 18, banned tobacco advertising in magazines, newspapers and billboards, 2009 autism act, free breast cancer screening, record low A&E waiting times, reintroduced matrons, NHS direct, access to life saving drugs for HIV and AIDS, smoking ban

Education

>42400 extra teachers, 212000 more support staff, doubled education funding, increased university places, oversaw the rise in the number of school leavers with five good GCSEs from 45% to 76%, free entry to galleries and museums, reduced class sizes, 93000 more 11-year-olds achieving in numeracy each year, healthier school meals, EMA, ban on grammar schools

Law and justice

the human rights act, scrapped section 28, introduced civil partnerships, equality and human rights commission, 16000 more police officers, equality act, FOI act, equalised age of consent, public interest test, crime down 45% since 1995

Foreign policy and defence

doubled overseas aid budget, good friday agreement, stopped milosevic, helped end the civil war in sierra leone, department of international development, wrote off up to 100% of debt owed by poorest countries, banned cluster bombs,

Environment

beating the kyoto target on greenhouse gases, climate change act, food standards agency, hunting act, banned testing of cosmetics on animals

Other

removed the majority of hereditary peers, electoral commission, crossrail, removed the minimum donations limit from gift aid, London 2012, 10 years of continuous economic growth, points-based immigration system, devolution, longest period of sustained low inflation since the 1960s

It’s an odd mixture: the list includes some things that may or may not be the government’s doing (the drops in heart and cancer deaths); some that definitely would have happened whoever had been in power (the crime drop, London 2012); some that you’d expect from a government of any colour (free breast cancer screening); some that could easily be reversed by the next government (the ‘ban’ on grammar schools); some that never came to anything to begin with (the Electoral Commission); and some that weren’t necessarily good ideas anyway (Sierra Leone, points-based immigration, the smoking ban).

But it would be churlish to deny that there’s a lot of good stuff in there. New Labour In Genuine Improvements To People’s Lives Shock.

Exhibit B is a briefer tweetstorm from @natt:

for me, it was never just about Iraq, or tuition fees, it was the deliberate adoption of the rhetoric of the far right on immigration that gave us the proto-fascists of today, cutting benefits to single parents as their first major social policy when in office, an audience[sic] of corruption from Expressive[sic] through Mandelson and tennis partners and Blunkett’s having to resign in disgrace twice, anti-social behaviour laws that criminalised speech and rudeness and disproportionately affected poor people, the leading lights of New Labour, Blunkett & Reid, doing TV interviews to scupper any chance of a LD / Lab coalition in 2010, Control Orders used on people not found guilty of an offence, constant pushing for longer and longer detention without trial, the language of “Our schools are swamped,” “I’m afraid of women in the veil,” and “the immigration system isn’t fit for purpose”, Alan Milburn’s part-privatisation of the NHS, and the ‘reforms’ without which the 2012 HSCA wouldn’t have been possible, year after year of terrible PFI deals that have crippled our ability to invest for the future, the privatisation of air traffic control and the closure of post offices and the services post offices provided to rural communities, “British jobs for British people,” the managerialisation of politics that had led to large swathes of disaffected voters

Four main charges there: moralistic attacks on some of the poorest people in society; unbridled and rather self-satisfied authoritarianism on crime, terrorism and ASB; the tacit endorsement of ‘white working class’ racism; and complicity with, if not outright promotion of, the neo-liberal erosion of public services. Is it possible that a government that (at least after 2001) massively increased spending on health, education and welfare could also have opened the door to the private sector and run classic right-wing campaigns against yobs, benefit scroungers and unintegrated ethnic minorities? You’d better believe it.

Good or bad, all this is with several years’ hindsight, of course. So what did people think about New Labour at the time? Well, here’s what I thought in 1994:

It’s not Labour’s abstaining on the Criminal Justice Bill that bothers me, or their refusal to support the signal workers; it’s not all the weird stuff which Tony Blair apparently believes (cannabis should stay illegal, the electoral system couldn’t be better and the middle class bore the brunt of the recession – Dan Quayle eat your heart out). … What bothers me (and I’m amazed it doesn’t bother more people – that’s depressing in itself) is Tony Blair’s obvious intention of redefining Labour as a kind of Socially Responsible Mildly Reactionary Party, somewhere between the Right of the Liberal Democrats and the Left of Melanie Phillips. If he succeeds … Labour will have ceased to exist as a party of the Left. If he fails … Labour will probably just cease to exist.

And in 1997:

The party leadership’s refusal to give even token support to strikers; their determination to ingratiate the party with big business; their approval of punitive and divisive social policies; their frankly Stalinist approach to the party’s membership – all these [are] qualitatively new features of the party under Blair and Mandelson … Any commitment to … overriding the requirements of the economy in certain areas for the good of society had been beaten out of Labour by the time of the 1992 election, fought under the banner of ‘when resources allow’. What is new about Blair is that this loss of what had been a defining principle is now being happily embraced, flaunted as a sign of the very newness of New Labour. Labour will get things done not through government intervention or even public spending – pre-emptively frozen at Tory levels – but through co-operation with the private sector …

the fervour for ‘renewal’ coexists with a passion for ‘realism’: a fierce disdain for anyone advocating reforms which would actually redistribute power or wealth. Ultimately the two enthusiasms seem to spring from the same source: the convulsive, triumphant abandonment of all those things Kinnock and Smith spent years edging away from. It must be quite a relief to admit that you don’t really oppose the status quo – nuclear weapons, privatised railways, 40% top rate of tax and all: it must feel like coming home. What is new about New Labour, in short, is that the party doesn’t plan to change anything fundamental and it admits it. … Any halfway competent right-wing government would have signed the Social Chapter, and several have. Similarly, the notion that the mere existence of a minimum wage is bad for business could only be taken seriously under Thatcherism. …

A few policies in Labour’s programme do hold out some hope for a genuine democratic renewal … The Scottish Parliament, the promised referendum on electoral reform, House of Lords reform, the Freedom of Information Act: all of these could herald major and beneficial changes in the way Britain is governed. However, extreme scepticism is still in order … openings in these areas may be created by Labour, but they will have to be exploited despite Labour. …

The community – ‘the decent society’, in Blair’s words – is a strong theme but a vague one. In its positive form it has little content which isn’t shared across the political spectrum … Only in its negative form do the contours of the decent society start to become clear. Parents should spend twenty minutes a night reading to their children (Blunkett); parents should bring their children up to respect the police (Straw). Single motherhood is not just a difficult lifestyle; it is wrong and should be discouraged (Blair). “YOUNG OFFENDERS WILL BE PUNISHED” (Labour campaign poster). Blunkett proposes to deal with training scheme refuseniks by cutting 40% of their benefit; Straw’s views on ravers and beggars are too well known to go into here. The rhetoric of ‘community’ announces a punitive, moralistic, openly divisive social policy, whose main function is to create and stigmatise outsiders: people who don’t play by the rules, people who don’t pull their weight; people who don’t fit in. …

Patriotism; alliances with big business; attacks on unconventional lifestyles. Closure of ‘failing’ schools by central diktat; compulsory childcare classes for irresponsible parents. Restrictions on the right to strike; restrictions on welfare payments; no tax rises for the middle classes; more money from the Lottery. Oh, and the party conference will be made ‘more like a rally’. It doesn’t look like a country I’ve ever wanted to live in – let alone a programme I could ever vote for.

And in 2001 (written a few days before the General Election):

Imagine a Tory government. This government does what Tories do: it privatises what it can, for instance, then invites private companies into the public sector, paying them with assets that belonged to schools and hospitals. The government cuts income tax and corporation tax; it passes a raft of illiberal social legislation; it makes it more expensive to go to university and harder to claim unemployment benefit. (It also extends licensing hours, but I suppose everyone’s got to have one good idea.)

Now imagine that, after nearly two decades, this government is replaced. Then imagine that the new government maintains and extends every one of the policies I’ve just described. Imagine that, after four years, it asks for a mandate to continue along the same lines, taking policies introduced by the Tories further than the Tories ever dreamed. Finally, imagine that millions of loyal Labour voters – people who stood by the Labour Party through the Thatcher years, who voted Labour under Smith and Kinnock and Foot – go out and vote for this government, giving it another four years in power.

Then stop imagining, because that’s what’s going to happen on Thursday.

It wasn’t just Iraq, in other words; it really wasn’t just Iraq. Although since you’ve mentioned it, here’s what I wrote about New Labour in 2005, shortly before that year’s General Election:

As far as I’m concerned, this is a single-issue election – and the issue is New Labour. Iraq matters – the government’s duplicity over Iraq matters hugely – but these things matter because they shine a light on what this government is really like. This government has pulled a whole range of foul and insane and alarming strokes in the last four years, but they’ve always been able to talk their way out of trouble (particularly when they were talking to people who weren’t directly affected). Iraq is the moment when this government ceases to have the benefit of the doubt; from this point on, there is nothing they can say that we will ever believe. The trouble is, they’re still there. They’re still occupying the centre ground of British politics, and reshaping it in their own unsavoury, authoritarian, crony-capitalist image; they’re still sustained by having the Left vote in an armlock. … They have to be shifted – and if they can’t be shifted, they have to be shaken up. … Don’t hold your nose: inhale the stink. If something smells bad, you don’t have to take it.

The people who took this country into Iraq aren’t just asking us to ignore what they did; they’re actually asking us to put our trust in them all over again. The fact that those people are New Labour makes it all the more blatant – New Labour’s all about trust. Or rather, it’s about trust, ruthlessly efficient machine politics, Economist-reading power-worship and motivational-poster managerialism – but the greatest of these is trust. You could sum up the basic proposition in one line: “It’s not Old Labour. It’ll work. Trust me.” The trouble with this is that if you lose trust, you’ve lost everything.

they’ve always been able to talk their way out of trouble (particularly when they were talking to people who weren’t directly affected). Hmm.

So, yes, there were some good people involved in those Labour governments, and yes, they did some genuinely good things. But the charge sheet is long: the crony capitalism, the abandonment of the unions, the embrace of Murdoch, the privatisation, the moralistic authoritarianism, the counter-terror laws, the ASB laws, the disregard for democracy, the attacks on unpopular minorities, the temporising with racism and bigotry, the complicity in illegal wars of aggression… And, at the end of it all, the inexorable decline of the Labour vote (and its complete collapse in Scotland). Loach:

It was their Labour party, not Corbyn’s, that lost Scotland, lost two elections and has seen Labour’s vote shrink inexorably. Yet they retain a sense of entitlement to lead. They have tolerated or endorsed the erosion of the welfare state, the dereliction of the old industrial areas, public services cut back and privatised, and the illegal war that caused a million or more deaths and terrorised and destabilised Iraq and its neighbours.

Accusing the government that brought us Sure Start, the EMA, tax credits and the rest of tolerating “the erosion of the welfare state” is harsh. But when you look at the extension of welfare conditionality during the New Labour years – and when you consider that the removal of tax credits was the hill on which Liz Kendall was prepared to let her leadership bid die – it’s not all that unfair. The other charges seem pretty straightforwardly accurate.

But Ken Loach wasn’t writing about the history of New Labour. What’s more important now is the damage that all those years of putting up with this weird parasitical pseudo-Left – even supporting it, for the sake of electing a government with a red rosette – did to the Labour movement’s moral and political compass. More than anything, we need renewal; we need to take our political bearings, as the left always has, from the needs of working people. September 2015 was a start, but only a start; we need to keep our nerve and push ahead.

One final quotation from 2005:

We’re living in a strange, muted, deadened political landscape, where many of the most important questions go unanswered or unasked. I don’t for a moment believe that this is our historical condition, that we’re beached in some Fukuyamaesque arrivals lounge at the end of History; I believe it’s the calm before the storm breaks. The question is how it will break.

I guess we know the answer to that one now.

Spitfires

As you can see, I’ve changed the title of this blog (although not the URL). I’ve got a bad habit of picking titles and catchphrases which are resonant but gloomy – the title of my book is a classic example. “The gaping silence never starts to amaze” is a nice line (it’s from a fairly obscure song by the Nightingales) but I thought we could all do with something a bit more upbeat. “In a few words, explain what this site is about.” says the WordPress rubric; I think the new title and strapline are a bit more informative, too.

The reference is to a song which a friend reminded me of (inadvertently as it turned out).

I first heard this song at a local folk club about a year ago, and it’s grown on me since then. It seems like a good song for where we are now; where we’ve been since the 16th of June 2016, really.

Spitfires (Chris Wood)
Sometimes in our Kentish summer
We still see Spitfires in the sky
It’s the sound.

We run outside to catch a glimpse
As they go growling by
It’s the sound…

There goes another England:
Sacrifice and derring do
And a victory roll or two.

From the drawing board to the hand of the factory girl
Upon the lathe
It’s the sound…

It’s ordinary men and women
With an ordinary part to play.

