:: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 ::

A Personal View:

What I want to address is the unmistakable sense of superiority amongst large sections of the educated opinion on this side of the Atlantic, which basically is comfortable in the knowledge of however silly the Americans are behaving at the moment, that this is only to be expected of a country that can’t even place 2/3 of the rest of the world on the map, whose citizens don’t really travel out of their own borders etc. Europeans with their history, being part of the Old World and much more knowledgable about the rest of the globe could never fall prey to such easy manipulation or stereotyping. “Yes, well what do expect; they are Americans after all” is the common refrain in the smoke-filled bars and cafes that one can hear in London. Suspect elections, dodgy electioneering, Christian fundamentalism, and the heavy hand of corporate money in political fundraising, media manipulation of public opinion, disinterested voters and a citizenry that consists mostly of sheeple rather than informed and active people. The implicit assumption seems to be that this could never happen here on in a ‘civilised’ place like Europe, and for argument’s sake let us say Britain.

Or could it.

What really is the difference in the way political opinion operates and the influence it has on politics in the US and UK. A cliché seems to be the disregard the current Bush administration has for the wishes of the “people” yet when opinion polling indicated that the US public would not back a war against Iraq without the presence of allies in a coalition, the Oil-men in the regime had to chomp at the bit and go through the rigmarole of seeking a UN resolution and reviving the spectre of UN inspectors searching for WMD. This in a country where the dominance of the Corporate media is endlessly bemoaned and where the average voter is seen as malleable clay for the nefarious policy making elite that decides US foreign policy. What about the UK? Here polls have consistently shown that most of the electorate is against the war, the last anti-war rally in London saw 400,000 people to protest against the war and another is planned in February, the most senior figure in the Church of England (to which 90% of the British population belong to formally), Rowan Williams the new Archbishop of Canterbury, has in writing said that a war against Iraq would be immoral, Labour party backbenchers are relishing a debate in Parliament since they know there will be an internal revolt in the shiny mechanical Machine of New Labour against any military action in Iraq and the Liberal Democrat party has already made it clear that it would vote against any military action involving British troops; Tony Blair knowing this has made it clear that there will be no Parliamentary vote or debate on the upcoming Iraq situation; even the military are not happy with the Chief of Army Staff voicing private concerns about Britain’s ability to conduct any prolonged conflict in the Gulf. So basically despite the presence of wide felt opposition and resistance to the war from various groups the British PM has been able to go ahead without conceding any substantial ground to his critics. This becomes even more important as for intents and purposes Britain is the only real ally the US has; most Arab countries being unhappy about American plans, the rest Europe varying from lukewarm to downright sceptical and traditional allies like Canada wary of US intentions. The only difference it seems to me is that while it may be easier to shape and manoeuvre public opinion in the US to go for a war, there is a need to pay attention to the “ratings” as it were and any wavering on this front raises concerns; in Britain it seems that one can steamroller over opposition with a belief in the Spin-machine of New Labour and the peculiar constitutional role of the Prime Minister which gives plenty of room for fudging for a PM who has a strong command over his party machinery and a substantial majority in Parliament. To put it another in the US a populace can be conditioned to believe that a war is the answer, or at least conditioned not to question the leadership decisions of the administration and such lack of critical thinking is bemoaned by the rest of the world. Yet in a place like Britain where such resistance is endemic and prevalent within the polity and civil society, there is not even a minimal concession to such sentiment. A case of well if you want the war support it or show your desire for an alternative; yet when such a desire is expressed, it is a response of “tough, we want our war and we are going ahead with it anyway”.

Yesterday, Tony was reduced to addressing 150 British Ambassadors and High Commissioners that had gathered in London for one the regular briefing sessions that the Foreign Office holds. It was a scheduled occurrence, yet none of the wags could help commenting that since no one else in the country accepted the govt line on Iraq and there were few forums where Tony wouldn’t face either entrenched disbelief or uncomfortable questions he was reduced to addressing a collection of bearcats and civil servants when he should have been addressing the nation. There is more than a little truth in this; in the last two weeks alone serious crisis have come to a head in the weakened Public services in Britain. Despite the election refrain of “Education, Education and Education” the govt education policy is in tatters. Falling funding for Universities has forced the introduction of fees for undergraduates and now with little improvement top-up fees are proposed which set the scene for more confrontation with the National Union of Students and more worryingly for New Labour hordes of irate middle-class parents. More seriously the teacher shortages in the national schooling system has reached threatening depths, with several counties in the South-East like Essex now having 3-day school weeks owing to shortage of staff (shortages which were so severe that inadvertently checks on those with criminal convictions for sexually related assaults and crimes were not properly implemented in screening applicants for supply teacher positions) and a survey out this week showed that one in five teachers are going to leave the education profession in the next year. The problems with education are reflected in the other great public service the NHS which is also struggling under similar problems of not enough staff, too few hospital beds and a resource crunch in providing adequate health care to vulnerable groups like the elderly and those diagnosed with terminal conditions. The simmering pay dispute which saw a Fire-fighters strike is still on the horizon; last time strike action saw the Army fulfilling the fire-fighters’ role and coming out to respond to emergencies; but the Joint Chiefs of the Defence Services have made it clear that any action in Iraq will mean that no such cover will be available for any such strike action in the future. I can only wonder that a Labour govt elected on specific pledges to improve the Public Services and rejuvenate the Education and Health sectors is willing to jeopardise and subjugate these aims for a war in the Gulf. Discontent at home will not be bought off by success overseas in this case.

