New fronts of terror

For several years during various stints on a business-led Middle East/North Africa magazine, In Amenas represented little more than a pool of data – owners-producers, capacity, products, pipeline routes, end-users (broadly, us in Europe) – that’s what we cared about and reported with repetitive monotony. We could be lulled into false assumptions about its security because, like many such installations in the region, it was a militarised industrial complex in a remote outpost of a huge country used to dealing brutally with terrorists. No danger here, we effectively told subscribers.

Last week’s attack on the workers and the plant, by a bunch of Maghrebis (and, er, Canadians) pledging allegiance to a stateless cause where Salafist beliefs provide the veneer of a crusade (as if one were needed) against western geopolitics, shattered all those illusions. The numbers, around 40 hostages killed alongside 30 kidnappers in nearly five days’ worth of assault and counter-assault, are not as grim as some 90s/00s bombings. Unlike 1998’s East Africa embassy blasts, 9/11, 7/7, the Bali bombings, etc etc, this attack, on a remote plant 1,000 miles from Algiers, was a largely unseen event; in the early hours news editors, especially television editors desperate for images and movement, were forced to make assumptions and perhaps push the story too far on the basis of faintly credible sources. But the fundamentals of the event – a not-quite-successful kidnapping and a ferocious but bungled response – provide for a deeper narrative and strong resonance.

Despite the frustrating invisibility as far as insatiable western media were concerned (leading to an over-reliance on talking heads playing guessing games), there was still more than enough fodder for the endless war on terror (as Phil says, our politicians know no different) and what Cameron has proclaimed as a ‘generational struggle’ (conveniently in a theatre-galaxy far far away). We had the archetypal bad guy, ‘the Uncatchable’ Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Like Bin Laden too wise to actually be there, he was said to be a ruthless veteran of Afghanistan (must have been making the green tea; could have only been about 12) and Algeria’s civil war. We had old players in new situations – not least an Algeria frustrated its Mali peace initiative failed and then reluctantly drawn into it by offering up airspace. We had new motives – not just the broader motive of revenge for French action in Mali, but Belmokhtar’s coming out (!) as leader of a breakaway group. Thus we had new blood curdling names to assign fear to – Katibat al-Mulathameen (Masked Brigade), Those Who Sign in Blood or Signatories in Blood. All this combined with the grisly accounts of survivors.

While the ostensible aim to rush expats out to remote hideouts inevitably twisted into holding a huge industrial complex to ransom – that plant carries way more capital than a few hundred expendable staff – the ‘fluid’ dynamics of the attack resulted in a weird meta-collusion between Algiers and the attackers. A plant producing 10% of its energy and crucial in providing the revenue that keeps Algerians in subsidies and therefore more politically quiescent, gave Algiers little choice in how to deal with it. That made the jihadist raid effectively a suicide attack – attacking a complex like that could only result in a brutal reprisal, despite initial western dismay. Everyone knew the stakes. There was also perhaps an embarrassed realisation that the local security forces’ reaction at the start had been less than the iron fist we’d expected of fortress Algeria. It is worth emphasising here Algiers’ approach to the expat workers who some view as mercenaries working for first-world companies exploiting developing world resources. They were destined to end up as collateral, the ultimate price of a well-paid but highly alienating spell in the desert in the pay of majors such as BP.

‘Once again the good ol' Global War on Terror (GWOT) remains the serpent biting its own tail … As blowback goes, [Mali] is just the hors d'oeuvres’ - Pepe Escobar

So for all the talk of shutting down the Islamist threat, quixotic and inconsistent western policy shows a remarkable capacity for opening up new fronts, in weird double-step with the Islamists they denounce. While in Syria we have seen bearded warriors actively given time, space and materiel to mess up the Shia crescent, Mali was something experts had been warning about with increasing noise since Islamicised Tuareg fighters came back with loads of gear from Libya - more Arab spring blowback to consider there. Though a counterinsurgency campaign would doubtless have won sympathy with those world heritage sites and the region’s beautiful music at threat (Damon Albarn will lead the campaigning here), the west looked on as Mali’s defence structures imploded with a weak coup led by leaders nonplussed at defending the north.