Theirs was a gritty England:
“Workers’ Playtime” got them through
And an oily rag or two.

But sometimes I hear the story told
In a voice that’s not my own
It’s the sound…

It’s a Land of Hope and Glory voice
An Anglo klaxon overblown
It’s the sound…

Theirs is another England:
It hides behind the red white and blue.
Rule Britannia? No thankyou.

Because when I hear them Merlin engines
In the white days of July
It’s the sound…

They sing the song of how they hung a little Fascist out to dry.

Statues dressed in stars

A couple of quick thoughts, or irritations. Very different sources, but I think they’ll turn out to be connected; let’s find out.

First irritation: this piece from yesterday. Slightly edited quote:

Some believe the Richmond Park defeat could catapult [Labour] into an electoral crisis as the Lib Dems gain support in pro-Remain and historically Conservative areas, while Ukip gains confidence among working-class voters in Labour’s heartlands of the north and Midlands.

“We do have two different strong pulls. There are metropolitan seats, in London, Manchester and Leeds; they are strongly pro-EU. Then equally, there are dozens and dozens of seats which are working class, where many did not vote to remain. There’s no doubt it’s difficult to balance the two,” [said] a senior Corbyn ally

None of these statements are obviously self-contradictory, but the combination is hard to make sense of. Are Manchester and Leeds not Labour heartlands in the North? Come to that, does Labour actually have heartlands in the Midlands? (Birmingham certainly isn’t a Labour city in the same way Manchester is, not to mention Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield…) Yes, there are dozens of constituencies which have a working-class majority and were majority Leave, but equally there are lots of majority Leave constituencies that are mainly middle-class; come to that, there are lots of working-class people who are rock-solid Tory, and there always have been (where else did the figure of Alf Garnett came from?).

FourFive different ways of dividing the country are uneasily superimposed in the passage I’ve quoted. There’s geography (rather hazily understood); there’s class; there’s Labour loyalty (solid, wavering, non-existent); there’s Leave vs Remain. Then there’s the fourthfifth layer, which has the weakest moorings in reality but the strongest in emotion: the anti-‘metropolitan’ leftist cultural cringe, which says that anything that happens (a) in London or (b) among people who read the Guardian is shallow, inauthentic and to be discounted. Put them all together and you get a horribly clear picture of the divided opposition to the Tories: divided between solid Labour heartland voters, who voted Leave because they’re working class and are just asking to be poached by UKIP, and shallow metropolitan socialists, who are likely to drift off to the Lib Dems because they’re middle-class Remainers with no Labour roots. It’s a clear picture, a simple picture and a picture that’s almost completely unreliable. Unfortunately it seems to be immune to counter-evidence – see e.g. Oldham West, just twelve months ago. (Working-class majority-Leave Labour heartland voters don’t drift off anywhere, but give Labour an increased majority? Naah, that would never happen.)

Viewed from the perspective of a (not very active) Labour Party member – and with Oldham W in the back of my mind – these prophecies of doom are reminiscent of those crime surveys where they ask people if they think crime is a major problem, then ask whether they think crime is a major problem in their area. This invariably results in much lower figures, as people effectively reality-check their opinions against what they’ve seen and heard (the local news included). Similarly, my own immediate reading of the threat of a Lib Dem/UKIP pincer movement was maybe in some places, but it’s never going to happen round here. Round here – in Manchester – the council recently went from 95-1 (Labour/defrocked independent ex-Labour) to 96-0, and then back to 95-1 (Labour/Lib Dem). At the last round of council elections, there were lots of council seats where the Lib Dems are in second place, but they were mostly really bad second places. And yes, there were lots of other council seats – in parts of Manchester with fewer Guardian readers – where the Kippers were in second place; but again, we’re mostly talking really bad second places. At those elections, the Lib Dems threw everything they had – including the former local MP – at two council seats, and won one of them. They’ve got a pretty good ground game, but their cadre is thin – too many young enthusiasts, not enough old hacks – and the number of members they can deploy isn’t great. Maybe they’ll make it two out of 96 next time round, or even three. I can’t see it happening myself (Labour didn’t let that one seat go easily; our runner-up got more votes than several of the winning candidates in other wards) – but even if they do pull it off, so what? Without an Alliance-style surge in membership and self-belief, the LDs are never going to be in a position to target and win more than a handful of seats on the City Council. As for the Kippers, the most they can say about last time – in a vote held a month and a half before the EU Referendum – is that there were three seats in which their candidate took nearly half as many votes as the winning (Labour) candidate. Even then – when their support in the polls was running a good 5% higher than it is now – they couldn’t overcome their weaknesses: their ground game is poor, their membership’s never amounted to a great deal and their cadre’s basically non-existent. (Such is Labour’s grip on Manchester, even former Tories joining UKIP aren’t likely to be former Tory councillors. There hasn’t been an elected Tory councillor in Manchester since 1995 – and the last time they won a seat from another party was 1988.)

Thinking about voting behaviour I get something of the same double vision as those crime survey respondents. Out there, in all those other places, I’m prepared to concede that people may think like Leavers or Remainers and vote for the Leave-iest or most Remainful candidate they can find. Round here, though, not so much. Round our way, it’s more a matter of organised political machines, or the lack of ditto; who’s organising the door-knocking, who’s getting the posters distributed, who’s going round one more time on the morning of the vote and then once more in the evening. It’s about getting the vote out, in other words; it’s about reminding people that there’s an election on, that there’s a candidate for our party standing, and that there are good reasons to support that candidate. It’s an exercise in organised capillary political communication, one-to-one interactions on a mass scale. And it’s something parties do; barring the odd Martin Bell or Richard Taylor candidacy, it’s something only parties do. Support for political parties is always going to wax and wane, but the speed at which those changes happen in a given area is inversely related to the strength of party support in that area – and that’s directly related to the health of the local party and the resources it can mobilise.

Ultimately, it’s about two different ways of thinking about politics. To the extent that the Labour vote consists of the people who have a personal investment in a particular set of policies and in the leader who puts them forward, the Labour vote is genuinely threatened by Brexit: if what you want is a leader who will campaign to overturn the referendum result – or a leader who will campaign to have it carried out – it’s not at all obvious that Jeremy Corbyn is the man for you. But, to the extent that the Labour vote is a function of the number of people in an area who would say that they ‘are’ Labour, on one hand, and the members and other resources available to the local party, on the other… maybe not. To the extent that we’re talking about organised party politics, that is, and not about some kind of vacuous narcissistic popularity contest (who’s the leader for me?).

Second irritation. I found out that Fidel had died through the medium of Twitter (him and David Bowie, now I come to think of it). I was on my way out, but I thought I’d take a moment to make my feelings on the matter clear.

¡Hasta siempre, comandante!

— Phil Edwards (@Flandyke) November 26, 2016

If you want it at greater length, Corbyn’s tribute contains nothing I disagreed with. (Paul Staines & others made hay with “for all his flaws”, of course – but then, they would, wouldn’t they?)

Some time later I read Owen Jones’s take; as with the piece I quoted at the start, this gave me the odd experience of not quite being able to disagree with any of the individual statements, but wanting to throw the whole thing across the room.

Socialism without democracy, as I wrote yesterday when I caused offence, isn’t socialism. It’s paternalism with prisons and persecution.

Mmmyeahbut…

Many of the people uncritically praising Cuba’s regime are tweeting about it. Practically no-one in Cuba can read these tweets, because practically no-one has the internet at home … sympathisers of Cuba’s regime would never tolerate or endure the political conditions that exist there … is it really acceptable to expect others to endure conditions you wouldn’t yourself?

Yes, but I’m not sure that was exactly what I was…

There are democratic radical leftists in Cuba, and they warn that “the biggest obstacle for democratic socialist activists may be reaching people who, disenchanted with the Stalinist experience, believe in purely market-based solutions.”

Well, second biggest, after being massively outgunned by groups with an interest in those “purely market-based solutions” and the means to impose them. But yes, decades of Stalinism is the kind of thing that tends to give socialism a bad name. And decades of Stalinism plus some uncritical tweets – that ‘practically no-one in Cuba’ will read – is even worse, presumably.

Championing Cuba in its current form will certainly resonate with a chunk of the radical left, but it just won’t with the mass of the population who will simply go — aha, that’s really the sort of system you would like to impose on us. Which it isn’t.

Sorry, are we still talking about Fidel Castro?

From the top: there’s a difference between defining what you want to achieve in the world and recognising something someone else has achieved. Socialism-the-thing-I-want-to-achieve certainly wouldn’t look a lot like Cuba, but we’re not talking about me or my ideals. If you’ve taken an offshore resort colony and turned it into a country with state ownership of industry, universal healthcare and universal education – and maintained it in the face of massive opposition and resource starvation – I’d say what you’ve achieved deserves to be called socialism and you deserve to be congratulated for it. It’s a form of socialism to which I’m personally bitterly opposed, but at the end of the day I’d rather be poor under a socialist tyranny than starving and illiterate under colonial tyranny. That – putting it in its most hostile terms – is the change Fidel made, and he doesn’t deserve to be vilified for it.

As for ‘uncritically praising Castro’s Cuba’, if this means ‘praising Castro’s Cuba and explicitly denying that any criticism is possible’, then fine, I’m agin it. In the present context, though, I suspect it meant something more along the lines of ‘praising Castro’s achievements on the occasion of his death, without also taking care to get some criticisms into the 140 characters’. In which case, I think Owen’s inviting me to take a purity test, and I frankly decline the invitation. When I – and others – responded to Castro’s death with tributes and expressions of solidarity, without pausing (in our 140 characters) to condemn press censorship and the harassment of political opponents, was it really likely that we either (a) didn’t know that Castro’s Cuba had carried out these things or (b) supported them? We can expect the Right to insinuate that (a) or more probably (b) must be true, but I think we can expect better from the Left – or, for that matter, from anyone prepared to use a bit of common sense. (If you know a prominent character to have done something awful and you meet a self-confessed supporter of that character, do you start by assuming that they approve of the awful thing? Think carefully. (Or think Cromwell.))

The final quote is just odd. Perhaps “championing Cuba in its current form” would resonate with the radical Left, perhaps not; I don’t know. (I don’t much care what the radical Left thinks, and I don’t intend to champion Cuba anyway.) But it’s the next part of the argument where Owen really goes wrong. We can’t possibly know what “the mass of the population” thinks; more to the point, we can’t be guided by what people already think. Politics isn’t about putting forward policies that match what people think; it’s about identifying what’s needed and campaigning for that. You certainly need to get a sense of what people are thinking, but only so that you know how much effort you’ll need to put in to get them to support what you believe to be right. Sometimes you’ll be in tune with the public mood, sometimes you’ll need to reframe your campaign in terms that connect with how people are thinking, sometimes your policies will just be downright unpopular. Sometimes you’ll be pushing at an open door (funding the NHS), sometimes the door will be closed so hard it’s not worth pushing (abolishing the monarchy). But you start with what you believe to be right, not with what you believe to be potentially popular; still less by doing what Owen’s actually proposing – ditching anything that looks as if it might be interpreted as being similar to something unpopular.

To put it another way: Owen, this isn’t about you. It’s not about the credibility of the British left, it’s not how the Labour Party can win back “the mass of the population”, and it’s not about making sure that the political stance of prominent Internet leftists is specified in sufficient detail to be beyond critique, at least to the satisfaction of those prominent Internet leftists themselves (it’s not as if the Right aren’t going to attack you anyway). What it’s about is paying tribute to somebody who made a big, positive difference in the world on the sad occasion of his death, and having the decency to reserve whatever else we could say about the guy to a later date.

Again, it comes back to two ways of looking at politics, I think. There’s a frame of reference within which the correct response to Fidel’s death, and the correct view of his achievements, is radiantly clear, and it’s the frame of reference that goes like this: OK, so which side are you on? Allende or Pinochet? The Sandinistas or the Contras? Apartheid or the ANC? (Not questions which the contemporary Right can answer without blushing, or so you’d have thought.) Then there’s a frame of reference that says that we – the Left – can’t be seen to be overlooking this, condoning that, failing to denounce the other, we must always be mindful of the need to maintain our principles on the one hand, without losing touch with the public on the other hand, and so we must move on from the old and discredited whatever it was, while not overlooking the and so on and so forth. To return to my first point, one of these sounds like it’s based in actual political struggles. The other sounds like it’s based in – well, vacuous narcissistic personality contests (where’s the Left for me?).

If Brexit tells us anything it’s that weightless decisions – individual decisions based on nothing more than mood, individual preference, popularity – are bad decisions. We need a lot more politics in this world – in the sense of people getting together and working for their goals, using existing machinery where necessary – and a lot less attitudinising and questing for the perfect platform.

Say what you’ll say

I read a restaurant review once in which the service was described as ‘pleasantly relaxed and unhurried’. I think we’ve all been to places like that. It’s also a good way of looking at my blogging routine, which is so pleasantly unhurried these days that I rarely get to a burning issue until (checks calendar… blimey) four or five days after everyone else.

