Category: Power Dynamics

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Power Dynamics

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Alan Greenspan in his memoirs.

Why did the US and UK invade Iraq? Theories abound, but here are the top four:

  1. To get rid of weapons of mass destruction.
  2. To overthrow an evil dictator and extend democracy to the Iraqi people.
  3. To aid Israel in its quest for global domination.
  4. To secure control of strategic oil reserves.

If you've read any of my previous musings, you'll know which I think is the correct answer. The real question is why so many liberal lefties and antiwar activists choose to believe variants of the first three theories. Let us suppose Iraq did have deployable nuclear missiles, as Iran might have and Israel certainly has, would this not prove the first theory right? Never mind the failure of inspectors to find little more than remnants of past chemical weapons projects in a country devastated by sanctions, that is not the primary reason why the US administration has spent over US$ 200 billion invading and occupying Iraq. If they cared about the WMDs of other countries, then presumably China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Brazil and North Korea should be of greater concern and let's not forget the nuclear arsenal of France and UK that the US usually deems friendly countries. Not even UK government ministers believe WMDs were the real reason for Britain's support. It served as a mere pretext to secure a UN rubber stamp for Anglo-American geostrategic aims.

However, many pundits have lent credence to the second excuse. Some would have us believe that even if the US and UK did it for their own self-interest, the Iraqi people benefited through their first multi-party elections and greater freedom of expression. This version of events assumes democracy can exist without any effective control over the economy of the country over which the elected officials nominally have jurisdiction. From a psychological standpoint I'd suggest most leftists who pretend Iraqis have somehow benefited from the invasion are simply in a state of denial. While they criticise the neocon elements behind the Bush Junta and Brown/Blair subsidiary in the UK, they somehow believe the US and UK are progressive forces for good, largely because they see progress in terms of the value system prevalent in trendy upper middle class circles of San Francisco, New York, London and Sydney. I can just see the likes of Peter Tatchell lecturing Iraqi students on sexual politics in a newly opened Starbucks in downtown Baghdad with Bono's U2 music in the background. Bono and Tatchell may have voiced their opposition to the invasion, but their idea of progress is very much the consumerist dystopia that made Bono rich or bankrolled Peter's lifestyle campaigns.

The third reason has certain appeals both on the hard left and within the Muslim community. To entertain this theory, we need to distinguish three groups, which many critics confuse, the Israeli government, the Israeli people and anyone with Jewish connections. The three are not the same, except many in the third category will tend to sympathise with policies and actions of the first, but that is not a given. Beyond doubt many of the key instigators behind the US/UK invasion had close ties with the Israeli government. I need not name names as this ground others have covered extensively. I'd consider this alliance little more than a marriage of convenience, but the inevitable Iraqi insurgence and growing instability hardly benefit ordinary Israelis of any faith. Not only does the conflict lead to greater migratory pressure to Israel's neighbours, but it fuels the civil war against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian terroritories. Some variants of the "They did it for Israel" theory claim Israeli business interests have their eyes set on acquiring vast quantities of real estate in a dismembered Iraq in alliance with Iraqi Kurd leaders. Now why would Israel want to extend its borders to include territory inhabitated by a largely hostile population in which Jews would be a very small minority? More likely is the thesis that Israeli military and business ventures acts a proxy for a wider axis of US, UK and other global interests. That Kurdish and Shiite distrust of the traditionally Sunni-dominated Iraqi regime has been manipulated is beyond dispute, but to extend its borders Israel would need an army much larger than the 200,000 odd US and UK troops currently stationed in Iraq. Israel is currently one of the most dangerous places in the world for practising Jews. Indeed many Russian Jews prefer Germany and most Iranian Jews have turned down large financial incentives to relocate to the Promised Land.

There are two ways to analyse power structures. One is simply to look at the ethno-religious composition of the world's elite and assume they act in the best interests of poorer members of their respective groups. However, a quick look at the world's leading bankers, oligarchs, multinational CEOs, corrupt politicians and other power brokers may reveal the over-representation of some groups and the other under-representation of others, but the gulf between this group and the rest of the world is several orders of magnitude greater than that between middle class Western Europeans and ordinary Ethopians. This elite comprises both the likes of Alan Greenspan, cited above, and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia as well as the CEO of Russia's Gazprom, Japan's Sony Corporation and India's Mittal. They owe no more allegiance to their countryfolk than is strictly necessary for public relations purposes.

However, there is another reason some prefer this Israeli connection theory to the much more obvious oil motive. They fail to believe the resources on which our high-consumption economy with a record human population are becoming scarcer, thus threatening civilisation as we know it. Many politcally correct utopian dreams rely on continous growth to accommodate unrestrained immigration to high consumption countries while others countries catch up with Western European living standards. Currently such a lifestyle depends on fossil fuels and the only realistic alternative that could hope generate anywhere near the same capacity remains the nuclear option. Faced with hard ecological facts, many leftists enter a state of denial, which in its extreme form may even lead them to refute the evidence linking human activity with climate change. Why? Because if we have to rethink our model of development and adapt to much lower levels of aggregate consumption, then, as Richard Heinberg puts it so succinctly, the party is truly over. While it's easy just to urge a reduction in consumption in wealthy regions, the obvious consequence is that the earth record population of 6.5 billion human beings risks rapid implosion. What is certain is that the more the wealthy few continue to indulge, the greater the resultant die-off.

Another analytical error common on the wishful-thinking left is the notion that the US/UK invasion of Iraq has somehow failed. This could only be true if we assume they wanted to bring about a stable and notionally democratic Iraq. They need the spectre of a civil war between rival ethno-religious groups, of an emboldened Al Qaeda and of the involvement of a Islamic Fundamentalist Iran to justify their continued presence. Indeed with the passing of the Petroleum Act and agreements for permanent US bases on Iraqi soil, the US presence there is very much for medium to long term.

They didn't do it for oil, but....

That leaves just one theory. It comes as no surprise that in BBC and CNN discussions on Iraq, oil is seldom mentioned in this regard. The Israel theory suits them fine, because they can then paint opponents as paranoid antisemites, who'd blame Israel for everything from global warming to cultural decay. They no longer entertain the first theory, preferring a mix of ill-defined geostrategic (national security) motives and selfish altruism. Many intellectuals in the public eye have long recognised this reality, but tend to qualify any oil motivations in terms of strategic control, i.e. "They didn't invade Iraq because of oil, but o gain a foothold in the Middle East so they stabilise the region in line with interests of US and UK multinationals." This is like saying "My wife doesn't work as a nude model for the money, but to stabilise our joint financial situation.". However clever such obfuscatory reasoning may appear, gaining control of oil producing regions is the same as grabbing oil, even if you do not use it yourself, but sell it to your competitors. Right now the US economy can source most of its oil from Mexico, Canada, Coolombia, Venezuala and Nigeria, but sooner or later without control over Middle East and Central Asian fossil fuel reserves the US economic model will flounder. Believe me if they could solve the problem by converting thousands of square miles to rapeseed plantations for bio-diesel or 4 metre tall Miscanthus elephant grass, they would. What peak oil deniers fail to recognise is the concept of EROEI or Energy Returned On Energy Invested. If you need to invest immense energy and reallocate vast swatches of farmland to grow fuel crops, it becomes little more than a temporary fix. The same applies to the nuclear option, it requires huge investment and hard-to-obtain uranium. It may be feasible for advanced countries like France with cosy deals with Uranium exporters like Niger to generate 80% of their energy this way, but if we used atomic power to replace fossil fuels we'd soon run out of uranium that can be easily isolated, all this without considering long-term storage, radioactivity, security and potential catastrophic accidents.

What if the US hadn't invaded Iraq?

