“Thank goodness it’s Friday!”

 Iraq, Iraq-ification, on a high, phone-hacking, police, publishing, Rupert Murdoch, social media, social networks, Sun  1 Response »
Sep 142012
 

Yes, I know.  It’s pretty hackneyed to say so.  It’s a cliché – yet, even so, a truth.

Is that why publishing empires like Murdoch’s have grown to such a size?  He has, after all, specialised in giving people what they allegedly want.  And perhaps, for some decades, what people have wanted is precisely not the truth.  The truth consists in the following:

  1. Those in charge will always remain in charge.
  2. Those in charge are not those best suited to rule.
  3. Those in charge will always try and make your life more miserable.
  4. Those in charge are there to win every bloody battle.
  5. Those in charge are there to win every bloodless battle.
  6. Those in charge are bloody, full stop.
  7. Those in charge are greedy and money-grabbing.
  8. Those in charge are always lying.
  9. Those in charge feather their nests at our expense.
  10. Those in charge are permanent cuckoos in the nests of democracy.

Mind you, one truth that Murdoch does sell runs as follows:

  1. Given the chance, we’d all love to be like those in charge.

Or so, at least, I used to believe.  But I do truly think things are changing.  My last post kind of reaches, in a nakedly rambling sort of way, a quite precise conclusion:

I don’t know about the civilisation you live in – but it seems to me that something really dirty is about to unspool out of the civilisation I habitually inhabit.

It’s probably a consequence of all that social media honesty.  If you start doing it for fun in your everyday life, how can you avoid not ending up doing it for real in your work?  We’re all, little by little, acquiring whistleblowing instincts, aren’t we?  Even those people in the middle levels of organisations, who generally find their job is to filter away reality from both the public and workforce’s gaze.

Who said Facebook and Twitter couldn’t conquer the world?  Maybe what’s really happening here is that these environments are actually retraining us all in the twin, unassailable and universal virtues of honesty and good faith!

With truth becoming a natural instinct again, perhaps there really is a chance for hope on the horizon.

Perhaps we are seeing a changing of the guard in the publishing world.  Murdoch’s penchant for avoiding the truth in his papers, that hackneyed clichéd boring truth which no wage slave on a daily basis would be able to survive, is being undermined by the amateur realities we generally honestly transmit in our social media communications.  And even when you avoid your truth in such communications, it’s eventually clear to the gathered audience what you’re really about – as well as where that truth is to be found.  So whether you tell the truth or not, the multi-directional nature of social media makes it impossible to convincingly sustain for any length of time a posture which does not approximate to reality.

Think of the tabloid empires throughout history and how they managed to support establishment inexactitudes.  Think of phonehacking and the police; think of certain MPs’ outrageous privileges; think of Hillsborough and maybe the miners too; think of Iraq and other points of intellectually brutalised conflict, wiped out in a tide of impositional politics.

The age of editing reality – without a productive and immediate comeback from those who might know differently – is coming to an end.

In a sense, therefore, so is traditional newspaper publishing.

The future lies once more in the hackneyed and clichéd realities that fairly paint our world as it actually is – instead of as the powerful would have it be shaped.

Thank goodness it’s Friday, eh?  Thank goodness it’s Friday.

Why can Amazon have a near-monopoly on the web but, in our bodies, the NHS mustn’t?

 Amazon, in a hole, Iraq, Iraq-ification, NHS  No Responses »
May 152012
 

Here’s the tweet which sparked this post off:

YOU IDIOTS. I DON’T WANT TO PICK AND CHOOSE HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS TO FIND THE BEST SERVICE. ITS A HEALTH SERVICE NOT F***ING AMAZON. #NHS

The truth of the matter is, however, as the monopoly on health services by the NHS is slowly but surely picked away at by the business equivalents of flesh-eating bacteria of the most voracious kind, companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung affirm and strengthen their monopolistic holds over the supposedly free-market capitalism we are regularly informed guarantees us transparency and a maximisation of outcomes.

To return to the above tweet, then, whilst the NHS is splintered into many unhappy shards of allegedly beneficial competition, Amazon destroys all those who would plan an alternative to their evermore singular offer.

So why do we allow Amazon to proceed on its merry monopolistic way and yet choose, with respect to something that manifestly delivers true value for money, to destroy a model of economic worth?