What the geopolitical analysts are talking about now is a cross-Sahel force of Al-Qaida aligned fighters, bringing the pain for diverse reasons: some localised and further afield such as Somalia; others more vaguely for the ‘cause’; still more mere fronts for cocaine, cigarette and people trafficking. Such ‘existential’ crises can be pretty brutal for some. But all in all cause enough to keep the military industrial complex well funded and focused on picking nonsensical fights for decades to come.

Little Empires

‘I’ve never written about Welsh identity before: these days, I’ve got to search for things to write about, whereas in the past everything would be driven by anger and all the rest of it. Now I’ve got to delve more… Ready For Drowning is the most complete song I’ve ever written, I think…’

 – Nicky Wire, 1998

After Everything Must Go, This is my Truth Tell me Yours is the best album of a mediocre bunch – even with its overblown and airless moments, even with Wire’s retreat behind domestic lines and po-faced earnestness replacing their early half-articulate, all-encompassing ire. Ready for Drowning is perhaps not the best but the most interesting song on the album: its rippling chapel-service introduction; Bradfield’s precisely rendered Valleys diction on the line ‘Said ‘e’d y’eard it in a tacsi’; the second verse’s disappointing touch of that chronic Nineties disease whereby ‘proving you care’ feels like more of an imperative than actually caring; and the climactic sample, amidst the song’s drunk-sounding central lurch, of Richard Burton’s misanthropic telekinesis master in The Medusa Touch. As the early Manics were and remain a band only a teenager could properly love, so this, their first album produced entirely post-Richey, is inescapably the product of a band forced to grow up, but unsure what to grow into – a state reflective of, among other things, the post-industrial stasis and stagnation still affecting much of their homeland. 

Released in 1998, This is my Truth is a deeply Welsh production. Its cover photo was taken on Black Rock Sands in Gwynedd, a tourist-friendly beach which in the cover shot manages nevertheless to look as desolate and featureless as an abandoned slate quarry or the surface of the moon. The album quotes, references or eulogises Aneurin Bevan; the impressively irascible North Wales poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas; and the Welsh who left to fight fascism in 1930s Spain. In 1998, of course, at the end of a decade marked by the pushing of confected ideas of ‘Britishness’, ‘Welshness’ was also getting big (everything’s relative). As explored in Wales Off Message, Patrick Hannan’s occasionally amusing compendium of devolutionary culture and its cock-ups, the taking root of specifically Welsh political institutions gave rise to broader debates on how national identity was to be characterised and defined. The Welsh Assembly’s establishment took place alongside a very Nineties shift of focus from economic issues to the nation’s performance on various cultural stages; for Wales, this meant a cathartic concentration on the national team’s improvement on the rugby pitch and the consolidation of a dubious ‘New Welsh Cool’, based around the sudden commercial success of the Manics and the emergence in their slipstream of other Welsh bands of varying quality and longevity. 

Around the time of this album the Manics, never having previously appeared to endorse flags as anything other than combustible material, began draping their amplifiers and themselves in the red dragon. But, just as 1994’s The Holy Bible had been a refusenik splinter in the side of Britpop, so in Wales, when everything surrounding This Is My Truth seemed to indicate a post-Thatcher, post-imperial, post-devolution sigh of forward-looking relief, the Welsh album of the year was steeped in backwards-looking pessimism, quietly if resentfully resigned to despair, and old before its time. Well, of course it was. It’s Welsh.

In late-90s South Wales at least, the experience of having had work first defined as one’s purpose for living, then abruptly removed but not replaced with anything meaningful, was cemented by the shallowness of Blairite triumphalism, which, despite Kinnock’s unenviable place as New Labour’s handmaiden, had little time for Wales. The dispiriting and bathetic micro-machinations surrounding the attempt in 1998 to impose Alun Michael as London’s man in Cardiff, against Rhodri Morgan’s positioning as the people’s choice, exemplified this distance. In addition, New Labour’s post-socialist direction and the Welsh Assembly’s lack of tax-raising powers both militated against any commitment to concrete economic improvement. No longer condemned to an industrial past, vast swathes of the country remained condemned to a post-industrial future, against which the New Welsh Cool rang as hollow as a lot of other Nineties rhetoric. Against this backdrop, Ready for Drowning has no solutions and little hope to offer, in accordance with the quietly bleak defeatism, resignation and pathos that riddles the album.