In the short term the invasion of Iraq has cost the debt-ridden US economy dear. An estimated 250 billion US bucks squandered on one military venture could theoretically save millions of lives if diverted to third world aid. With over 300 US soldiers dead and certainly hundreds of thousands more Iraqis slaughtered, the left falls into the trap of considering this venture a failure. It may seem odd that just as the US prevented Iraq from selling its oil in Euros, the US dollar has fallen from €1.30 in 2001 to just €0.71 in September 2007, while the currency of resource-rich and sparsely populated Canada has gained significantly and for the first time in 30 years is about to overtake the nominal value of the US dollar. At the same time Russia is rising from a financial abyss. Suddenly world leaders from China, France, India to the United Kingdom, are courting Vladimir Putin and turning a blind eye to his government's human rights abuses, which actually pale into insignificance when compared to the true horrors of recent US military crimes or those of the former Soviet Union. What's more former Russian Oligarchs are fuelling the artificial property boom in London with their untold billions. Why? what's going on? How can supposedly advanced countries like the UK and US be at the mercy of Russia, Canada, Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia? Could it be because the immense financial wealth of the City of London and New York Stock Exchange will soon be worthless unless it can be translated into the commodoties we need to drive our high consumption lifestyle? Just think by 2010 Russia will be the primary provider of gas to UK homes. These countries hold the keys to the survival of the global economy because they are only ones remaining with a substantial surplus of material resources, but they comprise only a tiny fraction of the world's population. The big consumer nations, China, India, USA, Japan and the European Union will vy for these prized resources. If the US had not acted promptly to prevent its competitors from striking favourable deals with Iraq, it would have lacked the necessary military might in the region to prevent Saudi Arabia and Iran doing the same. The mounting chaos in Iraq provides a pretext for the long-term presence of US troops next door to Iran and Saudi Arabia with troops already stationed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Anyone denying the oil motive is guilty of the worst pedantry to avoid admitting the obvious. The US and UK have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to acquire control of liquid black gold to maintain, at least temporarily, their economic power. That makes New Labour politicians not just liars, but as they were no doubt aware of the true reasons for the invasion, guilty of greed, death and destruction.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qcc2YXY-COc

Bird and Fortune couldn't have put it more succinctly

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Power Dynamics

Rewriting History

A few months after Coalition forces successfully secured control of Baghdad and toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square before the world's media, Tony Blair referred to way future historians will remember the liberation of Iraq. It is certainly possible to construct a version of history in which the US and UK armed forces liberate a country condemned to years of tyranny by a murderous despot and then proceed to build the foundations of a new liberal democracy extending both wealth and freedoms to the majority of ordinary Iraqi citizens, but sadly hampered by a growing insurgency fuelled by the forces of intolerant Islamic fundamentalism and funded by external powers. Fox News succeeds fairly well at convincing a large section of the American viewing public that whether or not the Coalition forces ultimately succeed in defeating Al Qaeda, they are a force for good, but to do so they have to suppress glaring facts on the ground, not least the ninety years of Anglo-American intervention in the Middle East, overthrowing democratically elected governments, installing despots and arming client regimes, and more important a medium term plan to seize control of the largest concentration of the world's remaining cheap oil and gas reserves. Fox News's rewriting of recent history differs little from that deployed in the Stalinist Soviet Union or in the short-lived Third Reich, except for their reliance on private capital rather than a state monopoly to ensure the masses only receive filtered information and all dissent is methodically sidelined and ridiculed.

Some may recall the debate within the self-defined liberal left on the free speech we should afford to rightwing political extremists. Broadly speaking we may distinguish the Voltairean position preferred by the likes of Noam Chomsky with the militant anti-fascist position preferred by the ideological hard left, but intriguingly also by a number of national governments. The latter position, popularised as no platform for fascists, has two variants, one relying on the state to ban neo-fascist views and the other relying on militant antifascists to silence any murmurings of fascistoid historical revisionism, e.g. staging demos outside David Irving's lectures. I discussed this in Free Speech and Hate Speech, analysing the thorny issue of the intellectual freedom of Nazi holocaust deniers or revisionists (as nobody admits to denial). The subtle point many on the left fail to gauge is that historical research and debate does not need state protection, indeed as soon as the state outlaws certain versions of history, effective debate ceases. Thus currently it is illegal to call into question the official version of the Nazi holocaust in Germany, Austria, Poland, France and Israel, but apparently in Turkey and Israel it's fine to downplay the extent of Armenian holocaust. Naive leftists would extend the interpretation of the French Gaissot Law to outlaw denial of the 1918-19 Turkish slaughter of 1,500,000 Armenians (that's the usual estimate, but the Turkish government revises this down to 300,000), the victims of slavery (as many as 50 to 60 million) and the victims of Stalinism and Maoism (also in their tens of millions). As the Armenian case exemplifies, truth does not need state protection as long as historians on all sides of the debate with different cultural biases are allowed to continue their endless research and debate. When dealing with tragedies on the scale of the afore-mentioned massacres one can never be very exact with numbers, 100,000 soon becomes 1 million and 10 million can soon become just a few hundred thousand.

Out of the blue the neolaborite Guardian reports on Amaresh Misra's "War of Civilisations: India AD 1857" claiming the occupying British administration was responsible not for just a few hundred thousands deaths during the Indian Mutiny, but a deliberate policy for the eradication of as many as ten million Indians, a forgotten holocaust occurring 88 years prior to the Nazi Shoah, but seldom taught in modern British schools. Now let's have a quick reality check. Ask a random group of 20 British teenagers of their understanding of the Nazi holocaust and then ask the same question to 20 Germans in the same age group. Surprisingly most will give fairly similar answers, though I'd hazard that the German group would be a little more precise in their rendition of the official facts. Now ask the same teenagers what they know about the Indian mutiny and with one or two possible exceptions you'll meet with blank faces. Why? Because the history of British colonisation is mainly written either by British academics or by the descendants of a highly anglicised Indian ruling elite, educated in English-medium schools. To limit the death toll atributed to British loyalists to just 100,000 (the orthodox figure usually cited in history books) is tantamount to revising the horrendous murder count of the 1994 Rwandan democide by only considering official death certificates or possibly corpses counted by Red Cross personnel, both of which are undoubtedly much lower than the usual estimate of 800,000 to a million. Anyone visiting the country in the aftermath of the slaughter could not fail to appreciate the scale of the atrocities, whatever the exact composition or ethnic identity of the perpetrators and victims might have been.

Two key factors tend to muddy the waters when in comes to the historical truth of human death and desctruction. One is time itself. The further back in history a mass slaughter is buried, the harder it is to prove the exactitude of rival claims. The second is the powers of persuasion and social control. Most of us who have grown to like much of modern North American culture, myself included, may struggle with the notion that elements of the US ruling elite are responsible, either directly or indirectly, for millions of killings.

Let's fast forward to the controversy over varying Iraqi body counts. Figures range from 650,000 as estimated by the Lancet October 2006 household survey to just 70,000 as estimated by Iraqi Body Count on the basis of press reports and other official sources. The former survey used the same cluster survey method deployed in Rwanda and not dissimilar at all from the population sampling techniques used to obtain figures for other mass slaughters of the last two centuries and much more accurate than wild exaggerations of enemy atrocities sometimes used to justify intervention, most notably during the 1999 Kosovo airstrikes when a UK government minister announced as many as 100,000 Kosovans had been gone missing and feared dead at the hands of Serb security forces, without any scientifically valid surveys on the ground to back up the claim. Later estimates fail to show more than 3000 deaths during the conflict. Yet when our rulers are responsible for mass murder, we are expected to believe only the lowest estimates.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Combatting Extremism

Years of conditioning have led us to believe our benevolent leaders and entrepreneurs want to protect us from all sorts of political extremists, commonly defined on the outmoded left-right spectrum or in terms of religious fundamentalism. That our leaders themselves may be extremists seldom dawns on the collective imagination of media pundits. Could we not describe our government's commitment to ever greater surveillance as extremist, given that the UK has Europe's highest density of CCTV cameras and growing databases recording every aspect of our personal lives from our spending habits to episodes of depression meriting a visit to our GP. Living in London for the last eighteen months has made me even more aware of the degree of personal monitoring. If the Police ever wanted to know my whereabouts (and I had to have my fingerprints taken after a recent burglary in the house where I rent a room), they could simply check the Oyster Card database or possibly ask my mobile phone company for records of all calls I made or received. I would also have appeared in numerous CCTV cameras. But amazingly this does little to deter the kind of petty crime that ruins the lives of the more vulnerable members of society.

Every problem publicised by the mainstream media, whether of the tabloid Sun variety or the pseudo-intellectual Independent kind, ranging from rampant paedophilia, racism, Islamic extremism to credit card fraud seems to require the same solutions, more surveillance and more intervention by remote public and private sector bodies. If only, the parents of the abducted toddler, Maddy, had installed a CCTV camera in their children's holiday bedroom? If only Portuguese Police had an extensive database of all citizens likely to commit heinous acts of abuse against young children.

The Blair/Brown government is extremist in many other aspects too. Consider their attitude to the future of British manufacturing and agriculture, both essential for any populous country with large nutritional and material needs. They support a rather extremist variant of globalisation, in which nearly all traditional primary and secondary sector jobs (which means engaged in the extraction or production of the food and goods we consume) are either outsourced or rely on cheap seasonal labour imported from Eastern Europe. Again the UK economy has seen the most extreme transformation in the post-industrial era. If for any conceivable reason the rest of the world imposed a complete embargo on the UK forbidding the trading and movement of all goods to and from the country, its population would starve within months. Deprived of the financial gains of the superfluous service sector, supermarket shelves would begin to empty very quickly. No other European has taken such an extremist approach. The French would fair quite well from international isolation, able to produce most of its food, but Britain's economy would crumble, soon unable even to acquire the fossil fuels it needs to maintain agricultural production without resurrecting the Coal industry. Only nine miles away from my former home in Fife is the Longannet Power Station, which since 2001 has used Polish coal following the flooding of Scotland last deep vein coal pit.

