Guaranteeing Eternal Conservative Governments - One Victory is Not Enough to Satisfy Cameron

I did wonder during the lead up to the Scottish independence referendum why Prime Minister David Cameron was campaigning so hard for Scotland to remain in the Union.  With Scotland independent, the Labour Party would be denied 41 of its current 256 MPs.  In contrast the Conservatives have only 1 MP from Scotland among their 304 currently in the House of Commons.  It would have probably made it impossible for Labour ever to get back into office on its own ever again.  While this would not have ensured a Conservative government for ever more, it would certainly have increased the chances of that happening.  I realise now that I was naive to wonder why Cameron was behaving in the way he did.  

Today the explanation has become clear.  In fact it did not matter which way the referendum went, he had plans on how to permanently reduce Labour's majority at Westminster.  This can be seen as the next step in his shaping of democracy to constantly favour his party.  We know that boundary changes will favour the Conservatives anyway.  However, now he is going to exclude Scottish MPs from voting on legislation that is about England (and presumably Wales too).  The argument is that with certain powers being given to the Scottish Parliament it is argued Scots MPs in Westminster should not then vote on things that English, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs cannot affect in the Scottish Parliament.  Of course, 83% of the UK population lives in England and with the royal prerogative legislation passed can be extended in time or scope without reference to Parliament.  Thus, now Cameron can simply introduce purely English laws, be guaranteed of opposition not being able to muster sufficient seats and then extend it to the other nations through royal prerogative.

Cameron has steadily adopted steps to reduce democracy.  The introduction of the fixed 5-year term was the first move in this direction, making it almost impossible to break the coalition or bring down his minority government.  The vote on proportional representation similarly dismissed another chance to make the UK more democratic.  Only one, poor model was offered and yet its rejection is seen as ruling out any electoral reform.  At the last election the Conservatives received 36.1% of the vote but 47.2% of the seats; Labour won 29.0% of the votes but 39% of the seats; the Liberal Democrats got 23% of the votes but only 8.7% of the seats, they should have received 149 rather than 57.  However, these things such as fair representation are seen as 'not British'.  The Conservatives benefit from the fact that most British people feel politics is somehow inappropriate for them even though they complain about its impact.

Of course, the chipping away of democracy was begun under the Blair regime.  With hindsight it appears that the governments of Tony Blair had very little to do with Labour Party values, they were simply a repackaged form of Thatcherism something Cameron is taking to new extremes.  The erosion of civil liberties under Blair, notably the extension of detention without charge; the declaration of war based on faked evidence, the elimination of some critics and steps like identity cards and the RIPA anti-terrorism legislation which has constantly been abused by local authorities, let alone the constant use of the royal prerogative established a culture in which Cameron's steps to erode democracy can prosper.

In future I will be sure to try to see behind every step Cameron takes and recognise that no matter what he says it is about, all the rubbish about being passionate for the Union, in fact his core agenda is about creating a Britain where the Conservatives will never leave office and many of our remaining freedoms will be gone.  Today I really pity the Scots for not having chosen to escape from this developing dictatorship.  I know it would have left people in England in a tougher position, but even if you cannot escape from the prison yourself it is always good to see that someone else has made it out.  Now we are simply going to share our bitter fate together and I am sure many who voted for Scotland to stay under the yoke of Westminster yesterday will soon be regretting it.

The Dark Days Return

When Margaret Thatcher was kicked from office as prime minister by her own party in 1990, I really hoped that we would have seen the last of the nasty, selfish, hopeless days that we had seen when she came to power in 1979.  Throughout that period and as a direct result of her policies, Britain faced the highest unemployment it had ever seen, many industries disappeared and many people lived in poverty and others lost their homes.  Society became sharply divided and this was expressed by the numerous riots the UK experienced in the early 1980s.  Public service deteriorated as local authorities were compelled to take the lowest bidders for any service and they achieved this by paying poor wages; public bodies like utilities were broken off and sold off to the great benefit of speculators and already wealthy business people.  The rights of the individual were seriously eroded and it took almost another decade to even get some of these back.


Of course, after Thatcher we had seven years of John Major.  Whilst also a Conservative he did not pursue the assiduous campaign to undermine the UK.  He did not deny that society existed in the way Thatcher had done and for much of the time he had too small a majority to introduce forceful policies, though railways were privatised much to the detriment of the British economy and society.  Some of us hoped that he would fall in 1992, the last time the UK ever had a chance for a Socialist government, but through scare tactics and electoral irregularities the Conservatives remained in power until replaced by the Christian Democrat, New Labour Party which came to power in 1997.  Of course, by then the 'centre' of British politics had moved far to the right of where it had been in 1975 and now privatised utilities, even an independent Bank of England were seen as acceptable.  New Labour did introduce the minimum wage and signed up to the Social Chapter provided by the European Union but its other policies such as electoral reform and removal of the unelected House of Lords were soon dropped.


Now we have a coalition government, but as William Hague, the new Foreign Secretary noted, the 'bulk' of the Conservative election manifesto will be put into effect.  Tactical voters like myself who voted for the local Liberal Democrat candidate they thought might keep the Conservatives out of a seat now feel utterly stupid.  Effectively anyone wanting progressive approaches has no voice in this country.  Of course, that is precisely what the wealthy like Lord Ashcroft and other corrupt ultra-rich want.  The election of New Labour in 1997 was no restoration of democracy, given the deals Tony Blair had to make to get into power, it, in fact marked a further step in the erosion of the influence of ordinary people on politics.  With David Cameron in charge control of politics and the economy is now more blatantly in the hands of the elites than it has probably been since Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a former lord, left office in 1964.  Cameron is far less 'ordinary' than even Margaret Thatcher.  Fortunately a number of his 'babes', young, glamorous, privileged candidates parachuted into constituencies did not get elected, but there are are tens of MPs who owe their position to Cameron and will follow him devotedly the way Blair was able to build a large coterie of devotee MPs around him when he came to power in 1997.

Even with my fear of the Cameron government I was startled at how fast he has moved to further damage democracy, by moving to 5-year fixed term parliaments and making the dissolution of parliament require a 55% majority rather than a 1 vote majority.  Yes, of course, this brings stability in the way that a dictatorship brings stability by doing away with those tiresome things called elections.  It is interesting that even Conservative MPs are opposing this step, barely days into Cameron's government.  I just pray they give him a hard time over this threat to our polity.  Cameron seems to combine all the worst of Tony Blair with the worst of Margaret Thatcher.  This means not only will he pursue policies that will put millions of us out of work and hundreds of thousands to lose their houses, but he will expect thanks for all the suffering he is putting us through and like Blair be surprised when we complain about what he has done. 

I hope that my expectations do not come true.  I hope the Liberal Democrats and even Conservative backbench MPs can rein in Cameron's Frankenstein's monster of New Labour media manipulation, Thatcherite economic policies and an elitist focus on carrying out policies that benefit the already highly privileged.  However, what I see at least is a return to the 1980s with mass unemployment and as a result social discontent leading to increased racism and rioting.  I hate to think of how many wasted years we have ahead of us in which the average person is going to have to battle week after week just to keep a job and somewhere to live.  People have analysed how much the people born just before and during the Thatcher period have suffered throughout their lives.  I really pity the children of today who from this week onward will have their lives blighted as education and health funding is slashed.  In the course of a day, the opportunities of millions were closed down.  From now it will be the privileged who get the job, who get that place at university, not the average young person who will be marched into whatever schemes Cameron and his lackeys think up, notably the military-style national service for 16-year olds that he has already promised on numerous posters.  Cameron seems to have been raiding Mussolini's handbook for policies.  I can only hope that the day will come when I am among the crowd cheering as Cameron is strung up by his feet in Westminster.  In the meantime we have to mourn yet another lost generation blighted by economic and social policies aimed at benefiting the very rich and in particular enabling them to deny opportunities and exploit the average person in the UK. 

Emigrate now.  How many people wished they had left Nazi Germany sooner? Leave now before the UK is turned into an utter wasteland populated by a bullied people struggling just to survive as the privileged literally lord it over them as we take step after step to an authoritarian regime.

The Block Warden Arrives

None of this is original research, it is something which I read in 'The Guardian' newspaper, but seems to mesh with the developments I have been reading about from different sources ever since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 and particularly since 2001. As we all know, the terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists against the USA in September 2001, unlike previous such attacks, allowed the government of George W. Bush to adopt a policy they termed the 'War on Terror'. Elements of this included supposed justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and of Iraq by US-led alliances and the introduction of authoritarian domestic legislation in the USA and many of its allied states which have severely reduced the civil liberties of citizens of those countries as well as foreigners. Consequently in the 2000s we have seen a ramping up in the use of torture and detainment without charge or trial particularly by the USA and the UK, notably in collaboration with Pakistan. I have written before about how house arrest and 28 days' detention without charge, which in the past would have been totally unacceptable in the UK have become to be seen as the norm, and in fact, by some, as mild measures. Fortunately, the change in government in the USA and the work of the independent judiciary reviewing such steps in the UK has begun rolling back such policies, at least a little.