As for the media bias and the attempts of the govt spin-machine to control public perception; given the weaker institutionalisation of corporate control in the media sector this has been harder; yet such elements are not non-existent, they are just articulated in different ways. The discovery yesterday of 5 men in a north London area, Wood Green, possessing substantial amounts of ricin, a deadly poison made from castor beans; was carried in all the late night news media. The Blair govt was quick to exploit this, with Tony saying that it was a clear indication of why it was important to make sure that terrorists do not acquire WMD and so British intervention in Iraq etc. The Defence Secretary David Hoon weighed in with comments as to how this was a pure terror weapon and was an indication of how future attacks in Britain might happen. More mind boggling was that the same news reports blissfully carried interviews with anti-terrorism experts who said that ricin was not very suitable for targeting large populations given the way it needed to be administered and that its main use was as a poison most suited for individual assassinations. The men arrested were all of Algerian nationality and had no clear connection with Iraq. Even more disturbingly were some of the interviews of local London residents that were broadcast on today’s news. Most interviewed from Wood Green complained of the lack of community spirit in the locality and linked this with influxes of Asylum Seekers and refugees. Others blamed the ethnic diversity of the neighbourhood, which impeded cross-cutting socialisation and contact and segmented people into their own mini-communities. There was much harking back to a time of 20-30 years ago when the reverse was the case and when neighbourhoods such as Wood Green were “friendly places where everybody knew everybody else” - the idea that London or that any major metropolis today is or can be like this is more than slightly utopian. I will not comment on the more obvious undercurrent here except for the persistent but bizarre link between such changes in the social make-up and the presence of Asylum Seekers. Asylum Seekers seem to be a peculiarly British obsession; most Western countries have some sort of hostility towards immigrants especially those who are of a different ethnicity and this is articulated differently from one country to the next. What strikes me as so peculiar, odd and, well British about the choice of Asylum Seekers is the sheer incongruity of it all. These are people who face genuine persecution in their own countries and quite often are victims of torture, death threats and intimidation; those that aren’t and are referred to as “bogus asylum seekers” face no political persecution but living conditions that are so appalling that they take life-threatening and inordinately costly passages to escape such conditions in the hope of a better situation in their country of refuge. It is sickening to see such a weak and defenceless group be on the receiving end of so much hostility and hatred; the real fear being of course that they are “economic migrants” and not bona fide refugees. The real question as to why economic migrants need to be so treated is quietly elided away and so do code-words for xenophobic and racist sentiment creep into respectable public discourse. The govt instead of trying to correct public opinion in this case tends to pander to it with high-profile but futile gestures in toughening up immigration and order controls and hunting down illegal refugees. Thus the disgusting site before the air campaign in Afghanistan of the govt on the one hand saying that Afghanistan was a brutal theocracy that made life for its own people unbearable, yet at the same time repatriating forcibly Afghan refugees who had entered the country “illegally”. It seems that governments too are keen to have their cake and eat it too.

More appallingly, is an upcoming series on the BBC that is going to be presented by the Oxford History Professor Niall Ferguson, on the British Empire. The idea behind the series is to show how the Empire has been maligned and how on balance it was a beneficial force, responsible for making much of the modern world, as we know it today. “It is time”, Ferguson intones, “that the British stop being ashamed of their Empire”….Er, yes, well, what more can I say to this; it seems that autocentric egoism is not a peculiarly American trait, though one would have needed to be slightly deluded to think that it ever was.

So in sum, it seems that where difference does exist with regard to the upcoming Oil war and issues of race, imperialism and nationality; there are differences only of degree not of kind.

:: Conrad Barwa 1:03 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
..............