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NOTE: Due to presently concentrating on the polemical Afterword to the forthcoming Robin Hood Book - in which all current austerity-related issues will be comprehensively addressed - I will not be penning any further editorials until the new year... but the Recusant remains ever watchful and is taking its notes on ongoing political developments...

AM

Bevan’s ‘vermin’ in ermine have kicked the cradle into its own grave and voted through a new National Hedge-Fund Service

The NHS as we know it: R.I.P. 1948 - 2011

12th October 2011 - what an awful day, one of those on which it is very easy to believe the old adage that ‘the devil is prince of this earth’ and there is truly no moral justice whatsoever. Just as we have the latest sleaze farce of the Tory Government being played out in slow replay via the dastardly machinations of Doctor Fox and his boundary-blurring business associates, yet another – as we are supposed to believe – case of a gullible and overly-trusting leading government figure falling for the ‘fibs’ of a rogue playmate in the arena of sandpit politics, there are three other deeply depressing snippets alongside:

new figures released showing unemployment (that oil that turns the Tories’ cogs) has risen to 2.5 million, with up to 1 million young people unemployed, the worst figures since 1994 when, surprise, surprise, the Tories were last in power;

news that the scapegoated Irish gypsy community at Dale Farm in Essex has lost its final appeal to stop the Troglodytes at Tory-run Basildon Council evicting the ten-year-old caravan and chalet site constructed on land legally purchased, and all apparently to restore a small patch of the ‘greenbelt’ to its former glory as a disused piece of scrapyard;

and then of course the crowning vicissitude not only of today but arguably of a generation: the passing of the anti-democratic and mandate-less NHS Reform Bill in the House of Lords, Dr David Owen’s amendment designed to seriously scrutinise its worst and most dangerous excesses being inexplicably voted down by a reasonable margin, comprising, unsurprisingly, 80 spineless Lib Dem Peers who seemingly bottled it at the last minute and, as the Guardian pointed out, ‘dipped their hands in the blood’ of this atrocious bill, which will be very difficult for them to 'rub off' for the future. Impossible, I’d say: the Liberal Democrat party might as well enjoy power while they can because come the next election, their party is likely to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Even Shirley Williams, one of the most vocal critics of the bill, apparently ‘abstained’ from the vote altogether. While ex-Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown has shown himself to be well and truly ‘Pantsdown’ when it comes to greasing up to the Coalition: what a hollow man he has proven to be in his dotage. And as for the BBC and it’s marked lack of coverage on BBC Parliament of the crucial Lords debate on the NHS Bill, bizarrely substituted with two drawn-out sidelining debates on much less important policies in a half-empty Commons two days' running, and precious little coverage on either their allegedly 24-hour news, even less on the Westminster Bridge sit-in of Sunday – well, it’s long toed the establishment line ever since Greg Dyke was unceremoniously pressured out, so perhaps it’s nothing too surprising; only infuriating, especially since we have to pay a license fee for this facile shadow of a former great televisual institution.

But just to cast back to the halcyon days of the NHS. In 1948, on the eve of the birth of his new National Health Service, the titan of the Labour left (remember the Labour left?), Aneurin Bevan, Health Secretary and chief architect of the NHS, referred in a public speech to the Tories being as far as he was concerned, ‘lower than vermin’. On embarking on his ‘controversial’ mission to build an egalitarian health system for the country, Bevan inevitably met with resistance from the vested interests of the majority of the medical profession, and also famously said that he’d had to ‘stuff the doctors’ mouths with gold’ to get them to sign up to the new health covenant. But this time round, it’s been more of a case of the doctors’ and the BMA trying to strangle this legislation at birth with their stethoscopes – the fanatically Thatcherite Health Secretary failing to take the hint, again and again and again until his abysmal bill has been finally dragged into the light of day simply because our wonderful legislators are bored with debating it and want to get on with the next apocalyptic piece of legislation. But they do so, cavalierly, to all our lasting detriment.

What our parliamentary Ubermenschen are forgetting is that the NHS is indeed a Covenant: between the medical profession and the people. That has been implicit since its inception. But today, 12th October 2011, Bevan’s covenant with the people has finally been ripped up following a spineless vote against a vitally needed amendment tabled by Dr David Owen in order to ensure the NHS is not opened up to unfettered market interests. No doubt, if he had been alive today, Bevan might have extended his famous epithet to ‘vermin in ermine’, and red gowns. 80 of the spineless Lib Dem Peers, in accordance with the general invertebracy of their parliamentary party, voted against this absolutely crucial amendment, a last-ditch attempt to stave off the worst Thatcherite excess of Andrew Lansley’s soulless and contemptible piece of legislation which cheapens the spirit of our health system for the gains of the private bidder.