What is interesting is another element that has come to light in the UK about steps to target those people who are seen as being 'at risk' of becoming extremists, notably males with origins in South Asia. These are seen as the easy representation of Islamist terrorism and such attitudes have helped fuel racist groups and attitudes in the UK. Back in October 2006 and again in November 2008, university lecturers were encouraged to monitor Muslim students and report to the security services if they saw behaviour that was felt to indicate these students were becoming extremist: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/16/highereducation.topstories3 and
http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/5087-lecturers-asked-to-spy-on-foreign-students-again Unsurprisingly, given that universities pride themselves on their autonomy and welcoming people from across the world, notably from countries where they face oppression, they were not happy to be told to adopt this spying role: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7774949.stm

Parallel to these high profile developments in universities it seems less apparent has been the development of such monitoring at community level. The 'Prevent Violent Extremism' programme, termed 'Prevent' launched in 2006, has received £140 million (€152 million; US$228 million) has aimed at targeting these 'at risk' Muslims, and using language borrowed from the Communist Chinese dictatorship, 'deprogrammed'. As with the university lecturers, the government has set out to recruit community group leaders and workers to being their surveillance force. Those who have expressed a reluctance to do the government's spying have been terrified that they will lose their jobs or face threats from the police and security services themselves. It is becoming apparent that some college teachers are collaborating with the authorities in reporting 'suspects'. However, others are being pressured such as a mental health project in the Midlands and various youth projects across the country. The project is run by the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism and its head, Charles Farr and local leaders of the scheme, are former intelligence officers. The youngest suspect was aged 9 and he was sent for deprogramming.

'Deprogramming' is a term, which in English, is usually associated with helping people who have been rescued from cults to allow them to have a more normal perspective on society and people around them. It is a common way of translating what used to be termed 're-education' in China under Chairman Mao, punishing those, usually with imprisonment and hard labour, who were seen to hold views different from the state or came from a social class that was deemed to be a threat to the state. 'Re-education camps', which still exist in China, most of us would see as being identical to concentration camps (as opposed to extermination camps) of the Nazi German design. 'Deprogramming' is probably a correct term to use, but if this is being imposed on a 9-year old, one has to see it as being very severe. In the UK children do not even have criminal responsibility until the age of 10, one of the lowest ages in the world. So, can a 9-year old even be an 'extremist'? I was speaking to a 7-year old recently who was talking about chopping up girls and eating them, should he simply see a child psychologist or is he a genuine threat to the security of the country? If a child espouses fundamental Christian views and wants people struck down for stealing or coveting their neighbour's wife is he a potential terrorist? If he espouses the Five Pillars of Islam it seems he is much more likely to be seen as one.

Of course, a lot of this, trying to predict future crime, sounds very like something out of a science fiction novel or movie, in particular 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (1948) in which dissidents are tortured and terrified into accepting without question, the totalitarian regime they are living under. The science fiction nature of this scary policy continues when you read quotations from Ed Husain, head of the Quilliam Foundation (which has received £700,000 from the Prevent fund), believes it is morally right to stop people committing terrorist offences before they occur. This is naturally the role of security services. However, there is a difference between stopping some conspirators who are sitting around assembling bomb making equipment and stopping someone, a child even, who perhaps might some many years into the future think about carrying out terrorist activity. No-one has used the term 'thought police' (from thinkpol in 'Nineteen Eight-Four') in the popular media for many years, but it is effectively what we are now moving towards. Other science fiction that we seem to be basing policing policies on includes 'Minority Report' (novel 1956; movie 2002) in which people with psychic powers are used by the police to predict crimes before they happen and in 'A Philosophical Investigation' (1992) by Philip Kerr in which scientists try to predict which men are going to commit violent crime by studying the lay out of their brains.

The key issue is that the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' has gone. The principle of 'innocent until plans/commits a crime' has gone. In its place is 'innocent until someone believes that sometime in the future you may commit a crime'. There seems to be no monitoring of the quality of the assumptions about these 'potential' extremists, not even some pseudo-scientific explanation that people with a particular physiology or in specific circumstances are far more certain to commit a crime in the future. It is just a case of someone reporting someone else. As someone who has worked in different parts of the civil service, I know people are being reported on a daily basis. Every mail sack arriving at every job centre or tax office, every working day, has letters reporting people in it. The bulk of these are simply the disgruntled taking it out on the people they do not like the look of, or simply just a random person so they can make themselves appear more important.

Most of the public forgets that the authorities generally have a good idea on what people to target based on a mix of their own experience and own prejudices, generally they do not need help from the public. What involving the public is about, is developing an air of paranoia which helps foster compliance among them, so they do not complain when they have to undress, have their luggage opened in their absence or are searched repeatedly at an airport or when public transport is closed or the road blocks are put up. Paranoia in the UK tends to fade quicker than it does in the USA. I think because the British have faced far more real threats in their recent history than the Americans ever have. We have develop an awareness of genuine and falsified threat and have a natural scepticism which seems less common among Americans, but perhaps, more common among, say, the French, Germans, Spanish and Italians.

Simply thinking about a crime let alone having some vague resentment towards the government, should not be a crime, otherwise they will have to ban all crime novels and series and prevent anyone complaining about the service they receive from the government. Of course, that might be on the cards. What Prevent has helped do, is divide the very communities that policies following the Bradford and Oldham riots of 2001 were supposed to be assisting. It is pressurising more and more public servants in an insidious way to spy for the state.

The Prevent approach also blinkers people. The assumption that young Asian males from particular districts (Prevent currently only works with 82 councils; rising to 94 next year) are the only threat leads lots of 'blind spots' neglecting other threats and terrorism from different groups like the far right and Irish terror groups. That is if you believe, as the government seems to, that extremism leading to terrorism is so pervasive in our society. In the UK, partly due to public apathy, extremist views have never been popular. Even in states like Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia, Islamist extremists are a small minority.

Of course, security services like to be well funded, so if to get more cash they have to adopt an approach of trying to be pre-emptive and in someone's view stop scores of young people coming terrorists, they are going to go with it, even if they have little faith in the approach. The UK government has got so wrapped up in the Bush myths that it cannot see straight. If terrorism is so widespread why did the UK never face a war over Ireland with the large Irish (869,000 of the UK population were born in Ireland; 6 million have Irish ancestry compared to 1.6 million Muslims) population here? Why was there not extreme left-wing terrorism in the UK in the 1970s when there was in Italy and West Germany? Why was there no neo-Nazi terrorism in the late 1970s? I suppose they would argue that somehow South Asian and/or Muslim young people have different 'mental wiring' to Irish or other white people, but that is not based on any scientific fact at all or the fact that many Muslim states, though facing incidents as the UK has faced, have also not had massive terrorist activity in the way the Prevent method envisages it coming.

I titled this section 'The Block Warden Arrives'. This refers to the role in Germany during the Nazi period (1933-45) though similar positions were used in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-74) and in Argentina (1976-83). A block warden is a representative of the dominant party/state regime who in Germany oversaw around 40-60 houses and not only spreads propaganda in favour of the regime but monitors that his/her neighbours are complying with the regime's wishes, not simply passively but in an active way. Anyone, in the individual's judgement, who is not complying or without insufficient vigour or that the block warden simply dislikes, is arrested by the secret police and imprisoned/tortured/killed. The example from Argentina which brought the term 'the disappeared' to the world, is probably the model most likely to be adopted in the UK. Most simply people would disappear usually for long-term imprisonment or execution without their families ever knowing what happened to them.

What we are seeing in the UK at present with people reporting Asian neighbours plus the government trying to compel community workers to spy for them is a back door introduction of the block warden approach. Once in a while they may catch someone who is a real threat, but recent evidence shows that even the security services with their high tech equipment have arrested innocent people. Such powers are quickly abused especially by small-minded people who see their personal quirks as issues of national security, so people will be put under suspicion, not because they have any genuine terrorist sympathies but because some neighbour simply dislikes them or they parked in 'their' slot or their children were noisy or something. Such an approach actually wastes the time of the police and security services and creates so much 'traffic' of denunciation and counter-denunciation that it provides good cover for genuine criminals and even terrorists, though of course, their numbers are in fact tiny.

