A man with a plan

When I read about Ed Balls’ plan, if Labour are elected, to build a 'wave' of new towns, I wondered whether the current nostalgia for all things 1963 had gone to his head. Or perhaps this was an extreme example of the two Eds’ intention to eradicate every trace of New Labour, and to unlearn the lessons of the wilderness years of the Eighties and early Nineties. Surely new towns were a feature of the unpopular Old Labourism that voters decisively rejected at the end of the Seventies, along with tower blocks, nationalisation and the closed shop?

In case you’re wondering whether I know whereof I speak, I should mention that my first full-time job was in Basildon, another was in Berinsfield (a planned ‘new village’ in the Oxfordshire countryside), I now live a few minutes from Stevenage, and for the past two decades I’ve worked in Milton Keynes, arguably the only new town that (sort of) works. All of these, except perhaps the last, are characterised by bleak and soulless centres, brutalist architecture, and large and isolating housing estates. What they lack are many of the things residents of ‘old’ towns take for granted: the informal bustle of street life, an attractive diversity of architecture in which the ancient jostles with the modern, buildings and spaces hallowed by tradition and collective memory, and the capacity for organic and spontaneous social, economic and cultural initiative. A recent story in our local paper reported that Stevenage is the ‘unhappiest’ town in Hertfordshire. To be sure, many of its social ills (a high unemployment rate, widespread drug and alcohol problems) are shared by a number of ‘old’ towns and cities, but surely they must be exacerbated by the depressing built environment and the legacy of soulless, centralised planning? Perhaps the most telling sentence in the report is the last: 'Being a new town, Stevenage might not have the established community networks to make people feel they belong, leading to alienation.' (This is despite the 'new' town having been there since 1946).

Another thing new towns tend to lack, though it’s difficult to talk about, particularly on the Left, is class diversity. The new towns of the Sixties were, by and large, one-class towns – working-class towns, in fact – unsurprisingly, since they were mostly intended as a means of clearing the decaying slum areas of London and other big cities, and offering their residents a better life in the country air. By contrast, ‘traditional’ towns tend to be marked by a vibrant social mix, from which everyone gains. Like it or not, in most communities it's those with economic, educational or cultural capital - the  middle classes, in other words - who keep the schools going, organise cultural events, attract higher-end shops and restaurants, and campaign to preserve the local environment. It’s probably the social diversity of Milton Keynes which accounts for it being one of the more attractive and popular of the new towns - which isn’t to overlook its negative aspects, such as the lack of streets you can actually walk along, its disadvantaged outlying estates, and the dire transport connections for anyone without a car.

The deliberately proletarian character of the Sixties new towns always had vaguely Soviet overtones, as did the council-run cultural centres and centrally-planned landscapes and public art works. Balls & co. might object that their new generation of new towns will learn from these past mistakes, and will go out of their way to attract a social mix, employ decent architects, and ensure good transport facilities. But that doesn’t get away from the basic problem with new towns, whether we’re talking about the windswept decay of Basildon or the consumer paradise of Milton Keynes: and that is that they are planned. Surely the main lesson from the new towns of the Sixties is that you can’t plan community, that it has to grown organically over time, and given the choice, most people would prefer to live in an unplanned traditional town, with its mixture of old and new, than in a centrally-planned new town where the government and local authority have preordained where and how you shall live, shop, and enjoy yourself.

When I posted about this story on Facebook and Twitter earlier today, a few commenters suggested that garden cities such as Welwyn and Letchworth provided examples of 'good' new towns and might offer a better model. However (and again, writing as someone who lives within a few minutes of both of the aforementioned places), I have to agree with Jane Jacobs, who was as hostile to the fantasies of Ebenezer Howard as she was to those of Robert Moses. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs described Howard's aim as 'the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge'.  I'm biased, of course, but I much prefer Hitchin, the old, diverse, attractive and constantly surprising town where I'm privileged to live, to either of its rationally-planned near-neighbours, whether the brutalist squares of Stevenage or the orderly avenues of Letchworth.