We’re almost back at Iraq now, aren’t we?

WHY, WHY, WHY?

How Greece is a kind of Iraq for our very own financial times

 a con, copyright, copyright madness, Greece, Iraq, Iraq-ification, liberal interventionism, neo-liberal interventionism  3 Responses »
Nov 032011
 

Iraq was an unhappy case of the excesses of liberal interventionism.  Quite possibly Blair did believe in fighting a war on behalf of the downtrodden Iraqis.  Whether it was the case or not, it wasn’t a happy experience – as events subsequently showed.

Today, in different parliaments and sovereign bodies, at a very different time, with a very different background, and with different leaders at their respective helms, it would appear that Greece is now a parallel case – an Iraq for our very own financial times.  Not a case of the kind of interventionism which afflicted Iraq’s sovereign brutalities in the pursuit of moneyed oil but rather – this time – an example of neo-liberal interventionism where entire national economies are the goal. 

The people count for very little here.  The moneymen and women count for everything.

As the vultures circle Greece and the threats from Germany and France dissuade the half-baked democratic flailings of too many ineffectual politicians, we have on the horizon a conflict as long drawn-out as Iraq ever was – just on a rather different plain. 

It just goes to show that when the interests are structured enough, sovereignty either counts for everything there is or – alternatively – for absolutely nothing.

As, indeed, Greece is now clearly demonstrating.

It’s getting more and more like Iraq, in that process is the real objective here

 Coalition, Coalition U-turns, David Cameron, FibDems, George W Bush, in a hole, Iraq, Iraq-ification, Lib-Con pact, LibDems, process, things, Tony Blair  No Responses »
May 192011
 

Yup.  That’s how I feel today.  I’m scratching my head and wondering exactly what the real aim of the Tory side of the Coalition is.

And I am fiercely dragged back to the time of Iraq when we didn’t know if it was WMDs, oil, democracy or Bush’s presidency which truly was at stake in that terrible lead-up to outright conflict.  So what are they looking to detonate here then?  Woodlands?  The NHS?  The Labour Party itself?

Or is it more a very British way of doing stuff?

Slowly I am beginning to wonder if the latter isn’t the case.  As politicking begins to enter a mire of managed soundbites on the one hand and legal recriminations on the other, it doesn’t half seem as if we’re importing lock, stock and barrel the impasse of anti-consensual politics which – at least from the outside looking in – is what American democracy appears to exemplify.

What if it wasn’t really any of these things I mention which the Tory side of the Coalition government (that is to say, David Cameron and his closest cronies themselves) were interested in pulling apart?  What if, instead, it was process they were actually looking to destroy?

Oh, the irony of it all!  To employ the figure of coalition government – about as anti-Thatcherite in its assumption of the importance of fudge as you could possibly get – in order that the British way of getting things done (often, the essence of fudge) could be dismantled in a period of five short years.

Yes.  Irony is the word.  Whilst the radicals, in the figure of the Tory side of the Coalition, dominate the stage once more in their violent desire to uproot all those cosy ways of solving problems we have been so eccentrically familiar with, we find our only alternative to sitting back and waiting for the many axes to awfully fall is to make use of the headlining tactics of our lawyerly friends so beloved of our American cousins.  We ourselves are participating in the process of turning our constituency-connected MPs into little more than empty mouthpieces, fearful of putting their feet in their mouths.  As Chris points out:

But this is not the debate we’re having. Instead, we’re seeing three ugly aspects of our political culture.
One is a tendency to view all political utterances through the prism of whether or not they are “gaffes” – the effect of which will be to discourage plain speaking, or indeed speaking at all.
A second is an atavistic tribalism, which leads both Ed Miliband and The Sun to demand Clarke’s resignation, both on the grounds that he is not “one of us.”
And this leads to a third aspect – the tendency for politics to be reported in terms of who’s up/down/in/out – terms which are to a large extent uninteresting tittle-tattle.
Meanwhile, the real substance of proper politics is forgotten.

This, then, is the wholesale importation of a political culture which has turned into entertainment the otherwise serious business of improving the lot of men and women.  David Cameron’s goal wasn’t the woodlands – because he seemed to give in quite amicably when he saw the opposition was there.  It’s not even the NHS – except inasmuch as the NHS represents quite symbolically all that good socialism is capable of achieving.  (And in Cameron’s world, remnants of this ilk are hardly the most convenient things to have hanging around -  reminders as they are of the truly possible alternatives to the Darwinism of the extreme right.)