On This is my Truth, lacking roots in older, more established ideas of Welshness tied to custom, place and language, Wire’s casting around for a secure identity finds him latching on to specific traditions of Welsh political history. From the Bevan quote in the album’s title to Welsh participation in the Spanish Civil War, these aspects of Welsh identity are more modern than ancient, more southern than northern, and more industrial than agrarian. They are also, crucially, based in class rather than national consciousness, and they are, equally significantly, things of a heroic and romanticised recent past – stuff of history rather than myth, but just as irrecoverable. The album derives its few comforts and securities from the past, reinforcing the present lack of either. Ready for Drowning, like If You Tolerate This…, is almost unbearable in its yearning for what’s lost – for principles, potential and power that, by the end of the twentieth century, were all over bar the shouting.

* 

[A much longer version of this, if you're so inclined, is here, here, here, here and here.]

Tech-fetish

For years I considered Richard Branson to be Britain's most over-rated businessman, but now I think it's James Dyson. Partly because such a grand reputation could be built on a small and over-priced line of white goods. Unlike the original Hoover or the Singer sewing machine, there really has been no wider economic or social impact of Dyson's products. More than this though he and his products are perfect embodiments of the tech-fetish that has bedevilled our times since the launch of Windows 95 and the spread of mobile phones.

Dyson's products all offer minor amendments to already established goods. He replaced the wheel in the wheelbarrow with a ball; he took the bag out of the vacuum cleaner. I still can't work out what's new about his hand dryers other than they are sought of upside down. He thinks his success lies in his 'engineering' but really it lies in the aesthetics of his products, his marketing department and, of course, in outsourcing the manufacturing to East Asia.

The Dyson vacuum cleaner is finished in primary coloured plastic and allows you to see inside and watch the working parts in action. It makes a fetish of its own machine-ness. It is playful, and suggests, consciously or unconsciously,  a child's toy.

When it appeared in the 1990s it was not alone in doing this. The original iMac also came in bright plastic and let the user see inside. So did the wind up radio.

 I'm sure Phil can find a good Spengler concept to capture this infitalisation of manufacturing and design. These products, I would also argue, are related to the ludicrous boosterism of Silicon Valley: particularly the claims that 'tech is the future' or that IT will bring about a new Industrial Revolution. Both the Wired crowd's love of 'tech' and Dyson's overestimation of engineering show a profound misunderstanding of the Industrial Revolution itself. It was revolutionary in world historical terms not because there were lots of innovations in machinery, but because manufacturing became, for the first time, the dominant sector in the economy. Seeing as IT and engineering are part of the services sector, which has already become the dominant sector in the western economies, it's hard to see how they could lead a similar fundamental shift in the economy.

Furthermore, in the 18th and early 19th century innovations in machinery were overwhelmingly concentrated in textiles. This was in order to make better and cheaper cottons and woollens which there was a huge mass-market for, not to sell gizmos to bored consumers. As Raphael Samuel showed long ago almost all other manufacturing sectors in Britain expanded through increasing the hours worked by labour and making incremental improvements in hand tools. There were hundreds of thousands of 'engineers' in the 19th century but their main role was to supervise and mend steam engines not to invent stuff.

In our time, the great change in manufacturing has been its relocation and, in some areas like car-making, the use of robotics. But Dell and Apple have not pioneered any significant manufacturing innovations which others sectors might want to use. Textile technologies have not really altered since the invention of the artificial fibres nearly 100 years ago. Cotton is still picked by hand in the open field, and garments made up in sweatshops with sewing machines. The future is low-tech and long hours. It's just that the Western middle class, including its liberal commentators, no longer have to see it from the study window.

Paedogeddon

"Paedogeddon" was a one-off special of Chris Morris's "Brass Eye" satirical documentary show, aired on Channel 4 on 26 July 2001. The programme was a response to the then News Of The World editor Rebekah Wade's campaign to "name and shame" convicted paeodophiles after it was revealed that the murderer of eight year old Sarah Payne, Roy Whiting, had previously abducted and assaulted young girls in the area where Sarah was killed. The News Of The World's campaign caused something of a national uproar, with mobs aggregating in housing estates and attacking individuals suspected of being paedophiles, resulting in some notorious examples of mistaken identity, including the home of a paediatrician being attacked in Newport, Wales.

