A not very rapid response to the riots

Apologies for the lateness of this. I started to write something in the immediate aftermath of the riots, but didn't manage to finish it before leaving for a week in Cornwall. Still, reflection in tranquillity is sometimes preferable to hasty reaction...

First, some recommendations. If you didn't get round to reading them at the time, the following responses to the events of two weeks ago are certainly worth reading (though I don't necessarily agree with everything they say): from Norm, Kenan, Michael, Luke, Martin, Katharine and Rosamicula. Plus any comment by David Lammy or Chuka Umunna, two black Labour MPs who (in my view) had a 'good' crisis. More recently, Tony Blair's intervention is characteristically insightful, while Nick Cohen's report on the judicial response gives pause for thought.

You'll notice that two of my links are to self-identified Tory commentators, and it has to be said that the capacity to talk sense about the riots crossed party lines - as did the tendency to spout dangerous nonsense. In the remainder of this post, I wanted to make three points about some liberal-left responses to the wave of looting, arson and violence that gripped English cities earlier this month. This doesn't mean I'm uncritical of conservative reactions, but 'the Left' is my parish, so to speak, and I have an interest in the healthiness or otherwise of its discourse.

1. There's nothing progressive about lawlessness and disorder.

The rule of law is one of the basic conditions of liberty. Law and order are valued by the vast majority of working people, especially those with relatively little personal power, since it means they have some protection against life’s unpredictability and it makes it possible for them to get on with the important business of earning a living and looking after their families. Conversely, the breakdown of social order affects the poor and powerless disproportionately, as Tony Blair famously said. There’s nothing romantic, or even vaguely ‘progressive’, about chaos and disorder on the streets. When there’s riot and mayhem, it’s the powerless, those who have no one and nothing to protect them, who suffer most. In situations of lawlessness and disorder, the powerful – those who have the numbers, the muscle, the weapons - rule the roost.

The left, in reacting to events such as those we've seen this summer, is rightly alert to the actions of the obviously powerful, the agents of state power – whether police, judges or politicians – but often blind and insensitive to the actions of other, less legitimately powerful groups – gangsters, criminals, bullies. The powerless need the law, and a degree of social order, to protect them from abuses by these powerful non-state actors. There's an analogy here with the debate over the proposed banning of the burqa, where much left rhetoric was devoted to the wrongs of the state telling women what they could wear, while often failing to address the power (and occasional violence) of community and religious leaders, not to mention fathers and brothers, in imposing their will on women and girls.

2. Looking the other way

There's been an awful lot of 'whataboutery' in discussion of the riots. It's a familiar rhetorical habit among some sections of the left: if a problem arises that doesn’t easily fit the usual categories, the tendency is to avoid facing up to the awkwardness by immediately deflecting attention on to supposedly far greater evils elsewhere. This is particularly apparent when those we have hitherto seen as passive victims of oppression, or even as the bearers of our revolutionary hopes, turn out to be aggressors and offenders themselves. So, at the height of the Cold War, leftists tended to deflect criticism of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union by pointing to the abuse of 'economic' rights under our own system. After 9/11 and 7/7, the characteristic response of a section of the left was to avoid blaming the actual culprits by switching the focus to the ‘real' terrorists in our own governments, or to expend energy criticising those governments' reactions to the attacks. 

The 'whataboutery' and 'looking the other way' in the aftermath of the recent riots took two forms. The most immediate and instantaneous was the tendency to undercut criticism of the rioters by reminding people of the 'looting' of the nation's assets by bankers and by dishonest politicians fiddling their expenses. The effect, if not the intention, of this knee-jerk rhetorical strategy was to minimise the crimes of those who smashed, burned and looted properties in London, Manchester and elsewhere: after all, weren't 'the kids' just following the example of the politically and economically powerful? To which the obvious response is: two wrongs don't make a right, and if you condemned the 'thieving' bankers, you should condemn these street thieves and vandals just as vigorously. And again, if you think the bankers 'got away' with their less blatant 'looting', then in a democratic society there are legitimate means of redress, including campaigning for changes in the law and electing a government that will address such abuses. As for the implication that politicians got away with their looting of the nation's coffers: try telling that to the former MPs currently sweating out sentences at Her Majesty's pleasure. The rule of law in a democratic society prescribes legal and political redress for social wrongs, not tit-for-tat wrongdoing.