The chances are you’ve formed your own opinion on the Livingstone affair, and even if you haven’t you’ve almost certainly read enough Livingstone-related blog posts to be going on with. (I’ll list some of the better pieces I’ve seen at the end of this post, in a spirit of old-school “Web logging”.) But I’m going to make a couple of points about it anyway, focusing mainly on the conversational dynamics of what’s gone on.

On racism and racists

When I was at school it wasn’t exactly OK to be racist – but then, it wasn’t exactly OK to run in the corridor or grow your hair long. It was more that open expressions of racism were frowned on in polite society; when we weren’t on our best behaviour, hearing racist attitudes expressed was entirely unsurprising. Widespread awareness that this kind of ambient racism was in fact not OK, anywhere, came much later. But something odd seems to have happened, over the generation or so that it’s taken to internalise the wrongness of racism. You’d think awareness of the danger of racism would bring a real humility with it, an attitude of “We know that racism is bad, but we also know that it was normal for so long that we’ve all effectively breathed it in, and any one of us may sometimes reproduce it in our thoughts and words”. Humility and self-doubt are tough to live with, though, and the stance that seems more common is “We know that racism is bad, and this knowledge protects us from ever being racist.” Which in turn leads easily to “We all know that racism is bad, so anyone who exhibits racism must have chosen it deliberately” – and so on down to “The problem of racism is the problem of (those) racist people, it’s nothing to do with us”. From humility to smug intolerance in three short steps.

I think this is bad news. Racism doesn’t live in a few bad people’s brains, it lives in images and attitudes and ways of thinking. Today’s 18-year-olds may leave school without a racist thought in their heads – and I think to a large extent they actually do; there is a real, generational foundation for the attitudes I sketched out above – but they’re soon reading papers and watching programmes produced by 30-, 40- and 50-year-olds, just like the rest of us. Racism can stay in the cultural groundwater for a long time. I’m not suggesting that we’re all cultural dupes, hapless victims of the racist tropes swirling around in a culture we never made; I’m not saying there’s no such thing as a racist. I don’t have to wrestle with my conscience for very long before applying the label of ‘racist’ to Nick Griffin, say, or Boris Johnson. But I do think it’s facile at best, and dangerous at worst, to assume that someone who’s made a racist statement is ipso facto a racist.

I also think that people’s motivations for doing so aren’t always pure. Consider two possible responses to a racist statement made by somebody not previously considered to be a racist – let’s call them Len.

1.
ALEX (an accuser): Len, my long-time opponent, has made a racist statement. We need to tell him it’s not OK.
DAVE (a defender): Are you sure? That doesn’t sound like Len, my political ally and personal friend.
ALEX: [explains]
DAVE: Oh dear, that does sound racist. We need to tell Len that making racist statements isn’t OK.
ALEX: Let’s do just that. I’ll draft something and get it over to you.
DAVE: Thankyou for raising this issue. I’m glad that we could discuss it constructively, despite being political opponents.
[curtain]

2.

ALEX (an accuser): Len, my long-time opponent, has made a racist statement. Len’s a racist!
DAVE (a defender): No, you’ve got that wrong. Len’s my political ally and personal friend; he’s no racist. What did he say?
ALEX: [explains]
DAVE: Oh dear, that does sound… But I’m sure Len isn’t a racist.
ALEX: Yeah, right! I’ve just told you what he said.
ALAN (another accuser): What did I tell you, Alex? They’re in denial about their own racism!
DAVE: No, hang on. Perhaps Len did say something he shouldn’t have said, perhaps it was a bit racist…
ALAN: Oh, so it’s OK as long as it’s only a bit racist. Very convenient!
ALEX: So you admit it was racist. You admit you’re defending a racist. What does that say about you?
DEREK (another defender): Look, Dave isn’t a racist. He was just trying to explain…
ALAN: That’s right, he was trying to explain away racism. Thanks for admitting it!
[continues indefinitely]

You get the idea – and I think you’d agree that in the last few days we’ve seen a lot more of scenario 2 than scenario 1. Which is unfortunate, as escalating from attacking a person’s actions to attacking that person as a person is one of the most counter-productive things you can possibly do – at least, it’s counter-productive if what you’re trying to do is to address those actions and put them right. The trouble is – and I’m reminded here of the awful truth about the Toclafane – it’s fun. Writing somebody a letter in the hope that they’ll change their ways in future is no fun at all, compared to the compulsive thrill of logic-twisting, question-begging and name-calling. These days, of course, every Alex and Alan who’s spoiling for a fight can mix it in 140-character instalments, with the added gratification of tag-team validation from all the other Alans and Alexes who identify with them on the issue of the day.

The dinosaur bone problem

When you do get stuck in a type-2 scenario, there’s a tendency to reach for the evidence and slap it down on the metaphorical table – see? see what they actually said? you can’t call them a racist/deny they’re a racist now! I recently baled out of an argument along very much these lines, when I realised that the other person and I were both quoting the same couple of lines at each other, each of us convinced that they proved our own position without the need to say more. The problem is that you can’t reliably infer motivation, let alone character, from a single action; you need a course of action to work with, a pattern of behaviour. (This even applies to single actions which seem to carry a fairly blunt and unequivocal message. Somebody burning a Union flag in public probably isn’t motivated by British patriotism, but are they: anarchists? Irish Republicans? Islamic extremists? disillusioned former patriots? apolitical provocateurs? police spies? Place your bets!)

On the basis of what Ken Livingstone said last Thursday, everyone from John Mann to Mark Regev has claimed that Ken is an anti-semite. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of people (see links at the end of this post) have argued back that there’s no reason to imagine that Ken’s an anti-semite, and plenty of reasons to think otherwise. But the claims and counter-claims have rested on the same evidence – sometimes grotesquely distorted, admittedly, but not always by any means. The problem is that we’re all looking at a fragment of evidence and inferring something much bigger from it, like cartoon paleontologists reconstructing a dinosaur from a single bone. And it depends which dinosaur you’re expecting to find. If you already believe that Livingstone’s an anti-semite, some weird statement about Hitler supporting Zionism fits right in to your mental model – you don’t even have to look at it closely. If you believe, as I do, that he’s no such thing, then it doesn’t look like a statement made by an anti-semite. Actually it looks more as if somebody who’s never shown any sign of holding anti-semitic attitudes – and who has stated that anti-semitism is as unacceptable as any other type of racism – had decided to say something grossly offensive to Zionists for cheap shock value, while discounting the offence it would predictably cause to Jews more widely. Because the sad fact is, that’s how racism works. It says, those people are different from you, so you don’t need to care about them; if you want to lash out, lash out at them. And it stays in the groundwater for a long time.

So one person can look at last Thursday’s interview and come away thinking that Ken’s a left-wing anti-semite who’s said something anti-semitic (confirmation!), while I come away thinking he’s a solid if unreliable socialist who’s said something anti-semitic (aberration!). The question is, what would I and this person have thought about Ken last Wednesday, if we’d been asked? Presumably I would have said he was a solid if unreliable socialist, and the other person would have said he was a left-wing anti-semite. The evidence made no difference, in other words. (Well, it made me think Ken was even less reliable than I’d thought, so there is that.) There is a ‘tipping-point’ narrative that gets trotted out on occasions like this – surely now we must realise that these aren’t just random aberrations: the aberrations are the pattern! The idea of changing your opinion of somebody on this basis, suddenly realising that you’re looking at a black cat with white patches and not vice versa, does have a kind of narrative plausibility : one unfortunate lapse by an otherwise blameless individual; two unfortunate lapses by an otherwise blameless individual; three unfortunate – hang on a minute! But I’m not sure how often it actually happens. Certainly you’ll rarely see a first-hand account from the ‘surely now‘ merchants. They say that what they’re describing ought to be a tipping point for their readers, but they’re way ahead of us; they sussed out whoever-it-is ages ago. (Has Nick Cohen ever said anything positive about Ken Livingstone?)

It goes back to what I think of as rule 1 of online debate – in fact, rule 1 of debate in general (apart from a few very specialised settings): Nobody’s above it all. Don’t expect consistent application of unchanging principles from anyone; everyone attacks their enemies, everyone defends their friends. I think we all basically know this; it’s the reason why something like the partial implosion of the SWP a few years back was big enough news to make the national press. Normally you go to Mark Steel to see the Right get a savage satirical tweaking, but Left attacks Right isn’t news; Left attacks Left is. It follows, incidentally, that calling on one’s opponents to disown this outrageous shyster or denounce that bit of cynical manoeuvring on their own side is utterly futile (at least on the surface – I’ll come back to this). If they were going to denounce their friends and allies, they wouldn’t have those friends and allies in the first place – and they wouldn’t be your opponent.

Why we fight

I got bullied on Twitter a bit back. I’m not going to make a big deal of it – it only really bothered me for a couple of hours, and I had kicked it off by saying something really unusually stupid; lots of people regularly endure worse, with less provocation. But it was interesting, if nothing else. It wasn’t pleasant to see two people happily chatting about how ludicrously, contemptibly wrong I was – still less so when the retweets started – but what really sticks in my mind is the mental state it put me in, which was one of obsessive second-guessing. I’d spend fifteen minutes at a time thinking of the objection or the defence I was going to put forward and working out how I was going to phrase it, then thinking of how they might reply to it, then scrapping my original objection and mentally rewording it – then thinking of ways they might counter that, thinking of possible replies to their replies, and so on. I felt like a mouse on a wheel; whenever I thought I was getting somewhere, moments later I’d have second thoughts and realise that if I said that they could still put me in the wrong, and I’d have to start again. Fortunately I was ‘away from keyboard’ for most of the evening in question, so most of these objections and defences never made it to the screen; eventually I managed to ignore it, and eventually it went away. But it wasn’t fun.

I think this gets at something about bullying, or at least one kind of bullying. It can be summed up in two statements: you’ve got to say something and what you say will be wrong. Just as abuse works by offering false reassurance (you’re contemptible/you know I love you), bullying offers false hope: nothing you’ve said up to now has been any good, but come on, let’s see what you’ve got… bzzt, wrong again! Bullying doesn’t depend on the existence of a relationship involving power, though. Some forms of bullying – e.g. in the workplace – do exploit an existing imbalance of power, but I think it’s far more characteristic for bullying to create its own power relation. The school bully doesn’t generally start out in a position of power or privilege over his or her victims, after all. Like school bullying, social media bullying is something anyone can do, given an appropriate victim; like school bullying, it looks ephemeral and trivial when viewed from outside; and like school bullying, it can have very real consequences.

Now: what’s the difference between this model of bullying and what’s going on in scenario 2 up yonder?

I’m not pitching for sympathy for Ken Livingstone – I don’t even feel sympathy for Ken Livingstone. But I think it’s useful to think of some of the reaction to those interviews in terms of bullying. To set the scene, never forget just how unprecedented Jeremy Corbyn’s election last year was. When I was active on the Left, a while ago, there was a big, broad ‘democratic socialist’ area for us to work in, well over to the Left of the then party leadership (er, Kinnock and Hattersley – I did say it was a while ago). I was in the Socialist Society; we were in in a similar sort of area to Chartist and Tribune and ILP and the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform and the New Statesman, give or take a bit of Labour Party chauvinism on the part of the first two. The Fabians, the Christian Socialists and the Graun were off to our right a bit; over to our Left were the Campaign Group and related hard-liners. We had good relations with some of the hard Left types (Benn), less good with others (Vlad Derer) and some we didn’t really want to talk to anyway (Scargill). Beyond them were the Trots, with the same three-way division; the ISG talked to us, the Mils didn’t, and nobody really wanted to talk to the SWP.

That was in the late 80s and early 90s. We know what happened to the Labour Party soon after that – how Roy Hattersley, for example, found that he’d moved from the Right of the Labour Party to the Left without changing any of his beliefs. The comfortable and well-populated democratic socialist area which the Socialist Society used to occupy is an extreme-left desert now, way out beyond Hattersley – the centre has shifted, and all those left-of-centre groups and publications have shifted with it, or else shut up shop. Bear in mind that, as a result, the Labour leadership has no dependable friends in the media (the Daily Mirror is probably the closest thing). The Graun and the New Statesman are still, by contemporary standards, left of centre; which is to say, they think the elected leader of the Labour Party is a dangerous extremist and feel a lot more comfortable with his sworn enemies.

Because not everyone has chased the ‘centre’ of the party to the Right. Out beyond where we were, there they still are: through everything that’s happened to the Left, Corbyn and Dennis Skinner and a few others kept saying what they’d believed all along, and kept being re-elected. Till finally the ‘centre’ could not hold – at least, it didn’t mean anything any more – and rough old Jeremy’s hour came round at last. The Labour Party of the late 80s looks like a commune of utopian socialists compared to its current incarnation, but even then there was no shortage of people who hated the Campaign Group almost as much as they hated the Tories. How the Right and ‘centre’ of the party must feel now, at having an unreconstructed Campaign Group member as leader – it must be dreadful for them. Really, I can almost sympathise.