The Blair regime's slavish adherence to US foreign policy is yet another example of political extremism whose consequences do not need repeating here. Last but not least is the goverment's attitude to the mass entertainment sector. Despite overwhelming opposition from the more cautious and lower-cased conservative sections of the public the government pushed through the most radical deregulation of the gambling, advertising, TV and booze sectors in a country with a personal debt of £1.3 trillion. That 1.3 times ten to the power of twelve. Just how providing more gambling opportunities will improve the lives of children already deprived of their parents company often working asocial hours is beyond me. If your social ideal is family with one parent dedicated to child rearing and housework and both parents dedicated to each other and their local community, then New Labour has certainly taken an extreme anti-family stance by removing married couple's tax relief and encouraging more women to return to work as soon after childbirth as possible by heavily subsidising childcare and empowering social services to intervene in problem families. Has anyone noticed the huge rise in children taken into care, often costing local council as much as £90,000 a year.

Wherever you look the government takes some rather extreme positions. On free trade the government unashamedly backs large multinationals. On pharmaceuticals and genetically modified food, surprise surprise it takes the same stance. The only concessions seem to relate to public relations and mitigating the socially destabilising impact of its policies, something often referred to as change management.

May the real Extremists please stand up

When the mainstream refers to extremism, it never means corporate extremism or surveillance extremism. Instead it refers to right-wing nostalgics of defunct authoritarian regimes, old-time socialists advocating nationalisation of industries and redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, little nationalists valuing cohesive mono-cultural communities, religious fundamentalists opposed to the governments women's or gay rights agenda and dissident researchers who fail to believe the orthodox version of recent events or scientific analyses (e.g. on 9/11 or the AIDS/HIV link). In short anyone who interferes with their notion of change management is an extremist. Anyone who goes with the flow and takes a positive attitude to their social engineering agenda is called a moderate. Thus a moderate is extremely in favour of outsourcing the manufacture of vacuum cleaners to China, but an extremist would rather preserve the status quo or possibly return to the recent past when most vacuum cleaners bought and used in the UK were actually made here.

Semantics

At best the mainstream media's use of the words extremist and moderate mean anticonformist and conformist respectively. At worst they mean conservatively opposed to our agenda and extremely enthusiastic about our change management agenda. Thus moderates get labelled extremists and the real extremists are rebranded realists.

The convenient extremism label enables pundits with a liberal reputation to confuse the public mind, likening racial supremacists with migration realists or UFO nuts with 9/11 sceptics. Consider if you will the Independent's front page description of the South African president as an AIDS-denier. Thus the debate as whether the undeniable rise in mortality of much of Sub-Saharan Africa due to common diseases like Tuberculosis and Malaria can be attributed to HIV and require expensive AZT drugs is simplified to denying the existence of ADIS. At stake are the lives of millions of poor Africans who could be killed not by the presence of HIV antibodies revealed by AIDS tests, but by their medication, while Western pharmaceutical multinationals reap billions, even at the huge discounts they are alleged to have offered. Many polemicists or gatekeepers imply anyone disputing the orthodox line promoted by media-savvy experts and numerous TV documentaries has mental health issues or their own axe to grind. The mere mention of the term, conspiracy theory, suggests any believers or sympathisers are by definition seriously deluded.

Off Topic

The 1960s and 70s were in many ways the heyday of free speech and social wellbeing in what we then called the Western World. One could hold opinions on all sorts of subjects without being subject to suspicion of madness and/or political incorrectness. In around 1970 one could debate the causes, morality and history of homosexual behaviour without being accused by misanthropy or extreme intolerance. One could debate the pros and cons of psychoactive medication in the general population without being accused of denying the reality of various psychiatric disorders. Political correctness emerged largely in the 1980s, ironically in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The basic tenet of political correctness is indisputable, some terms are offensive. Just consider these common dismissal of critical thiking:

Issues, Media labels and Suggested associations

Responsibility for 9/11 attacks
9/11 Conspiracy theorist, 9/11 truther, 9/11 nut Far leftist, anti-government rightist, Islamic fundamentalist, Internet-addicted loser
HIV/AIDS link
AIDS denier Religious fundamentalist, conspiracy theorist, racist, homophobe
Widespread prescription of psycho-active drugs
Anti-psychiatry nut, opponent of modern medicine, Langian, mental illness denier, religious fanatic, anarchist, psychopath apologist
The big bang theory is scientifically implausible, e.g. what triggered it.
Outmoded believer in the steady state theory, misinformed geek heretic
Sexual orientation is mainly influenced by psycho-social factors
Homophobe, gay basher, Religious fundamentalist, right-wing extremist, extreme sexual libertarian, paedophilia apologist
Climate change scepticism Climate change denier
Big oil apologist, political extremist, fantasist

I deliberately add the last item because ironically I tend to agree with the wishy washy liberal establishment in Western Europe on this, namely the onset of rapid climate change is in all likelihood man-made. I'd also agree that the Earth is spherical and orbits the Sun, creationism is a load of nonsense and UFOs are just apparently flying objects that observers fail to identify, but whose appearances have perfectly rational explanations very close to planet Earth. Personally I do not see the need to attend a debate between a creationist and the much publicised intellect of Richard Dawkins, but I'd hate to live in a world where one may not challenge Prof. Dawkins' interpretation of evolutionary biology. I'd also rather have dinner with a creationist pacificist than with a neo-Darwinian warmonger. Scientific rectitude does not always lead one to wisest practical decisions, especially when one's faith in the supremacy of human technology conceals the limits of one's own understanding of the way nature works. Judging from the prominence that bookstores and media outlets afford him, Prof. Dawkins enjoys a messianic status as a beacon of wisdom. Thus anything he says, whether he intervenes on the MMR controversy or on the HIV-AIDS link in both cases vehemently supporting the status quo, is taken as the gospel, rather odd for a confirmed atheist.

Think for yourself

In a surprisingly mild-toned Al Jazeerah Documentary titled Iraqi Oil Factor on the new Petroleum Law, a UK minister at the Foreign Office Kim Howell'ss recycled the line that the occupying Coalition forces have no interest in controlling Iraq's oil, but poignantly accusing those of us who believe in the primary role of oil behind the US/UK invasion of Iraq of "manipulating data to feed their own wild conspiracy theories". So there you have it, never mind the evidence, just stick with the safe information disseiminated on BBC News and the Guardian and steer clear of any information suggesting the criminality of our own leadership. However, many armchair lefties raised on the Independent and Channel 4 documentaries somehow expect sooner or later the true horror of our ruling class's crimes will be broadcast on prime-time TV, especially those of us who stayed up till the wee hours of the morning to watch John Pilger's prioneering documentaries. After all we live in a liberal democracy, don't we? In reality to suggest oil played no role in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq is tantamount to believing in the flat earth theory after viewing the curvature of the earth during a high-altitude transatlantic flight. The evidence is there for anyone to see. They could censor the whole Internet, TV, Radio and print media, and yet the connection could still be made by anyone prepared to dedicate their mind to their country's foreign policy.

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Power Dynamics

The Brown Broadcasting Corporation

Call me a cynic, but the BBC seems to have transitioned magnificently from its role as a covet apologist for the Blair regime to a smooth public relations operation for the emerging Brown leadership. Such a transition requires no change in logo, editorial control or political outlook. Indeed, as the electorate has grown tired of Blair's persistent hectoring and lecturing on subjects about which he is so obvioulsy ill-informed, Gordon Brown will give the New Labour project a whole new lease of life. Some English voters may not like his Scottishness, but that's quite irrelevant as his chancellorship has overseen a continuation of the steady flow of high-paid jobs away from Scotland and Northern England to the South East of England with the near total demise of the country's manufacturing sector and the flight of call centre jobs abroad.

One wonders just how Gordon Brown retained his credentials as a prudent defender of the interests of ordinary working people tied to his Scottish roots in the Lang Toun of Kirkcaldy, an area with considerable social deprivation and paradoxically the UK's highest Ritalin prescription rate (and probably lowest consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables). For his political choices over the last decade as Chancellor of Exchequer have been neither prudent nor in the interests of the traditional working classes Mr Brown claims to represent.

In the UK the best test of your overall class allegiance is not your annual income, your parents' income or even your academic background, but your favourite newspaper, whether print or online. Whether we like or not, there is a class of UK residents who instinctively buy one of the redtop tabloids, the Sun, Star, Mirror and in Scotland the Daily Record (aka the Daily Retard). As more school leavers go to university, you'll even see the shelves of student shops stacked with copies of these Celebrity Gossip comics. Without the blessing of a hanful of media magnates and their appointed editors-in-chief Thatcher would never have won such a resounding victory in 1979, 83 and 87, Kinnock might have won in 1992, but Tony Blair would never have swept to power in 1997 or retained sufficient public confidence despite his repeated warmongering, corruption and toadying to the whims of big business. The usual suspects in Scotland, the Daily Retard and the Scottish Sun, both of which have helped fuel anti-English sentiment in the past, tried their best to avert an SNP victory at the Polls. When New Labour's line manager in Holyrood, Jack McConnell, belittles the SNP's electoral gains, he does so in the full knowledge that without the gutter press the fate of the New Labour Mafia north of the border would be a whole lot worse. In short New Labour's tabloid propagandists appeal to the same tribal gut instincts that lead some to support Rangers or Celtic come what may.