The events had all the trappings of what contemporary sociologists call a "moral panic". It's fashionable to view such moral panics as media-generated phantasms, and dismiss them accordingly. But that is far from the case. A moral panic is actually a process in which a deep social problem that lies unacknowledged in the collective unconscious erupts into consciousness via the punishing social superego mechanism of the media, most usually through the tabloid press. There then follows a moment of agonising hysteria before the calming, reasonable voice of the paternalistic liberal media tamps it down with imprecations against "mob rule" and "kangaroo justice". At the end of the whole process, the issues remain pretty much as they were before. Which is to say that moral panics are media-managed cathartic processes that give vent to anxieties while doing nothing to resolve them.

"Paedogeddon", compromising its gullible populist celebrities to expose the wafer-thin understanding of the issue that drove the panic, is a classic example of a liberal-paternalist damping down of inchoate public rage. Its biting satire was actually soothing balm. It did everything necessary to endear itself to a metropolitan elite for whom the sight of mobs waving placards denouncing "peadofiles" was unspeakably embarrassing in a modern democracy. Morris excoriated the tabloid hype by imagining a Britain overwhelmed by child molesters to such an extent that, for all the complaints against the programme, it must surely have been clear that he was attacking the media's tendency towards hyperbole, and not the victims of abuse themselves.

There was, however, one problem with this approach. The actual scale of paedophile activity in Britain and northern Europe had been exposed three years earlier in a sober report by The Guardian's Nick Davies, and the reality was far in excess of Morris's satire. Davies's report, titled "The Sheer Scale Of Child Sexual Abuse In Britain" is by quite some distance the most shocking and depressing report I have ever read, and I would recommend not reading the entire article if you want to retain even the slightest flicker of faith in humanity. In attempting to enumerate the problem, he wrote:

The ease of the crime is reflected in its scale. No one knows the exact numbers, but to construct a picture is to watch an arithmetical explosion. Start with a hard fact. At the last count, there were 2,100 child sex abusers behind the bars of British jails. Now think of all those who have previously been convicted but who have been released back into the community. You have to multiply by 50: according to the Home Office Research Department, there are 108,000 convicted paedophiles in the community.

Now, think of all the child victims who are conned and confused and never report their abuse in the first place; and all those cases which are reported but which fall short of the demands of the courts; and all those cases of rape and indecent assault which are convicted but which are not statistically recorded as crimes against children. At the most conservative estimate, the NSPCC and specialist police agree with studies here and in the United States, that the official figures for convictions record no more than ten per cent of the paedophile population. Which means that today in Britain, there are probably 1.1 million paedophiles at large. Other studies suggest that the figure is very much higher.

This vast scale appears to be confirmed by “prevalance studies” which take samples of the population and establish how many were childhood victims of sexual abuse. In the UK, the United States, Germany, Switzerland and Australia, studies consistently find that around 20% of women and around 8% of men suffered sexual abuse as children. In the current population of UK children, that would cover 1.5 million girls and 520,000 boys, a figure that is consistent with the projection of 1.1 million offenders.

That's one hell of a lot of nonces. It becomes clear then, that paedophilia is not a marginal activity pursued by a small number of isolated individuals, but is an endemic part of British society, and perhaps all human societies in turn. The surprise is not in Wade's moral panic, but in the fact that the dark truth, as evidenced in the recent Jimmy Saville hysteria, stayed suppressed for so long. There is the added irony here that it was Nick Davies's research in exposing the issue that would facilitate Wade's ascent to the top of News International, and the same Nick Davies whose research into phone hacking would bring her low again.

The lesson, as with so many British scandals of recent times, is that despite the punitive hysteria and dubious methodologies of the tabloids, the truth of what they point to is usually even worse than their moral panics suggest. The crooked timber of humanity is more warped than we could ever have guessed.

The Rich Being Rich

“I believe in the rich being rich and looking after the poor, because in my experience, the poor cannot look after themselves”

In the spirit of recent-ish moves towards a proper understanding of conservatism, I thought I’d take a look at a BBC documentary on his party by late Tory pinup Alan Clark. It was made in the immediate aftermath of the 1997 general election and the end of 18 years of Tory rule. Indeed, one of the first shots is Clark standing outside a desolate Tory election soiree, with chants of “You’re out, and you know you are” echoing behind him. Interestingly, Clark is already talking in the past tense about events happening as he speaks.