Back to bullying. The point is that, however much the Right and ‘centre’ hated last year’s election result, there was nothing that Labour MPs could actually do about Corbyn, other than banging their desk lids at him (or pointedly refusing to bang their desk lids, or whatever that bit of nonsense was). And there was nothing that their friends in the media could do about it, other than wringing their hands, promoting backbench rebels and talking down the party’s prospects. Now, after all their laborious and ineffectual attempts to undermine him, Corbyn’s party enemies and their media friends have finally struck gold: someone’s actually done something wrong. And they are not going to let it go – the fact that it only benefits the Tories, even the fact that it was actually started by the Tories, means nothing beside the chance to get some hits in on the Left. In a dark moment I wondered if the attack on Naz Shah was actually planned as a set-up: take a young and inexperienced politician, pressurise her until she admits to what you want her to admit to, then sit back and wait for someone to walk into the trap of trying to defend her against unfair criticism (what do you mean, unfair? are you denying what she did? perhaps you’re the real problem…) If so, it succeeded beyond all expectations.

Pace Vaclav Havel, living in truth isn’t the power of the powerless. The power of the powerless is bullying somebody else powerless: for as long as you’re asking the questions, you’re the one in charge. But by the same token, a bully is someone who can’t get what he or she really wants. Don’t get angry with John Mann, feel sorry for him. (He’d hate that.)

This land is my land

I’ll end this overlong and overdue post with a couple of rays of hope, interspersed with something that doesn’t look like one at all: gloom sandwich. The first is the point I’ve just touched on: bullying considered as the power of the powerless. Bullying is horrible to endure – it has that obsessional, mouse-wheel quality of soaking up all your time and attention – but it’s not cost-free for the bully him- or herself; it takes up at least some of the bully’s time and attention, without actually getting them anywhere, or doing anything apart from disempowering the victim. Every bully has something they would much rather achieve – they would rather you would just shut up, or just not be there; it’s only because they can’t achieve that that they settle for bullying you. You don’t follow someone around, getting in his face and making a scene in public, if you can stop him saying what he’s saying; you don’t demand somebody clarify their position on X, their views of the implications of their position on X, their views on someone else’s interpretations of the implications of cont’d p. 94 if you can hold them to account for something they’ve actually done.

Not all the anti-Corbyn machinations can be described as bullying – some of them are much more serious (Jarvis, Reeves), as well as being much less noisy. But when you see a lot of people being relentlessly aggressive and unpleasant with no obvious goal or game plan, it’s worth considering that they’re being relentlessly aggressive and unpleasant because they’ve got no obvious goal or game plan. If they’re shouting at Corbyn, it’s because they can’t touch him: force an election and he’ll win again; try to change the rules and Corbyn’s supporters will block it. The only way Corbyn’s leadership of the party is going to end is if he resigns of his own accord – and bullying isn’t going to make that happen. (This is someone who’s been a politician since 1974; I think we can assume he’s developed a fairly thick skin over the years.) People like Mann – and their friends in the media – are making a noise for the sake of making a noise, because there’s nothing more effective that they can do.

But if Corbyn isn’t going to go away, neither is the issue that sparked all this off. Speaking as an ex-Zionist (long story, another time), I don’t think it will really do to say that 72% of British Jews identify as Zionists, therefore attacks on Zionism are tantamount to attacks on (most) British Jews. Zionism is a body of ideas, irrespective of how widely it’s held, and the expression of views opposed to it has to be legitimate. I’d hazard a guess that at least 72% of the population of Cheadle are staunch believers in capitalism, but we wouldn’t say that selling Socialist Worker in Cheadle should be banned because of the offence it might cause. (At least, I hope we wouldn’t.) At the same time, I don’t think it will really do to say that Zionism is just a body of ideas, or that Israel is just a nation state like any other. There’s an element of naivety – or even bad faith – in saying, in effect, “so 72% of British Jews identify as Zionists, so what?”. However much we might sympathise with the diasporist minority, however much we might wish there were more Bundists around, we need to recognise that support for the state of Israel – and investment in the dream of Zionism, as realised (however imperfectly) in the state of Israel – runs both broad and deep in the Jewish community. At the same time – coming back to my starting point – opposition to Zionism is a valid political position, and it’s one which is becoming increasingly vocal and visible. The two aren’t going to be reconciled by holding an inquiry or reaching an agreement on which terms can and can’t be used. On one side, support for a national home for a persecuted minority; on the other, opposition to an aggressive and unlawful occupying power. Nobody wants to oppose a national home for a persecuted minority, whatever Jonathan Freedland thinks, and I should hope that nobody wants to support an aggressive and unlawful occupying power, but avoiding both is harder than it sounds. (Note at the foot of Freedland’s piece: The illustration that originally accompanied this piece has been removed because it included a representation of the shape of Israel that failed to distinguish between Israel itself and the territories it has occupied since 1967.) There’s a real and intractable conflict here – which is only to be expected, considering that there’s a real and intractable conflict on the ground.

The good news (finally) is that, pace Freedland, this isn’t a conflict over the existence of the state of Israel – how could it be? – but over the direction of travel. (As political debate usually is.) Is Israel going to continue the direction of the last 49 years – more annexations, more settlements, more segregation, more collective punishment of the Palestinian people – or will there, finally, be a change of course? I’m optimistic; the strength of the international movement for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions is growing, and I don’t think it’ll be too long before Western governments see Israel very much as they saw South Africa in the 1980s – i.e. as a vital international ally which they continue to support in public, while recognising the need to put on the pressure behind closed doors. I think change is coming, and I suspect that when it does come it will come quite quickly. (1985: Thatcher describes sanctions against South Africa as a “tiny, tiny, tiny” concession to Commonwealth pressure. 1990: Mandela walks free.) So perhaps the bullying, illogic and assorted scenario-2 behaviour which so often accompanies accusations of anti-semitism is itself a sign of weakness (see also Fraser v UCU).

That’s all very well, but how am I going to fill the next two hours?

Here are some of the better pieces on the Livingstone brouhaha. I’m going to list them in date order, for simplicity and also to track how the story developed. I’m not going to defend every statement in every one of them (why would I?), but I do pretty much agree with everything in this list & think it’s worth reading – which isn’t the case for some of the stuff linked in the body of the post.

25th April
Open Democracy, “New accusations of antisemitism thrown at the left are flimsy”
Jamie Stern-Weiner on the Oxford University Labour Club and NUS anti-semitism stories. (Guido Fawkes exposed Naz Shah’s two-year-old Facebook post the following day.)

27th April
Open Democracy, “Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t got an ‘antisemitism problem’. His opponents do.”
Jamie Stern-Weiner provides a comprehensive overview of incidents of Labour Party anti-semitism, real and fabricated. Essential background reading.

28th April
Electronic Intifada, “How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis”
Asa Winstanley goes into detail on the roots of the Oxford University Labour Club story.
Leninology, “The ‘anti-semitism’ panic”
Leninology, “Pitch forks at the ready”
Richard Seymour has been all over this from early on. The second of these pieces responds to Ken Livingstone’s intervention.
Guardian, “The elephant in the room in Labour’s antisemitism row”
By Keith Kahn-Harris; one of the few really worthwhile MSM pieces on all of this.

29th April
Open Democracy, “The multiple truths of the Labour antisemitism story”
Really excellent piece by Adam Ramsay – essential reading.
Jamie Stern-Weiner, “Ken Livingstone: gobshite yes, anti-semite no”
Does what it says on the tin.

30th April
Leninology, “Where the twain meet”
Richard Seymour does some serious thinking about anti-Zionism and anti-semitism.
lives; running, “The friends I want to have, and the friends I don’t”
Thoughtful, personal piece by Dave Renton.
Jamie Stern-Weiner, “Jonathan Freedland’s plea”
An acerbic, evidence-based response to Freedland.

1st May
Crooked Timber, “Antisemitism in the Labour Party – what’s going on?”
Long, thoughtful, considered piece from Dan Davies – essential reading. Even the comment thread went well to begin with.

3rd May
Whitey on the Moon, “Our Plea to Jonathan Freedland: Treat Israel As You Would Any Other Colonial State”
Excellent counter-argument to Freedland’s ‘plea’.
Jamie Stern-Weiner, “Labour’s phoney ‘anti-semitism’ scandal: the liars behind the lies”
Jamie has a go at Dan Hodges and Hugo Rifkind. Particularly interesting for the comments, in which Rifkind has a go right back.
Leninology, “Yes, it is a witch-hunt”
“no one is ‘innocent’, all of us have been politically impure. So the existence of real problems, where they exist, may provide the occasion or raw material for a witch-hunt, but it is not its point, and it is not a justification”
Open Democracy, “The American Jewish scholar behind Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ scandal breaks his silence”
Jamie Stern-Weiner interviews Norman Finkelstein. Essential reading.

TCM 8 – Too many friends

There’s something accidental about the Corbyn campaign; nobody, from Jeremy on down, expected it to be like this. On his own admission, Corbyn wasn’t chosen as a sure-fire election-winner (even an internal party election-winner) but because somebody needed to represent the Left and, broadly speaking, it was his turn. So Corbyn wasn’t grooming himself for this campaign for years beforehand (or months, for that matter). With that in mind, I’ve been braced for things to get nasty in the media, to at least “Ralph Miliband Hated Britain” levels of nastiness. You can’t be an active and committed left-winger for forty years without leaving a few hostages to fortune, and making a lot of enemies who will be only too happy to exploit them. To my great surprise – if not downright bemusement – it hasn’t really happened. Obviously the Telegraph and the Mail haven’t been particularly friendly, and the New Statesman‘s been downright vicious, but all that is pretty much par for the course. (Shame about the Staggers.) I remember how the media monstered Livingstone, Benn and Tatchell, and this is nothing like that; in fact I think even Neil Kinnock would have reason to feel Corbyn was getting off lightly.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the beginnings of a fresh wave of attacks on Corbyn, nastier and potentially more effective than anything he’s been hit with before. I say ‘potentially’; I don’t know whether this stuff is reaching an audience to speak of, and suspect it may just be rallying a group of people who already think that way. It is nasty, though, and it doesn’t seem to be dying down. But the attackers, weirdly enough, aren’t the Mail or the Murdoch press, or Peter Mandelson or Tristram Hunt, or even John Sodding McTernan (although, classy as ever, he has tagged along). These attacks are coming from… Euston.

You read that right: it’s the Euston Manifesto crowd – the street-fighters of Standpoint, the intellectual wing of Engage. In terms of the people involved it’s Aaro and Nick, and it’s Harry’s Place and Left Foot Forward, and Norm sadly can’t be with us but we have some self-styled Gerasites (some of them surely too young to have had much overlap with the great man). In terms of the themes, it’s all about opposition to reactionary Islamists and anti-semites, considered as the first duty of any leftist with a brain and a conscience – all the more so when those people present themselves to the untrained eye as Muslim radicals and anti-Zionists. And in terms of method it’s all about denunciation, dissociation, denouncing anyone who fails to dissociate and dissociating from anyone who fails to denounce; it’s all about will you condemn and why didn’t he condemn and why haven’t you condemned him; it’s all about guilt by association, guilt by implication, guilt by omission and in some cases guilt by analogy (would you say the same about…). It’s also not about condemning or denouncing or pronouncing guilt at all – dear me no, heaven forfend! No, it’s just a matter of raising questions. Then demanding answers, then raising them again, then asking why they haven’t been answered – and then starting again and raising the question of what we can conclude from the failure to answer the original questions.

Basically it’s too, too 2006 to put a finger on. It’s an odd little social formation. I mean, I’m sure it’s possible to be vigilant against anti-semitism on the Left without being a smug, tedious bully, and I honestly don’t know why the two should tend to go together; all I know is that over the last decade they have done. The experience of arguing with these people is not rewarding, to say the least; weirdly, it reminds me of nothing so much as trying to argue with devotees of Chomsky.

What of our man Corbyn? Well, it seems he’s been hanging out with some nutters. It seems that he’s attended a Palestinian solidarity event organised by Deir Yassin Remembered – a group which the Palestine Solidarity Campaign had themselves broken with, due to the group’s associations with Holocaust denial. It also seems that he’s praised an Interpal organiser warmly and without qualification, despite this person having denounced homosexuality as a sin on a par with paedophilia.