Brown's left wing credentials are largely a figment of the media's and New Labour's spin machine's imagination. This is the same man who has consistently backed every single decision Tony Blair has taken on behalf of his corporate handlers. He had absolutely no qualms about hosting dinners in honour of Alan Greenberg, a person more responsible than almost anyone else for the imposition of neoliberal policies on the Third World leading to the decimation of public services and the selling off of local industries to predatory multinationals, a processs popularised as privatisation or inward investment. The only conceivable concession to those who fear a slide towards British involvement in a future US invasion of Iran seems to be his rhetorical support for a increased role of Parliament in decisions over war and peace. But let us not forget that a majority of New Labour MPs voted to support British participation in the invasion of Iraq, so why shouldn't the same bunch of lemmings fall for humanitarian propaganda that the likes of the Guardian and BBC have already begun to peddle to justify more military intervention in resource-rich regions?

Gordon Brown may give the New Labour project a temporary facelift, but don't be fooled. His prudence is as big a façade as his predecessor's integrity.

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Power Dynamics

New Labour’s Legacy

Results from recent regional and local elections should bring a few cheers to those, like me, who have long distrusted New Labour. While the letters in Tony Blair nearly form an anagram for Tory Plan B (if we replace i with p), David Cameron certainly follows in the deceptive footsteps of our Tone, as the gutter press once affectionately referred to the current prime minister. In Scotland the SNP has done surprisingly well, but thanks to last minute scaremongering by the terrible twins of the Scottish tabloid press, the Daily Record and Scottish Sun (both fervently anti-independence and ultra-Blairite) and possibly a wee bit of election rigging here and there, New Labour have just one fewer MSPs than the minority SNP administration. In Wales Plaid Cymru have made impressive gains outside their traditional heartland, but once again New Labour has hung on with the prospect of a coalition with the LibDems. So basically despite New Labour getting just 27% of the vote nationally, it's business as usual for the Blairite agenda. However, one thing is certain New Labour's lead actor is moving on to pastures new as a keynote speaker on the US conference circuit. More important New Labour under Gordon Gold-dumping Brown may well not win the next election, paving the way for Mr Cameron's entry into the world of international theatrics.

To understand New Labour's legacy we need not look so much at the legislation they did pass, some mildly positive such as devolution for Scotland and Wales or the introduction of the minimum wage and some negative such as greater surveillance of private citizens, but at their role in enabling the underlying socio-economic and governmental trends that have transformed our society. All these trends trace their roots to changes that took place long before Tony Blair had even become leader of the Labour Party, the unrestrained consumerism of the late 1980s, which in turn had been a reaction to the pessimistic realism of the late 70s and early 80s. The early Thatcher government preached "back to the basics" at school, better housekeeping with large reductions in social welfare spending, privatisation and high interest rates forcing thousands of traditional manufacturers into liquidation. For a few short years some on the left saw this as a sign of the final collapse of British capitalism. Gone were the days of jobs for life handed down from father to son, tight-knit communities built around single industrial activities like car manufacturing or coal mining. We saw the birth of a new service-oriented economy centred around the naked accumulation of capital and the shameless promotion of a consumerist lifestyle. Of course, the welfare state of the 60s and 70s did not disappear, it simply adapted to a new era and to meet new challenges. Indeed after the initial Thatcherite shock therapy, the Tory establishment began to sing a more reconciliatory tune. Despite the worst fears of some pundits state education and the beloved National Health Service survived the Thatcher and Major years albeit with a steady drift towards private provision, but few doubted where the Tories' true allegiances lay.

So what are the greatest achievements of Tony Blair's junta:

  • Transfer of interest rate varying powers from a nominally elected Chancellor of the Exchequer to a bunch of unaccountable bankers at the Bank of England. How anyone could spin this as mildly progressive is beyond me, yet Blairites and Brownites alike frequently cite this as the foundation stone of the period of unprecedented consumer growth that followed.
  • Introduction of tuition fees for higher education, while simultaneously encouraging corporate and state entities to require degrees from everyone from hairdressers to environmental safety officers (read refuse disposal workers) and promoting absurd Mickey Mouse degrees.
  • Selling half of the UK gold reserveswhen the yellow metal was at an inflation-adjusted historic low, leading to a temporary boost for the US dollar, weakening the Euro and losing over £2 billion in 5 years .
  • Deregulating TV advertising and allowing the merger of major commercial networks.
  • Granting planning permission to large supermarkets to open more and large superstores, further eroding the dwindling market share of independent family-run stores.
  • Deregulating gambling and booze.
  • Deliberately subverting EU attempts to regulate adult pornography, gambling and violent video gaming, both multi-billion pound industries linked to UK businesses though often officially based abroad.
  • Regulating the culturally ingrained habits of millions of private citizens such as smoking.
  • Increasing surveillance of private citizens.
  • Overseeing a huge rise in the prescription of psychoactive drugs for mood disorders, while co-financing the promotion of new personality disorders.

Austere back-to-basics Thatcherism transitioned seamlessly to Cool Britannia Blairism, a non-entity as Anthony Blair himself has no real convictions other than his career, through the medium of MTV-style culture. Millions had been conditioned to associate homophobic, Tory-voting, church-going besuited businessmen with the old guard, and thus positively welcomed the new guard of casually dressed supercool metrosexual advertising execs. People see these products of the nouveau riche as somehow progressive, reminiscent of rebelliously philanthropic movie stars re-enacting the cultural revolution of the late 60s and early 70s. If there is any remnant correlation between conservative values and tastes and class, then we'll find much more old-fashioned mores among the provincial working classes and lower echelons of the traditional managerial classes, than among the emerging globalised ruling elite, stretching from Glibraltar-based gambling tycoons to CEOs of funky new media companies. The money is in fun culture, not in what we tend, disparagingly, to call Victorian values. Apparently it is easier to manipulate the masses if they are lulled into a false sense of joy and diverted from critical analysis of the doctrinal system. For some progress is measured in terms of the effective presentation of abstract rights and outlawing outmoded nasty habits and pursuits. So if progress means gay marriage, smoke-free pubs and an end to fox hunting, you'll be superficially pleased with New Labour's record. Instead we have dysfunctional family units with kids increasingly isolated, over five million adults on psychoactive drugs with side effects far worse than cigarettes and nearly one billion animals slain every year to meet our voracious demand. In this context New Labour's progressive achievements are very minor indeed and pale in comparison to their services to the US-centred corporate and military establishment, especially their friends at GSK, Tesco, BA Systems and KPMG to name but a few.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Scientific Orthodoxy and Scientific Fact

Open letter to George Monbiot

I just read your recent piece (3 May 2007) on Alexander Cockburn's anthropogenic climate change scepticism and his reliance on one scientist. Let me first state that broadly speaking I'm with you on this one. Irrespective of our exact scientific interpretation, it seems obvious that the exponential rise in humanity's overall impact on our planet's delicate environment (consumption and population) has had some effect whose full impact only future generations will experience.

However, your approach equating climate change deniers with 9/11 truthers worries me for several reasons. The only thing the two groups really have in common is that they challenge the received wisdom as popularised by the mainstream liberal media such as the Independent and the BBC. However, let us be in no doubt the former group enjoys large backing from corporate lobbies and pitifully little support from grass roots activists, while the latter group receives only limited funding from a few isolated entrepreneurs, but much more support from a large grassroots movement including many relatives of those murdered in the 9/11 attacks. Indeed it cannot escape my attention that in another recent piece (Guardian, 6 February 2007) on the purported insanity of 9/11 truthers you favourably quoted a Counterpunch investigation to explain how intense heat caused by burning aircraft fuel could have distributed evenly along 400m long piles causing the towers to collapse vertically from the bottom rather than bend and topple at the point of collision. Indeed please just consider the long list of those who doubt the official conspiracy theory (in which Osama Bin Laden ordered 19 mainly Saudi Arabian hijackers to kamikaze passenger jets into strategic buildings of US military and financial power) includes not only David Ray Griffin, who has extensively dissected the official 9/11 report and answered just about every scientific point you have attempted to make, but also Richard Heinberg, author of the Party's Over, Democrat representative Cynthia McKinney, Michael Meacher and Andreas von Bülow, former State Secretary in the German Ministry of Defence. History teaches us that the establishment has never had a monopoly on empirical truth, but your reply to Cockburn's article focuses not on scientific analysis of substantive facts, but on suspect concepts such as “peer-reviewed†research or a scientific consensus. Peer review merely means that research has been reviewed by someone else in a position of trust employed by corporate or state institutions. Peer-reviewed research has been used to support the safety of genetically modified organisms with terminator genes, deny the side effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or claim that new behavioural categories such as ADHD have genetic or polygenic roots (cf. Jay Joseph, the Missing Gene). The overall bias of peer-reviewed research tends to reflect the vested interests and bias of its funders. Currently, biotech and pharmaceutical multinationals represent a huge lobby perfectly prepared to spend billions in funding research and public relations to sustain whatever scientific thesis suits their interests. Pitifully little research money is channelled into investigating the psychosocial causes of childhood behavioural problems or the dangers of genetically modified crops, so dissident researchers are soon lampooned as mavericks or even as conspiracy theorists, whose work has not been peer-reviewed. If you go against the grain in today's world of intermeshed corporate, state and non-governmental entities, your work simply does not get peer-reviewed, little more than an establishment rubber stamp.