Clark’s thesis is that the origins of this Tory defeat go back “to when they first became the party of government, in nineteen-twentytwo-oooo”. Implicit in his argument is that the sexism and snobbery that many would see as intimate to the party were the flaws that allowed both for the spectacular rebellion of Thatcher, but also caused them to lose to a man who publicly distained such discrimination while remaining essentially conservative: Tony Blair.

Clark sees the rebellion that caused the Tories to split from Lloyd George’s Liberal coalition as marking the foundation of modern Toryism. “The toffs and the grandees suffered from that customary illusion of politicians: that they were indispensable”. An ability to change – “that innate sense of self preservation”, Clark calls it – is what kept them in power.

The programme came out at the beginning of a long period of Tory weakness, and there’s a sense that many of those being interviewed know it. This allows for a frankness that suits Clark’s aristocratic self-confidence, a trait that caused him to be at the centre of many political gaffes when in office. While it’s difficult to call a man who speaks in full, recursive sentences plain spoken, he is less concerned with being “on message” than most politicians. The programmes introduction for instance, intercuts various members of the Tory fellowship defining Conservatism. Peter Carington merely replies bullishly, “What does everyone else say?” Clark on the other hand is able to gesture towards something central to modern conservatism: the belief in fairness within a strict hierarchy of class inequality. This enables new blood to gain positions of power and enact the radical changes necessary to preserve such a hierarchy.

There are other revealing moments. The quote at the top of this post comes from the slight, cigar-smoking Lady D’Avigdor-Goldsmid, who is subtitled as a “friend of Lord Beaverbrook” (as is Michael Foot, who wears his arm in a sling). Her remark reflects a deep, prevailing attitude in the Tory Party and indeed the whole political class. It could be said by any minister today, but only behind closed doors. Again in the intro, Nigel Lawson describes the Tories as kind of ideological police force: “If you didn’t have any criminals, you wouldn’t need policemen. And in the same way, if you didn’t have people going about with damaging political ideas and nostrums, you wouldn’t need the Conservative Party”.

As Clark stiffly minces around private clubs and his stately home – all tinted a sickly 90s VHS sepia – he frequently reiterates the point that for the history of the Tory Party in the 20^th century, anyone, even aristocracy and royalty, were disposable. He also gives us entertaining anecdotes, like the one about Lord Curzon, who lost out the office of Prime Minister to Stanley Baldwin, who remarked while seeing British soldiers bathing in Palestine that he was surprised that “the lower classes had such white skin”. Clark sees Curzon’s failure to become PM, despite being Viceroy of India and Deputy Prime Minister, as marking a sea change in the Tory Party, where power moved from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie.

From here he narrates the history of the party, but it’s not until he reaches the seventies that things become particularly relevant for us. He mocks Heath, a “replica Wilson”, for not being good at economics at school. His damming verdict of the man is that his government was “one of the most frustrating and melancholy interludes in the whole history of post-war conservativism”. Heath “had not the slightest idea of what he wanted to do” and “his objectives were often couched in language so obscure as to mislead the author as well as the audience”.

It’s here that Clark, in his attitude more than anything else, describes the conservative commitment to the sublime. The sublime is a harsh glory. It doesn’t involve getting your hands dirty – not literally at least – but it is a brisk toughness that opposes the comfortable and safe. Clark helpfully reminds us – despite it being “hard now to remember” – “just how powerful and disruptive the unions were in the nineteen-seventies”. Heath “didn’t have the muscle, political or economic, to meet the unions head-on and win”. Thatcher did.

This economic “muscle” is foreshadowed in an earlier episode by a spectral Enoch Powell, who dismisses Macmillan’s belief in planned economies, Keynesianism and that Macmillan “never accepted the monetary theory of inflation”. Powell says all this like Jacob Marley haunting Scrooge. This is fitting, as Powell’s ideas on economics and immigration haunted both the Party and the political class in general, then and now. As Clark points out, Powell’s jabs show that Macmillan was “far more left than New Labour today”.

Clark summarises the goal of Thatcher’s right hand man Keith Joseph as being an avoidance of “the ratchet effect”. That is, there was a need to reverse the polarities of British politics from socialists pulling left and Conservatives “content with the status quo”, to it being Labour “who had to apply the ratchet, while Conservatives were deciding which way the wheel must turn”. Clark delivers these lines as the camera swirls around him melodramatically in a 360 degree pan. There is a faint smile on his lips.

