I learn the interesting news that David Aaronovitch tweeted to Joan Smith and Jenny Jones that I am:
“an angry and dangerous man who could as easily be on the far right as the far left”.
I had no idea I was on the far left, though I suppose it is a matter of perspective, and from where Mr Aaronovitch stands I, and a great many others, look awfully far away to the left. I don’t believe you should bomb people for their own good, I don’t believe the people of Palestine should be crushed, I don’t believe the profit motive should dominate the NHS, I think utilities and railways were better in public ownership, I think education should be free. I guess that makes me Joseph Stalin.
But actually I am very flattered. Apparently I am not just angry – since the invasion of Iraq and the banker bailouts everybody should be angry – but “dangerous”. If I can be a danger to the interests represented by a Rupert Murdoch employee like Aaronovitch, I must have done something right in my life. I fear he sadly overrates me; but it does make me feel a little bit warmer, and hold my head that little bit higher.
Protection, condemned above is conventional free trade malarkey that has let to this race to the bottom in material and labour costs. Adam Smith’s grossly misrepresented study of the manufacture of plain pins, extrapolated and seized by the right as justification, sanctification for free trade policies in a hypothetical ideal perfect ‘market’ that can never exist in the real word, is condemnable without a moral dimension; The Wealth of Nations, being a two-part work the first part of which and the most important is studiously ignored by todays capitalists. I would maintain, contrary to Smith that in very many cases, almost all, it is better to do anything we can do for ourselves as nations, by ourselves within this one collective, the nation, rather than the market idea that if any commodity can be bought abroad cheaper than we could produce it here, that we should buy it abroad, no matter what other considerations that might trump price.
The shallow Shirley Williams school boneheaded dismissal of Protection, is “look at the thirties and look what that lead to -world war” – therefore she and all two and half of our neo-con UK parties are in lockstep accord. If protection would lead automatically lead to war, well the free market alternative has delivered wars without end and the special circumstances of the thirties: the rise of dicators, new mass corporate or state controlled media, increased literacy -all exploited by Machiavellian propagandists contributed as much as not more than untried national self-sufficiency and doing for ourselves because we can.
The Sperglord of Doom: Better looking ? Jeez, and I thought I was beginning to need glasses.
(sigh again) Blair was a Thatcherite, But I like the title, Sperglord.
@The Sperglord of Doom
I believe in “the Sweep of History”. That is to say, if it hadn’t been Thatcher it would have been someone else. There are always Thatchers, Hitlers, Churchills and all the rest, all waiting in the wings, all the time. Only rarely, though, do circumstances favour a particular kind of person to rise to prominence.
As for Thatcher and her so-called “achievements”; all she did was allow the party that had already ended before she came to power, to be restarted for a while on the back of the sale of all the family silver, the one time draw-down of the stored solar wealth of millennia and the deregulation of the financial sector in the “Big Bang”.
By the time Labour came to power in 97, the cupboard was already bare. There was little left to sell off and North Sea oil has already peaked and was in terminal decline by about 7% per year. The only thing left was the financial sector. So, a further round of deregulation was instituted meaning the party could continue for some time more. This time entirely on the back of debt based “growth”. However, with the advent of the peaking of the global supply of light sweet crude in 2007 and the onward economic march of the BRICS, even that game is up.
It’s game over.
On the way up, over the last 200 years, our elites have managed to keep the rest of us quiet while they stuffed their faces by, occasionally throwing us a few crumbs. Enough, at least, to keep us from complaining too loudly. However, from now on in, the cake gets smaller. But, you can bet that those at the top are not going to allow their slice to get any smaller. Not if they can help it. Which means the rest of us are going to be thrown fewer crumbs from now on. Naturally, people are going to start kicking off as this new reality dawns on them. Which is precisely what we are seeing the beginnings of all over the world. Our elites have already got this covered, though and are busily implementing a claim-back of all of the “liberties” and “democratic rights” they allowed us to play with for a few decades and so allow us the illusion of freedom. Thy can’t afford to allow us those delusions now. And so, they are going to rely on more ancient, tried and tested methods of control.
The Arab Spring, the civil unrest in the Mediterranean and other parts of europe, the London riots, the illegal wars and other military adventures in the Middle East, the Occupy movement Wiki Leaks and the persecution of Julian Assange; they are all related. They are all part of the same process. they are all signs of the beginnings of a war against the people by those who would rule them
The future is going to be some form of socialism as we manage the decline of industrial civilisation or it will be a return to serfdom for the majority.
Having said all that, I would personally be disinclined to push any line – including ‘you must be more radical’ – to young people. I can remember Max Hastings, of all people, arguing that they should be manning the barricades, but as an adult it seems to me a bit cheap – why should our young people be pushed into going where older ones fear to?