Second, we should take a quick look at Alexander Cockburn's motivations. Honestly, I think he's an old-timer who sees progress in terms of extending to millions of the world's poor the same prosperity we take for granted. As a brand of commercialised libertarianism has accompanied this steady rise in material living standards, some mistakenly see progress as evolution towards society in the most enlightened middle-class enclaves of the US and Western Europe. Consider the cultural microcosm of the aspiring intellectual elite who congregate in the Starbucks where I sit at the heart of a larger Borders store. Most would almost definitely consider themselves progressives, yet all are indulging in a form of politically correct consumerism, reassured their coffee, or at least some of it, is fair trade and very aware of most of the issues you raise in your regular Guardian columns. Indeed your books are often on prominent display alongside those of Naomi Klein. They have, if you like, been peer-reviewed or rather vetted as safe for public consumption unlikely to rock any boats.

Science does matter and it is surely too important to leave to a technocratic elite in bed with a historically deceitful corporate establishment.

By all means, polemicise against climate change deniers, but please do so based on science and do not suggest that only an elite in the pay of big business and big government have a monopoly over scientific analysis. Despite all the rhetoric we hear from very mainstream political and business leaders, I do not see any abatement in orthodox economists' addiction to continuous material growth. The government are forging ahead with plans to expand airports and provide more gambling opportunities with an economy based on abstract financial, marketing and personal services nobody really needs. The same ruling elite who preach a "don't worry, be happy and trust us" philosophy, also invest millions in belittling, subverting and as a last resort criminalising dissident intellectuals. Just because some popular conspiracy theories are plainly wacky, does not mean all unorthodox perspectives should be tarnished with the same brush or are even conspiracy theories at all. Let us not forget in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair described the "war for oil" slur as a mere conspiracy theory circulating on the Internet. On 9/11 it is the establishment, not their naysayers, who entertain the public with a grotesque conspiracy theory defying the laws of physics. The establishment can no longer deny the reality of climate change, because you cannot lie very long about medium-term weather forecasts and the human impact on the environment is undeniable to all but the most hardened followers of Frank Füredi's Spiked Online sect (who incidentally agree with you on 9/11, but never mind). As for motivation, while it may seem superficially plausible that US imperialism in the Middle East may have induced a bunch of extremists to perpetrate atrocities against the civilian American population and some have hypothesised that US has been drawn into a war that it cannot win, copious evidence, which you have yourself quoted, shows that US plans to conquer the world's largest source of cheap and easy fossil fuels in the Middle East and Central Asia predates the first (Persian) Gulf War at a time when the US oil imports accounted for less 50% of domestic consumption. Their actions are entirely consistent both with their high-consumption economic model and with the peak oil scenario (which the likes of Alexander Cockburn and Greg Palast also deny). History is replete with examples of governments instigating and perpetrating atrocities against sections of their citizenry to engender a climate of war and hiding this reality from their own population. Without such levels of government deceit the huge crimes against humanity such as Nazi Holocaust or the largely forgotten forced famines in Belgian Congo, Ukraine or British occupied Bengal in 1943-44 would not have happened.

If we accept that Bush and Blair are not motivated by high humanitarian ideals such as spreading democracy and women's rights, defeating tyrants or ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction, then we have to weigh the merits of two explanations for their behaviour: the systematic pursuit of power or inherent contradictions of our current model of development. I submit that the driving force behind the current wave of imperialist conflict is ultimately the latter but inevitably engenders the former with increased levels of ferocity as supply fails to meet the growing demand for limited resources on a finite planet.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Is the Crime Rate Falling or Rising

One well-designed Website, www.anxietyculture.com seemed worthy of a link exchange request as it was publicised in the forum of another site I respect Medialens. It claims to offer an antidote to the mainstream media with a special focus on the left's favourite bête noire The Daily Mail. I particularly liked the article on 'Team spirit Means Mob Mentality', but took issue with the site's general dislike for the work ethic, while agreeing wholeheartedly that probably way over half of jobs in the UK serve no meaningful purpose other than entangling everyone in a huge web of endless corporate promotion, deception and bureaucracy. The site peddles a simplistic line placing huge optimism in the future evolution of humanity given recent cultural developments, with only overwork holding people back from realising their full creative potential. Judging from the polished bespoke Flash design, I'd assume that a good deal of work has gone into the site's presentation. It offers myriad excuses for trendy student types and layabouts to justify their lifestyle and falls into the dangerous trap of extolling the virtues of economic model centred around consumption and entertainment. That's right hundreds of thousands of UK residents work hard in offices, advertising agencies, shopping malls, bars, nightclubs and casinos so much of the remaining population can indulge in materialistic dreams that are both unsustainable and unattainable to all but a lucky few.

Among the myths that the reactionary press allegedly perpetrates is the relentless rise in domestic violence and anti-social behaviour. Quoting the British Crime Survey (BCS) Anxiety Culture claims not only is crime at an all time low and any statistical increases can be attributed to greater reporting and changing definitions, but accuses the BBC and Daily Mail of scaremongering. The same logic is applied to the overhyped obesity epidemic and again there is a good deal of common sense in the site 's observations. Britons ate on average more calories three decades ago and many otherwise healthy people have lived into their 80s and 90s despite being clinically overweight or obese based on the simplified body mass index. However, in both cases just because the corporate and state media simplify and misstate the causes of evident issues that people experience in their everyday lives does not mean these problems do not exist. All power elites have their own agendas. Certainly the spectre of pervasive antisocial behaviour and rampant crime can serve to justify new Draconian legislation expanding surveillance in one of the most heavily monitored countries in the world.

However, the trouble with crime statistics lies in the definition of crime. If crime means petty theft, then the installation of surveillance technology, the transition to electronic transactions for all but the smallest purchases and, dare I say, a relatively buoyant economy, albeit unsustainable with a widening rich-poor gap, have led to a marked reduction. Very few people in this country carry more than £50 in hard cash and if their car is worth more than a few hundred quid it probably has an alarm. Indeed people spend more and more of their time at home, watching TV and surfing the net. Look through the windows of houses and flats in working class areas and you'll see gigantic home cinemas in almost every living room. Increasingly each member of a household has a personalised media delivery system in their bedroom, leading to a further disintegration of family life. At least in the 70s and 80s when families would tend to watch prime-time TV together in the living room each member would benefit from the others' insights and collective viewing would also limit certain indulgences, especially graphic scenes of murder and rape.

The corporate and state elites consider crime any acts that endanger their grip on power and may destabilise the delicate social order that keeps the masses loyal to the system and easily manageable. Drunk youths rampaging down high streets scaring the living daylights out of any passers-by suit the elite agenda just fine. First their behaviour boosts not only the multi-billion pound booze business, but is also excellent for the booming CCTV surveillance industry and justifies incessant calls from mainstream politicians for more police on the beat. More important it lets the system keep tabs on young hooligans, so after their Saturday night brawls they can safely return to grease the wheels of a corrupt corporate machine. If the same youths had spent their weekend reading Joel Bakan's The Corporation or attending an antiwar demo, they might not act as obediently when asked to enforce new diktats (conveniently labelled as best practice guidelines). The real troublemakers the establishment worries about are not yobs of any social class, serving a useful purpose both as scapegoats and as bullies they can later disown, but conscientious independent thinkers, the kind of people who get labelled mavericks, mad professors, extremists and just plain crazies.

An act is only considered criminal in law if powerful forces have not only put it on the statute books but are actually willing to enforce it. If we redefined crime as 'harming, robbing or unduly exploiting others' and 'infringing on the basic human rights of others', then megabuck corporations that dominate the City of London would be in the dock alongside the politicians who let them move trillions of pounds, dollars and Euros across the globe to boost their bottom line with little regard to the immense human consequences. Indeed in the UK the kind of lobbying that led to the trial in absentia of former Italian PM Bettino Craxi and arrest of his successor Silvio Berlusconi is perfectly legal. Whether the state is minimally concerned about the harm caused by toxic effluents produced by industry essential to our high consumption lifestyle depends largely on its analysis of the effects pollution has on social and economic stability. The establishment wish both to command the loyalty of its subjects through its public image of benevolence and needs workers and consumers to be healthy enough to participate in their business model. In recent decades the establishment in much of Western Europe and North America has been able to clean up its act on industrial pollution by outsourcing most of the really dirty jobs to low wage economies.