It is clear that more and more British people, often those very individuals who have been working hard to keep their communities in a fit state, are being compelled to work for what is increasingly a state machine aiming to police people's thinking. These people are often reluctant but history has always shown us there are always the 'little Hitlers' who relish such roles and you can imagine the bullyboys of the English Defence League queuing up to become these monitors in their neighbourhoods. I have noted before how local authorities have been abusing anti-terrorist laws to carry out their own agendas often in punishing people for violating (or for being suspected, however wrongly, of trying to violate) local regulations. The Prevent approach is simply giving them yet more abilities for them and even simple members of the public with which to beat the people they do not like in their neighbourhood.

Beating and Killing by Police Returns to the UK

People have been talking recently about the legacy of the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 and one aspect that we have been reminded of in the past fortnight is how it made it seem permissible that the police behave as if they were putting down a peasants' revolt when suppressing legitimate protest. Though we have moved on 25 years the attitude seems to have reawoken. The police have better surveillance equipment and a whole host of weaponry to suppress protests but they do not seem to have learned how to keep their tempers any better than they did in the 1980s.

Perhaps it is the new generation who feel they missed out on the exciting riots of the 1980s. It is always incredible when you talk to the children of police officers or immigration officers thinking of following their parents into the force at how already they are inculcated with the bigoted attitudes. I suppose we all learn from our parents, but never have I been so startled at how ingrained negative, violent attitudes are in these people. There is no reference to serving the public or protecting society, just to the chance to suppress people. In other contexts, such as those moving to football hooliganism it is condemned, but somehow violent police are exempt from such censure.

Commentators used to speak of how the television series, 'The Sweeney' (1975-8) encouraged police to drive fast and smoke and drink heavily and 'The Bill' (since 1983) police series has tried to encourage more responsible policing as you know every police officer and his/her family watch it religiously. However, it is clear that a culture is still running deep with in the police service which sees any protest no matter how peaceful as illegitimate and in need of being put down violently. If there is no violence present, the police try to provoke it, if they fail in doing that they simply wade in and beat people.

We have a new legitimacy for attacking protestors which was given to the world by the USA following the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks in that country. The Bush government built up an attitude that we are in constant and sustained danger which permits them to do anything (as anyone who has had their suitcase opened when it was being loaded on to an aircraft out of the USA knows, they leave a nice slip of smiley people saying how necessary it was to break into your luggage and how you must understand this), notably abductions and torture. Such attitudes foisted repeatedly on the UK by its US ally which often feels we are not sufficiently paranoid, spread widely throughout society. In the USA people were even beaten up attending the celebrations are around Barack Obama's inaugural ceremony, because despite the change at the top, the hostile attitudes lower down the hierarchy have not changed an iota yet. In this kind of attitude, the UK police, feel as they have not done since the 1980s, that they have a green light to be violent and that they will get away with it.

In the weeks leading up to the G20 protests we were told how they were going to be violent and the police would have to act forcefully. As it turned out, of course, the violence came from the police, frustrated that they had not got the battle their bosses had promised. Of course the knock-on effect and presumably the one desired by broader government was to scare off legitimate peaceful protestors from doing anything of this kind again. Stamping on legal protest is accelerating very quickly in the UK. Yesterday 114 people were arrested before they even began protesting and were 16 Km away from the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. They were said to represent a 'serious threat' to the power station. Anyone who, like me, has been inside power stations, knows they are not that easy either to get into (certainly beyond the reception) or to damage. If they were that vulnerable to protest, surely the security should be look at.

What these police do not understand is that real terrorists, not the part-time protestors they try to portray as terrorists, real terrorists would be in there and blowing up the place while the police were mucking around arresting middle-aged protestors many kilometres away. Real terrorists would not be as ineffectual as these protestors and it is alarming that the police do not recognise this. Of course, their real agenda is not really that bothered about protecting power stations, it is more about fostering a society in which there is no protest and we meekly accept all that the government and big private companies tell us, no matter how damaging it is to us and the wider world. Police officers and their families are just as prone to suffering from the consequences of global warming, the collapse of banks that have behave recklessly, GM crops, nuclear weapons and so on, as the rest of us.

The stepping up of the suppression of protesting in the UK has come in the past fortnight. As the days pass more and more evidence has come to light of how violent the police were at the G20 summit protests. Despite their predictions the most virulent assault by protestors was on a branch of the RBS bank which was broken into and ransacked. However, only a few out of the 124 people arrested were associated with that incident and it looks like charges will not be pressed against the rest. So why did the police go on the hunt around the different protestor encampments on 1st April and simply beating up people who had generally stopped their protests by the time the police had arrived?

I know the police like football hooligans get very excitable and are looking for 'action'. They had been telling protestors this throughout the day, clearly in a desire to raise the tension and hoping to provoke a reaction which of course did not come. As no full-scale riot had manifested despite what their seniors had promised, they had to work out their desire for beating people with truncheons. Certain units were even throwing people men and women through the air. At least 120 people have made complaints about the violence by the police. The units were involved were from the Metropolitan Police (which covers almost all of London), the City of London police (which is a weird tiny unit that only covers the financial district of London) and the British Transport Police (a new departure for them, they are not usually known for such violence but clearly wanted to get a look in at how to break arms with truncheons).

The police tried to keep journalists away and even detained six press photographers. What they forgot is that these days all of us have cameras and so there is stacks of footage and stills of the police brutality. This almost immediately showed how the police were lying about the murder of Ian Tomlinson. They said he had collapsed from a heart attack and that medics were prevented by people throwing bottles from attending to him. In fact video evidence shows he was clubbed and thrown to the ground by police and lay at their feet while he died. There is photographic evidence of a whole series of truncheon wounds and police dog bites. Ironically it is likely to be the legal system and its tariff of compensation for such injuries that is going to rein in police behaviour or at least bring them to account. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is moving very slowly on these cases but at least the officer who murdered Ian Tomlinson has been suspended.

While I have been speaking on and off about the creeping authoritarian state in the UK, I remain an eternal optimist that these things are isolated, that people will realise they have gone too far and will rein back in their or their officers' behaviour. However, we keep seeing incidents like the ones outlined here which show how quickly civil liberties are decaying. It is ironic when the media of China, so renowned for its suppression of civil liberties and any protest, starts reporting our behaviour in that direction. How can we complain of Chinese government behaviour when they can simply turn round and say 'well, we are only behaving as you did at the G20 summit'. Such behaviour as we are seeing from the British police has an impact far beyond the UK and leads to suffering not just of British citizens. Of course the bulk of police officers, feeling empowered in their bigotry by the paranoia around Islamist terrorists, have no concern for 'foreign types'.

We must only hope that the police involved in the violence of 1st April are suspended and their constabularies have to pay out again and again compensation for the injuries and the murder that their officers inflicted. Of course, I fear more likely that simply police will investigate police and will come back with 'no case to answer'. Whatever happens, the police and those others who want to choke off any protest will have won a great victory. In the future most protestors no matter how mild their protest is going to be, will think twice before setting off to make a legal protest for fear that they will be beaten, thrown about like a rugby ball or beaten to death by British police officers. Democracy in the UK suffered a terrible blow on 1st April 2009 from which it is unlikely to recover in the short term.


P.P. 19/04/2009 - Other things are coming to light connected with these two incidents that highlight further worrying trends. Ian Tomlinson was not a protestor, he was a newspaper seller who worked in the area of the demonstration and happened to have his hands in his pockets while walking home. This apparently was a defiant gesture sufficient in the minds of the police to warrant him being clubbed to death. You do not have to be a protestor to be killed by the British police, just happen to be going about your business when the police are in a mood to carry out a killing. Employers should withdraw all employees from areas where such activity is going on, they have a moral obligation to keep their workers safe. I am pleased to hear that the policeman who murdered Ian Tomlinson may be charged with manslaughter. I do not use the word 'murder' lightly, it was clear that there was predmeditation, the police went out to kill someone and so are little different to an American teenager driving through town shooting at people. I accept that they did not target Ian Tomlinson until the last murder, but they had a 'mind to murder' from the start.

We must watch this carefully to see he is brought to court. I feel we are at a real crossroads. If this incident is swept under the carpet then the police will feel they have a green light to do this sort of thing again; protests will be choked off because people will fear being killed by the police at them. If the police are at least called to order then hopefully they will think twice before going on the rampage as they clearly did at the start of this month.