The second, slightly delayed example of 'whataboutery' became evident after our political leaders did what we pay them to do, and began to formulate responses to the wave of urban criminality. Rather than offering a substantive critique of that response, too many on the left reacted with sneering reminders of the antics of the Bullingdon Club - and even managed to drag up evidence of Nick Clegg's misspent youth. Again, even if it wasn't intended, the effect was to distract attention from and undercut condemnation of the rioters. The sub-text seemed to be, if our political masters got up to similar pranks in their youth, then this vandalism and looting can't be all that bad - and, more insidiously, 'Who are you to talk?' The answer to the latter question is, of course, they are our elected leaders and it's their job at times like this to speak and act on our behalf - regardless of their own personal shortcomings. To question the legitimacy of democratic leaders in the middle of a crisis is to give unnecessary comfort to criminals.

3. Causes, explanations and excuses

Finally, a word about causation, though Norm has said much of what needs to be said on this point. The same confusion has infected discussion of the riots' underlying causes as befuddles debates about terrorism. There's a confusion between different types of causes - proximate and long-term - and between causes, explanations and excuses. Imagine for a moment that the burning and looting of this last month had been carried out by roaming gangs of BNP or EDL supporters, perhaps targeting Asian, black or Jewish homes and businesses - a not unlikely scenario, I'm sure you'll agree. What kind of discussion might then have followed about underlying causes, blame, and responsibility? I guess there would still have been some talk about poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity in white, working-class communities, but I guarantee there would be far less of it than we've seen recently, and much more blaming of the perpetrators and condemnation of their ideas, morality and shared culture - and quite rightly so. Nor would we be hearing so much about 'the kids' going 'too far' or about 'understandable' reactions to government policies - which in this case would be policies on immigration, migrant workers, housing policy, etc.  

In other words, social and economic factors would certainly be seen as long-term contributory 'causes', but no one, certainly on the left, would seek to explain or even less excuse racist violence on these grounds. One commentator (I can no longer find the link) made the facile point that, if you look at a map of the recent riots, you'll notice that none of them happened in wealthy areas. Well, if you look at a map of racist attacks and demonstrations, they're not usually in leafy areas either. What does that tell you? Nothing. Except that some on the left still see the poor and powerless as mindless dopes reacting reflexively to their economic circumstances, rather than as social actors capable of making moral choices.

This doesn't exhaust everything I want to say about these events, and I'm sure it won't be my last word on the subject. But it will do for now.

Note: a version of this post can now be found over at Huffington Post UK - my first post for them

'I'm ashamed to be a Hackney person'

'She's working hard to make her business work, and then you lot want to go and burn it out - for what?'

An ordinary Hackney resident on last night's madness:

Boa viagem

Will be in this part of the world for a couple of weeks, with limited internet access, so the blog will be in recess until mid-August.

From anniversaries to anti-imperialism: some links

Here are some things you might have missed over the last week or so...

On the sixth anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London, Jonathon Narvey is disappointed to find that most of the videos of the event posted at Youtube reproduce discredited conspiracy theories:

How will historians look back on the years when a global network of religious fanatics began ratcheting up their indiscriminate slaughter of innocents living in the West? As memory recedes, the more lazy among them will increasingly rely on the plentiful video resources made ubiquitous and accessible over the Internet. Conspiracy theories may become more mainstream only because these obsessive kooks seem to working a lot harder than the rest of us to get their own twisted narrative out.