Whether you believe the BCS or the (in my humble opinion) more realistic picture painted in Francis Gilbert's Yob Nation, a true measure of social cohesion cannot be based on abstract crime statistics, but on people's selfishness or rather their propensity towards psychopathy. I don't care if my neighbour downloads gigabytes of copyrighted music, fails to pay her taxes or smokes an illicit substance as long as this behaviour does not affect my basic dignity. Some would have us believe as a result of such transgressions musicians would stop recording new albums because peer-to-peer file sharing has put them out of business, the state would fail to provide basic social services because nobody pays taxes or we'd be plagued with rampant cannabis-induced psychosis. In the real world record companies and pop stars make billions out of a select group of high profile acts, tax evasion by ordinary citizens accounts for a minuscule percentage of potential government income and psychosis induced by other perfectly legal drugs such as alcohol is a much greater problem than the latest potent strains of cannabis. What concerns me is whether my neighbour respects my personal dignity and participates as a conscientious member of the local community. If people distrust their neighbours, indeed are encouraged by the scaremongering media to regard any deviant behaviour with suspicion, then they owe allegiance only to themselves, possibly their immediate family, and remote entities such as their employer, musical or cinematographic idols, favourite sports team, nation, special interest sect, religion or even a supranational organisation, but not to their geographic community. Increasingly people feel they have less in common with their neighbours than they do with distant cyberbuddies, so it's no wonder that we care less about the welfare of other members of our community. Despite the oft-repeated rhetoric of mainstream politicians a combination of economic and cultural trends have led to the steady corrosion not just of traditional extended families, but communities. Much of the media attention given to domestic violence, antisocial behaviour and paedophilia serve not only to spread fear and distrust, but more importantly to assert the role of a vast state and corporate control structure, comprising police, social workers, psychiatric nurses and increasingly non-governmental organisations such as abnormal personality (aka mental health) charities. Recent initiatives such as parenting lessons for begetters of antisocial children and the extension of the definition of domestic assault to include verbal abuse fit wonderfully into this pattern. Children growing up in the late 1990s and early 21st century lack the respect that previous generations had for their primary caregivers, learning early on of their parents' fallibility, e.g. Mummy why are you smoking? Don't you know it's bad for you? or Daddy, you can't send me to bed at nine o'clock, that's child abuse!

A fairer measure would be the extent of social and personal injustice. With such a pervasive network of CCTV cameras it comes as little surprise that many forms of visible theft and disorderly behaviour have shown a steady decline since the early 1990s. Criminals have simply become smarter turning to credit card identity theft, loan extortion rackets for the heavily indebted and supplying technically illegal recreational mind drugs such as ecstasy, often tacitly tolerated by the establishment. Fear of reprimand has certainly changed the way husbands and parents behave. Rather than expressing their true feelings they will often act out scenes they have witnessed in movies and TV soap operas, resorting to antidepressants and other drugs to cope with their inability to assert their role at home, or simply distancing themselves from the family. So statistical reductions in the perception of crime as reported by the government-sponsored BCS do not necessarily mean greater social tranquillity and reciprocal trust, but merely reflect the effectiveness of the government's chosen means of controlling the populace. As the establishment only cares about maintaining its tight grip over the plebs, it favours measures that boost profitability and surveillance, while atomising and marginalising the population at large and destroying traditional allegiances to local communities and faith groupings. Moral criminality is inherent in a society like ours that worships consumerism encouraging long-term debt, is hooked on soaps, violence-packed movies and with large proportions of the youth regularly playing first-person shooter games and indulging in binge drinking and gambling.

Recent legal changes have effectively outlawed traditional safety valves for pent-up anxiety such as having a ciggy and shouting at your spouse, while making it easier to get inebriated 24/7 and then blow a fortune on a night at the casino, whose extortionate operations would have been illegal only two years ago. The big criminals have been given free reign, able either to bankroll lobbies or circumvent new surveillance technology, while the little criminals are treated like naughty kids and sent to the head teacher to take their medication.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

May the Thought Police be with you!

Over the last week the mainstream media in the UK have focused on two moral issues. The first concerned the televised racial slurs of a working class Londoner raised in a Bermondsey council estate who made her name on Channel Four's Big Brother against a multi-millionaire Bollywood diva. The second drew our attention to the unwillingness of the Catholic and other religious adoption agencies to place children with same sex couples. Campaigns against discrimination on grounds of race or sexual orientation have traditionally been the preserve of the Left, who like to think of themselves as bastions of free thought forever battling ingrained establishment biases. Fast-forward to 2007 and the banning of all speech officially interpreted as racist or homophobic has become the establishment line. Were it not for heroic equal rights campaigners, so we are led to believe, women would still be working 16 hours a day scrubbing floors and satisfying the libido of their menfolk with no say whatsoever in the democratic process, dark-hued people would still be slaves or mere subjects of colonial rule and people with unauthorised sexual orientations treated as psychiatric patients. Sadly, the harsh reality on the ground differs from this fairytale image of progress over the last sixty years of unbridled consumerist expansion. Back on planet Earth hundreds of millions of mostly dark-hued people are condemned to lives of extreme economic deprivation, evicted from their ancestral lands, forced to migrate to large conurbations and sucked in to the periphery of a global economic monster that controls the population's food and energy supply and affords local units of governance little alternative but to collaborate. In the high-consumption world, relatively few women will spend hour upon hour on their knees scrubbing floors, hand-washing clothes and cooking for their extended family single-handed. Most benefit from modern technology and expect their partners to help, but unlike their recent forebears, have to hold down a second job in an office or retail outlet to fulfil themselves both materially and professionally. More and more women are prone to a whole host of emotional hang-ups as they fail to live up to media-imposed expectations and thus lack self-worth. As for the expansion of democracy to the fairer sex, we can only dwell on the state of a political system that views electors as targets of viral marketing campaigns, who need to be constantly persuaded and reassured of the establishment's good intentions and of the inherent dangers posed by any alternatives that may appear on the horizon, effectively disenfranchising anyone without access the levers of mediocracy.

The last tenet of the apparent progress we have witnessed over the last two decades is the legalisation of homosexuality and now the extension and enshrinement of gay rights. One might argue that you can only legalise something that has been banned. The same establishment that imposed Victorian values of chastity and sex only within wedlock later reversed prohibition of erotic behaviour between consenting individuals. As late as the 1960s the establishment considered homosexuality a psychiatric illness, the WHO even had a code for it and it was listed in the first two editions of the infamous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Twenty years later the latest revision of DSM-IV lists over 400 personality disorders applicable to a growing proportion of the population. So now it's okay if you have a compulsive sexual attraction to a member of the same sex. Indeed you should celebrate your diversity and insist on your right to marry, sue your employers over any alleged discrimination and even raise children that are not your own. Yet if you're a bit of geek with obsessional special interests and nonconformist socialisation patterns, you need psychiatric intervention just in case you offend mainstream society. All that's changed is the definition of which behaviours are acceptable and which are not, yet there is pitifilly little evidence that the tendency to lead a homosexual lifestyle is any more a product of one's genes than a tendency to develop a mad professor personality type, the expression of both behavioural traits is highly dependent on cultural factors. Consider, if you will, the tragic case of Alan Turing, a socially withdrawn cryptographer and pioneering computer scientist who formalised the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine and later helped war-time British intelligence services at Bletchley Park crack the Nazi code. Back then they celebrated his geekishness, a positive virtue, but referred him to a psychiatrist to treat his delusional erotic attraction to men, which eventually led to his suicide. Today, the former trait, deemed dysfunctional in any team-working environment, would be psychiatrised and the latter celebrated. So much for progress.

Why should those of us who genuinely champion the rights of the downtrodden and abhor authoritarianism in all its guises have more sympathy for Jane Goody and Catholic Bishops than for a Bollywood actress and trendy enforcers of political correctness? I'm not suggesting that any of the parties involved are free of proverbal skeletons in their cupboards, but it is clear which side the establishment is on. The same newspapers and politicians who lied to us over the real reasons for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and let predatory entrepreneurs spread the contagion of online gambling and open new legalised casinos, consider progress to be letting children be raised by same-sex couples and gagging working class expressions of inferiority by labelling it uneducated racism.

Indeed I'd go one step further, even if you believe that some same sex couples are better parents than some dysfunctional heterosexual couples (which is undoubtedly the case considering the proliferation of psychological stressors that contaminate meaningful relations between men and women in a highly competitive society), we should still support the Catholic Church's right to refer gay couples to other adoption agencies, because to do otherwise would impose the same logic and mores on everyone. An adoption agency cannot succeed without a fair balance between worthy foster parents and parentless children yearning to share the most treasured gift of any balanced childhood, a loving family with a fair balance of the roles traditionally assigned to the mother and father figures. If social services cannot place children via conservative adoption agencies due to a lack of eligible mixed gender foster parents, they can simply switch to gay-friendly adoption agencies. Likewise gay couples can simply approach an agency they know would be sympathetic to their status. Most adoption agencies consider multiple factors including the couple's emotional and economic well-being. Few children in care would benefit from being shunted from one dysfunctional household to another with enormous potential for abuse. Given the establishment's preoccupation with paedophilia, they are required to screen all candidates' police records for any hint of sexual offences (including mere cautions for briefly viewing images of underage children in sexually explicit poses) and would also be privy to confidential information about past psychiatric diagnoses. So it would, according to current best practice, be perfectly within their powers to rule somebody out as a potential foster parent because of a childhood diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome or ADHD as the parent would purportedly lack the requisite empathy or attention span to act in a responsible and loving way. However, the proposition that mixed gender parenting is always preferable is not just the opinion of one extreme fundamentalist sect, it's the experience of thousands of years of human civilisation and enshrined in cultures and religions spanning the globe. It's not two outdated Catholic Bishops against the modern forward-thinking majority, it's a bunch of New Labour intellectuals, many of whom supported all of Tony Blair's recent wars and endorse their party's wholesale capitulation to neoliberal corporatism, against the majority of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Africans, South Americans, Indians and Chinese.