The other alarming development is around the power station protest arrests. The 114 people were arrested over a period of 36 hours. This sounds very much like a Gestapo round up of the 1930s or 1940s. Again, I do not use the word 'Gestapo' lightly. The sweeping down on people, handcuffing, forcing them to face the wall and bringing no charges against them is very like the behaviour of an authoritarian police force. Interestingly one of the people arrested was asked if they were 'proud to be a terrorist'. Clearly the definition of terrorism has now become a catch-all term and can be used in any way people choose to define those they seek to eliminate. This is very like what Adolf Hitler said, 'I decide who is a Jew', i.e. that there was no set criteria, he could simply define a person as someone he wanted removed. It is clear that the police now feel in that position too. Of course we have long seen this at airports where anyone who makes a complaint is deemed to be acting in a manner like a terrorist. This suppression of complaint and protest is clearly now being widened throughout society. As I have noted, in this atmosphere, all of us have been empowered to cause trouble for neighbours who annoy us by simply reporting them as 'hoarding' chemicals such as common garden products or rotting kidney beans, that could be used as a bomb or biological weapon. There is an easy equation: 'people we do not like = terrorist'.

I have no sympathy with the Conservative Party at all but agree that the arrest of Shadow Home Affairs Spokesperson, Damian Green was again very authoritarian. What complicates the matter is that Boris Johnson, Mayor of London was trying to tip off Green about his imminent arrest anyway, because of knowledge Johnson had got through overseeing the Metropolitan Police. I suppose it is not surprise that as the state moves further and further away from accountability and democracy that people will increasingly use influence and corruption to protect themselves from state power, so exacerbating the spiral of the collapse of a healthy civil society until it becomes a 'gangster-style' society. This term is often applied to corrupt military regimes such as that of Chiang Kai-Shek in China before the Second World War. The Blarite party fostered nepotism and favouritism so helping to create a structure which is now coming to fruition.

We are at a crossroads and I just hope UK society takes the correct road.

Be Patriotic: Be Paranoid

Driving through Hampshire this week I heard the Hampshire police announcing the re-launch of an anti-terrorist hotline for members of the public to telephone in and report suspicious behaviour that they feel might be connected with terrorism. Given that the last terrorist attack in Britain (so excluding Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not Great Britain) was in July 2005, this seems to be an incredibly tardy response from the county which has the major port and rapidly developing airport of Southampton, the port and naval base of Portsmouth, numerous Army regiments housed across the country and the major Army base at Aldershot.


In 2006 Hampshire Constabulary set up its Special Branch Contact Unit and has been whining recently that no-one is calling its hotline and clearly felt that the public needs a new jolt of warnings about terrorism? Local authorities have been criticised by the Local Government Association and by the House of Lords Constitution Committee for abusing the powers they were granted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which gave them the ability to put members of the public under surveillance. Not finding any terrorists, local councils have used these powers to keep people under surveillance suspected of applying to schools from outside the catchment area or allowing their dogs to foul the highway or putting out their dustbins on the wrong day for collection. In total 794 bodies including 474 councils as well as health service trusts and fire service can use the powers and apparently across Britain there are over 1000 covert surveillance operations (it is important to note the use of the word covert here, because for example, the used of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) is overt surveillance) being mounted each month. The most criticised council is that of the town of Poole in Dorset (a county bordering Hampshire) which used the powers to monitor people for all kinds of suspected things in most cases they were found not to be breaking regulations, e.g. on school applications, let alone the law. Its representative Tim Martin admits that the council has put 50 such covert operations into effect since RIPA was introduced in 2000, though it is clear usage has stepped up in the past couple of years.


So being stymied in its development of our authoritarian society through the means of what previously seemed to be legal covert surveillance but is now being challenged, a new approach has been adopted which is to get people to start reporting their neighbours. The radio advertisement which has followed the announcement says 'if you are suspicious, report it'. It features the sounds of a busy nightclub saying that it is only like this because the bomb that would have been planted here was prevented by someone reporting the theft of chemicals which could have been used to make a bomb, presumably this means fertilisers, so there seems a danger thay any Muslim or Irish people shopping in a garden centre better watch out (though I advise not looking at the CCTV cameras, the reason why you will see below). It then follows with a sound of a busy shopping centres, saying that a bomb was prevented by someone reporting a person looking at the CCTV cameras in the centre. The two locations are probably intended to remind the listeners of real bomb attacks, such as the Bali nightclub bomb of October 2002 and the bombing at the Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996. The implication is however, that we are currently under constant threat of bomb explosions across Hampshire's town centres and it is only the hard work of the Hampshire Constabulary and its informants that is preventing carnage. Where is the evidence for this high level of threat?


Informants never need encouragement. I have worked for three branches of the civil service and every day in every office in which I have been employed we received about twenty letters from informants 'shopping' (i.e. reporting them to the authorities) their neighbours who they were sure were committing some offence. The usual accusations are that the person must be committing benefit fraud or not paying their tax. Certainly where I worked the number of genuine cases were less than 1% of the ones reported to us. If I worked for 5 days x 48 weeks per year, that meant that I saw say, on average 2000 informant letters per year and that was at just one office. In one job there were three offices of the same branch of the civil service receiving coming on for 6000 informant letters per year and I imagine the Inland Revenue offices, Social Security offices, Job Centres and the police all received similar volumes of information. These days with email it is probably even easier.


It is interesting to note what the suspicious behaviour Hampshire Constabulary want you to look out for and this comes from their website: observing security procedures and routines (such as the regular marches of regiments through Winchester, home to five regiments which seem constantly on parade?), taking photographs or video (a very unusual activity in historic Winchester and Portsmouth or the New Forest also in Hampshire and basically anywhere someone might be with their family), note taking (I will make sure not to amend my shopping list or do any train spotting in Hampshire and will advise all teachers not to send their children to do projects in town) and repeat visits to a location (so I will buy my newspapers and groceries for a different shop each week and not be a regular at any pub in Hampshire and suggest that people try not to go daily to their workplace if it happens to be in Hampshire). This is utterly ridiculous. What they do not add, but is assumed is that these things are suspicious if done by a man of Middle Eastern appearance or with an Irish accent. The ironic thing is, that in Hampshire the most active terrorists are people like the Real Countryside Alliance campaigning to reinstate fox hunting and Motorists Against Detection which burns speed cameras and are made up of the middle-aged, middle-class white males that both make up the senior ranks of Hampshire police and are presumably immune from such suspicion.


To add to the paranoia that there are terrorists lurking in every shopping centre, the Hampshire police are running a seemingly unrelated poster campaign asking 'Who's walking down your street?'. The poster tells you to keep an eye out for burglars and advises you that they may be of different age, ethnic, social or gender groups to what you might expect. So the implication is to spread the paranoia far and wide and not just suspect what young, white workling class man of being a burglar but also that elderly Asian woman too. How long is it before we have checkpoints at the end of each road where you have to show your identity card and explain why you want to walk down that street before being permitted to do so. Has no-one heard of the block wardens that the Nazis introduced to their residential areas?


Parts of the government has been trying, especially since the Bradford race riots of 2001, to try to bring communities, especially those of mixed ethnicity. Yet in one of Britain's largest counties we seem to have a policy which seems to be encouraging citizens to turn on their neighbours no matter what their background. As it is, British society is incredibly insular with people closing their front doors and only looking out surepticiously to spy on happenings in the street. This is why children get abused and the corpses of elderly people lay undisturbed for weeks. This approach is the wrong one, it will simply encourage vigilanteism and hounding of people who look a little different or are simply new or disliked or are just behaving in one of these ill-defined 'suspicious' ways. This kind of reaction does nothing to make our towns safer in fact it makes them inhospitable and dangerous. Yet, the urging of some, influential in British society, if we are not sufficiently paraniod and not reporting the suspicious people the authorities assume must be active in our towns (even though the police and Security Service cannot find them), we are being unpatriotic and of course it is a short step to lacking patriotism being seen as suspicious itself. I once read a science fiction short story in which everyone in a community reported each other to the authorities and the whole village was taken away, but I will simply return to the Del Amitri song, 'Nothing Ever Happens' (1990), which reached Number 1 in the UK: 'They'll burn down the synagogues at Six o'Clock/ And we'll all go along like before/ We'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow.'


P.P. 30/03/2009 - I notice from radio advertisements that the Hampshire initiative seems to have spread nationally very quickly. Also interesting to note is that the government has been saying that anti-G20 summit protests this week will be violent and police are saying they will have to use anti-terrorist legislation. This is an unsurprising public behaviour as agents provocateur. Clearly the government wants no protest so they are seeking to provoke a violent response and scare off peaceful protestors. Next time anyone wants to do some peaceful protesting they can say 'no, look what happened last time' and ban it. Despite the shift from Blair to Brown, the step-by-step move towards an authoritarian state in the UK is continuing. These tactics are not new and you can easily find examples from European, African, Asian and American history of the past 80 years of them all being used.