R.I.P. Norman Geras (1943 - 2013)

It must have been some time in 2003 that I came across an article in a Sunday newspaper, about a Marxist professor who supported the Iraq war. Although it had been a long time since I’d called myself any kind of Marxist, and at the time I was sceptical of the rationale for invading Iraq, I was intrigued. Perhaps it was because I’d been having my own internal debates with conventional Left thinking and was increasingly disappointed and depressed by my fellow progressives’ failure to condemn (and in some cases their tendency to find apologetic ‘explanations’ for) terror and tyranny, as long as it was directed at the ‘imperialist’ West.  To my shame, I hadn’t heard of Norman Geras before then, despite the fact that he was a recently retired professor at Manchester, where I’d been a postgraduate student.

The newspaper article mentioned that Geras wrote something called a ‘blog’ – the first time I’d come across this neologism. Curious, I looked up the eponymous normblog and was immediately hooked. I found myself nodding in frequent agreement with Norm’s concise but elegant posts and reading his disquisitions soon became a daily habit. From normblog, I branched out to read the bloggers and commentators that he linked to, many of them associated with the Euston Manifesto, of which Norm was one of the key authors, and the broader anti-totalitarian, liberal-interventionist Left. As well as finding myself in immediate sympathy with many of Norm’s political opinions, I’m happy to acknowledge that he was also influential in changing my mind on a number of important issues, most notably Israel. In fact, as time went on, I came to see Norm as one of the key influences on my political thinking, on a par with figures like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall at earlier stages in my life. Of course, it wasn’t all about politics: Norm was just as stimulating and entertaining when writing about Jane Austen, country and western music, John Ford movies, cricket or his beloved Manchester United.

As time went on, I decided I wanted to be a participant in, and not just an observer of the online debates to which Norm had introduced me, so I started my own blog. I was enormously flattered when Norm started to link to my own posts, and like many other bloggers, I regarded being granted a normblog profile as the highest possible accolade. I now realise that, as well as being the inspiration and model for my blogging, Norm was also my imaginary ideal reader: on many occasions, I’ve held back from posting something, not so much because I thought Norm would disagree with it, but because I knew the argument wouldn’t come up to his exacting standard.

Despite his towering reputation as a political philosopher, Norm was a generous supporter and nurturer of the talents of others, and although I had only met him virtually, I regarded him as a mentor and a friend. Then, earlier this year, came the opportunity to meet him in person: Norm and Adele Geras kindly invited Helen and me to lunch at their new home in Cambridge. I was as nervous as it’s possible to be at meeting one of my political gurus, but we were made to feel very welcome. Norm must have been quite ill at the time, but characteristically he didn’t mention it once. Instead, we got a guided tour of his book collection, including the unrivalled cricket section, and the extensive ‘waiting to be read’ shelf. I was surprised to discover that this most well-informed of bloggers, who somehow managed to read and comment on everything before the rest of us, was in the habit of not switching on his computer before mid-morning. Instead, he spent the first hour of each day reading a novel – a practice that he repeated every evening. Normblog regulars will be aware that he was a voracious reader of fiction, something that I believe shone through in the imaginative and humane sympathy that characterised his posts.

Nick Cohen has written about his own habit of turning to normblog when he wanted to find a way through a difficult moral or political issue. For many of us, ‘What does Norm think?’ became a reflexive response to perplexing items of news or complex debates. One of the many sadnesses of his passing is that he’ll no longer be around to help us think things through in his characteristically clear, rational, humane and often highly amusing way. That won’t stop us from occasionally wondering 'What would Norm have thought?’ And that won’t be a bad starting point for any debate.

Today my thoughts and prayers are with Adele Geras, who is of course a well-respected and much-loved writer herself (Norm kept a detailed and devoted bibliography of her numerous publications), though to normblog devotees she’ll always be (and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind the appellation) ‘WotN’: Wife of the Norm. May he rest in peace.