Now, if you start from the position that the Left is rife with anti-semitism and pro-Islamism, and your stock in trade is denouncing the implications of this, calling for dissociation from that and raising questions about the other, obviously you’ll eat all this up with a big spoon; from that point of view none of this is very surprising. The phrase ‘tediously predictable’ comes to mind. But on another level it still puzzles me. Why does all this matter, even to those for whom it evidently does matter? Bob from Brockley emphasises that the DYR story “does not mean Corbyn is an anti-semite (and no one serious is saying so)”; James Bloodworth is even more emphatic, assuring us that “I genuinely believe that Corbyn does not have an antisemitic bone in his body”. Which is fair enough; if there were evidence that Corbyn was anti-semitic – that he had contributed to identifiably anti-semitic campaigns or voted for identifiably anti-semitic policies, at some point in his 40-year political career – presumably these writers and those they quote would be all over it. As for gay rights, to my knowledge nobody’s even gone to the effort of affirming that they sincerely don’t believe Corbyn is homophobic – that dog isn’t going to hunt.

So why does it matter? If there’s a mismatch between the moral worth of someone’s words and that of their public, consequential deeds, surely we only need to worry if it’s the words that are the good part. If a Labour leftist works with a homophobe or sits next to a racist – sod it, if a Labour MP counts a homophobe as a personal friend and attends an event organised by a racist – and then goes right on voting against racism and homophobia, why should we care?

A variety of answers have been given to this question, none of which I really find persuasive. Bloodworth’s article is peculiar, and I tend to feel he protests too much: if he genuinely didn’t believe Corbyn was an antisemite, surely he wouldn’t think it necessary to pass judgment on whether his ‘excuses’ for apparently associating with anti-semites ‘stand up’, or whether his ‘denials’ were sufficiently ‘forceful or convincing’. We’re back to the same question: what does Corbyn have to excuse or deny, other than the anti-semitism of which nobody’s accusing him? Bloodworth doesn’t tell us: by the end of his article Corbyn’s just some guy, an eccentric with erratic judgment, no harm done. The real problems are the public indifference to foreign policy which makes his career possible (“a politician can at present take almost any position on foreign affairs and get away with it”) and the other candidates’ failure to challenge him; this “shows that the Labour party – and the left more generally – no longer takes antisemitism seriously”. But, but… if Corbyn isn’t an anti-semite – and we all agree that he isn’t – then… It’s all a bit “Brutus is an honourable man” – of course Corbyn’s not anti-semitic, nobody’s saying he’s anti-semitic, but still, you know… when you look at the evidence… kind of makes you think… not saying just saying… Faugh.

As for ‘Bob’, he finds Corbyn’s association with DYR “really worrying”, but – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – why?

Corbyn should have abided by the PSC decision [to break with DYR] and kept well away from them. That he didn’t says something very depressing about him – either that he doesn’t believe serious anti-racists when they talk about Holocaust denial, or he doesn’t care.

I don’t believe these are the only two possible interpretations, but for now let’s pick the second one: let’s assume that Corbyn, while not himself a racist, genuinely ‘doesn’t care’ whether his friends and associates adhere to lunatic racist fantasies. It seems pretty unlikely, but for the sake of argument let’s go there. Now: why would this matter? If this weirdly, stupidly, distressingly tolerant attitude doesn’t actually affect the causes Corbyn campaigns for or the policies he votes for – which apparently it doesn’t – then how can it matter? Turning it round, if this attitude doesn’t find any expression what Corbyn actually does – the effect he has on the world as a politician – perhaps it’d make more sense to conclude that he doesn’t actually hold it. Perhaps there’s a third option as well as ‘doesn’t believe’ and ‘doesn’t care’ – something along the lines of ‘cares as much about Holocaust denial as the next sane person, but took the judgment call on this occasion that the PSC decision didn’t justify his breaking with a group with which he’d previously formed political and personal links’.

A third critique of Corbyn in this area is encapsulated in an argument I had on Twitter the other night, and which I’ve Storified here. It’s the argument from moral consistency: if Corbyn were a true opponent of bigotry he’d oppose it at all times and in all places, and not only when (say) voting in the House of Commons. I suggested in response that Corbyn might be guilty of nothing worse than compartmentalising – in this case, thinking of a homophobic Islamist as a good guy and a solid ally within the context of Palestinian solidarity work, as in that context the guy presumably was. This was met with a flurry of would you say the same about (what if Corbyn was saying nice things about somebody from Golden Dawn? what then, eh?) and the oracular pronouncement “‘Compartmentalising’ is a pretentious way of saying ‘hypocrisy’.” Well, that’s me told. (And the three-for-one accusation that one is not only (1) saying something unacceptable but (2) trying to hide it and (3) putting on airs is very Euston. Tom’s learnt from the masters.)

I find this quite bizarre. As I say in the Storify story, compartmentalising surely means nothing more than living life without applying a single set of ethico-political criteria to every encounter. Not only is this something which pretty much everybody does pretty much all the time, it’s something that politicians need to do more than most: just to get the job done, they need to be capable of a certain amount of inconsistency, insincerity and bluff, to put forward imperfect and inconstant policy positions as if they believed in them deeply and personally, to make multiple different audiences feel they’ve heard what they wanted to hear. Taken seriously and consistently – applied everywhere all the time – the demand for moral consistency is deeply unworldly: it’s not something you’d ask from your friends, colleagues or employers, let alone from anyone aspiring to be a political operator. If the same standard is weaponised and applied selectively – if, say, we demand moral consistency of our opponents while proclaiming that our allies are already exhibiting it – it’s just rhetoric and can be ignored.

In short(!) the Eustonite charges against Corbyn aren’t, ultimately, all that; in terms of denunciation and delegitimation we’re still facing the B team. They seem to boil down to smears and insinuations, the selective application of unachievable or inappropriate moral standards, and a vague sense of worry and depression. I take the third of these – as expressed by ‘Bob’ – the most seriously; in another post I’ll come back to an issue which I think it points to, and which may also underlie the other two types of attack. For now, here’s what I made of the Euston Manifesto back in April 2006. Share and enjoy.

A Doctor writes

I’ve tagged this post ‘flummery’, which I think was the category I chose for chatty and personal posts of no enduring value. As well as ‘flummery’ I find I’ve got categories for ‘drollery’, ‘foolishness’, ‘idiocy’ and ‘tosh’, not to mention ‘saying the thing that is not’; I must have had distinct purposes for each of those, although I’m not sure now what they are.

It’s a while since I last posted here; there ought to be a third ‘Dangerous decisions’ post, for one thing. Over the last month I’ve been working on a long and autobiographical post, which I began in an attempt to answer the question “why all this legal stuff?”. It’s got so long (and so autobiographical) that I’m now planning on breaking it up into sections and publishing it on another blog.

Also, I’ve recently been reminded that I’ve written a book – or, more to the point (and rather to my surprise, if I’m honest) that it’s still selling. For new readers, my book (publisher’s page) is an academic hardback on the radical social movements of late-1970s Italy and their relationship with the Italian Communist Party; I called it ‘More work! Less pay!’ and chose a rather dramatic cover image, which you can see to the right of this post. Shall we hear a bit more about the book before we go on? I think we shall.

In the mid-1970s, a wave of contentious radicalism swept through Italy. Groups and movements such as ‘Proletarian Youth’, ‘Metropolitan Indians’ and ‘the area of Autonomy’ practised new forms of activism, confrontational and often violent. Creative and brutal, intransigent and playful, the movements flourished briefly before being suppressed through heavy policing and political exclusion.

‘More work! Less pay!’ is the first full-length study in English of these movements. Building on Sidney Tarrow’s ‘cycle of contention’ model and drawing on a range of Italian materials, it tells the story of a unique and fascinating group of political movements, and of their disastrous engagement with the mainstream Left. As well as shedding light on a neglected period of twentieth century history, this book offers lessons for understanding today’s contentious movements (‘No Global’, ‘Black Bloc’) and today’s ‘armed struggle’ groups.

I’m afraid that both the cover image and, more importantly, the title were ill-chosen – partly because you basically have to read the entire book to discover what they refer to, but mainly because the phrase “more work, less pay” is, frankly, a bit of a downer. I don’t believe in magic, but I do think that words are powerful: if you were choosing between my book and one called Chimes of freedom or A brighter tomorrow or ‘Rich, lads, we’re rich!’, I think the negative connotations of my title could easily nudge it down the list. And when you’re dealing with academic hardback prices, it’s not going to be on thousands of lists to start with. (An academic paperback might be – but that would mean selling out the hardback print run.)

Still, when it came out it did sell quite a few copies – albeit not enough to sell out the print run – and apparently the publisher is still getting orders coming in. Good! (And if your nearest academic library doesn’t have a copy, why not?) Interestingly enough, several of the sales were ebooks, going for a bit less than the hardback; these (as far as I can tell) are library ebooks, made available through the Manchester Scholarship Online service. I’m in two minds about this; it means more eyes on my work, which is good, but it doesn’t bring the paperback edition any closer.

In other news, I’m horribly stuck. (In terms of writing, that is – real life is trundling along.) I’ve got no teaching this week – and I’m on a part-time contract anyway – so I resolved at the start of the week to clear some admin, get some student support in place, check the rest of the term’s teaching, answer emails as they come in obviously… and then devote myself to writing. Proper writing, that is – as distinct from ‘student support’ and ‘answering emails’, which between them involved writing about three and a half thousand words. Writing, hurrah!

Or maybe not. I’m partway through a paper (with a deadline) which is on a topic that passionately interests me, and I can’t think where the argument’s supposed to go; I go blank when I look at it. It’s a real block; I’ve always had difficulty motivating myself to write when deadlines were a long way away, but this is worse. I think part of the trouble is just that it is a topic that passionately interests me – all through the years I worked in IT, I did the autodidact thing: I would seize on scraps of time (evenings, lunch-hours, the bus to and from work) to read, and write, about the stuff that interested me in the way that work didn’t. And here I am, writing about precisely what interests me, in work time – well, I did some of that too, but here I am doing it for work. It seems to set the bar much higher – if I fail at this, where do I go?

Academia seems to be a weirdly scary place, albeit that it’s indoor work with no heavy lifting and no micro-management. (I remember the reaction of a colleague when the department we were in piloted timesheets for lecturers. Fresh out of IT, I just thought “yes, that’s a timesheet”; I was on the point of explaining how five minutes was roughly 0.01 of a standard day, so if you thought of it in terms of multiples of five minutes… Then I saw the expression on my colleague’s face: it combined affronted horror with an element of genuine bafflement. The pilot wasn’t a success.) There’s not much danger that your boss will tell you to get something done yesterday, but you will be strongly encouraged to seek out opportunities to shine – and, when it comes to it, you may just sputter out. (All very gouvernementale.) The nightmare scenario isn’t that your boss sets you an impossible task, in other words – it’s that you do. The glory’s all yours, if it’s recognised; so is the ignominy.

Oh well, back to the old drawing board. Wish me whatever it is that enables a climber to avoid looking down. Luck, possibly.

A moment worth waiting for

I’ve been pleased by the response to the last couple of posts, including the corrections to my theology (cosmogony?) offered by a couple of commenters – although they do tend to undermine the argument I was making, so I’m not going to update the post to address them. The second post – the one derived from comments on Crooked Timber – was a bit more uneven; I think there’s some good stuff there (if I say so myself) but also some stuff that deserved the challenges it got from the CT sceptics. I’m going to use this space to think about which was which.

1. The Good Bits (I think)

faith is a subjective response to an experience of the sacred; experiences of the sacred emerge out of collective practices of reverence; and collective practices of reverence are a way of publicly expressing a sense of the value of things that need valuing (birth, death, sex, society, the passage of time and so on). Faith is what you end up with, not what you start from.

I think this is true – more importantly, I think it’s the right way round – but it’s only part of the truth; that phrase expressing a sense of the value of things that need valuing is carrying an awful lot of weight, and getting a bit squashed by it. And what is the “value” of death? At a subjective level, surely, death is the greatest and most terrible challenge to everything we value, as well as being a universal and inescapable fact. “Expressing a sense of the value” is a coffee-morning phrase for something much more problematic and difficult – “the value of death” cashes in, roughly speaking, as she’s gone and I will never, ever see her again – and where the hell does that leave me?

But that’s also something people do with religion.

What do you do when the old man’s gone –
Do you want to be him?
And your real self sings the song –
Do you want to free him?

As if to say, you may be able to get clear of the “old man” (or you may not) – but even if you do you can’t simply let the “real self” out (and you may not want to). … The real oppressions & constrictions (psychological as well as material) and the utopian yearnings for absolute freedom and self-expression – we all carry all this stuff around, and we need somewhere to put it, be it a church, an analyst’s couch or an inflatable Stonehenge.

The thing is, I think that being human is deeply, deeply problematic – why wouldn’t it be? Thinking meat – what’s that about? House a reflective consciousness in a simian brain and you’re bound to get a bit of friction. I think churches are a good place to take those problems and work with them – although not the only place, obviously. Atheists would say that the fact that churches rely on a belief in God is a bug; I think the fact that they house practices that produce a belief in God is a feature, and an interesting one.