P.P. 23/07/2010 - Being unemployed I currently look through all kinds of vacancies that I would not normally have encountered; this is increased by the fact that I look for work right across the UK not just in my local area.  I was struck when at my local Job Centre Plus by the three separate advertisements on their job search computer, posted by the University of Brighton.  They were seeking recruits who have previously served in the Security Service, i.e. MI5, to work for the university at three locations in southern England, only one of which seemed to be Brighton itself, vetting their students.  Clearly this university alone (or perhaps it is simply more open about the fact than the others) believes it runs the risk of having terrorists among its intake and thinks it needs skilled people to check them out.  The salary seemed pretty desultory for the kind of skills they are seeking, but I guess that is an implication of cutbacks in higher education.  The radio advertisements encouraging paranoia may not be currently running, but the outlook they have fostered seems to be living on in various corners of UK society.

Was Fascist UK Ever Possible? - The View of Fiction

This posting was stimulated by two things. While I was trying to find information about the 'Noah's Castle' TV series I came across a fascinating couple of websites. The first was Memorable TV which has a pretty full alphabetic list of interesting television programmes, primarily drama and soap operas shown on British television over the past few decades: http://www.memorabletv.com/uktv.htm Another was Television Heaven:
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/overview.htm which has a more erratic range of programmes featured. However, in terms of the kind of series I was talking about, the most useful was The British Telefantasy Timeline: http://www.mjsimpson.co.uk/timeline/1970s.html
This is run by a journalist called M.J.Simpson and lists British television programmes with a science fiction or fantasy theme and when they were shown, year-by-year. Currently it covers the 1930s-1970s and there are plans to expand it into the 1980s and beyond.

What struck my attention were details of a number of dramas in the 1970s which envisaged Britain under some kind of dictatorship. This was further stimulated by the posting from Mitch which I found when I logged on today: it is on the tail of the posting about controversial counter-factuals from last month. He/she had emailed Eugene Byrne about 'The Matter of Britain' (a novel about the UK under Nazi control) which I mentioned in response to MCG's comment about Byrne & Newman's USSA stories. It is interesting to note that Byrne did not envisage a military dictatorship in the UK as being possible and also that he does not believe that in the past any Fascist party in the UK had a chance of coming to power. His model seems to be rather like that in 'V for Vendetta' (in comic form 1982-5, graphic novel 2005, movie 2006) which has the Norsefire party in control, but there is still civil rather than military control of society, though obviously the military works for the authoritarian government. There also seem to be competing factions within the system very much as there were in Nazi Germany between the SS and the Abwehr, Organisation Todt and the Four Year Plan Office plus the three branches of the military and the OKW which in theory oversaw them all.

Before turning to look at the background to these stories, I will mention the dramas from the British Telefantasy website that I had not heard of before and have not seen mentioned elsewhere on the internet, though I am happy if people correct me on this. There were two series each with two blocks of episodes, thanks to Simpson for the details.

The first was 'The Donati Conspiracy' first shown on 14th September 1973 on BBC 2 and had three episodes. Simpson summarises it as 'simmering discontent in a present-day Britain ruled by a fascist dictatorship'. A follow-up called 'State of Emergency' was another three episodes on BBC2 first shown on 4th December 1975, so over two years after the first series. Simpson's summary is 'in a present-day Britain ruled by a fascist dictatorship, a rebellion is planned'. Both were written by John Gould who wrote numerous TV dramas, many of them spy, conspiracy or science fiction, 1965-74. He died in 1974.

'The Donati Conspiracy' starred Michael Aldridge as Professor Donati. Other well known actors in it were Anthony Valentine as Paul Frederick, Richard Beckinsale (unusually for him, in a serious rather than comedy role) as Robert Sadler and Mary Tamm (she was also in the movie 'The Odessa File' (1974) as Sigi, John Voight's character, Peter Miller's girlfriend), who would later be best known as the first Romana in 'Doctor Who', as Sally Ross. What the story was and who these characters were I cannot tell. You can get the best detail, which is thin, from the IMDB website.

'State of Emergency' had Hugh Whitemore pick up Gould's reins probably due to his death. Interestingly almost all the cast had changed with Michael Gwynn now playing Professor Donati and Patrick Mower as Paul Frederick. Only Janet Key as Jane Frederick and Ian Gelder as Dave Dent returned. Interestingly, the early 1970s had seen more states of emergency declared than at any time in British history since the power had been gained by the government in 1920. Declaring such a state allows the British government almost unlimited power and it was used in the late 1940s to tackle dock strikes and in the early 1970s to combat strikes by coal miners.

The other two block series that Simpson highlighted for me was called '1990'. Maybe it aimed to suggest something like 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. Again details are thin. This is what I have. Each block was eight episodes long. It was again shown on BBC2 the key channel for serious dramas that ran as series as opposed to one-offs. The first block of eight (or six, IMDB disagrees with Simpson) episodes that ran from 18th September 1977 and the second block from 20th February 1978. They both starred Edward Woodward (most famous for the bleak spy series 'Callan' which ran 1967-72, 'The Wicker Man' (1973), 'Breaker Morant' (1980), 'The Equalizer' series 1985-9.  He has been acting year-on-year on television since 1955 and is still appearing in things including the movie 'Hot Fuzz' (2007) and the TV series 'The Bill' this year).

Simpson's descriptions are for Series 1: 'Edward Woodward battles the authorities in a near-future totalitarian Britain.' and for Series 2: 'Edward Woodward continues his struggle against the Powers That Be.' Woodward plays a character called Jim Kyle and IMDB has a long list of other characters and the actors who played them, none of whom I am familiar with. Some of the characters hint at story elements and, interestingly, most characters do not appear for more than two episodes. There is the 'PCD Inspector' played by Stacy Davies and a man called 'Faceless' played by Paul Hardwick in the first series; 'The Surveillance Man' acted by Norman Rutherford and an 'Inspector Macrae' from David McKail in the second series, amongst more standard character names like Harry Tasker, Dr. and Mrs. Vickers, Kate Smith and Tony Doran.

As an aside I came across a three-part counter-factual drama: 'An Englishman’s Castle' which ran for three episoders on BBC2 starting 5th June 1978. Simpson says: 'In a world where Germany won the Second World War, a scriptwriter is forced to work on a propaganda-filled soap opera. Shown in the Play of the Week strand.'

Of course, many TV series are now inaccessible, but it would be intriguing to know what was behind these stories and how they went. I am particularly interested to know how they envisaged a dictatorship coming to the UK. Interesting '1990' was set only 12-13 years into the future of when it was produced. So, it was typical of the near future dystopias that seem common in 1970s drama, notably through the series 'Doomwatch' which ran to 38 episodes 1970-2 and attracted viewing figures of 13 million.

'Doomwatch' had an environmental angle and billed itself as 'science fact' rather than fiction. One episode I have seen part of featured intelligent rats attacking humans and another in which the flight paths of two supersonic jets crossed causing pain and death to the people below. Apparently other episodes showed the effect of growth hormones on staff working at a fish farm, pollution from non-degrading waste (which has come true) and the dangers of nuclear fallout (viz Chernobyl). Apparently the government of the time seriously considered setting up a Doomwatch committee to mimic the one shown in the series.

We are rather getting off track now but one thing that seems to occur when you begin to probe the varieties of British 1970s TV drama. The two stories envisaging a Fascist style Britain that we know most about (or I can find stuff on via the internet) are 'V for Vendetta' and the 'Inferno' epsiodes of 'Doctor Who'. Alan Moore began writing 'V for Vendetta' in 1982 and, like many people, could not envisage that Margaret Thatcher would win the 1983 general election. Of course she did, helped by the 'Falklands Factor' of the nationalism that followed in the wake of the Falklands Conflict. In addition the Labour Party was heavily divided and was fragmenting with the break away of its right to form the SDP. It was led by Michael Foot (born 1913, so 70 years old in 1983, he is still alive now, aged 95) who believed in unilateral nuclear disarmament at a time of heightened Cold War tension. Moore believed there would be full scale nuclear disarmament by the UK which would mean it would not be targeted in the nuclear war that would follow in the mid-1980s (at that time nuclear war did seem very close). Following this, as in my novel, 'His Majesty's Dictator' which envisaged a British defeat in 1916, Moore expected the subsequent crisis to trigger a Fascist seizure of power in the UK, presumably sometime in the late 1980s. This is assisted by them using a biological weapon to kill around 100,000 people in Britain and in this atmosphere of a 'terrorist' attack they are able to get the public to accept dictatorship and the party leaders make vast profits out of the 'cure' which is produced by pharmaceutical companies they control. The stories were set in 1997-8.