Now conclusively – the Tories apart, as they are already beyond any ethical redemption going on their brutalising record of the past year and a half – the Liberal Democrats of both Houses are a political anathema and will rightly be decimated at the next general election. The one last straw of consolation in all this ermined moral farce is that it is now likely that the Tory Party itself will be similarly treated with the contempt they deserve by a vast section of the electorate come the gerrymandered 2015 electoral showdown.

But what we must hope now is that Labour, if it does finally return to power, reverses the worst market-driven excesses of these regressive ‘reforms’ at the earliest opportunity and hopefully before sufficient time has elapsed for Lansley’s ethically philistine Bill to do irreparable damage to the health and wellbeing of our nation which, let's face it, is already pretty poor.

Having said all that, it is a truly pitiful state of affairs that we must grudgingly hope for Labour to get back in eventually and put all this nightmare right, when it was under its last administrative manifestation that the hospital door was wedged opened significantly wider for private interests to infest our public health institution.

Of course, the rot started to set in very early with the NHS: only a couple of years after its inception, prescription charges were introduced, a vicissitude which caused a second: the resignation of Nye Bevan from his ministerial post. Bevan was undoubtedly the greatest leader Labour never had; a controversial and furiously opinionated man, yes, but one of the highest principles chiselled out from the implacability of a Welsh pit-face to a rise as meteoric in its defiant determination as his party’s original leader, also an ex-coal miner, James Keir Hardie. Bevan fought tooth and nail to bring the NHS about in the face of almost insurmountable opposition; but such was his feat, he even managed through the demonstrable compassion in practice of his brainchild to convert the Tories to the cause, not only of protecting the new NHS, but also respecting the new post-war social-democratic consensus.

Post-Thatcherism, of course, the previously inviolable publicly funded sanctuary of the NHS, not only its structure but its very spirit, has been consistently undermined through monetarist policies, slowly stripped bit by bit of its best and most enduring aspects, not only by the Tories but also by New Labour and its opening up for deeper private integration; simultaneous to all this has been the consistent hike in prescription charges which has in many ways already turned the NHS into a part-charging health system as opposed to its original vision, ‘free to everyone at the point of delivery’.

Today is a veritable second Ash Wednesday for our calendars now, because it marks the day that the NHS has been razed and gutted of its universal egalitarian spirit, even if some structural aspects remain intact – it is the spirit and driving force of the institution which has been desecrated today through this abysmal Bill which has betrayed the principle of the NHS and the covenant between it and us: such radical changes to OUR health system should never have been left in the hands of a few hundred MPs and Peers, the People should have been directly consulted through a Referendum. The fact that we were not, in my view, means this Bill is bogus, has no constitutional validity, and is anathema. Imposed changes by a government with NO MANDATE, let alone any electoral right to rip up the peoples’ health system, especially since it misled us prior to election by campaigning to protect the NHS against any more ‘top-down’ restructuring, constitutes a transgression of the People’s Covenant with an institution which belongs, not to the MPs, or Peers, but to THE PEOPLE. But of course, a Referendum never would have been called, since the Government knows full well what the answer would have been. So, as per usual, the expediency of power over the will of the people, the ConDems bulldoze through parliament what may prove to be the single worst, most unpopular and anti-democratic Bill ever passed.

If the Tories and their Lib Dem pets really wanted to restore trust between the people and the political constitution, by forcing through this utterly unwanted and unwarranted Bill, they have now finally sealed their reputation in the minds of a vast portion of the electorate that they truly do hold the principle of true democracy in contempt. They have, indeed, finally confirmed through a self-fulfilling prophecy that furious epithet of the great Aneurin Bevan. Let’s just hope that once the rats eventually desert the sinking ship that is this appalling government, the ship will still be in a sailable state to pull back to the harbour of sane and compassionate democratic accountability.