“Many ways to God” isn’t some kind of “wouldn’t it be nice if things were nice” rationalisation – it’s what lots of people believe. Lots of devoutly religious people, who sincerely believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God – but who don’t find it necessary to believe that God would have damned most of humanity for worshipping somebody other than Jesus, and therefore leave open the possibility that God might have revealed himself in other ways to other people. … We don’t have any business asserting that our beliefs (“Jesus was the son of God”, etc) are factually correct. We have no way of knowing whether they are factually correct or not; we’ll only know for sure when we meet God, by which time it’ll be too late to argue. So we stick to [saying that non-believers are] “incorrect as far as we can see from our imperfect vantage point”.

The idea of holding a belief without asserting that people who denied that belief were wrong provoked a lot of resistance, but I think it’s still a valid point. Saying “I believe X, but I’m not going to say that X-deniers are wrong” is a way of saying that, in a particular (and important) area, it’s not up to me to decide what’s correct or incorrect; I may never know what’s correct or incorrect, or if I was told I might not understand. It’s a Horatio moment – a way of saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than our philosophy dreams of.

One of the most valuable things religion does, I think, is to confront the believer with something they cannot possibly understand. What this is is secondary; what’s important is the feeling of being at the limit of your understanding and being at peace with that. Because life will throw things at you that permanently exceed your understanding, and the ability to be at peace with them will serve you well.

Believing lots of things exposes you to exploitation – believing that your hard work will pay off, believing that your partner loves you, believing that you’re making the right spending decisions. And yet we get through the day. In which context, I like the idea that the word ‘faith’ would have been better translated as ‘faithfulness’. That to me is what ‘faith’ is about – an orientation of trustful commitment towards… something. Something outside ourselves.

This also provoked a bit of resistance, mostly along the lines of “I trust the people who have given me good reason to trust them”. (Yes, I remember being young and in love.) Maybe some people do go through life up- and downgrading everyone they deal with, divulging a bit more or a bit less personal information, allowing themselves a bit more or less spontaneous emotional engagement. I think that sounds like Hell, and I don’t think it’s the way most people live. The belief in God is a lot like the belief that your partner loves you, or that the people you work with aren’t going to stitch you up – it’s not so much a belief as a commitment to choose to believe, an orientation of trustful commitment, extended in the case of religion to the universe and all that surrounds it. And I think there’s something to be said for that.

2. A little light pushback

“Religion certainly does provide comfort to a lot of people in difficult situations, but does that make it a good thing? Follow the ‘opiate of the people’ analogy – opiates bring vital relief to people in severe pain, but we don’t think being a junkie is a good way to live your life. Perhaps religious beliefs are good to have when you need a comforting illusion, but they’re illusions that should be abandoned as soon as you feel mentally strong enough.”

My answer to this one is that I don’t think religious beliefs are comforting in any easy sense. The most comforting thing I heard from anyone in religious clothing after my mother died was something along the lines of “It’s time to let go” – as if to say, You’ve run into a wall that you can’t get past; perhaps you should turn round now and go home. (Not that going home was just a matter of going home, if you see what I mean.) I don’t think anybody told me my mother was watching over me or that I’d see her again, and if they had I wouldn’t have believed it. Religion, for me, is something that takes you to the very edge of abandonment and despair, and stays with you there.

And in any case, just how much comfort can those ‘comforting’ beliefs really be, even if you manage to believe them? I’ve been to a couple of funerals where the continuing existence of the departed was emphasised heavily, and I felt that every restatement was prefixed by a tacit This certainly doesn’t appear to be true, but by God, it’s worth at least trying to believe. Anyone committed to believing that their departed parent was having a high old time up there, strumming a harp and chatting with Einstein, would also be committed to believing that something that appeared to be unbearable and incomprehensible actually made sense, except that it made sense in some way that couldn’t be understood either. Which isn’t that comfortable a place to be – in fact, I think it’s pretty much on the edge of abandonment and despair. But with a sense of not being alone there.

“Is it really a good thing to be confronted by something you can’t possibly understand? Doesn’t that associate religion rather strongly with ignorance and lack of curiosity? For that hit of blissful non-comprehension, wouldn’t it be quicker just to believe that God made the world in seven days? Never mind that you don’t understand how it happened – it’s a religious truth, so it’s meant to be incomprehensible!”

I’ll take this one on: yes, it is a good thing to be confronted by something you can’t possibly understand. It’s good to look at something you don’t understand and realise you don’t understand it (as distinct from thinking that if you don’t understand it it must be nonsense). It’s also good to learn more and understand more. But there will always be something you don’t understand, and there will always be some things you can’t understand. I think that’s a good thing to recognise. The alternative is to think that there isn’t anything that, in principle, you couldn’t understand. That might work for the law of torts or the Keynesian multiplier, but it wouldn’t do you much good with “why does everything die?”

“Fine, but you don’t need religion for that – just a reasonably well-developed sense of wonder and humility.”

Never said you did need it – just that religion is, often, a carrier of those things.

3. The less good bits

Sometimes what you’re being asked to believe will seem to cut with the grain of your experience of the religion, other times it’ll seem daft, but if the experience of religious practice and community are working for you you’ll tend to go with it. … Of course, in some churches the package of beliefs you’re asked to take on board will included some harmful and dangerous stuff.

That ‘of course’ is doing rather a lot of work – or perhaps it’d be truer to say that it’s avoiding rather a lot of work. There’s a real problem here. I argued that religious ‘truths’ aren’t incompatible with scientific fact, because where they make factual propositions they’re not presented as law-like statements. Nobody’s saying that people who die generally rise again after three days, quite the reverse – Christians believe that Christ’s resurrection was miraculous precisely because it was an exception to the laws of death and decomposition. And it’s these localised, miraculous exceptions – at most – which believers are asked to commit to, and which they grapple with more or less effectively. But there’s no particular reason why the package of religious ‘exceptions’ should be limited to those relating directly to the life of Jesus. What about the plagues of Egypt? What about Aaron’s rod? What about God speaking to Abram? Come to that, what about the creation of the world in seven days? We know that this isn’t how the cosmos looks as if it works, but after all, this is an exception to all those rules…

I haven’t got an answer to this one, except to say that there’s nothing in Christianity to stop you travelling relatively light. Figurative interpretations of the Bible have a much longer history in Christianity than literal readings; by the time you’ve finished grappling with impossible beliefs and finding ways to believe in them, you may well come to the conclusion that God worked in his mysterious way through the Big Bang, the Nile flooding cycle and various other things, and generally kept his powder dry for the big performance in 30 AD. (In the immortal words of Wikipedia: “30 April – After being condemned to death by the Jewish court known as the Sanhedrin Jesus of Nazareth is crucified at Golgotha^{[citation needed]}“.)

I just don’t see the bright line between philosophy and religion  – or between religion and any other set of ideas having to do with morality or ethics. People who believe in God think that a belief in God is a good way to orient your life. That doesn’t mean they don’t believe in science or rely on divine intervention to boil a kettle – it means they don’t believe that the fact that science works entails that a belief in God is not a good way to orient your life. And surely you could say the same of any philosophical position – it’s how you think the world is, irrespective of whether your daily life supplies any evidence of it.

The weasel words here are “your daily life”. Anyone who believes in the ultimate overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, say, is unlikely to find much evidence for the underpinnings of this belief in their daily life, but if they follow the news for more than a day or two they’ll find enough. Whether evidence of God working his purpose out will also be apparent is more debatable. Perhaps the point that needed developing here was what was meant by a belief in God, or by orienting your life by way of such a belief. In other words, the question is not whether class struggle is a reality, but whether it’s a good framework for judging whether things are going well or badly. Similarly with a belief in God, and the beliefs that follow from it – above all the belief that humanity was made in the image of God, which makes each human life enormously valuable. And yes, you can find Christians campaigning against abortion on these grounds, but also against euthanasia, against the death penalty, against war, against poverty and political programmes that entrench it. Hence Christian Aid’s marvellous slogan, “We believe in life before death”.

³⁴ Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
³⁵ For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
³⁶ Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
³⁷ Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
³⁸ When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
³⁹ Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
⁴⁰ And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Again, you don’t need religion for any of this (and, again, I’m not religious myself) – you just need a belief in people. But religion is, often, a carrier of that belief.

For me, religion is a way of dealing with the incomprehensible – and sometimes incomprehensibly terrible – facts of human life, a way of honouring things in life that seem to need honouring, and a way of giving due respect to people. Or rather, it’s one particularly specialised example of a family of cultural practices which offer ways of doing these things. It’s not a bad thing.

Falling to bits, gloriously

This post at Crooked Timber sparked an interesting and only intermittently acrimonious debate about whether religious belief is inherently irrational or self-contradictory, and how best to combat religious reactionaries. I got stuck in and ended up essentially playing a Christian on the Internet, despite not being one in real life. It was an interesting debate, though, and really made me think. Here are some of my comments. (Italics are other people’s comments; I’ve included links to their original comments as well as to mine.) Discussion centred on four inter-related topics:

• the relationship of faith and practice (and by extension the relative importance of the two)
• the truth-status of religious claims (if someone believes that Jesus was the son of God, are they committed to believing that someone who doesn’t believe that is wrong?)
• whether beliefs grounded in faith set themselves above rational argument, so that a Christian can always end the debate by saying “it’s what I believe“; and
• whether reactionary claims made in the name of religion are a good reason for arguing against religion, or (as I argued) a good reason for not doing so.

It’s a bit of a comment-dump – or rather, it is a comment-dump, slightly rearranged – but parts of it may prove interesting.

1. Who are these people and why do they do it?

I’ve been playing with the idea that religion is a practice first, a faith second and a set of factual propositions third. First, you commit yourself to a certain way of living, a certain set of practices (even if that’s no more demanding than going to church once a week and saying ‘Yes’ if somebody asks if you’re a Christian, it’s still a different way of living). Second, in the context of those practices and in the company of others who share that commitment, you experience (or learn to experience) a sense of the sacred, of reverence for something numinous. Third, as part of the work you do to maintain that way of living and recreate that experience, you submit yourself to the mental discipline of believing what your church asks you to believe. Sometimes what you’re being asked to believe will seem to cut with the grain of your experience of the religion, other times it’ll seem daft, but if the experience of religious practice and community are working for you you’ll tend to go with it.The atheist’s view of religion often seems to centre on the third step, which is much the least fundamental. To the atheist’s question You believe that? a Christian will often answer “Well, I try to.” (Spufford: “Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed”, emph. added.) And believing religious propositions can mean grappling with them, trying to make them make sense, rather than simply believing them literally. (It was a Bishop of the Church of England who described the Biblical story of the Resurrection as “a conjuring trick with bones”.)

Of course, in some churches the package of beliefs you’re asked to take on board will included some harmful and dangerous stuff. But there’s plenty of room to argue against those beliefs while still taking religious practice & religious community to be valuable forms of social life and granting some validity to subjective religious experience. You won’t find any stronger opponent of reactionary right-wing Christians than a radical left-wing Christian.

Faith which wasn’t accompanied by the possibility of doubt wouldn’t be faith, it’d be (subjectively) certain knowledge – just as the belief that Christ rose from the dead wouldn’t be at all remarkable if we didn’t simultaneously hold the belief that resurrection from the dead is physically impossible.As for what faith is, as I said above I believe that religious practice comes first, the experience of collective reverence for the numinous second and commitment to factual propositions a slow & often troubled third – as if to say, if worshipping Jesus together with these people works as it clearly does (for me), then perhaps I should take what these people say about Jesus to be true, however impossible it seems. Saying that faith is wrong because it entails believing six impossible things before breakfast didn’t work on Tertullian and it doesn’t work much better now.

It does seem to me that we, human beings, long for meaning, and struggle with an inner chaos of unordered impulses, response and experience, a dream world, we’d like to control, order and (contradictorily) free and express

Reminds me of a couple of lines from Jethro Tull which have lodged in my mind (potency of cheap music and all that) –

What do you do when the old man’s gone –
Do you want to be him?
And your real self sings the song –
Do you want to free him?

As if to say, you may be able to get clear of the “old man” (or you may not) – but even if you do you can’t simply let the “real self” out (and you may not want to). I think that’s psychologically quite powerful – and it reminds me in turn of Roy Bhaskar’s strictures on the image of “a magic transportation into a realm free of determination, as imagined by both utopian and so-called ‘scientific’ socialists”, to which he counterposed a project of “transition from unneeded, unwanted and oppressive to needed, wanted and empowering sources of determination”. The real oppressions & constrictions (psychological as well as material) and the utopian yearnings for absolute freedom and self-expression – we all carry all this stuff around, and we need somewhere to put it, be it a church, an analyst’s couch or an inflatable Stonehenge.

This is where Christians and their defenders really annoy me. Sure it is easy to poke holes in the arguments of naive rationalists, but the validity of those criticisms do not justify the jump to “Jesus Christ is our Lord and savior”.