The Norsefire party is assumed to be a breakaway from the Conservative Party. It has the slogan 'Strength Through Purity, Purity Through Faith' emphasising the Nordic nature of white Britons. In the graphic novels it uses the sign 'N' or 'NF', the latter which of course stood for National Front, the neo-Nazi party which was active in the UK in the 1980s when the stories were being written; their newspaper was called 'The Flame' and fire symbols also feature a great deal in the story. In the movie the Lorraine Cross is used instead, this was used by the French Resistance but also features in Free Mason iconography. The Norsefire Party also has links to the Church of England, and so is rather more like the authoritarian regimes of Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Austria 1934-8, the Croat Republic 1941-4 than Nazi Germany. However, this may address some of what Byrne seems to have talked about that a British dictatorship would have to have British (or in fact in this case English) characteristics.

The regime, with its use of concentration camps against ethnic minorites and persecution of other minorities such as Quakers and gays, is the same as in Nazi Germany. Its use of surveillance and absorption of standard police into the party machine are also the same. Persecution of ethnic minorities (who make up 17% of the UK population and are very important in the medical and retail sectors) plus of homosexuals (who make up 10% of the population though clearly there is some overlap with the ethnic minorities) would disrupt the economy, but presumably that is compensated for by it being run rigidly by the state.

Clearly 'V for Vendetta' was written at a time of particular circumstances. However, by covering both the nuclear threat and also negative integration stimulated by a manufactured fear of terrorism, it covers many feasible bases. I certainly think that as in this graphic novel series, we would not have a new party coming to the fore, more that one which had already taken power would begin to become more controlling until it was in a position to reinvent itself with new iconography when no-one would be in a position to complain any longer. From there on, the rest is from a standard template of European (and some South American) dictatorships. In Moore's novel, the USA has become fragmented by the war, but given their support for dictatorships around the world anyway, it is unlikely they would intervene to topple one in the UK in fact some US Presidents would be happier with a less troublesome UK than a democratic one.

I will just mention the 'Inferno' story. This was a 7-part story in the long-running British science fiction series and was broadcast 9th May - 20th June 1970. It featured the third incarnation of The Doctor (played by John Pertwee). Importantly this incarnation had been exiled to Earth and was unable to travel through time and space as freely as he had done previously (the series had run since 1963) in his vehicle the Tardis. Many of the stories of this era feature UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) a military force formed to combat alien attacks on Earth. Though the stories have contemporary settings in fact they are supposed to happen in the 1980s. In 'Inferno' there are really two parallel elements. The Doctor is marginally involved with the drilling for 'Stahlman's Gas' from the Earth's core that is supposed to be a new form of energy. It soon becomes apparent that the green slime which oozes from the drill head turns humans into 'Primords', ape-like creatures. The Doctor is tinkering with the control panel of his Tardis which has been removed from the shell (which has the form of a 1960s police telephone box). Rather than moving through time or space he is taken into a parallel UK and this is the element which interests us here.

In the parallel UK there are the same people carrying out the same experiment except that it has advanced further and more people are already infected and ultimately the core of the Earth breaks open ending the planet. What the Doctor learns in this parallel world enables him to halt the experiment in our world and so save the day. The parallel UK, the Republic of Great Britain, is under a form of dictatorship with soldiers armed with Soviet rifles rather than the Armalites which were used in the UK at the time. The UNIT Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is a 'Brigade Leader', the Doctor's assistant, Liz Shaw is called 'Section Leader', rather than simply a scientist and the UNIT Sergeant Benton is 'Platoon Under Leader' [these are very like ranks in the SS: SS-Brigadeführer; SS-Sturmbannführer (equivalent to a Major) and SS-Unterscharführer]; Professor Stahlman is 'Director' Stahlmann (the extra 'n' emphasising the Germanic nature of his name, it means literally 'steel man'). Rather than work for UNIT they are part of the RSF - Republican Security Force.

We do not know how this parallel regime came about but it is said that the Royal Family were executed in 1943. Possibly the UK has been defeated though not occupied by Nazi Germany triggering a Fascist coup d'etat which clearly as with Spain, the Germans would have supported. In line with Nazi Germany it is not surprising that the RSF, like the SS, would be involved in scientific experimentation, especially of an extreme kind. Also interesting is that it is a Republic of Great Britain, obviously without a monarchy it could not be the United Kingdom but is also might suggest that Northern Ireland is outside this regime, perhaps combined with a puppet state in the Republic of Ireland (some Irish nationalists hoped a Nazi victory would lead to the reunification of Ireland). The rifles may have been developed in the RGB along the lines of Soviet models or perhaps the USSR has either reached an agreement with Nazi Germany or this is the rump that 25 years after the war is trading with the RGB. Of course, throughout history firearms have been made under licence in numerous countries sometimes on opposite sides in a war. Naturally with no United Nations following the Second World War (perhaps the USA stayed out) there is no UNIT. Perhaps the parallel world has faced the same kind of alien attacks as in shown in the series in our world, and the RSF like UNIT is charged with defeating them. Some have suggested that The Doctor himself is the dictator of the RGB.

The series did not use parallel universes very often, the next one featured in the series would not come until 2006. Partly this is because I think there is always a challenge of explaining parallel worlds to the average viewer and 'Doctor Who' has a very mainstream audience. 'Inferno' does adhere to the parallel universe convention as seen in the movie 'Sliding Doors' (1998) in which one of the versions of Gwyneth Paltrow's character has a plaster on her head, in 'Inferno', the Brigade Leader has an eye patch and facial scarring to mark him out from the more amenable Brigadier of our world. Of course, actors in long running series love alternate worlds as it lets them play different characters and show their acting range.

So, from the fiction that I can explore, it seems that dictatorship is not expected to appear in the UK except from a war then supplemented with an engineered crisis, notably one which presents a clear enemy and scapegoats and leads to a serious number of deaths. As I always argue, however, it is wrong to think that the UK is immune to dictatorship (George Orwell believed this emphasising the British focus on the Navy rather than the Army, though missing that Argentina was to have a naval dictatorship). Ordinary people generally go along with whatever offers them stability. The British, in theory, have no real enthusiasm for ostentatious ceremony and marching around in uniform, but as we have seen with the Queen's jubilees and birthdays and the funeral procession of Princess Diana, if they feel an affinity they will turn out just like any Fascist crowd. Interestingly, I would advise any would-be dictatorial parties in the UK to have a woman at least as the figurehead if not as the actual leader. Maybe the British have never got over the Boudicca/Elizabeth I/Queen Victoria (even, dare I say it, Margaret Thatcher) factor and are willing to lap up pomp and circumstance combined with aggression much more from a woman than they will from a man.

'Pre-Charge Detention': Wrapping Up the Destruction of Liberties in Weasly Words

Any hope I had for Gordon Brown, any belief that his imminent removal was being over-exaggerated and a hope he would continue has been eroded utterly by his pig-headed push to extend the period without charge from 28 days to 42 days. There is utterly no need for this measure. The USA has only 2 days (though prisoners taken to Guantanamo Bay are exempt) and even places like Turkey which hardly has a good human rights record only has 7½ days. Why does the UK have so much more and wanted it extended? I have no love for the Conservative Party, but am heartened by David Davis the Shadow Home Secretary resigning because he opposes this legislation. He is resigning his seat too and will campaign at the by-election as an independent on this issue. A Labour MP for Rotherham, Dennis McShane, was on television this lunchtime saying he could not believe that a Conservative (the party has a history of supporting strong law and order legisation) is opposed the 'necessary' stronger legislation (McShane listed the things he wants including identity cards for foreigners and more CCTV as well as this extended detention without charge), but he cannot see that this shows that the Labour Party is moving so far to the right-wing in its rush to abolish democracy in the UK that it is leaving the Conservatives behind.

The other thing that sickened me is how the BBC is now referring to detention without charge. It has gone from being called that, i.e. 'detention without charge' which it is, to now being termed 'pre-charge detention' to make it sound like some kind of preliminary process that will always lead to a charge. Of course this is not the case. If the police need 42 days to get the evidence to make a charge it suggests that the case is pretty weak anyway. In fact what the 42 days are about is less to do with gathering evidence and more about psychological pressure and presumably ultimately torture to get the suspect to confess. This kind of detention does not lead to charges as clearly was seen in the Hicham Yezza - Rizwaan Saber case last month. Rizwaan Saber who is studying a PhD at Nottingham University was arrested along with his academic supervisor Dr. Hicham Yezza who is of Algerian origins (he has lived in the UK since 1995 when he was aged 17). Saber's research meant he had to study terrorist literature. He had been accepted into the UK to study this area (which clearly is an important one which speaking Arabic he would be ideally equipped to focus on) and was using resources publicly available on US government websites. Both men were held 14th-20th May and were released without charge. So they were in 'pre-charge detention' for six days, but of course it was not 'pre-charge' because they were doing nothing wrong. The government is clearly embarrassed by the whole incident and are now trying to deport Yezza back to Algeria despite him living here for over a decade and working as an academic (who are usually exempt from immigration regulations to promote contact between universities and their staff across countries).