No.  Just as Bush used Iraq to keep his constituencies well onside, and WMDs, oil, democracy and most of the rest of the mix were simply things to keep us distracted in the meantime, so Cameron is using the tangibles which raise our progressive hackles (disability benefit, the NHS, the police, the education service, the woodlands, the Murdochs, playground fees and so on) in order to distract us from the far more pernicious objective that underlies what’s really going on: that is to say, the broader aim of destroying forever the bonds and mediums of exchange which have served to tie together even the most contrary of opposition representatives.

It is the virulent atavism, to use Chris’s phrase, which terrifies me most in all of this.  Cameron and his closest cronies are looking to foment a kind of civil war – just as Bush and his closest cronies looked to do so in post-”shock and awe” Iraq.  They are looking to generate that dynamic which says: you are either with us or against us, but never will you be able to choose to station yourself in the middle.  Most Labourites, if asked, would express pure hatred for everything the Lib Dems represented prior to the forming of the Coalition government in May 2010.  (It is not uncommon to hear them described in Labour circles as Fib Dems.)  And yet, in the light of what has happened since, it seems to me that if Cameron is to the Coalition what Bush was to Iraq, then the Lib Dems are to Cameron what Blair was to Bush.

Bush used Blair.  Whilst Blair believed in right and wrong, Bush believed in saving his own skin.  From the perspective of most involved, at least at grassroots level, the same could be said to be true of Cameron and the Lib Dems.

And as Iraq served to enrich the ruthless amongst us, so Cameron’s Britain will eventually destroy all those beautiful British processes which historically allowed the humble to surface, communicate and survive.

The Shock-Doctrined Iraq-ification of the UK deserves a march like today’s

 a con, David Cameron, Enterprise Zones, Iraq, Iraq-ification, shock and awe  No Responses »
Mar 262011
 

Next Left has a shocking report on how the Tory-led Coalition is dividing the country: single parents and families with children lose out to couples without children.

The Shock Doctrine approach to re-engineering British society has been well documented.  The consequences of such an approach will be analogous to the aftermath of Iraq.  We will expect enterprise and innovation to flower in both a virtual and offline desert of people left entirely to their own devices.  I am not surprised that the government’s version of Enterprise Zones should aim utterly to attract existing businesses and organisations to locate new offices and plants.

It’s far more difficult to set up infrastructures to train up new entrepreneurs in the recognisably viable desire to create an enterprise economy than it is to drag in with bribes and sweeteners corporate money machines which already operate.  It would however be far better for the British economy long-term to create – from scratch – a pool of clever and informed individuals capable of regenerating the SME sector.  This would benefit current unemployment levels and bring new ideas and new minds into the economic cycle.

The SME sector should be our way forward to developing future corporate behemoths.  Rather than focussing all our efforts on enriching the already deep pockets of organisations which already choose to shrug off thousands of workers on behalf of the interests of their shareholders – even when they run profitable operations and generate billions of pounds in profits – we should, I think, construct Enterprise Zones tailored to the needs of the new entrepreneurs, and those we might manage to convince of the virtues of taking such a path.

We need more entrepreneurs.  But we need incubating environments to help them develop and grow – and attain that virtuous status.  These Enterprise Zones, as currently posited, incubate only those who already know how to run businesses.  Hanging on to the coattails of the considerably wealthy – as this government is clearly doing – is justifiable only in the sense that any politics worth its salt needs to attend to the needs of all its subjects.  In some strangely sad and unambitious way, however, this government has chosen to renege on that responsibility and attend only to the needs of that wealthiest part of the population which brought them to power in the first place.  Pork-barrel politics of the most overt and unhappy kind.

As the corporations benefited so obviously from the Iraq conflict, so Cameron wants the same to take place in the UK.

So today’s march is exactly what we need.  Just as during the Iraq conflict people needed to express their opposition to a piece of social re-engineering of the most naive kind – bomb a country to bits and then expect democracy to flower out of the ashes – so during this UK conflict people need to show the government that it has not done enough to convince them it has a constructive exit strategy from the all-out war it has chosen to declare on most of the country’s subjects.