POOPCAN

Does this sound familiar? You’re thoroughly absorbed in reading a biography or historical work, lost in admiration for the author’s ability to bring the past alive, when suddenly, perhaps in the final chapter of the book, you experience a rude shock. All of a sudden, the spell is broken: the essential relationship of trust between writer and reader has been undermined, and you feel traduced, irritated, sullied even.

What has happened? The author has committed what I’m tentatively calling a POOPCAN (though if anyone can come up with a better acronym, I’m open to suggestions). A what, you may ask? A POOPCAN. A Politically Objectionable Out of Place Contemporary Analogy. Departing from his or her brief, and straying from their acknowledged expertise as a biographer or historian, the author has unexpectedly drawn a tendentious parallel between historical events and current concerns, and worse, has attempted to see ‘lessons’ in the past for contemporary debates. And let’s be honest: it's especially grating when this parallel-drawing serves to reinforce political positions that the reader finds objectionable.

The most egregious example of this sort of thing that I’ve come across is in the closing pages of Carmen Callil’s devastating account of anti-semitism and pro-Nazi collaborationism in occupied France. For me, the book was almost ruined by her concluding (and deeply offensive) claim that the Jews of Israel were now ‘passing on’ to the Palestinians what they had experienced at the hands of the Nazis.

Much less offensive, but still extremely irritating to this reader, was Jenny Uglow’s attempt, towards the end of her richly enjoyable book about the Restoration, to compare Charles II’s high-handed behaviour with the strategy of a recent British prime minister. Discussing the king’s controversial negotiation of the Treaty of Dover in 1670, Uglow writes:

It was the secrecy of the treaty that was so significant. For a king who had intended to be so open and accessible, this was an admission that he must now rule in a different way. His assertion at the Restoration that he wanted to rule with his parliament was implicitly denied, and his actions were the forerunner of many later deals, when heads or cabinets of allegedly democratic states commit their nations to action without the knowledge or full agreement of parliament and people. To modern eyes, the treachery may lie less in ‘the design about R[eligion]’, which so shocked his contemporaries, than in Charles’ committing his country to fight a pointless war in which thousands of lives might be lost.

Uglow was writing in 2009, and it’s not difficult to see which recent events were in her mind. The analogy is both anachronistic (there's a world of difference between a 17^th century monarch ruling as if by divine right and an elected 21^st century leader) and deeply flawed. If it’s the decision to go to war in Iraq that Uglow is referring to (and I’d bet good money that it is), then she is conveniently forgetting the fact that the decision, whatever you think of it, was supported by a majority in Parliament and that the debate was conducted very much in public. Then there is the lazy use of the hackneyed terminology of what Norm Geras calls the verkrappt Left: ‘allegedly democratic states’, ‘pointless war’. At this point carefully-evidenced historical narrative gives way to political grandstanding.

My most recent experience of POOPCAN-spotting came a couple of weeks ago. We spent a few days in Barcelona over Easter, and one of the books I took with me was Michael Eaude’s cultural history of Catalonia. It’s an informative and wide-ranging introduction to this stateless nation, covering history, literature, the visual arts and sport. But it was almost spoilt for me by a single throwaway remark. Writing about the expulsion of Muslims from Catalonia in the Middle Ages, Eaude adds in brackets: 'the War on Islam is nothing new'. Hang on: what war on Islam? Does such a thing even exist, outside the paranoid ravings of fundamentalists, or their apologists on the aforesaid verkrappt Left? And what’s with the capital ‘W’, lending this tendentious coining a semi-official status? OK, so it's literally a parenthetical remark, but what I found objectionable was the lazy recycling of the slogans of clerical fascists, in a way that can only give comfort to their spurious claims of victimhood. 

Like Uglow’s nudge-nudge reference to the Iraq war, Eaude’s use of the unexamined assumptions of a certain section of the Left appeals to a set of supposedly shared assumptions – ‘we all think this way, don’t we?’ - which is both objectionable and out of place. POOP, in fact. I shall be on the lookout for further examples and would be pleased to have any others pointed out to me.

The voice of the academic left? Not in my name.