The Yezza-Saber case is alarming for two reasons. First it shows how even with the 28 days detention without charge it is being used improperly. Second it shows an aspect that I neglected to look at in my posting on the creation of the police state in the UK, that is the suppression of academic freedom to research what is seen as important. This is a form of censorship and seems to have slipped by without the bulk of the population being aware of it. Self-censorship seems to be increasing off the back of it with the BBC coming up with euphemisms and weasly words to conceal the actual severity and speed of the erosion of our civil liberties. Brown you have lost any support I had for you. You could have turned back the tide of Blair's authoritarianism, instead you have decided to extend and accelerate it. I hope that you will lose the vote on extending detention without charge and that it will bring down your government in the way that you have been warning Labour MPs that it will. You are not fit to hold office in a democracy, you need to go.

Respect the Difficulties of Escaping Tyranny

Sorry that this is another posting prompted by an article in 'The Guardian', but these days with work calming down and me trying to stay off the roads to save on petrol, it is one major source of input into my thinking. Yesterday I read a very moving article by Julia Hollander about her great-grandfather, Moriz Hollander, a Jewish owner of distilleries in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia in the 1920s and 1930s. In her family this man is portrayed as foolish, one who invested poorly and was stupid enough not to leave Austria (which was absorbed into Nazi Germany in 1938) before he was carted off the Treblinka death camp where he was murdered. Julia Hollander, uncovered letters from him right from 1916 until February 1939, just seven months before war broke out. His wife and children were able to escape but he was later taken to Theresienstadt, a 'model' ghetto (which at first took elderly Jews like Moriz and those who had fought in the First World War) the Nazis had built in lands they had taken from Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and later was moved on to Treblinka.

From these letters it was clear that Julia's family had a very distorted view of this man. He had managed to keep his business going and even began moving into new lines right through the worst of the Depression. Austria was particularly hit, the collapse in 1931 of its Kreditanstalt bank in 1931 triggered off economic chaos across Central and Eastern Europe and mass unemployment. To maintain a business in those circumstances especially one dealing in luxury items was a very big challenge and thousands of businesses completely collapsed. As to escaping, this is an issue I will come on to later. However, though Moriz Hollander did not get away himself, all his family were able to get to Britain with sufficient funds to live on. He brought fake papers for his wife Minna that showed she was not a Jew, which allowed her to travel when Jews had had their papers taken from them. He also divorced his wife, so breaking her link to his Jewish background. All of these were measured steps to make his wife and children safer. Without him working so hard all of Julia Hollander's family would not now exist, so I agree with her, they are very hard on the memory of her great-grandfather.

Now from this story, I will turn to broader issues and especially how we look at people fleeing oppression. As is commonly known, the average British person despises asylum seekers, lumping them in with economic migrants and seeing both as parasites on the British economy. To some extent I think this is added to by an unstated unease at the courage of these people who have abandoned everything and gone through difficult circumstances to reach safety. These people have a 'get up and go' that most British people lack. There is also an unease at facing up to the horrors going on around the world, people generally do not want to think about torture or having members of your family disappear in the middle of the night and never knowing how they died. For the average British person, fortunately, these things are generally unknown and in most cases people do not want to know. Despite this hostility to asylum seekers there is a patronising attitude when looking back, especially to those who fell under Nazi Germany: 'why did they simply not leave?' too many people ask. Well there are many reasons.

The first is that Jews arriving in Britain in the 1930s received as much hostility as asylum seekers today. As foreigners anyway they were looked on suspiciously and anti-Semitism whilst not reaching the scale of that of Germany and Austria, was alive in Britain as had been seen in the anti-Semitic riots of 1911 in Wales, and across the country in 1915 and 1917, let alone the actions of Mosley's blackshirts in the 1930s. In addition, there was a great deal of what would not be called 'institutional racism', especially in the civil service, which made life difficult for refugees. Banks also exploited the refugees. Many began taking money out of Germany once Hitler came to power and with the pound, though increasingly rivalled by the dollar at the time, being one of the strongest currencies in the world, it was natural that they brought their money to London. Of course the banks levied special charges on them that sapped their savings and once war broke out and it was clear that the bulk of Jewish account holders from continental Europe were never going to collect their funds, they basically drained all of this accounts with impunity. Money is always a big issue. When people know you need to flee they will exploit you to the full. Even if you get to a country of asylum often you will be barred from working and you have support yourself and your family somehow. Your assets, like your house, equipment, most of your belongings have to be abandoned. This is why many of the people who escaped Germany in the 1930s were wealthy because it was only they who could afford to do so, ordinary middle class and certainly working class people were in no position to do that. It is a challenge to take yourself out of an established situation for a life of poverty elsewhere, especially when we are talking of a time where there was no free health care. Even today the UK is making it increasingly hard for people seeking asylum to come to the UK and survive. There is also an issue of language. I have lived abroad, it is loathsome, you really yearn to have someone speak in your own language, to read or watch something that you understand immediately rather than having to go through a schoolroom exercise each time, simply to understand. People in the country you go to make no allowances for you as a foreigner coming to live as opposed to being a tourist, both in terms of language and customs. Civil servants and business people always assume their ways of doing things are blatantly obvious and understandable, well of course often they are not even to the local population let alone for someone from abroad. So, do not patronise those who stay behind. They are not really 'staying' behind, they simply have no ability to leave.

The other thing, is that it is easy with hindsight to argue that 'well they must have known what was going to happen'. Again this is foolish. At the moment, the UK is not moving to being a Nazi state, but it is becoming quickly authoritarian. Do I leave the UK now? No-one in Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc. would give me asylum at the moment. It is not when you judge that the country has become a tyranny it is when the officials of foreign countries do. The UK has an appalling record of sending people back to regimes like Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia or China and a score of others, which the average person knows are horrific but to the government are not quite dangerous enough to warrant granting asylum. So when should I leave? When police start rounding up people in the night and taking them away to unknown destinations? You could say, yes, but of course until my life is in direct threat then again foreign governments would not even consider my application. By that time, it is too late. Either I am disappeared or my passport is taken away. I can probably no longer hold down a job and so lack the money I need to flee. With the onset of an authoritarian state it is always far worse for the people experiencing it than it is perceived by outsiders whether in that country itself or most certainly abroad. The other factor, is of course, is that we are optimists, we always hope it will not be as bad as it turns out to be. These days when genocide seems an annual occurrence, we are more likely to be aware. In the 1930s the only known genocide had been of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915 a model that did not seem applicable to Germany at all, despite the rhetoric of the Nazis. No-one could have envisaged the industrialised slaughter of millions of people in the way that occurred from 1942 onwards. Even then that was nine years after the Nazi state had been established and as I have noted before there was no direct march to the death camps, it was a twisted and at times ad hoc path.

So to flee a country you gamble your whole livelihood, your standing, your money, your security on the chance that the regime will become so extreme and you will fall within its oppression. This is a hard gamble to take especially when you have a family who may not see things the same as you do. The woman living in my house has no belief in my warnings about the UK becoming authoritarian despite the fact she has relatives across the world to whom she could flee, something I lack. I cannot give up this house and liquidate my assets without her approval and so I cannot even enter into the gamble. Now, back in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy or Bolshevik Russia or Francoist Spain or Salazarian Portugal, or a hundred other dictatorships, millions of people had to face up to such decisions. Is it any suprise that in fact the numbers of people seeking asylum compared to the numbers of people facing oppression is really small. China has a population of 1.3 billion people, even if one thousandth of them decided to flee the oppression, that would be 1.3 million people. The number of people who can or do not escape always far outweighs those who stay and suffer.

In my view asylum seekers should be commended for achieving what they do, for the sake of themselves and their families. Britain has long been a refuge for those seeking safety, but in the past 100 years the attitudes have hardened. Maybe we have been spoilt by long periods of democracy and low levels of violence. We are now too happy to make deals with horrific tyrannies such as China and Saudi Arabia and to despise the people who flee from those states rather than the rulers who have forced them to go. I am glad Julia Hollander has recovered the true history of her great-grandfather and I hope we can move to a similar more positive perception of those seeking asylum rather treat them with almost as much hostility as the people they have fled.