Supplying them with facts and realities (and Orwell) is different: it allows them to think and make up their own minds. Most teachers I know seem to be of the same opinion.
John Goss
I can’t say I’m surprised by that reply from Aaronovitch. One injustice does not justify another and he is unable to justify his support for the horrors described in the article. It is common for proponents of regime change to attribute to their opponents support for the crimes of the targeted regime, or even a share of the responsibility for those crimes, if action is not taken. That Aaronovitch continues to use this tactic long after it has become clear that the Iraq War had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of Iraqis under Saddam, and that hundreds of thousands have died as a result of it, is indicative of how weak his position has become. If he is not willing to recant then he should at least join those who, knowing their guilt but not possessing the decency to admit it, stay silent on the matter. At least you have a clear conscience; you were not a cheerleader for Saddam, but Aaronovitch was a cheerleader for the Iraq War, and continues to be so.
Sorry bit of a garbled post (was minding dinner, whilst catching up), but you can get the gist; the sole and preposterous argument trotted out is that any form of protection, which is really just national self-sufficiency, failed catastrophically in the thirtes, when in reality it was a tiny factor in events of that decade, but is painted by many as the sole cause of ww2 and inevitably must by some specious process result in the same if it is released genie like again to revive our beleagured manufacturing base. Any limited form of protection tried now, to coddle domestic manufacturing, agriculture, mineral extraction, would be considered illegal under WTO or EU or some other autocratic body’s dictates we’ve submitted to. The figures someone mentioned about the decline of manufacturing, show its resilience when government policy was to actively dismantle it to free capital for overseas speculation, they show too that despite highly favourable conditions, the casino banking sector performed dismally before its inbuilt crashward trajectory played out.
From what I have seen of Aaronovitch, he seems like he has a massive ego as well an eye for the main chance. He is also a not a stupid man. He nailed his colours to the mast more loudly than most and so his ego is not going to let him back down yet, if ever. Also, he is intelligent enough to know that he is as likely to get as much shit, if not more, if he changes tack now. His course is fixed.
In any event, in terms of what the future holds, he probably believes he has made the “right” decision from a shamelessly pragmatic, as opposed to a principled point of view.
He’s probably right.
I just hope he isn’t.
Mods, is there a problem with my post on Thatcher in response to The Sperglord of Doom’s post?
It’s been in pre-mod a long while.
[Mod/Jon: it was auto-held due to its length, I think. No problem with it, it just gets released manually, and I was away 🙂 ]
@mary
One of Jara’s influences. I want this played at my funeral.
tinyurl.com/9vjn5nr
Noting some of the above posts, an engineer once said to me: education is what you’re left with when you’ve forgotten everything they told you.
John Goss
And Saddam got hung for it, our lot didn’t.
I saw Dateline London over the weekend chaired by our old friend Gavin Esler.
There was a woman on the panel, a London correspondent of an Arab newspaper, who said that JA had fled Sweden. GE didn’t bother to correct her. Nor did the other panelists who seemed to relish an extradition back to Sweden. So much for informative debate.
I switched channels. To hell with the BBC.
When people talk about ThatcherISM, they don’t necessary mean just Thatcher; it’s a shorthand for the whole monetarist ideology/practice. That’s why I used it wrt Heath’s Govt. They are ALL Fatch. Nu-Labour more than anyone. I thought that was clear. Clear now? 1971 was the start, really, of the dominance of Thatcherism/Keith Joseph-ism/Milton Friedmanism/Chicago-schoolism.
Yes, thanks Steve and others for all the nice comments.
It was only after witnessing Gavin Esler’s boorish treatment of Craig Murray on Newsnight that I started reading-up on the issue, and I must agree with you that BBC coverage of the facts has been appalling.
My worry now is that if the BBC can be so uninformed about Julian Assange, why should I trust them with the accurate reporting of anything else?
It’s all very depressing. Is there any broadsheet newspaper that I can trust to report this case accurately?
New Labour were Thatcherite all right, through and through. And I have little sympathy with people who say they started off supporting New Labour, and then got disillusioned, given that the party fought the 1997 on an explicitly right-wing and Thatcherite platform, so there was no excuse for supporting them even then, or for that matter in 1994.
Manufacturing industry may have declined from 26 per cent to 23% of the economy between 1979 and 1997, but that isn’t the most telling statistic to use. The percentage of the workforce in manufacturing fell from 32% to 18% between those same dates. And we haven’t even begun to talk about mining, which isn’t manufacturing. Running down coal, steel, and shipbuilding was all part of the same policy.
‘Real estate’ now accounts for something like 16% of the economy. That figure doesn’t include construction; it includes estate agency, property speculation, and landlordism – utterly parasitic ‘sectors’ which produce absolutely nothing whatsoever. Banking and financial services, including insurance(which similarly produce nothing useful whatsoever) account for 9%, but that 9% is the pivot of the British economy.