I’m defending Christians, but I’m certainly not advocating that anyone convert – I’m not a Christian myself. I think religious practice can play a valuable part in people’s lives, just as practices like living in a commune, hanging out with artists, writing music, political campaigning, folk dancing and psychotherapy can do for other people. I think all these things can get you to somewhere similar, and that it’s somewhere worth going to; I don’t think you need to be religious to have a “religious experience”. I do think that being religious can be a way of getting there, and that for a lot of people it’s as good as any other, or even better.

the atheist asks why faith and you reply … what exactly?

My one-sentence answer is that faith is a subjective response to an experience of the sacred; experiences of the sacred emerge out of collective practices of reverence; and that collective practices of reverence are a way of publicly expressing a sense of the value of things that need valuing (birth, death, sex, society, the passage of time and so on). Faith is what you end up with, not what you start from.

Now, you can live a happy and productive life without ever going to Midnight Mass, and you can be a devout believer and a horrendous, miserable fuck-up. You can get through life perfectly well without publicly giving value to the big things in life; you can give value to the big things in life in non-religious ways which don’t ‘feel’ sacred; you can get an experience of the sacred without being formally religious. A world without religion wouldn’t be a world without any of the valuable things currently borne by religion. But those things are real, and they are borne by religion.

it seems to me inherently dangerous (because it exposes you to exploitation),

Believing lots of things exposes you to exploitation – believing that your hard work will pay off, believing that your partner loves you, believing that you’re making the right spending decisions. And yet we get through the day. In which context, I like the idea that the word ‘faith’ would have been better translated as ‘faithfulness’. That to me is what ‘faith’ is about – an orientation of trustful commitment towards… something. Something outside ourselves.

Any Christian believes that God sees more and knows more than any human being, including him- or herself. All statements about God are approximations; prayer is an orientation to something unknowable, something outside ourselves. So the truth of a statement like “Jesus is the son of God” is, more or less by definition, one element of a greater truth that we don’t and, as human beings, can’t fully comprehend. For all we know, someone could go through life denying the divinity of Jesus and yet picking up more bits of that truth than a staunch Christian. If that’s a possibility, what sense would it make to say that they were wrong to say Jesus wasn’t the son of God? Christians believe they understand a bit of God’s nature and they believe they’re genuinely oriented towards it, but they don’t know.

The emotional response that the religious experience promotes, on the other hand, is not to feel sad, but rather to feel guilty. To feel like you are a bad, terrible, awful fuck-up of a person, who deserves, who needs to be punished. Any mercy here is, in fact, the tyrant suspending the doom he himself has pronounced.

First off, you’re clearly talking about Christianity specifically, not religion in general. More importantly, while I won’t deny that some churches do put a heavy stress on the experience of guilt, I think it’s actually a distortion of the Christian message, which is much more about forgiveness. Paraphrasing from memory, Rowan Williams said once, “People think that when they leave religion behind they’re leaving sin and guilt, but if you look at the papers you see that sin and guilt and condemnation are alive and well. What people leave behind when they turn away from God is forgiveness, the sense that our sins won’t burden us forever.”

Repentance/forgiveness/redemption is one of the most psychologically powerful and rewarding experiences we go through. And, if the person you’ve wronged will forgive you, so much the better, but what if they don’t – or what if you’ve lost touch, or they’ve died? I think a large part of the appeal of Christianity is right there.

2. Do they really believe all that stuff?

God isn’t an empirically testable proposition, and neither is the Kantian categorical imperative or the emergence of the proletariat as a class-for-itself or the maximisation of subjective utility. I believe that people who find it useful to talk in terms of proletarian self-awareness could in principle find common ground with people who talk in terms of rational utility maximisation, given a lot of work and good will on both sides; I also believe that in practice that conversation tends never to happen, for good reasons. (What is impossible, on the other hand, is finding empirical proof that one set of ideas is the truth about reality and the other isn’t.) I don’t think religious belief is any different.

And yes, that does commit me to believing that common ground could be found between people who find it useful to talk in terms of God and people who talk in terms of a Godless universe, given a lot of work and good will on both sides. In practice, of course, that’s a conversation that really doesn’t tend to happen.

there are some fairly basic propositions that one would have to say “yes, that is correct” in order to be a Christian, and therefore that people who think something different are incorrect

Yes and no – i.e. yes to the first statement, no to the second. The idea that there are many ways to God is very widely held among religious believers – probably more widely than the idea that everyone has to convert or be damned. Even C.S. Lewis, when he wrote his version of the Day of Judgement in the Last Battle, has some believers in the Calormene death-god Tash end up being saved on the grounds that they would have believed in Aslan if they’d had the chance – and his theology wasn’t exactly liberal. Christians know that they’re saved by their belief in Christ, but they’re also aware (well, many of them are) that they don’t know the mind of God and hence can’t know that everyone else is damned.

Aslan judges some [Calormenes] – and not others – to have been good enough to be saved, which must mean that “worships Aslan” isn’t a necessary condition of “good enough to be saved”. In any case, the “sea of faith”/”many paths to God” mentality is very widespread among your actual believers.

Transubstantiation and the resurrection aren’t factual statements about how the world works – anyone who believes in them also knows perfectly well that this isn’thow the world works. That makes religious faith a very particular type of ‘denial’ – a belief that universal physical laws are/were suspended in this one place, or rather a commitment to holding that belief.

Some of the discussion here defends what religion could be, with beliefs that are inconsequential, metaphorical mush, and ignores what (Christian) religion more commonly is, an acceptance of certain claims as boldface “truth”.

Firstly, general physical truths – those fossils actually are relics of Noah’s Flood – are in no way core to Christianity; lots of Christians reject them totally. Reading the Bible literally is a very modern idea. Christ’s Resurrection isn’t really a “boldface truth” – everyone who believes it literally happened also believes it was a unique exception to the boldface truths of death and decomposition. Secondly, holding those two contradictory beliefs together leads directly into what you denigrate as “metaphorical mush”, which is much more common – much more normal – among Christians than you seem to think. If you were to ask a Christian (sympathetically) what they really think happened on Easter Sunday or on the road to Emmaus, I think you’d get a ‘metaphorical’ answer as often as not.

Of course, if you ask for boldface truths and to hell with the metaphor – yes, yes, never mind “in a kind of a way”, never mind “they had a real experience of something”, did he come back to life or didn’t he? – boldface truths are what you’re going to get. All the more so if your starting question was “are Christians so stupid or ignorant as to believe that a three-day-old corpse can come back to life?”

this “many ways to God” thing is trying to have your mushy cake and eat it.

“Many ways to God” isn’t some kind of “wouldn’t it be nice if things were nice” rationalisation – it’s what lots of people believe. Lots of devoutly religious people, who sincerely believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God – but who don’t find it necessary to believe that God would have damned most of humanity for worshipping somebody other than Jesus, and therefore leave open the possibility that God might have revealed himself in other ways to other people.Atheists on this thread seem to be asking whether it’s possible to be a Christian and have both a heart and a brain; when we answer Yes, they say Ah, but we’re talking about being a rigorously consistent Christian. Newsflash – there’s no such thing. Apart from anything else, rigorously consistent with what? There are two separate Creation stories, only one of which features Adam’s rib (the other has one of my all-time favourite lines from the Bible, “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them”). The Gospels tell three versions of one set of stories and one radically different set of stories; you can’t believe them all, they can’t all have happened. And so on. The Bible, and a fortiori Christianity, isn’t about the-book-is-on-the-table statements of fact.

There are plenty of devout Christians, firm believers in the divinity of Christ, who nevertheless believe that not everyone who doesn’t believe in the divinity of Christ is damned. I can back this up, as well. God is omniscient, we’re not. God sees who he’s admitting to Heaven, we don’t. We can know that we’re saved, which gives us good reason to convert people if we can. However, we can’t know that everyone who misses out on the Good News is damned, or that there’s no other way for God to make himself known to them.

This is perfectly good Christian theology – as well as being a belief held more or less articulately by lots and lots of Christians – and it seems to me that it’s a substantial improvement on believing that everyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus is damned. That belief is a massive stumbling-block for anyone who believes in an omnipotent and benevolent God; in my experience it’s only embraced willingly by people who want God all to themselves and haven’t really got the point of the Gospels at all.

What you can’t logically do, if you believe that Jesus was the son of God, is think that other people believing something directly contradictory to that (ie that Jesus is not the son of God) are also correct. Ergo, they are wrong.

They appear wrong from our vantage-point, which we know to be imperfect. It would be the height of arrogance to say that they are wrong. Besides, what work is ‘wrong’ doing here? There’s been no objection to “I’m a Christian but non-Christians may do just as much good in the world”, or to “I’m a Christian but non-Christians may still be saved”. Why are those acceptable, and yet “I’m a Christian but I’m not going to say that non-Christians are wrong” is the badge of lily-livered pusillanimity that doesn’t deserve the name of religion?

We don’t have any business asserting that our beliefs (“Jesus was the son of God”, etc) are factually correct. We have no way of knowing whether they are factually correct or not; we’ll only know for sure when we meet God, by which time it’ll be too late to argue. So we stick to “incorrect as far as we can see from our imperfect vantage point”. Which is not a “mushy”, “woolly” or “uncommitted” position, although it does have a certain humility.

Do Christians believe it’s possible for people to return from the dead? No.
Do Christians believe that Jesus did return from the dead? Yes.

[NB when I wrote this I’d forgotten all about the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the faithful at the end of days, and was thinking in terms of people coming back from the dead here and now. The physical impossibility of resurrection from the dead is the main point here.]

At the risk of C. S. Lewis-esque reductivism, it seems to me that this contradiction gives you a range of possibilities:

1. Christians are all too stupid to realise it’s a contradiction.
2. Christians don’t really believe it and are all lying when they say they do.
3. Christians are all batshit crazy, only all in the same or similar ways.
4. Christians go through a particular mental process which they call ‘belief’ or ‘faith’.

1. is plainly not true, 2. seems improbable, and 3. is basically a less flattering description of 4. And that mental process is what I’ve been describing.

3. You can’t argue with a Christian – or can you?

Once you have conceded that “I feel it in my heart”, “this makes emotional sense to me” or “this makes me a better person” are adequate justifications for the conclusion that there is a higher intelligence behind the universe or that souls exist, you have given away any intellectual tools to criticize somebody who feels it in their heart that homosexuals should be stoned.

This is an “I refute it thus” moment, surely. If this were the case, the only way a believing Christian could respond to the vilest things done in the name of Xtianity would be to say “who knows whether this is God’s will or not, let us pray”. Fortunately that isn’t the case – there is quite spirited debate among Christians about exactly what it is that God would have believers do in the world. You could say they’re being inconsistent, but I don’t think they’d agree – they’d say they’re witnessing as Christians, and arguing with fellow-Christians is part of that (as it has been since St Paul). You’d end up in the position of an atheist telling religious believers that they’re not religious enough.

you still have not shown me where religions can move beyond arguing, actually resolve their differences and decide on anything unless they refer to a set of otherwise universally recognized cognitive tools that, consistently applied, shows their very religion to be indefensible

I don’t believe “religions” do anything. I believe that Christians can have difficult, intense and productive discussions about what their shared faith requires them to do, and that those discussions can – with some difficulty – be extended to people who aren’t Christians. This obviously means that being a Christian involves more cognitive faculties than direct reference to inward conviction. I don’t accept that using those cognitive faculties would necessarily involve those Christians becoming atheists, for the simple reason that it plainly doesn’t: you can be a Christian and an intellectual. And I don’t think this should surprise us, any more than we’d be surprised to discover that an intellectual can also be a phenomenological existentialist.Your rationalism doesn’t do the work you want it to. You can show (that word again) that pi doesn’t equal 3 and that crop rotation makes sense, and argue those propositions down to number theory & molecular chemistry respectively. You can’t show that “religion is not based on anything more than fantasy”, any more than you can show that to be true of phenomenological existentialism, Kantian jurisprudence or revolutionary anarchism. You can certainly show that you can’t ground religion in scientific enquiry, but nobody here is saying that you can.

“Reason is good for these areas where I use it daily, but not for these my cherished beliefs*. Why? Because that is different. It just is

Christians do use reason, they just don’t apply the scientific method to the foundation of their beliefs. Neither do philosophers, political thinkers or anyone else who thinks ethics and morality are worth arguing about. You can’t find the Holy Spirit with an ammeter; you can’t find class consciousness or the Husserlian epoche that way, either. It doesn’t make those things any less real and interesting & worth arguing about, for those who think they’re real and interesting & worth arguing about. (Those who don’t are free to argue about other things.)

I explicitly wrote that there are indeed ways of knowing, if you will, that aren’t scientific in the narrow sense, such as mathematics, deductive logic, moral philosophy, economics, history, art history, etc.
…
But the thing is, these areas all have more or less well-defined ways of deciding when a proposition is dead wrong.