This open letter, condemning ‘the Israeli assault on the defenceless people of the Gaza strip', angered and saddened me so much that it has finally lured me out of my extended blogging hibernation. The letter, sent to the Irish Left Review but no doubt also published in other earnest left-wing journals, is signed by no fewer than 136 academics. Some of them are the usual suspects – the far-left anti-Zionist Ilan Pappe, the Hamas spokesman and suicide bombing apologist Azzam Tamimi – but among the others are one or two people I vaguely know, others whose academic work I admire, and at least one (Judith Butler) whose writing I used to like but whose naïve interventions on this particular issue have caused me to re-evaluate everything she’s written.

The letter made me angry because I believe it is wrong on almost every level: every sentence is stuffed with lies and half-truths. And it made me sad because this collection of intellectual worthies seemed to be presenting themselves as the combined voice of the ‘academic left’. I'm an academic – have been for the better part of a quarter of a century. I am also of ‘the Left’, a paid-up Labour member who has never voted for any other party (unless you count a tactical vote for the Liberals in a Tory safe seat thirty years ago), whose political thinking has been shaped by the likes of Ruskin, Morris, Raymond Williams, E P Thompson, plus a smattering of early Marx, feminism and anti-racism. And yet when I read this, the supposed collective voice of the ‘academic left’, I feel nothing but alienation and revulsion, and want to cry out: ‘Not in my name!’

The letter is short, so a line-by-line fisking is in order. Here’s the first sentence:

We the undersigned watch with horror yet another ruthless and criminal Israeli assault on the defenceless people of the Gaza Strip.

You would never know from this that Israel’s ‘assault’ came after a week in which hundreds of rockets were launched indiscriminately from Gaza towards residential areas in Israel. Surely, if anything was ‘ruthless’ or ‘criminal’, it was this series of unprovoked terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. This lack of informing context is, to say the least, surprising from a list comprising so many expert social scientists. And in what way was Israel’s response, carefully targeting terrorist leaders, arms dumps, communication centres, and going out of its way to avoid civilian casualties, ‘criminal’: do states not have a right to protect their people against terrorist attack? ‘Ruthless’ and ‘criminal’ might better describe Hamas’ strategy of siting their military hardware among civilians, using their own people cruelly and cynically as human shields. And ‘defenceless’? What about all that firepower aimed at Israel in the past few weeks, including sophisticated weaponry supplied by Hamas’ paymasters in Tehran? 

Moving on:

The assassination of the Hamas’ military commander, Ahmad al-Jabari, by Israel was intended to disrupt any chance for a permanent cease fire between the two sides and caused the current cycle of violence.

This is quite breathtaking. Remember: before Israel targeted al-Jabiri, there was no two-sided conflict requiring a 'ceasefire', just a one-sided campaign by Hamas and its proxies. It was this series of attacks that ‘caused’ the current cycle of violence: Israel’s careful targeting of one of its masterminds was an attempt to end the violence. Again, it’s astonishing to find academics who spend their professional lives analysing causation wilfully misreading the obvious chain of cause and effect here.

For the last five years al-Jabari had been responsible for limiting rocket attacks on Israel.

Far leftists are often unfairly accused of being implicit apologists for terror – but this is a quite brazen apologia for a known terrorist. As Carlos Tomatis (to whom I'm indebted for the original link to this letter) commented on Facebook: ‘These fine people think that it's okay to attempt to murder random Jews as long as you don't do it too often.’ It’s striking that the signatories to this letter go out of their way to ‘understand’ a jihadist commander like al-Jabiri, but refuse to extend any such understanding to his victims, or to those who seek to curtail his terrorist activities.

The inaction of the Western governments is further proof of their indifference to their electorates’ wish to stop Israel from perpetrating yet another massacre against the Palestinian people.

Again, ‘massacre’ hardly seems the appropriate word for carefully targeted attacks against terrorist infrastructure – and what do they mean by the other 'massacres' implied here? Have these supposedly thoughtful and critical academics bought into the myths of one side? And what ‘action’, exactly, do these signatories want western governments to take? Do they want to stop Israel making any response to Hamas’ provocation - and if so, why?