Sheeple have been given the OK to mouth half-arsed criticisms of banks, but not yet of the insurance sector, who are just as vile a bunch of thieves.
How many times do we have to say it: capital is not productive. Bourgeois economics is premised upon the mystification that it is.
Not for a long time hence I trust Vronsky. I have been reading up about her.
Robbie and Viva Ecuador.
Dateline http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01mhwx7/Dateline_London_25_08_2012/ is worth a watch. Esler, or his producers, had assembled this little group and over half the thirty minutes were devoted to a discussion on rape. The word was used many times, in connection with Assange and with the American politician’s view. Margaronis even brought up Galloway in Big Brother. You get the picture.
The contributors were Ned Temko now a correspondent for the Observer and previously editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Anthony Faiola Washington Post, Marina Al Oraibi of Asharq Al-Awsat an Arab paper based in London and published in four continents and owned by one of the Saudi royals and Maria Margaronis of The Nation. Biogs below. Two of the four with connections to the Guardian/Observer either directly employed or writing for it.
Anthony Faiola is the Washington Post’s London bureau chief, covering Britain and beyond. Faiola joined the Post in 1994, since then reporting for the paper from five continents and serving as bureau chief in Tokyo, Buenos Aires and New York. From Washington, he has also covered global economics and the U.S. financial crisis. Faiola grew up in Connecticut and Florida, graduating from Florida International University in 1990 and beginning his journalism career under the South Florida sun at the Miami Herald.
Marina Al Oraibi Assistant Editor-in-Chief Asharq Al-Awsat Newspaper, the international daily newspaper. She was previously Washington DC Bureau Chief for Asharq Alawsat, where she was based from 2009 until November 2011. Her recent work includes a series of articles on Iraqi refugees, the development of American military doctrine and high profile interviews of such personalities as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki. Al Oraibi often has assignments in the Middle East, Europe and the United States. An Iraqi-Briton, Al Oraibi was born in Sweden and raised in Iraq, Australia and Saudi Arabia, before moving to the United Kingdom.
Maria Margaronis Contributing Editor The Nation writes from The Nation’s London bureau. Her work has appeared in many other publications, including the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and Grand Street.
Ned Temko (born Edward Temko, 1952) is an American Jewish journalist and newspaper editor who has worked much of his life in the United Kingdom. His articles appear mainly in The Observer newspaper and focus on political and social issues. He has previously written for The Guardian and was, until 2005, editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Temko is a regular panelist on the BBC World programme Dateline London and BBC TV’s Question Time.
Wrt “Fatch”, sorry, didn’t mean to sound grumpy.
On another note, social media networks, in recent times, I’ve noticed a veritable cadre of Ivy League/Oxbridge/SOAS-educated American/British people of Arab/South Asian origin who consistently and sometimes aggressively push the US/NATO line of just about everything, eg. wrt Syria, Wikileaks/Assange, what they call, in a sort of planetary imperialist shorthand, ‘Af-Pak’, and ‘MENA’ – the ‘Middle East and North Africa’. Does anyone know about this? Is it organised, or is it simply a societal, internalised ‘HMV’ (‘His Master’s Voice’) phenomenon?
Suhayl Saadi 27 Aug, 2012 – 8:45 pm
When people talk about ThatcherISM…1971 was the start, really, of the dominance of Thatcherism/Keith Joseph-ism/Milton Friedmanism/Chicago-schoolism.
Okay. But it might be better to use some other term. Although I can appreciate the term Thatcherism might have some rhetorical power, but only with a particular and limited audience. For me, Thatcherism as a pejorative is just irritating.
If you consider the early seventies as the start of it all, an interesting book on that topic is Prawn Cocktail Party by the bloke who runs the Lobster website. Definately worth a read.
FWIW, I’m inclined to think that the political divide over issues such as Assange may be more between libertarians and authoritarians, than between left and right – whatever those terms mean these days.
Reading through the posts on this blog over the last few days I’ve seen much use of rightwing to seemingly mean bad and wrong .
Yet, you can go to a site such as antiwar.com and see many articles written by supposed rightwingers who clearly share the same aims of people here, who, by their posts I presume identify as leftwingers
Something to consider maybe.
Good points, Sperglord. Thanks.
Here’s a very interesting blog from a Brit who spends lots of time in Syria:
http://garisullivan.co.uk/
Ever since I got criticised by a friend for having no ideology (they said that having no ideology was an ideology in itself) I have been quite interested in this left/right thing. Apparently it happened because after the French Revolution (?) the people who were on the side of the poor sat on the left of the new parliament and the people who were on the side of the landowners sat on the right. Too late to wiki, but is this true?