It’s the last half of the series that is most relevant to today, with its Tory-centric perspective of the struggles of the 80s and the illusions of the 90s. Despite Clark’s dogged and insipid devotion to Thatcher, there’s a number of interesting moments. Clark makes the surprising claim that “without North Sea oil, there could have been no Thatcherism”. And Jim Prior quotes Thatcher as saying “the problem with the middle of the road is that you get knocked down by traffic from both sides”, something the Labour Party continually fails to notice today. Sometimes the programmes aesthetic flourishes become ridiculous, like when the screen is tinted red during scenes of the miners’ strikes. To shots of policemen grappling protesters to the ground, Clark stonily intones “the conflict made [Thatcher] more determined”. The sublime at work.

However, Clark is candid about Thatcher’s tactic of using revenues from North Sea oil to pay for unemployment. Despite relishing the defeat of the miners, he calls the economic strategy “wasteful”. Convicted criminal Conrad Black makes an appearance to say that it was important to the press that “the government […] would not tolerate illegalities in the manner that some previous governments had in industrial relations disputes”. Thatcher could count on support from The Telegraph.

On the defeat in 1997 the programme says very little. John Major insists that the country is “apolitical”, but Ken Clarke puts it well when he says that during the 1997 election the Conservative Party itself “was the main subject of the debate. Not our policies. Not our ideas. We’d already won the battle of ideas – our policies were imitated by our opponents.”

None of this, I suppose, is new. But it’s interesting to see it articulated in 1997. Clark’s thesis of pragmatic Conservatism is a persuasive one. But he reveals the superficiality of his argument when he says,

“Most Tory MPs are not preoccupied with ideology. They seldom read the manifesto and indeed I don’t myself. So I don’t see the arrival of Thatcher as being a break from the pragmatic, power-driven tradition of politics that dominates this story.”

Self-interested scheming and compromise does indeed drive politicians. But that does not make them immune from ideology, whether they read press releases or not. Missing from Clark’s story is the world outside the corridors of power. Why the trade unions called strikes or why post-war politicians were committed to Keynesianism is barely hinted at. This view of politics as personal power play dominates official discourse. It’s why all of Westminster loves The Thick of It. It’s also why politicians are so totally out-of-touch with ordinary people and why they rarely stray from their bubble of big business and the 24 hour news cycle. In Clark’s view of the world, politicians are individuals like everyone else; they make pragmatic, commonsense decisions, usually for mundane personal reasons. That he can’t see this as ideology is because he is blind to it.

So it’s strange that Clark doesn’t consider Thatcher to be a true conservative. She didn’t stick to a manifesto idea of conservatism, but she favoured the rich and the privileged and saw inequality as necessary and good for it promotes “excellence”. Perhaps Clark overlooks this important aspect of the appeal of conservatism because, as an aristocrat, they do not touch him as viscerally as they do those outside of high privilege. Either that or he’s repeating the usual received opinions about conservative politics. Clark wants Thatcherism and traditionalism, but he can’t have both.

There are two lessons to be learned from the history of the Tory Party. One is that power plays, backstabbing and scheming are a necessary part of politics. The other, more important lesson is that low cunning is not enough: if you are content with appealing to the status quo, you will be destined to be directed by others who control the wheel.

I’ll give Clark the last word, as he seems to be describing not just the Tory Party, but the limits of the imagination of the current political class:

“Since 1922 the Conservative Party had been the natural party of government by stressing unity and consensus, always preferring pragmatism to ideology. Yes, the Party had its greatest electoral successes during the Thatcher years, when it abandoned this formula, but by demeaning the public sector, crushing the unions, and crippling local democracy, great damage had been caused to the traditional fabric of the nation state. In May 1997 they paid the price.

“There is now little left but question marks. How must the party change? Should it return to the One Nation tradition? Or should it push further out with a radical right wing agenda? To whom can it look for leadership?

“In 1922 the Conservatives had found rejuvenation, breaking away from a coalition that was exhausted and out-of-touch. Now the Party is in that same position itself. How feasible is it going to be for them to repeat their achievement of 75 years earlier?”