Meanwhile, over at the excellent A Girl, a Blog and a Life In-Between, Princess Pana pays tribute to those who were murdered, posting brief but moving biographies of the innocent victims. She writes:

These were the ordinary Londoners and visitors whose lives were cruelly destroyed on 7th July 2005. These are the people who are missed by sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and partners. They were innocents going about their everyday lives who represent the diversity and dynamism of the great World City that London is. The bombers looked them in the eye and decided their lives were not important. We need to say back that these were important lives, lives that cast a real shadow and count.

Also marking the anniversary, Kenan Malik reflects on the part played by a misconceived policy of communalist multiculturalism in fostering homegrown jihadism:

Politicians effectively abandoned their responsibility to engage directly with minorities, subcontracting it out to often reactionary 'leaders.' If the prime minister wanted to get a message to the 'Muslim community,' he called in the council or visited a mosque. Rather than appealing to Muslims as British citizens, politicians preferred to see them as people whose primary loyalty was to their faith and who could be politically engaged only by other Muslims. As a result religious — and Islamist — figures gained new legitimacy in their own neighborhoods and came to be seen by the wider society as the authentic voice of British Muslims.

As Kenan notes, it wasn't always thus:

Today 'radical' in an Islamic context means someone who is a religious fundamentalist. Thirty years ago it meant the opposite: a secularist who challenged both racism in the streets and the power of the mosques. Secularism was once strong within Muslim communities, but it has been squeezed out by the new relationship between the state and religious leaders.

More positively, Michael Weiss writes about the important contribution of British ex-jihadists, such as Shiraz Maher, to the continuing fight against Islamist terrorism (subscription required for full article):

London has [...] produced a commodity that the United States hasn’t yet—rehabilitated Islamists who’ve said goodbye to all that and lived to tell and write about about it. For a Western establishment that often can’t tell Hamas from its elbow, these ex-Islamists have added invaluable insights into how an obscurantist ideology can be preempted and defeated.

Similarly, the news that some British Muslim women have started a campaign against religiously-inspired violence and abuse is encouraging. As they say in their declaration:

We believe, as Muslim women, we can no longer sit in silence while we watch the name of our faith being used to justify crimes. We believe it is our duty to make our voices heard and to reclaim our faith so that it is no longer hijacked by individuals and organisations who in the name of Islam incite and carry out violent acts of hatred and extremism and whose sole aim is to create a broken world.

In Italy, too, women are organising against sexism and discrimination, galvanised into action by sordid revelations about Berlusconi's treatment of women. The new movement 'Se ne ora quando' ('If not now, when', which obviously takes its inspiration from here) held a rally this week in Siena, where it was heartening to see placards in support of female political prisoners in Iran: a rare but encouraging example of western feminists protesting against the institutional sexism of the Islamic Republic.

Still on liberal-left responses to the phenomenon of jihadism: Gita Sahgal provides a detailed analysis of the Amnesty / Cageprisoners affair which led to her departure from the organisation. And Alan Johnson marks the anniversary of another terrorist attack - the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 to Entebbe - and its legacy for the Left. According to Alan, the roots of today's anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist Left lie in 'the worldview cultivated in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s':

In the decidedly non-calloused hands of this largely student, spectacularly arrogant, but largely know-nothing New Left, an already-authoritarian Marxism became completely unmoored from the working class, the West, and democracy and moored instead to ideologies of the noble savage, fantasies of 'Third World Revolution' and an irrational belief in the redemptive power of violence. The New Left saw the world in a very peculiar way. A third world 'periphery' was pitted against the metropolitan 'center' and 'good' oppressed nations were at war with 'bad' oppressor nations. 'Camp' replaced 'class' as the track along which a great deal of left-wing thought would now run.

Much of what is said and done by today’s left—including its anti-Zionism—is unintelligible without grasping that when 'anti-imperialist struggle displaced 'class struggle' as the organizing category of thought and the basis of political identity, the result was a hybrid political phenomenon that the Germans call linksfaschismus, or left-fascism.