AM, 12 October 2011

STOP PRESS: Only a day after writing one of my more pessimistic editorials about the parlous state of the British nation as emphasized by the string of deeply dispiriting news in only one day, I felt it relevant to also note today another deeply worrying news item highlighted on the Guardian: the Child Poverty Action Group, who rightly challenged the Government's heartless proposals to arbitrarily cap Housing Benefit across the country without capping - or even encouraging the realignment of - private rent levels (probably because most of the Tory party are private property developers/landlords themselves) as threatening to make tens of thousands of families (specifically children) homeless and thus constituting 'social cleansing', had its case overturned by one Mr Justice Suppertsone on the grounds that - and this verdict is very telling about just how Malthusian our political and legal culture has become:

the purpose of housing benefit was not to prevent homelessness, but to help claimants with their rent while also protecting the public purse. Ministers were within their rights to cut back spending.

Note the phrase 'was not to prevent homelessness': this is a chilling reminder to all those who through no fault of their own and largely due to the Tories' own removal of rent controls in the Nineties have ended up in part reliant on housing benefit to keep their roofs - whether out of work or in work on a sub-living wage - that the England of 2011 might as well be the England of 1911 (only without the promise of progressive reforms under a left-leaning Liberal administration, or the hope of a rising left-wing Labour movement), even 1811, and the haunting echoes of communities condemned to generations of slums and poverty are once again ringing in our ears; Lloyd-George's 'wolves that once infested [the] forests', that is poverty, are now howling and baying once more in the ever-narrowing distance. And this is no hyperbole. When one reads such Dickensian rhetoric, and from a judge with a Dickensian-resonant name, Mr Justice Supperstone, being fustily intoned in a 21st century English court room, the spirit sinks. The doors of the British establishment seem well and truly shut to the cries of the dispossessed in a manner not witnessed since Thatcherism, even arguably since Victorian times which she and her heir apparent David Cameron seem so keen to revisit.

To add insult to injury, the DWP Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith has responded to this highly dubious judgement by lashing out at charities such as the CPAG for having 'wasted taxpayers' money and court time'. The CPAG and associated charities have quite rightly condemned his outburst as 'going nuts' because the minister is clearly rattled by this weeks' truly appalling child poverty figures. So much for the 'compassionate Tory's' sense of humility in the face of his own very sheltered naivety and disingenuousness regarding the reality of relative and absolute poverty in today's society, and his wilful blindness as to such modern poverty being the direct result of the last thirty years of failed neoliberal politics which has now reduced this country to a social apartheid.

The Recusant's verdict is this: the frenzy of draconian mass arrests, trials and imprisonments of scores of people caught up in the riots who did not commit any serious offences was a waste of taxpayers' money and court time, and the biggest waste of taxpayers' money of all has been the bank bail outs and the chronic malfeasance of super-rich tax avoidance that has stripped billions on billions out of our economy for decades.

It seems we now live in a society whose ruling elites operate an institutionalised 'justice' rooted in Carl Jung's concept of shadow projection: all the vices and profligacy of those with power and wealth are projected onto others who are merely the shadows and not the actual objects of such objectionable traits; the scapegoats of a society which is well and truly 'sick', but 'sick' at the top, and more just 'sick of that sickness' at the bottom. The effect is a superficial trickle down, but the true moral sickness, the twisted 'Christianity' that preaches 'fairness' and 'compassion' while legislating the complete opposite, that calls for greater 'responsibility' and less 'entitlement' among those who have the least in material terms while the same 'moral legislators' privately duck their 'responsibility' to others less fortunate, and who believe in their own 'entitlements', to wealth, to power, power over all our lives, continue to behave with an almost symbiotic hypocrisy.

One thinks: can things get any worse? One knows: of course they can under a Tory-led government. But things have to get worse to get better. The Recusant is in full support of November's countervailing Union-led vanguard for an alternative to this modern day reign of Robber Barons. Appropriately, a second anti-cuts anthology, The Robin Hood Book, whose patron will be PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka, is planned for 2012, and a call for submissions will be circulated widely before this year is out. As long as this atrocious government is in power, we will be there, with the Unions, with the progressive parties - the Greens, the socialists - and with the charities and community organisations, protest fringe groups and the disinherited youth of this nation, to shadow and oppose those in power every step of the way, democratically and peacefully, but defiantly, in the sharp dialectic of day.