I just don’t see the bright line between philosophy and religion in this respect – or between religion and any other set of ideas having to do with morality or ethics. People who believe in God think that a belief in God is a good way to orient your life. That doesn’t mean they don’t believe in science or rely on divine intervention to boil a kettle – it means they don’t believe that the fact that science works entails that a belief in God is not a good way to orient your life. And surely you could say the same of any philosophical position – it’s how you think the world is, irrespective of whether your daily life supplies any evidence of it.

There are lots of bad ways to be religious. Elevating revelation over reason is – not always but often – a very bad idea; cherry-picking scripture so as to give your own prejudices divine sanction is a bad thing to do; and treating God like a lucky rabbit’s foot (“please let the bus come now!”) is silly and childish. But it’s possible to argue against all of those things from a religious standpoint, and people do.

4. What about the bad guys?

the fact that religious claims are grounded in something other than rational enquiry doesn’t preclude believers from engaging in rational debate. Arguing that rational debate isn’t consistent with religious belief, and that Christians should therefore abandon either one or the other, is essentially criticising real Christians for not living up to your image of them. In real life the conversation between the liberal believer (L) and the homophobe (H) would go something like this:

H: “Jesus said we should kill homosexuals!”
L: No, he didn’t.
H: “Well, OK, not as such, but he did say [bullshit argument relying heavily on selective quotation]“
L: [Refers back to text and demolishes bullshit argument]
H: “But I just know that Jesus would say we should kill homosexuals!”
L: Well, I really think you ought to consider that you’re mistaken, because that goes against everything we know about Jesus. When did you start thinking this? Are you sure you’re not working out some of your own issues?
H: “But I’ve had a personal revelation! Jesus appeared to me and told me!”
L: I think you need help.

No different from the same kind of argument between a liberal rationalist and a rationalist homophobe – just replace Jesus with Darwin, say.

it remains true that large numbers of people, some of them important, do make truth claims about the state of the world based on their ancient poetry, and try to make life tougher for the rest of us on the authority of these claims. They need to be fought, and if the blowback from that fight upsets the nice club members who don’t actually cause problems for others, I’m genuinely sorry

Those people need to be fought with the “nice club members” on your side. If you’re fighting the NCMs as well, you’re fighting the wrong enemy.

What you need to do is pick your fights. If you’re fighting Creationism, fight Creationism. If you’re fighting sexism, fight sexism. In both cases you’ll have lots of Christians on your side. If you’re fighting the doctrine that Christ was born of the Virgin Mary… er, why, exactly?

Restrictions on abortion? Discrimination against gays? Lots of Christians oppose both. As for televangelists, there’s a reason people like Oral Roberts found their own churches. Campaign against what you want to campaign against, and I can pretty much guarantee that some Christians will be campaigning alongside you. Campaign against Christianity, and not only do you lose those potential allies, you get bogged down in side-arguments with people like me.

If you’re fighting televangelist scumbags, the many, many Christians who (a) believe in the power of prayer and (b) despise televangelist scumbags are not your enemy.

In his statement, [the Bishop of Down and Connor] doesn’t try to make any logical arguments we could address, he just states that abortion is against the teaching of the Catholic Church.

So we say, off the top of my head, “There is nothing in his statement to suggest that closing this clinic would result in better outcomes for women; women desperate to terminate a pregnancy will always find a way, and the closure of this clinic would simply help to drive abortion services back underground. I may not be qualified to argue Catholic doctrine with the Bishop, but I know something about the realities of women’s lives, and I am quite certain that more women – and more children – will suffer avoidable pain and misery if this clinic is closed than if it is left open.”

Or you could say, “Women have a right to abortion services on demand, and no old man in a silly hat is going to tell us otherwise just because some old book tells him so.” Which do you think would go over better to a largely Catholic audience? It’s all about picking your fights, and picking your enemies.

Lots of Christians do believe horrible and hateful things. Somebody once told me that Mother Teresa would be eternally damned unless she converted to the right form of Christianity before she died, the form of Christianity that had got her out into the slums of Calcutta not being the right one. On one level that’s angels on the head of a pin – what happens after anyone dies has never really interested me* – but it could have real effects; anyone who thought having the right beliefs was that important would presumably prioritise funding missionaries over funding famine relief.

So a kind of bigoted narrowness does, for many people, go along with belief in Christianity (go, as they say, figure). But here’s the thing: if bigotry always goes with religious belief and seldom appears without it, then religion’s your enemy. If bigotry sometimes goes with religious belief and sometimes with other beliefs, then bigotry’s your enemy – and un-bigoted religious believers are among your allies.

*In and of itself, that is, as I don’t believe that anything does. I do think what people believe about salvation and damnation is interesting & often very revealing.

To round it off I’ll just borrow a couple of other people’s comments, this time presented without any editing.

Zora 10.07.12 at 11:33 pm

I’m an American Zen Buddhist, in a sangha that doesn’t demand much in the way of faith. I’m not required to believe in a god — only in the efficacy of Zen practice. Or rather, that it’s worth trying out the practice. From that standpoint, the passionate denunciations of the atheists just whiz right past me. They’re not talking about me.

Yet I also find that I can read Christian or Muslim religious writings and say, “Yes, that’s SO.” I take God or Allah as a metaphor for those who need to experience their practice as a human relationship. The emotions evoked by this metaphor are powerful and useful. I recognize them. God is not my metaphor of choice, it does not resonate, but I cannot deny that it works for many people.

Isn’t that what Spufford is saying? That Christianity, as a practice, can cultivate love, compassion, serenity, acceptance of what must be endured. I understood what he said, and agreed — despite starting from an entirely different viewpoint.

Bruce Wilder 10.09.12 at 10:31 pm

The outside / inside dichotomy might be applied differently depending on whether you think the stress, in the OP title — Francis Spufford and the inner life of belief — should be placed on “belief” or “inner life”.

The very notion that the individual might have an inner experience — inalienable, subjective, private and owned — of which she needs to make sense, and which might, despite its seeming material inaccessibility to shared social observation, contain both a longing for, and a means of connection to the whole, of which the individual is an ephemeral part, whether that “whole” is a family, a society, a political state, a living planet or a universe, . . . seems curiously remote from the problems of political deliberation or ethical behavior.

Like others in the thread, I am troubled by the religious grasping at arbitrarily chosen, and apparently loosely held, “beliefs”, and using passionate “faith” in those supposed “beliefs” as a cudgel with which to bully others in various political disputes, or as a personal dispensation from personal shame or ethical responsibility. Putting those resentments against religion aside, the honoring of personal, inner experience, intrigues me.

It does seem to me that we, human beings, long for meaning, and struggle with an inner chaos of unordered impulses, response and experience, a dream world, we’d like to control, order and (contradictorily) free and express. I sometimes make the point in comments, that political arguments often take the form, not of a logical proposition like a syllogism, but of an hypnotic trance induction. We long to be hypnotized, to put aside our rationalizing, defensive consciousness; and, in persuading others, we instinctively play on this longing to be, literally, open to ideas and values.

If I come to the aid and comfort of a friend, who has experienced a tragedy or an accident, I don’t offer scientific analysis. I offer reassurance, touting “beliefs” which are objectively false as factual propositions, but are, nonetheless, aimed at repairing the person’s healthy narcissism. I am thinking of commonplace nonsense, like, “you are so lucky that the accident was not so much worse . . . ” It is important to hear that you are “lucky” — most especially, when you have been confronted with incontrovertible evidence that you are not — that you belong, that you are part of the whole, that you have as much right and purpose in being here, as the rocks, and the daffodils and the bugs and the stars.

We do a lot of this seeking after inner comfort and transcendant meaning, and not just in formally religious settings. I suppose that this is what people are mostly doing in a Tony Robbins seminar. It is why a business executive reads the Harvard Business Review. Maybe, following Aristotle, it is what we find in a great tragic drama. Or, what people seek, and sometimes, find in mind-altering drugs; or at AA meetings. It is what people want from magic or thinking about ESP and extra-terrestrials, or from sexual intercourse. It is what the coach is providing the team every day in practice, and in a pre-game pep talk.

I have listened to religious people, struggle with the concepts, say, of Darwinian evolution, and sense that their concern is that they are being asked to give up some necessary element of a favorite fairy tale, which has helped them find meaning or motivation in the necessary disciplining of their scarier impulses. They really don’t have to do molecular genetics or cure cancer (where factual and theoretical beliefs about evolution might have some purchase), but they do have to refrain from cheating their employers or killing their mother-in-laws, and hide their fear of being cheated by their employers or being killed by their mother-in-laws. If the universe doesn’t have an inherent moral structure of natural law and an all-observing God, well, then how can we justify ethical self-restraint in ourselves or expect ethical self-restraint from strangers?

I’m not always sure what the point would be in engaging people on the factualness of religious belief. I was raised in a Catholic tradition, which, following Thomas Aquinas, regards religious faith as focused on propositions, which are beyond factual refutation or confirmation, by definition. Of course, the bullying — exemplified by claims of papal infallibility — is front and center, as well. And, then there’s the hypocrisy — if that’s even the right word, for the disowned emergence of the darkest impulses — of sexual molestation or Mother Theresa making nice with the dictators of Haiti. The pragmatic case for religious belief or practice seems curiously difficult to put — the bridge to ethics or politics a mirage in the desert’s shimmering distance.

A man he may grow

Michael Rosen’s written a long and thoughtful piece about his experience of the grammar school system in the 1950s. I don’t know if it’s going to appear in print or on a higher-profile blog, but at the moment it’s just a post on his own blog – and he’s such a prolific poster that it’s going to roll off the bottom of the front page at any moment.

So catch it while you can – it’s a must-read for anyone who’s interested in the debate around grammar schools, or interested in debates about selective education, or secondary education in general. And anyone who’s got kids at school, has kids at school or is ever likely to. And anyone who went to a grammar school, or a selective school, or a comprehensive, or a secondary modern… Basically, you should read this.

It rings so many bells, both positively and negatively (really? we didn’t do that) that I’m tempted to live-blog my reactions to it, but that would be rather self-indulgent. I’ll just mention one small detail of Rosen’s story. He mentions that he was born in 1946, his mother’s second son, and that she died in 1976, aged 55. My own mother had her 55th birthday in 1976; I had my 16th. The coincidence of one date, and the differences of the others, raise all sorts of questions. I can’t begin to imagine my life if my mother had died in her 50s; it was hard enough when it did happen, thirty years later. Then: is it easier for an adult to lose a parent who dies relatively young? Then: easier than what?

But back to school, and a detail of Rosen’s story that sparked off a problem-solving train of thought. He writes:

the pass rate for the 11-plus wasn’t the same for boys and girls and it wasn’t the same from area to area. That’s to say, it panned out at the time that girls were generally better than boys at passing this exam. However, the places for boys and girls was split evenly between us. Somehow or another they engineered what was in reality something like a 55-45% split into a 50-50% cent split. Clearly, some five per cent of girls were serious losers in this and some five per cent of boys some kind of gainers – at least as far as the system thought of us.

But that last sentence can’t be right.

Say for the sake of simplicity that the children taking the test were evenly divided between boys and girls, rather than being 49:51 or 48:52. Then we want to know how many kids passed, and then how many were pushed up or down to even up the figures. Another thing I learned from Rosen’s post is that the pass rate varied from region to region(!), depending on the availability of grammar school places(!!), but let’s forget that for the moment and assume that about one in five passed the 11-plus (in fact the proportion ranged from 30% down to 10%).

So we’ve got, oh, let’s say 10,000 kids, made up of 5,000 boys and 5,000 girls, and 2,000 of them are going to Grammar School, the lucky so-and-so’s. Now, 55% of those 2,000 – 1,100 – are girls, and only 900 are boys. So we need to balance things up, and we skim off the dimmest 100 girls who passed and promote the brightest 100 boys who didn’t (each and every one of whom is officially less bright, and hence less able to benefit from grammar school, than the 100 girls we’ve just sent to the secondary mod, but we avert our eyes at this point).

So that’s 5% of girls demoted, 5% of boys promoted? No – it’s 100/5000, or 2%. When you massage that 55% down to 50%, the 5% that’s lost is 5% of the cohort that passed the exam (male and female), not of the girls (passed and failed). You could also say that the really serious losers – the ones who have been unfairly discriminated against even by the system’s own standards – are 100 out of the 1,100 girls who passed: roughly 9.1%. The serious gainers, on the other hand, are 100 out of the 4,100 boys who failed, roughly (reaches for calculator) 2.4%.

So there you go: applied maths for real-world problem-solving.

Clearly, some two per cent of girls (or nine per cent of the girls who passed the exam) were serious losers in this and some two per cent of boys some kind of gainers – at least as far as the system thought of us.

At which point I feel a bit like Babbage correcting Tennyson, but it’s right, dammit. And besides, without the maths I wouldn’t have arrived at the figure of nine per cent – for the girls who passed the eleven-plus but were artificially failed to even up the numbers – which is pretty shocking.