If a victim of persecution and/or economic deprivation were subjected to xenophobic abuse in a land to which inescapable circumstances compelled them to migrate, there'd be little doubt about the identity of the abuser and victim. But deep down racial abuse is just an expression of malcontent. "What are you doing on my patch?", "Why don't you become like the rest of us and assimilate?" and what about "People with your colour of skin tend to come from countries I consider uncivilised, so please accept your lowly status!"?. Jane Goody may be a minor millionaire now, but unlike Shilpa Shetty she grew up in a normal working class neighbourhood, constantly exposed to myriad forms of bullying, from which she probably learned her latent xenophobia, only to seize the opportunity to make it big on the telly. To be honest, I'd never heard of either celebrity before the media-created controversy. Millions of Indians are subjected day in day out to prejudice based on class, caste and their country's growing rich-poor gap. Yet like their British counterparts, they have been mesmerised by a virtual reality of televisual deities. To offend Shilpa, even in an ill-considered temper tantrum, is to insult the dignity if the entire Indian nation, a sad indictment of global reality. Global media tycoons can have tens of thousands on the streets protesting the language used by one person against another.

C4 ratings received a major boosting, but in any sane world we would all simply switch off and start thinking with our own brains. What is even more disturbing is the way the media exploits these constructed controversies to clamp down on critical thinking, while recruiting a motley collection of Guardian-reading gate-keepers to lower the public's guard to the incipient authoritarianism. If the neological social construct of homophobia is deemed a problem that must be addressed by more media awareness, education campaigns and psychoanalysis of those who hold views considered homophobic, then how long will be before any digression from orthodox thinking is considered the legitimate subject of psychiatric intervention. Worried? You should be. When the establishment realises it has lost the argument, despite billions squandered on propaganda, on the invasion of Iraq, they denigrate the opposition by likening their most prominent spokespeople with their new demons. Thus to oppose the US invasion of Afghanistan is to support the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law. To expose the true horrors of Israel's military actions over the last 40 years is to stand side by side with a bunch of Ayatollah-worshipping, wife-beating Islamic fascists. Debate is in practice confined to the technicalities of the implementation of an agenda over which we no control. If they, the establishment, say that all loners caught downloading child pornography should be imprisoned, while the entrepreneurs who run multi-billion pound gaming and porn sites should be given free reign, then so be it. It is a triumph of propaganda that few see the conspicuous contradiction, whereby the purveyors of sexual perversion and emotional distress walk free, while their victims may easily fall into a legal nightmare by overstepping ever-shifting moral boundaries.

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Power Dynamics

Blair’s Big Brother Binge

Blair's Big Brother Binge

If you thought genuine concerns over security and welfare motivated the deceptively named bills in Tony Blair's final Queen's speech, in all likelihood you believed him when he reassured us of his noble aims to rid the world of the genocidal threat presented by Slobodan Milosevic, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. With one dead, another at large and the third awaiting his fate in death row, Blair's speech writers have had to find some new daemons to justify even more surveillance of our everyday lives. A double whammy of new anti-terrorism legislation and a revised Mental Health Act empowering the authorities to detain emotionally disturbed citizens before they commit a heinous crime. On cue the corporate and state media highlight the case of a paranoid schizophrenic allegedly failed by mental health services and let loose only to brutally murder an innocent cyclist. The only conclusions the establishment media lets us draw is that we must pour even more funds into the burgeoning mental health sector to ensure vulnerable individuals diagnosed with psychiatric disorders take their medication and are kept well out of harm's way through 24/7 surveillance. One need merely join the dots by comparing this with recent legislation purportedly crafted to defend young children from the spectre of Internet paedophiles, but conveniently enabling the police to enter any dwelling to confiscate computer equipment. Do we seriously believe that the same government that deregulates gambling, allows 24 hour boozing and praises entrepreneurs responsible for a culture of mindless hedonism would only use these newly acquired powers against a handful of psychopathic killers and child molesters? The UK already has the world's highest density of CCTV cameras (bar a few densely populated city states), the highest psychiatric disorder diagnosis rate in Europe and the highest spending on mental health services (12.5% of total health expenditure in 2002 compared to 5% in Italy and France and 10% in Germany).

The psychiatric model absolves individuals with personality disorders of responsibility for their antisocial, self-harming, obsessive, abusive, murderous or otherwise dysfunctional actions, turning misfits into victims suffering from neurological diseases rather than citizens responsible for their actions. Rather we should empower people to get meaningful jobs to fend for themselves, but if they commit a crime, they should bear the consequences. Simultaneously we hear calls for universal screening of all children for all personality disorders, allegedly to help the undiagnosed victims or keep tabs on future criminals. By focussing narrowly on genetic markers that may make people more susceptible to the expression of psychotic symptoms, they completely ignore the social context, e.g. over 50% of Londoners diagnosed with schizoid disorders have a history of drug abuse, including the widely publicised psychopathic murderer. Someone who has endured years of illegal drug abuse, followed by years of psychoactive drugs and confinement is extremely vulnerable to violent mood swings, putting a lie to the myth that lack of medication caused a murder. It would be more accurate to say that failure to offset the combined effects of legal and illegal drugs and a background of emotional abuse in a consumerist society obsessed with virtual violence triggered a killing spree. Sadly the potential for this kind of behaviour is much more prevalent than we might like to think. numerous wars soldiers, especially in times of economic hardship, social upheaval and forced abstinence, have abused their new-found power by raping and pillaging the indigenous population. Yet the same soldiers back home in more prosperous times might seem exemplary fathers and members of their communities. Besides within just one month in England alone we have witnessed two cases of fathers on SSRIs murder two or more members of their family, yet in neither case did the media highlight medication as the cause.

The real agenda is to set a precedent for preventive detention, empowering the authorities to lock up emotionally unstable citizens considered at high risk of committing murder. If this power were only used sparingly against a handful of individuals there might seem little to worry about, but recent experience with the implementation of anti-terrorism legislation would suggest otherwise. Most murders in the UK are committed either as a result of domestic disputes or by the hitmen of self-confident gangsters. To even be sure of saving a single human life a year we would need to detain thousands of citizens. Current estimates show as many 500,000 with schizoid disorders (just under 1%), a similar number for bipolar disorder (1%), Autistic Spectrum Disorders (1%), OCD (1% again) and some estimates of the controversial ADHD label as high as 3-4%. If we begin to enter the hilly territory of manic depression, now shamelessly promoted by celebrities, then well over 10% of the population could be claimed to suffer from psychiatric problems likely to require medication and/or monitoring just in case they harm themselves. All could now be at risk of arrest, all to save one or two individuals killed by madmen on the loose. Most amusing of all, Camilla Cavendish reported in the Times of London (They're getting away with murder 23/11/2006) that "... between 55 and 63 people are killed every year by people who have recently been in contact with mental health services. At about 10 per cent of the total murder count, dare I say this is quite a lot?". Sadly that is very close to the percentage of the general population who've been in touch with mental health services in the last year.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Misery Industry

In the run-up to New labour's historic 1997 electoral victory, thespian extraordinaire Tony Blair launched his rallying soundbite "education, education, education". Any brief exposure to modern teaching techniques as they have continued to evolve since would reveal the necessity to revise that slogan to "edutainment, edutainment, edutainment" .

Outside the bustling edutainment sector with semi-privatised unis offering students free I-pods and advertising the prospects of vibrant night life and casual sexual encounters, the biggest boom sector under New Labour calls itself the entertainment industry. The figures are quite staggering, but hard to quantify. The components of the entertainment sector span multiple traditional categories such as alcoholic beverages, electronic media (movies and games), retail, catering, gambling, sports and leisure, covering anything from a ten-pin bowling alley to a nighclub, a TV broadcaster to an electronics retailer, a Laser Quest virtual shooting centre to theatres now frequented only by the more educated chattering classes. According to Prospects, the official guide to post-graduate employment ( Prospects: Sport and leisure ), 13.5% of the UK work force are employed in the leisure industry accounting for 10% of the economy, excluding the mass media, an additional 0.6%, and entertainment-oriented retail sales. Now just consider that much of the remaining population work in other branches of the non-essential service sector, whether in administration, finance or advertising.