This Haaretz article punctures some of the myths that have grown up around the Entebbe episode, but Johnson's thesis about the confluence of extreme-left and extreme-right influences in both the Sixties and contemporary far Left remains sound, and is something I've written about before. To end on a more hopeful note: Alan Johnson suggests that there was another legacy from the Entebbe affair, besides this twisted version of anti-imperialism. Hearing about the treatment of Jewish passengers by the hijackers, Joschka Fischer, then active on the revolutionary left, 'began his long journey back from madness':

Open self-recrimination and painful rethinking led him to develop a decent, antitotalitarian, and social democratic leftism. Later, as German foreign secretary, he was comfortable standing up for a Palestinian state while angrily confronting Yasir Arafat in person about the bombing of a Tel Aviv disco. This is the other legacy of the '68ers - the spread of a human rights culture, a refusal to accept the exclusion of minorities, liberal interventionism in the face of enormity, mutual recognition and two states for two traumatized peoples in Israel and Palestine, and the search for a global covenant in a world of staggering inequalities.

Stop press: if you want to read more from Alan on the deformations of the pseudo-Marxist left, his definitive take-down of Slavoj Zizek is in the new issue of Jacobin.

Go Fourth

Happy Independence day to all my American readers.

Left book club

If you’re writing a book about the state of progressive politics, and you’re casting around for a catchy title, the rule of thumb seems to be: find a stock phrase that includes the word ‘left’ and suggests a punning reference to your topic - then add a sub-title that explains what your book is really about. The locus classicus, in Britain at any rate, is of course Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way - where the main title neatly alludes to the two meanings of the word ‘left’: what exactly is the left these days? and what remains of the left?

The nearest US equivalent is Michael Tomasky’s Left for Dead: The Life, Death and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (American publishers love long sub-titles), where once again, there’s a clever play on the double meaning of ‘left’. However, my favourite example of the genre is Michael Sean Winters’ book about the falling-out between progressives and the Church: Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats (an even longer subtitle). You can imagine some editor dancing round the room when s/he came up with that one. 

But with these three stock phrases spoken for, where are new authors to find eye-catching titles for their explorations of the condition of liberal politics? Here are a few back-of-the- envelope ideas I came up with, which prospective scribblers should feel free to borrow. On the other hand, if you want to join in with this little diversion, you're welcome to add suggestions of your own. Here goes:

'Left on the Shelf: Socialism and the Single Person'

'Left Out: the Gay Voice in Progressive Politics'

'Left in the Dark: Labour and the Energy Crisis'

'Left Back' (or Outside Left, or Inside Left): Soccer and Socialism (with its companion volume: 'Outside Right: Extremism on the Terraces')

And, on reflection, I think Tomasky’s choice of title is a waste. Surely ‘Left for Dead’ would be much more appropriate for a book about radicalism in the undertakers’ union?

Finally, to get really cheeky:

'Left Behind: Pippa Middleton’s Radical Past'

The week's links

A few things that may have passed you by in the last seven days or so:


As Labour ponders its leadership and its electoral prospects, Luke Akehurst calls for a greater sense of pride in what the party achieved in power:

Every time I walk through the ward where I am a councillor, one of the most deprived wards in England, I see what Labour did for the poorest people in society: refurbished social housing, a brand new city academy where a failing school stood, a primary school rebuilt with BSF money, another new secondary school being built under a contract Ed Balls signed off, safer neighbourhood coppers and PCSOs put there by Ken Livingstone. Lives of my constituents which are still tough and sometimes desperate but lived a little safer, a little warmer, a little more prosperous and a little more full of hope and opportunity because of Labour.