Why they are Trying to Drive Brown Out

As readers of this blog will know, I am not a big fan of Gordon Brown, I think he is more honest and far less egotistical than Tony Blair was and whilst he still seems to be following New Labour's policy of moving to a semi-authoritarian state he is doing it with far less speed than his predecessor. However, it is clear that Brown is not acceptable to the super-rich and others in the so-called Establishment who actually run the UK. This seems to be the only reason for why there has been such massive fuss about the local elections. So, Labour lost seats and a handful of councils, but show me a mid-term party in government who does not. Local elections are never a good indication of national flows anyway, especially, as Thatcher demonstrated you can rule for years only attracting a minority of the general votes. Another issue is why replicate Labour on 26% and not Ken Livingstone on 47% which would mean a far closer election. The reason is, because those who want Brown removed are using any stick they can find to beat him with. 'The Guardian' is supposed to be a liberal paper which you would imagine would be sympathetic to the Brown government, but no it is talking about the 'dusk' of Labour on its front page even though the general election is not until 2010.

The super-rich could cope with Blair. For a start he did not head the Labour Party, he headed a personal party, which as I have noted before was tied to its head as tightly as the Peronists were to Peron and probably even more than the Gaullists were to De Gaulle. Blair could always control Blair by flattery. In addition, his desire to manipulate the media and to make the public feel somehow guilty when they disagreed with him, fitted with these influential people's desires. Blair would go to war when the USA commanded it and he totally toed the line over the threat of terrorism which is the first piece in threatening the populous to accept the authoritarian laws the super-rich seem so keen to have imposed in the UK.

It is clear that those with real influence dislike Brown because he is too cautious, too curious, too much his own man. They want the 90-day detention without charge in place, they want Brown involving himself in more wars they can profit from, they want him selling off Northern Rock cheap so they can buy it up, repossess houses and make more money. They do not want a prime minister who actually nationalises things and raises income tax even if it is on a sector of society they despise (loss of the 10p tax band upsets their servants, don't you know?). They tried it last year when they called Brown a coward for not having a general election and they are now going to hound him until he finally goes. The trouble for the UK is what is the alternative? The Conservatives should be snatching the initiative and drawing up vote winning policies. No, they are sitting back even smug than before. They have allowed a clown, Boris Johnson, a man who regularly parades how many people he has offended and how silly he is, to become London mayor. What are those coming to work on the 2012 London Olympics going to think of this buffoon. Even the Conservatives had better candidates than him. In fact I cannot believe he will even serve his full term of office, some major gaffe will force him to resign. Yet, the fact that he was the candidate indicates the contempt that the Conservatives have for the electorate.

The Conservative lead David Cameron is amenable, but like Johnson is another old boy from Eton, one of the public schools which admits such a small slice of British society. He is of a social category of the kind that we saw with Lord Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden back in the 1950s and 1960s. His social class is so far removed from that of 93% of the UK population, but then again, he is like George Bush in the USA, the elite are their core constituency. I could even forgive Cameron all of that if he actually had some policies. Though I despise Thatcher you could never say she lacked a clear vision of what she wanted to do and the policies to achieve it. Cameron, in contrast, is content to assume that the premiership will be gifted to him in 2010 and he will just keep the country steady in order to benefit the wealthiest. He will adopt a reactive policy with the limited economic tools the Treasury seems willing to consider. What I envisage in the 2010s is very similar to the UK of the 1930s under the National Government, just encourage the public to keep their chin up while they are crushed beneath the pressure of the global economy. Unlike 1939 there will be no move in 2019 when China goes to war, because the uber-wealthy are more than happy to let the Chinese government to kill and torture millions of people if they choose, just so long as China keeps exporting the cheap goods and provides the cheap labour the wealthy like to use.

As happened in the 1980s when the media brought Thatcher in and kept her in despite the bulk of the population abhoring her and voting against her, Brown will be removed by the campaign against him which started in full force this week. He will probably be the last politician to be in charge of the UK. After him it will be figureheads of the rich just as Bush is in the USA, so Cameron will be here, a man without any political impact or any sense of direction beyond what his wealthy masters command. What we are seeing the dusk of is not so much Brown's premiership, but of the last dose of democracy the UK will have.

Police Road Blocks Around Christchurch

Last month I blogged what I felt was the likely timescale for the construction of a police state in the UK something the Blair government and now the Brown government seemed set on doing, for example through extending the period of detention without charge to 42 days. Maybe I was optimistic in how long all of this would take as today I encountered the first police checkpoint in the UK that I have been aware of since the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 when police had the right to stop anyone anywhere (including infamously in the Blackwall Tunnel in London, scores of miles from any coal mine) if they suspected them of going to a picket around a coal mine. What I encountered this evening trying to drive through Christchurch which I thought was in Hampshire, but it turns out is in Dorset, reminded me of the one-off TV drama 'Party Time' (1992) written by Harold Pinter and starring Barry Foster. It was set in the near future in which the UK is a police state and many of the guests coming to the party are delayed by police checkpoints. Time passes so quickly that it is odd to think that here in 2008 we are in fact in the 'near future' of people living in 1992, so I guess it should not be too surprising that some elements of that play have already come true. Pinter is an astute playwright.


Anyway, if you have to drive anywhere near Christchurch (and I only had to because an accident had blocked the main road I was taking West), my advice is do not. It may only be temporary but these evening there are police roadblocks on all of the main roads into the town and they seem to be stopping everyone. They are heavily staffed with ten officers at each checkpoint. I saw them with car boots open, they were clearly searching cars. When I questioned the officer he denied there was any terrorist activity in the area. That may be what they always say but more alarmingly, it may suggest that this is now 'normal' police behaviour around the town. I think I was particularly pulled over because people often mistake me for a Pole. Around 1 million Poles moved to the UK in 2006 and the number for 2007 was probably not much less. In the city of Southampton around 20 miles to the East of Christchurch with a population over 220,000, 10% of the people are now from Poland. There has not been any real racial tension, though I see a BNP (British National Party, a fascist party) candidates is standing in Bournemouth next door to Christchurch. This is outside the BNP's normal area of operations in East London and Lancashire, but may represent that they feel a way in there if there is racist behaviour going on.

Anyway, when the policeman spoke to me and heard my middle class English accent he let me go. This suggests that not only do we have roadblocks as normal behaviour in the UK now but that the actions taken at them (for example whether to search the car or not) depends on the nationality or ethnicity of the driver. So, I advise all drivers to stay clear of what seems to have become a mini-authoritarian state of Christchurch in Dorset and especially if you happen to be of East European origins (or, presumably, Middle Eastern extraction too given how obsessed the UK remains with al-Qaeda).


I always hope that when I see signs of the growing police state in Britain that they are an error, that Christchurch police had a slow day and decided to exercise their powers. Who can blame then when you find Poole Council (hang on, that is next to Bournemouth, is there some kind of testing ground for an authoritarian regime going on in South-West England) was using anti-terrorism powers to put surveillance on three families trying to get their children into a particular state school. Anyway, I hope these things are an error, but how many errors can you accept before you have to recognise that the police state is already here?


P.P. I did wonder why Christchurch should be the focus of such police activity and then I looked on the map and realised that it lies very close to Bournemouth Airport and in fact the road I had been diverted on to runs right to the airport. Furthermore, Bournemouth Airport (along with Prestwick Airport) has been one of the airports at which CIA rendition flights on their way to Guantanamo Bay have been stopping. So, though I still believe that the police state is creeping up on us quickly, in this case it looks like the British police were actually acting on behalf of the Americans. Presumably they suspected protests or something at the airport and were keen to keep people, that in their eyes looked suspicious, away from the location so as not to embarrass the Americans.

P.P. 16/08/2010: I have now found out that these road blocks are an annual event, we are told, simply connected with monitoring traffic flow.  Apparently, they are not mentioned on local radio or television traffic reports so that people do not alter their route to avoid them.  I also, found that I was in my rights to refuse to speak to them. Despite the presence of the police and their assistants wearing a kind of uniform and official badge, you are not at all obliged to talk to them, the best thing is simply to sit in your car with your window closed and simply look ahead.  Wait until they have finished with everyone else and then simply drive on when the car in front of you does.  In spite of these road blocks (and I will call them nothing else as they do block the road and prevent you driving on) being given an innocuous spin, I would ask why is one stretch of road, close to an airport used by the CIA checked year in/year out.  What is so significant about Christchurch, Bournemouth even, that needs such attention?  I could understand it better around Southampton, Portsmouth or Bristol, but two holiday resorts?  Maybe I have been lucky and have missed out on such other road blocks around actually important urban centres.  If you have encountered some let me know and we can start a list of the black spots and the time of year they are likely to have road blocks, for whatever reason we are told we need them.