British students have long had a reputation for drinking, but I seem to recall back in the 1980s not many could afford indulge in nights out on the town more than once a week unless they had another source of income. Social life would revolve around the student bar and many would spend most evenings in swatting over their course work. Fast forward to the 21st century and student life has morphed into a non-stop partying session. Every lunchtime by the entrance of an image-obsessed Leeds Metropolitan University students earn a little extra cash to promote local night clubs, often performing stunts reminiscent of yesteryear's protesters. Even among teaching staff Curtis White's Middle Mind, the deluge of junk information that overwhelms what little remains of our independent imagination, dominates discourse. Hollywood movies, game consoles, commercial Websites, moronic TV, multi-millionnaire celebrities, consumer goods and the occasional pub crawl, interpolated only by the news agenda set by large corporations. Not surprisingly the aforementioned edutainmental establishment offers a BA Hospitality Business with Club & Casino Management . It's probably only a matter of time before they add Brothel Management to their repertoire. Welcome to Air Strip One anno 2006, where spending countless hours immersed in realistic simulations of death and destruction is apparently considered normal, indeed so normal that anyone who dares to question the morality of this pervasive pursuit awaits social exclusion, except in the safe confines of like-minded non-gamers. So they want to censor violent content from Youtube, but have they considered pulling all first-person shooter games from stores frequented by millions of young chiidren, often strategically located at kid height? No, it seems the only depravity they want to censor is that disseminated by ordinary folk, while respected corporate and state institutions fill our minds daily with the most abject technicolour vileness.

Regulating the Poor and Deregulating the Rich

If one trend were to summarise the Blair agenda, it is this. Give big business carte blanche to hook millions on their mind-altering pursuits and carcinogenic products, while imposing ever-greater restrictions on the freedom of private citizens, for their own benefit naturally.

Tobacco shares are probably not a very good buy just now as smoking has just been banned in all public buildings in Scotland and this ban looks set to extend to England next year. Revenue in public houses may decline at least in the short term in some deprived areas, but all is not bleak on the entertainment front. Apparently GSK and Aventis stand to profit enormously from the growing rate of prescription for their anti-depressants, if you're an investor follow my advice, sell tobacco shares and buy pharmaceuticals. Other opportunities loom on the horizon with considerable growth in the gambling sector, which will in turn fuel sales of both alcoholic beverages, party drugs and antidepressants. Prospects look good for the burgeoning debt relief and cash conversion business.

It may seem odd to some that the same government responsible for restricting the freedom to smoke in the name of public health, has extended pub opening hours, deregulated gambling, let the NHS dispense ever growing numbers of SSRI's (Prozac-like antidepressants) and Ritalin and oversee an explosion in the use of ecstasy in discos, night clubs and raves.

Evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease is quite compelling, but clearly it is not the only factor determining good health and longevity. Indeed some of the countries with the highest smoking rates such as Japan, Spain, France and Greece also have some of the highest life expectancies. May this have something to do with diet and lifestyle? So if you smoke 20 a day and eat junk food, it's kicking the latter habit that will statistically contribute more to lengthening your lifespan.

The whole point is it's none of the government's business to dictate such lifestyle choices, as long as citizens are well informed, are not under social or commercial pressure to adopt high risk habits and are protected against predatory and deceptive business practices.

However, the prevailing trend is to deregulate big business letting it make new inroads into the addiction sector, leading in years to come to a growing incidence of psychological problems. The same government that highlights the dangers of smoking, despite still getting huge revenues from the sale of tobacco, cohorts with its corporate friends in downplaying the adverse effects of of gambling, SSRIs, carginogenic food additives (i.e. aspartame contained in most deceptively labelled sugarfree or "no added sugar" drinks) and violent video games, all multibillion pound industries and an integral part of many young people's lives.

Consider the aspartame controversy and bear with me before you see the parallels with the tobacco controversy of the mid 20th century and its wider implications for manufacturing and controlling pleasure. There are broadly speaking three perspectives on the dangers of this pervasive sweetener. The industry has long claimed its safety is backed by research and may only pose a risk for minority groups such as phenylketonuriacs (PKU sufferers). Many aware of the alleged dangers, but regular consumers of products containing the substance, simply view it as a potential risk that may only affect them at extraordinarily high levels of consumption. They see millions consuming aspartame-containing products with no immediate side effects and even minor one benefit, aspartame does not rot your teeth as much as sugar (but other ingredients in fizzy drinks still do). Third a small minority avoid all foods likely to contain the substance because copiuous research suggests that the substance is a carcinogen even at normal levels of consumption (e.g. 3-4 aspartame-sweetened drinks and a packet of aspartame-sweetened chewing gum a day). Now if the third group were just a bunch of ill-informed conspiracy-theorists and aspartame were truly safe, you'd expect the industry to proudly and unashamedly advertise the fact. Coke Zero would be rebranded Coke Extra, now with aspartame instead of tooth-rotting sugar, Tookthkind Ribena (which incidentally still contributes to tooth decay even without added sugar) would inform parents in large print Now with added aspartame for your child's benefit. Instead we are entertained with misleading labels such as sugarfree (i.e. always contains aspartame) and no added sugar (probably contains aspartame), while the corporate health media do a little aspartame promotion by simply warning of the dangers of excessive sugar consumption, usually without distinguishing different forms of sugar (glucose, sucrose, lactose and fructose) or the fact that our body needs some sugar, a fact testified by the presence of lactose in maternal milk and fructose-containing berries in the paleolithic diet of our forebears (though later we acquired a much a sweeter tooth). Now cast your mind back to the 1940s when copious evidence available then not only linked tobacco with lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases, but proved its addictiveness. It took the tobacco industry 50 years to admit the health hazards of their lucrative products. Of course, in the meantime not all regular smokers dropped dead instantly and, ironically, mean life expectancy continued to rise. Many lived into their 70s, 80s or 90s despite their tobacco vice, while others who died early of lung cancer or heart failure had their illnesses attributed to other causes. Indeed smoking among the working classes only gained its quasi-universality in the aftermath of the 1914-18 Great War with millions returning from the trenches as nicotine addicts. Now what if, as some research would suggest, aspartame at normal rates of consumption is as carcinogenic as smoking 20 cigarettes a day? If that turns out to be the case, industry and government standards authorities would have misled the next generation by getting them hooked young with their sugarfree diet-conscious drinks, specifically targeted at kids. Since the introduction of aspartame into the food supply in the mid 1980s the incidence of diabetes and childhood obesity has skyrocketed and, ironically, per capita sugar consumption has declined. Yes the biggest rise in longevity occurred in the 1960s and 70s when over half the adult population smoked and almost everyone took sugar with their tea or coffee, but most had at least one square meal a day served at home on the dining room table rather than microwaved and consumed on the sofa before a 40" plasma screen. If aspartame has no other side effects, it makes otherwise boring food much sweeter and yummier, acting alongside MSG (monosodium glutamate) as a major appetite enhancer and encouraging a predilection for hyper-sweetened foods. If you're worried about sugared tea or coffee rotting your teeth, simply get used to taking these beverages unsweetened! If your waistline concerns you, why not just cut down on cakes and dairy products. But in a society that buys into the myth of a free lunch, we believe we can indulge without consequences and technology will always come to the rescue.

What's wrong with having fun?

Ask a stupid question and you'll get a stupid answer. We all aspire to enjoying life, but a better question would be: Why do we need such high doses of frivolous amusement to stay emotionally afloat?. If commercialised leisure centres, home cinemas and a never-ending drone of fast-beat dance music in stores and bars made us so happy, why are so many of prone to depression? Now imagine looking forward to a quiet walk in the park with a half hour break to read an enthralling novel only to find a bunch of twenty-somethings holding a daytime rave completely oblivious to your desire for tranquility? It soon becomes clear that the ecstatic joy of the few leads to the misery of the many, either because they cannot emulate the sexually appealing and self-confident charm of successful revellers or because they feel undermined or threatened by their mindless hedonism. How many of us have been to discos, nightclubs or on pub crawls, only to return with a huge hole in our bank balance and a hangover, in the vane hope that the disinhibition and stupor that booze and loud music invoke will revolutionise our social life, help us meet a dream partner or at least lead to a desperate one night stand? If you thought everyone else out there was having a whale of a time in the brave new world of post-industrial pleasure, think again. Most are at home glued to the TV, bidding on ebay, immersed in a virtual word of fantasy battles or maybe amusing themselves with titbits from www.youtube.com. We are presented with a dazzling spectacle, whose primary purpose is to distract us from leading fruitful and rewarding lives, the only source of long term happiness for those of us unlucky enough not to win the lottery. Once distracted, our animalistic behaviour can be monitored and and our lives more pervasively controlled. For if adults can be mesmerised into behaving like spoilt children on steroids, some will inevitably overstep the mark and require 24/7 surveillance, enabling the corporate and state establishment to clamp down on its real enemies, sober critical thinkers.