I am generally on the side of everybody. Otherwise I tend to use ‘extreme right’, rather than right, wing to reflect the horrors of the Nazi ideology, since so many people who would describe themselves as right wing espouse, to a greater or lesser extent, the same aggression towards perceived minority groups ( accurately summarised by Steve, above). I am aware that the Nazis (a slang term, apparently) described themselves as ‘socialists’ and that Stalin is perceived to be left wing. Perhaps one could more accurately differentiate people into those who are kind, and those who are not. Perhaps it would even be a more productive form of political discourse. Perhaps it would be a soppy nonsense. But I know who I would rather have in charge of my future care home.
I guess many here will know this one:
http://angryarab.blogspot.co.uk/
actually, to Steve’s list could be added
it’s the Jews
it’s the Zionists
it’s the Muslims
it’s the Islamicists
it’s the homos
it’s the feminazis
it’s the Americans
it’s the Chinese
it’s the liberals
and on, as he points out. It’s never ‘me’.
Gosh, I need to get to bed.
The “left/right” dichotomy isn’t merely some emergent property of the industrial age, now to be consigned to the dustbin of history. That is because the concepts “left/right” are just the industrial age’s conceptualisation of a much older, fundamental and universal truth of the human condition. It is a new way of describing the two fundamental human social urges; the urge to share and cooperate and the urge to not share and to compete. Most normal people, most of the time, are pretty cooperative and are likely to share, particularly if they feel secure. A very small number of people, however, are deeply selfish and compete ruthlessly. Unfortunately, these kind of people tend to rise to the top of human organisational systems and so end up running the show. The reason is simple; ruthless anti-social competitiveness is, for the most part, disastrous and so most normal well adjusted people are not prepared to expend so much psychological energy on a strategy for life that is so likely to fail. Thus, the only people make it to the top the utterly ruthless, single minded psychopaths. They are the only ones stupid enough to even try. Never mind that for every one of them that “succeeds”, there are loads of them that fail.
The upshot of the above is that the world ends up being run by psychopaths who, by their very nature, devise and impose systems in their own image. And so, the rest of us end up dancing to a tune not of our composing on a stage not of our making. In short, we all end up aping the psychos at the top in terms of our daily interactions with one another. We can do this because we are, after all, humans, the most adaptable animals on the planet. But, it comes at a psychological cost and we suffer for it. In the most rabid, free-market “fuck you jack I’m alright”, “it’s every man for himself” place on the planet, the USA, they have the highest rates of self harm.
So, the answer my friends is to find all of the psychopaths who are running the show…..
And then string the fuckers up….:)
I don’t think it’s so odd that Thatcherism is used as a perjorative, though I tend to use neoconservative first. That said, I think she (and Reagan) created a monster (largely unregulated market capitalism) that she would have disapproved of had she foresaw what it would turn into.
I think Thatcher created a substantial hatred, and so made her name a swear-word, in two ways. Firstly she harboured a malice for the working classes, and her pursuance of the miners was an exercise in spiteful divisiveness for cheap political purposes. The book The Enemy Within is a good read on this era.
Furthermore, her having been working class herself was seen as ‘turning on her own class’, and so she engendered feelings of widespread betrayal. (Her lack of awareness I think exemplifies the false consciousness of the Tory-voting working class. It works roughly like the brickie who makes the role of site foreman, whose social views encourage the idea that he is now ‘better than a brickie’. In particular those views are: an attachment to rigid social hierarchy, a sense of personal (wealth) entitlement, and a faith in the aspirational and meritocratic promises of capitalism.)
I agree, on the libertarian/authoritarian divide. I think left/right are valid terms, but perhaps we omit some detail that is implied when using them. Hitler was “right wing” in social/authoritarian terms, even though his economic programme was moderate and progressive. Perhaps Stalin is “left wing” because his communism was well to the left of the Nazi’s economic policies, and so that trumped his authoritarianism, which might be described as “right wing”. Rather inaccurate stuff, and much better described at Political Compass.
I did that political compass thingy. It turns out I am Ghandi with a gun,
Only joking…..I think…
Addendum: the Political Compass has an excellent position summary of the US Presidential Election, which echoes both left and right-libertarian concerns about the convergence of the big two parties.
(on way to bed) yes, Steve, thought this at the time of the Iraq mass murder/genocide – that the psychopathic ten percent, who as Fromm analysed, actively supported Hitler, and who would have done so in any country, were precisely the people who always make their way to power.
But then again, if Hitler hadn’t emerged, many of his generals would have been post office clerks. It is a mindset (I would suggest a brain damaged mindset) which seizes an insane opportunity, in contravention of the laws of nature, and it behoves the rest of us not to resort to their devices?