Balls and Livingstone are not my favourite Labour politicians, to say the least, but I'm in general agreement with what Luke says here. The other Ed should take note: putting distance between yourself and the achievements of New Labour is not necessarily a winning strategy. Elsewhere, this was the week that the Guardian published the speech that the Other Brother would have made had he been crowned leader, in which he echoed Luke's sentiments:

Last year Gordon read out a list of what had been achieved – by him, by Tony, by all of us. Two million new jobs. The ban on handguns. The Winter Fuel Allowance. 80 000 more nurses. Free museums. Rights of recognition for trade unions and the end of the union ban at GCHQ. And the small matter of peace in Northern Ireland. 

Just because we lost doesn't mean they are wrong. We clapped those changes in our country last year and we should clap them again, because if we don't defend our record no one will. 

Meanwhile, elements of the British left continue to make the wrong call when it comes to the Arab spring. Germaine Greer poured scorn on the suggestion that Gaddafi's soldiers were raping civilians, but thinks that British troops should not be deployed to Libya because there's no guarantee they won't become a 'rape squad' on the prowl. Hugo Schmidt is not impressed. I don't completely agree with his first sentence, but I think he's right about where the real fight for women's rights is happening today:

A single British soldier fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan or Al Qaeda does more for women’s rights than Greer has done in her entire life. That is worth bearing in mind, as is the fact that there is a small band of radicals who genuinely are fighting for the emancipation of women – women such as Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to name only some of the most prominent – who deserve our maximum support and solidarity, and yet do not receive anywhere near the fawning treatment that Greer does. 

Last week I quoted Mick Hulme's weaselly scepticism about the crimes of Ratko Mladic. This week's shameful apologia for repression comes from Alastair Crooke, who writes fawningly of Bashar al-Assad as 'a young leader...not ossified by time and convention' who 'really does believe in reform'. This fondness for the Syrian dictator seems to derive from the latter's endorsement of Crooke's own pet causes: 'Assad had opposed the war in Iraq and has supported the resistance in Palestine'. Nick Cohen is not won over:

Read the whole piece and you will recognise an astute work of propaganda that plays subtle tricks with considerable skill. The author seduces the reader by offering entrance to a privileged world of insider knowledge. He manipulates the belief, common among intelligent people, that events are more complicated than they appear. The simple-minded may hear of the troops of a dictatorship massacring civilians and think the dictator an evil man. We, by flattering contrast, know that the world is not black and white but coloured in shades of grey. Naïve westerners believe that Assad is just another vicious dictator, but he allows us to see that Assad is not a monster but a man who recognises the need for reform, who is admired around the region for his foreign policy and so on.

And Nick has his own explanation for Crooke's position:

He runs an organisation called Conflicts Forum, which aims to promote the Islamist cause. (His commitment to religious reactionaries, incidentally, probably explains his enthusiasm for the Syrian Baathists. Although they are nominally secular, they give logistical and financial support to Hamas and Hezbollah.)

This week, we discovered that the 'gay girl in Damascus', the supposed Syrian blogger who had apparently been kidnapped by the regime, was in fact a straight American man living in Edinburgh who created the persona as a mouthpiece for his own propaganda purposes. His confession was hardly apologetic: 'This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.' As Ethan Zuckerman comments: 'it’s hard to imagine a more orientalist project than a married, male American writer masquerading as a Syrian lesbian to tell a story about oppression and democratic protest.'

If you want to understand what's really going on in Syria, you could do worse than read the Henry Jackson Society's report on the country's nascent opposition movement, summarised here by Michael Weiss. He concludes: 'The evidence suggests that this revolution is the most liberal and Western-friendly of any of the Arab Spring uprisings. That it's also the least supported by the West is a tragedy.' Michael was also on BBC News this week, cutting through the regime propaganda to provide an excellent summary of the current situation.

Optimism about the prospects for a democratic revolution in Syria should be tempered by the realisation that demonstrations on a similar scale in Iran two years ago have done little to weaken the grip of the regime. In fact, the abuse of human rights has worsened, as these statistics from the British Embassy in Tehran attest. Last week, United4Iran and Move4Iran staged a quietly eloquent flashmob in a Paris metro station to mark the anniversary of the country's stolen election: