"New" Labour

To my immense surprise, I just heard Tony Blair on the radio summing up the primary characteristic of the last 9 years of government: "We spend without asking how effective is the spending." This is precisely "New" Labour's major innovation - they have done truly remarkable work in systematising the waste of fortunes in money and resources, with PFI initiatives leading the way.
I makes one wonder just how brazen Blair and New Labour will become about what they're up to before people stop voting for them. This government was defined in its first 5 years or so by "spin" (or so, at least, the journalists had it). In the last 4, it seems to have been more a realisation that they can do what they like because no one is going to ask serious questions about it.

His right to say it...

David Irving has been found guilty of denying the Nazi Holocaust in Austria, and has been sentenced to 3 years in prison. I've never been much interested in Irving personally, and am in no position to judge the value of his work in general (although I note with interest that a historian like Prof. Ian Kershaw at Sheffield, one of the leading experts on the Third Reich, and someone who has no doubt that Hitler took a decision to launch a campaign of extermination against Europe's Jews and directed his military staff to carry it out, is willing to cite Irving's work as evidence in the course of his celebrated biography of Hitler) but the point of principle about freedom of speech should be clear - not least as this comes just as the Danish cartoon controversy is dying down. Will the newspaper editors so outraged that anybody could suggest that offensive cartoons of Mohammed should not be published all come out against academic censorship? Those attempting to hide their hypocrisy are going to have a seriously hard time...
Perhaps I should be a little wary of defending Irving's right to publish/proclaim racist nonsense - the "news" that Chomsky defended the right of Robert Faurisson (a French academic accused of Holocaust denial) to print what he liked still appears fresh and shocking in certain quarters, even though it is 25 years old. Perhaps if I ever make a career out of writing, or history (or both!) it will all come back to haunt me...
Nevertheless, the point of principle should be clear enough: either we favour free speech or we don't. Free speech only for those who say 'acceptable' things is precisely the sort of "value" which upheld the power of the genocidal Nazi regime.

At the movies

"A Cock and Bull Story" is a wonderful comedy, but best avoided if you don't know what irony is. 10/10

"Cache" ("Hidden") is one of the best thrillers I have ever seen, featuring some stunningly beautiful photography but best avoided if you don't like leaving the cinema thinking through the implications of what you've just seen, and desperate to see the film again. 10/10

"Brokeback Mountain" is excellent for precisely none of the reasons the gushing reviews give, but for plenty of others. In much the same way as Pulp Fiction, the cinema-literate will find plenty (some suttle, some not so suttle) of new takes on old themes to enjoy. The cinema-illiterate will likely appreciate a distinctly palatable love story (four words I don't string together very often!). It deserves Oscars less than films like Hidden, The Beat that My Heart Skipped, A History of Violence or Wolf Creek (or even Batman Begins for that matter) but certainly a lot more than Crash. 9/10.

Voting

Yes, in a parliamentary "democracy," people are not really qualified to vote on issues that affect their lives and general wellbeing - so someone else has to do it for us, those good old MPs. And the leftiest of the lefy Labour "rebels" have really distinguished themselves this week by.... falling in to line with precisely the sorts of things they claim to dislike most about Blair's "New" Labour programme. Rowan Atkinson's (and the House of Lords'... but who listens to the House of Lords? Celebrity is our nobility!) efforts to defend freedom of speech (specifically, to stop "glorifying terror" being criminialised) have been thwarted by a second vote which affirmed that it should be criminalised. Some pedantic person might trawl through what the Foreign Office and Mr. Blair (or his successor-in-training) have to say about, say Palestine, Iraq, Indonesia, or other places where state-sponsored terrorism abounds - I'm confident some glorification could be found; any mention of the invasion of Afghanistan by "the coalition" is sure to be pretty glorified...

You now can't smoke whilst eating your dinner in public... probably not unwise all in all, but how many people smoke during dinner? (I fear some pubs, including a very nice one in St. Albans will be rendered unprofitable if they are faced with a choice between stopping serving food and banning smoking). Perhaps one could blame smokers for never sticking to the 'designated non-smoking areas' they have in a lot of pubs. I'm pretty ambivalent about it really - all you need to keep workers safe is decent ventilation. The argument that says "why should we tax-paying non-smokers pay to treat lung cancer that people knew they were going to get by smoking" is a bit silly though - you don't have to run very far with it to find a long list of people the NHS "shouldn't have" to treat because they were basically being negligent: people who get heart disease from an unhealthy diet, people who drive to fast and crash their cars (or even: people negligent enough to use a form of transport as unsafe as the car) people who play rugby? And so on...

Worst of all though, on Monday the MPs voted in favour of the introduction of these wretched biometric ID cards, which will essentially be: an enormous amount of free money for whichever private company (probably Capita) wins the contract to make them; the cost (and, doubtless, the risk - this is the key distinguishing feature of PFI, simple to understand but systematically concealed) will be socialised on a highly regressive basis (ie everyone has to pay the same, no matter how rich they are) instead of being funded by tax, a massive increase in the capcity for government surveillance to diminish the possibility of privacy (and, surely, freedom). Let us be clear, terrorism has not a thing to do with it, and the Home Secretary so keen on their introduction has admitted that if every British citizen had had one of these ID cards, it would have done NOTHING to prevent the callous murders of July the 7th.

Whatever one may think of these decisions in isolation, it is surely difficult to defend the claim that democracy and freedom (the two watchwords of the 'war on terror' which increasingly seems to define the present era) can be served by bowing to the wisdom of political leaders - these things must be claimed at the popular level, before the opportunity to save the world from "ultimate doom" has passed. (The threat of "Ultimate doom" isn't me being over-dramatic, but a fear which writers in Daedalus, the rather conservative and reserved journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences judge to be a very real possibility for the near future, which will surely be guaranteed if we as citizens can successfully be convinced of the most powerful deception of our time: that the idea that people make their own history is false. It is for this reason that, contrary to what someone said to me the other day, history is not 'optional' - it is necessary, at least for those who count a better future among their concerns.)

Still up to their old tricks...

When George Monbiot sticks to what he's best at, he can produce exemplary journalism. This week's subject: revelations about efforts of tobacco firms in the mid-90s to get some pro-smoking articles in the media, hiding behind the facade of a weird sort of revisionist science group called 'Arise.' Cracking stuff.

"Opposition"

In case anyone thought I was being a bit extreme in yesterday's post in my criticism of the intellectual opposition to the Bush clique, there's a long essay by Thomas Powers in the forthcoming (Feb. 23) issue of the New York Review which provides an excellent illustration of the kind of thing I mean. It begins "The challenges posed to American democracy by secrecy and by unchecked presidential power are the two great themes running through the history of the Iraq war..."

Budget priorities

The US budget seems to get a bit more scrutiny than the British one, which is perhaps why there's usually little attempt to disguise where the spending priorities lie. It doesn't require close analysis. The first paragraph of what will be the FT's front-page story on it tomorrow lays out the key elements:
"The White House on Monday put national security at the centre of its budget priorities, proposing increases in defence and homeland security while calling for $65bn in cuts in areas such as health insurance for the elderly and long-term entitlement reform."
The other coverage gives some interesting comparison figures. The tax cuts implemented in the first term - some of which are temporary that the administration wants to make permanent - are estimated at costing $100bn or so per year (very conservative estimate - see ibid.) It's worth bearing in mind that those cuts overwhelmingly affected the top 2% of earners.
The biggest cuts will be made to Medicare - the programme that provides a little relief to those on the sharp edge of what may be the most inefficient healthcare system in the world - which will lose $36bn (ibid.) The military budget rises to $439bn but that figure does not include "requests for $9.3bn to maintain the US nuclear arsenal or $50bn in emergency spending to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House last week asked for an additional $70bn in emergency spending for the fiscal year 2006." This brings "the total cost of the war [on terror] since 2001 to $443bn."
A mass of figures, but the main point is that the gigantic defence spending dwarves the cuts to welfare and health programmes, but these stingy cuts will have serious effects on America's most vulnerable and needy citizens (the elderly, single parents, the ill/disabled, inner-city African-Americans and other minority groups - Lord help those unfortunate enough to be a combination of these things).
"National priorities" require "tightening our belts elsewhere" the director fo the Office of Management and Budget Joshua Bolten asserts. Clearly, the safety and well-being of the American people in no way constitute a "priority" for the administration.

The institutionalised disparities and attempts to ensure that the dispensable elements in American society become disengaged from civil and political life create constraints on freedom and democracy that far outweigh the abuses that so outrage the "left-liberal" intelligentsia (at the moment, matters of principle like domestic spying and other 'civil liberties'). Too many who lamented Bush's re-election and the decline of Democratic politics are living in a bubble where politics is something detatched from their everyday experience, and matters of democratic principle matter more than then health or welfare policies. Little wonder, then, that as disillusioned New Englanders wonder "What's the matter with Kansas?," those on the receiving end of the Republicans worst excesses at home, who ought to form a base of political support for those presenting themselves as an "alternative" to this reactionary government, feel as though these people and the political programmes they pursue are no more relevant to them or representative of their interests than those of the Republicans.
If prospects look dim for those who care about the future of America, it is less because a group of reactionaries have taken the reigns and led the country down a dangerous, potentially disastrous path (although they have) and more because their political opponents have been completely unable to formulate an alternative that will address the major concerns of what ought to be their core constituency.
There are sources of hope for the future, but you'd have a hard time finding them among the Democrats.