Yes.  It’s the job of ambitious politicians to attempt to change nation states.  That’s true.  But, equally, it’s the job of subjects and citizens to say “enough is enough” – or, at least, when events prove, for them if not their wealthy landlords, that this just might be the case.

All power to those who are marching today.

We do not approve of the Shock-Doctrined Iraq-ification of the UK.

This is Cameron’s Iraq then – and we can learn from previous experiences.

Incompetence versus conspiracy in the NHS (or whether this is a question of political rape)

 a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, David Cameron, Iraq, Iraq-ification, NHS cuts, www.abookandablog.com  No Responses »
Jan 232011
 

I live my life according to one crucially important maxim: unpleasant stuff which happens to us – where it is the consequence of outside agencies – is a result of incompetence and not conspiracy.

There are a couple of reasons why I prefer to see the world in this way: firstly, it makes it a lot easier to sleep at night; secondly, I had some mental ill health problems in a previous life which made thoughts of conspiracy all too homely and easy to sanction; thirdly, I truly do believe that most of what happens in this world is either the result of nothing more than felicitous coincidence where it is a happy circumstance, and unfortunate inability where it is sad.

But I’m afraid my beloved maxim is currently being sorely tested by this Coalition government of “shock doctrine” tactics.  They may be invoking the Blitz spirit on the flood plains of Brisbane at the moment, but here in Blighty itself, it’s British politicians who are taking the decisions to dismantle the very structures of our most intimate lives.

Is this then a question of political rape?  Read on:

The PCTs have already started to dismantle and in London, staff with no future are haemorrhaging in droves, leaving a skeletal operation alone to determine the allocation of billions worth of spending. The Chair of The Royal College of GPs has described the proposed changes as the end of the NHS as we know it. The BMA, the Royal College of Nursing and several of the specialist medical Royal Colleges have spoken out against it. Calls to phase it in and start with a series of gradually building pilots have fallen on deaf ears. No one is sure how it will work or how adversely it will effect patient care. The very people who will be tasked with implementing such rapid change are already utterly perplexed by it.

That is because they are supposed to be. It is an engineered shock.

And this:

This is why unfettered free markets are a bad idea for health care, and why the US experience has led to a hard fought reversal away from marketization. This is also why, if they were asked to vote for it, the public never would. In fact, in the last election they clearly did not. The Conservative manifesto, with its “no major reorganisations” commitment gave exactly the opposite impression. The only way such drastic privatisation can ever be achieved is through a short sharp shock to the system. Nick Boles, the pro Cameron Conservative MP, laid it out starkly, “’Chaotic’ in our vocabulary is a good thing.” Friedman would be proud. As he himself said, “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”.

This is clearly not chaos by incompetence. It is chaos by design.

It all reminds me so very much, in fact, of another moment when shock doctrine was used to detonate a society.  Perhaps political rape is not the most appropriate metaphor to use when talking about what the Coalition government have planned for us.  In a sense, it would be more useful to take the example of the Iraq War and its aftermath to understand the mentality of the “shock doctrine” stormtroopers – and how they are so awfully unable to learn the lessons of history.

What happened to Iraq will happen to the NHS – that is to say, a costly aftermath of chaotic guerilla warfare, as structures are allowed to collapse in the expectation that vacuum will be filled by a flowering of wisdom and sensibility.

Some big expectation.

Unless, of course, enough of us become subversive enough to want to re-establish the original status quo opinion polls seem to affirm we would far rather have.  Even then, there will be no guarantees.  This government has already shown itself capable of laying the blame for generating (what is clearly now) a deliberately disturbing emotional and logistical chaos on a previous Labour regime – a regime which was anything but chaotic, however you choose to look at it.

You can’t have it both ways, can you?  You can’t argue that New Labour was a lumbering example of big government and, at the same time, accuse them of logistical chaos.  Chaos comes out of actions which are fleet of foot.  And certainly in the latter part of that thirteen years of government, you could hardly accuse their leaders of that.

The Iraq-ification of the NHS then?  Absolutely.

Time, I think, to revisit the dirty dirty of Iraq and how it affected us all.  For with this government I fear, only nine months in, that their moment of serious hubris is already on the horizon.