We call upon our governments, which have stood aloof and indifferent, in the face of Palestine’s  dispossession and colonization since 1948 to take immediate and effective action. No other people in the world has been subjected, for more than sixty years, to such relentless acts of collective punishment and military brutality as have the Palestinian people.

‘Dispossession and colonization’ – these are not the words of people seeking a two-state solution, one in which Israelis and Palestinians live peacefully side-by-side in two legitimate nations. No, this is precisely the language of rejectionists who deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, who seek to deny the Jewish people, alone in the world, a right to a homeland of their own. This is also the boilerplate rhetoric of the anti-imperialist far left, which seeks lazily to impose a false template, transferred from very different conflicts, on the complexities of the Middle East.

As for the second sentence in this paragraph, it’s a downright, ugly lie. Even if Israel’s admittedly imperfect treatment of the Palestinians could be accurately described using terms such as 'collective punishment' and military brutality' (terms with, one suspects, deliberate and offensive overtones of Nazism and fascism - and by the way, did you see the actual collective punishment meted out by Hamas to suspected collaborators this week? - there's real fascism for you) - how can any sensible person say this is worse than (say) the treatment of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs by Saddam, or the Tibetans by the Chinese, or the East Timorese by the Indonesians? The list could go on indefinitely, and the more examples are adduced, the more absurd and offensive this letter's claim becomes. To accept that Israel's treatment of Palestinians could be compared to these brutal, genocidal campaigns would be to acknowledge that words have lost their meaning - again, surprising for a group of academics whose writings are often concerned with the precise nuances of language.

We call for the removal of the blockade on the Gaza Strip, the free movement of people and goods in and out of the region and a total cessation of lethal attack from the air, land and sea, against a helpless civilian population in one of the most densely-populated areas in the world.

At last, you may think, an end to the rhetorical windbaggery, and something like a measured call for practical action. After all, even 'moderate' voices like Tony Blair have called for a removal of border restrictions between Israel and Gaza. But those voices also recognise, as this letter quite fails to do, the reason for those restrictions: the fact that, as events even this past week have shown, there are some who would abuse an open border to launch yet more terror attacks on Israel. And as for the sea blockade, surely the news this week of a secret Iranian shipment of weapons to Gaza has demonstrated that Israel is absolutely right to maintain this, for as long as Hamas and its backers in Tehran explicitly seek to destroy the state of Israel and call for genocide against the Jewish people. 

The world cannot stand by when Palestine is once more battered to death.

Sorry for resorting to linguistic trivia, but that just isn't English: you can’t be battered to death more than once, any more than you can commit suicide twice. More seriously, it prompts the question: why did 'the world', including this esteemed collection of academics, 'stand by' a couple of weeks ago when Israel was literally being 'battered' by repeated rocket attacks out of Gaza? Where were the letters to the press then? The almost complete silence from the great and the good following that outbreak of violence, when taken together with this letter's complete disavowal of Hamas' role in the 'cycle of violence', not to mention the bloated and offensive rhetoric, might lead some people to wonder about the motivation of the letter writers. How would these academics, many of them skilled in textual analysis, respond themselves to this kind of text in other circumstances - a text so replete with absences and silences, and one which focuses its whole attention on the actions of one party in a conflict to the exclusion of all others? 

By the way, I read that more than 400 Arabs of Palestinian origin have been killed in the civil war in Syria: maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I don't recall seeing any letters to the left-wing press protesting this particular massacre of Palestinians. One might wonder what it is about Israel that, alone of all the nations in the world, spurs such a hasty and vehement response from the combined academic 'left'. Some of those who signed this letter are acknowledged experts in the analysis of racism: I wonder what they would call it, if they came across another text in which one nation, one people, was singled out for such opprobrium, to the exclusion of all others, in defiance of all sense of balance and reason, and in such ugly and contemptuous terms?