Cameron’s Iraq won’t be a war against a foreign people.  Cameron’s Iraq will, quite intentionally, be a war against his own.
____________________

Further reading: I’ve set up a new creative writing blog which you can find at www.abookandablog.com and which covers the years leading up to and around the Iraq War, on the basis of two documents I wrote at the time – and which I wrote in that other life I mention above.  You can find out how to use this site at the User Manual here.  More background at the About page here.

Comments and feedback, as always, most welcome – either here or there.

Breaking taboos (or the new spin)

 a con, Coalition, David Cameron, Iraq-ification, shock and awe, spin, sword and shield, taboo subjects  2 Responses »
Aug 152010
 

As a general rule, the art of political spin attempts to define perceptions of an event before ordinary people – or indeed those very rare creatures, independently minded journalists – have a chance to define their own.  Apparently, if we are to believe recent common lore, New Labour and its exponents were particularly good at this.  Given the disastrous disintegration of this movement where disintegration was absolutely not necessary, I’m inclined to believe that spin as a tool of media control was more a mythical stick used to excuse sub-standard journalism than a truth which helped define reality for more than a decade.

I’m sure that New Labour did in some ways perfect the art, but in no way did it invent it.  And, in any case, it had to deal with 24-hour rolling news in a way that no previous British politicians were expected to.  The new sword always requires a new shield which in itself provokes the invention of a new sword – and so the story, and history itself, always continues.

This wonderful and tragic article today, however, both precisely logical and heart-rendingly emotional at the same time, now points us with clarity to a new reality.  And this new reality makes me realise that net neutrality never existed – and if it ever did, it certainly does not any longer.  With so many individuals and organisations massaging net rankings and trolling websites in a coordinated way, we have a different approach to spin and – possibly – a different intentionality too:

What really, really makes me want to howl with frustration is the media-orchestrated public reception to these broken promises, reflected in first few Observer comments:
Oh my God, at last some common sense. We need to look after our own, about time too. Never send money to the Third World, it will just disappear. If you want to help ask them what they need, and then send it via ship or plane. We’ve been sending money for decades, where did it go? …….

 Developmental Aid to Africa is a misnomer to rank alongside Tony Bliar, Middle East Peace Envoy.

Many more of the same ilk will follow, on this and other more trolled media sites, and the same old themes will be there: all the money is wasted, development never happens anyway, ’charity begins at home’.

And the usual rightwingers will be right now writing up their own versions of this, just as they have done previously [...].

But the new sword that has been invented has multiple edges – and the novelty in all of this is that all are designed to cut to the quick of the opposition, to make it scream in pain and retire, terminally injured, from all battle.  This is not a double-edged sword which may also hurt the user but a new kind of weapon that allows for no taking of prisoners of war. 

So what is this new kind of spin?  In a previous lifetime, it generally kicked in just after the event but before negative perceptions could coalesce.  Now, it aims to break all taboos (foreign aid, children’s playgrounds, school refurbishment, cancer care, Trident, the armed forces in general – the list is, must and will be interminable) before anyone can suggest anything that – even for this lot – would surely be quite beyond the pale.

Before, spin was a rifle used by a sniper.  Now, it has become a stream of shot-guns used by a band of flocking feathered friends.

The savage and widespread breaking of taboos that we are witnessing disorientates the mind in much the same way as the destruction of buildings through earthquake – or, indeed, shock-and-awe bombing campaigns such as those we visited on Iraq – does to grassroots communities.  Cherished structures, both mental and physical, collapse around us and destroy our desire to fight.

The Coalition’s communications strategy is not aimed mainly at politicians but, rather, in a very Reagan-esque way, over the heads of our duly elected representatives and directly at the political membership, grassroots and people in the streets, with the aim of undermining their understanding of exactly what’s happening – what, in fact, exactly will happen.

This is the figurative Iraq-ification of the United Kingdom.  Perhaps it is all we deserve. 

Shock and awe first, and only then decide what to do with the mess. 

Perhaps, somewhere, expect – out of chaos – a structure based on certain principles (those principles which see human beings fundamentally as part of a wider machinery of wealth generation) to emerge kind of wonderfully by itself.

In the meantime, get out of it – as much as you can – as much personal enrichment as possible.

So a new sword has been invented, and that’s how it goes. 

And all that is left for me to wonder is this: if the situation I describe is a second Iraq, where does the truth lie?  What is the oil they really want?  What are they really after?