AM, 14 October 2011

Arab Spring/ English Autumn

Having recently encouraged the British courts to impose 'exemplary' (i.e: 'political') sentences on any caught up in the August riots no matter how trivially, applauding the imprisonment of Facebook miscreants for a new tacit category of 'virtual criminality', whose party's Basildon Council is still in the process of evicting a ten-year-old, 86 family-strong Irish Catholic traveller community from Dale Farm in Essex so his government can reclaim a piece of scrapyard which apparently constitutes 'green-belt' land - prime minister David Cameron swooped into Libya to lap up his deeply implausible status as a 'liberator', champion of 'democracy' and tsar of the Arab Spring.

So while dismantling social democracy as we know it and threatening to tinker with our human rights legislation back in Blighty, Cameron masquerades as the charalatan democrat he is on foreign soil, when many of us in the UK know full well that his empty talk of the Arab Spring 'opening up the regions for democracy' is just shorthand for 'opening up the regions for the spread of poisonous unabashed capitalism and oil-raking'. Oh, and of course, shamelessly duplicitous arms-dealing. Cameron can scarcely move five paces off a plane before being flanked by arms dealers and other flannel-jacketed capitalists (even usurious bankers such as Bob Diamond, someone to whom the prime minister should be turning for a reimbursement of taxpayers' money in order to plug the deficit, rather than settling for the easiest option of gutting British social infrastructure, employment rights, legal aid, benefits, shelter, and, well, pretty much everything).

But on the subject of arms-dealing: it occurred to me recently just how much the arms trade is part of the machinery that turns capitalism, oiled by the frequent opportunity of war of course. Is it too hyperbolic to suspect that when Cameron spreaks at the UN of all nations' responsibility to act as well as talk against the human rights abuses of foreign tyrannies, the hint of that old Blairite pound-sign-eyed spotting of a winner in terms of fattening up the coffers back home? If this really is the kind of dirty politics that Western leaders are playing then to do so under the subterfuge of high-minded liberal interventionism or even Christian compassion is deeply reprehensible. That's not even to touch on the sheer hypocrisy of such moral grand-standing when those leaders' own grasp of 'democracy' and 'human rights' leaves much to be desired.

As cited in my first paragraph, what has 'democracy' got to do with the pointless and self-defeatingly expensive eviction of an entire community from a plot of land they have previously bought anyway, simply because of some hair-splitting 'legal' loophole which says they need 'planning permission' for chalets. I find it quite difficult to understand anyhow why, if someone has bought a bit of land, they don't automatically have some form of planning permission - at least to the extent of anchoring a few caravans. It seems conveniently bureaucratic (yes, the Tories are fine about bureaucracy when it suits them) that the tabard-happy Basildon Council is milking this clause to seemingly just make a very expensive political statement on behalf of their fellow Tories at Westminster: that, basically, the Essex nouveau riche just don't like travellers or gypsies, especially if they're Irish Catholic ones who inadvertantly insult the empty materialism of the area by enshrining plaster Virgin Maries in upturned bath-tubs as opposed to the proverbially waxed four by four parked in capacious bungalow driveways. It almost smacks of the Tudor days, all this Protestant distrust of Irish recusancy on their doorsteps.

As with aspects to the urban blazes of August, the sight of makeshift scaffoldings and barbed wire defences surrounding the besieged Dale Farm has also now become synonymous with this time of accelerated social apartheid and right-wing dogma, of intolerance and even prejudice towards what is different or challenging in our society. In short, the Recusant believes the compassionate conclusion to Dale Farm can only be through a negotiated settlement on behalf of Basildon Council to allow the 86 families to keep their relatively small plot of land. This issue is not, contrary to the rather twisted Daily Express-style arguments of the right, and even the self-styled 'centre-ground' (which is in any case still quite a bit towards the right) of political opinion, about equality before the law and 'fairness': it is simply about right-wing political dogma which puts the rights of property before the rights of human beings. We've witnessed this in the wholly out-of-proportion sentences for those 'rioters' who caused damage to private property or stole things; and how unsurprising that a government chockful of descendants from the historical land grabs should be the first to grab more land away from those who hardly have any as it is, whether it be their council houses or their travellers' sites.

But the lesson of Dale Farm is that the Tories are only respectors of property and of those who own property, but are tramplers of the rights of the propertiless or dispossessed, the present echoes of those whose want of universal suffrage back in the days of the Digger evictions (the 1650s) was officially 'justified' by the fact that not being owners of any property, they therefore had no steak in society and so shouldn't be allowed to contribute to choosing its governments. No doubt many modern Tories would secretly love to deny the vote to anyone who is unemployed, homeless, or even who rents.

The Recusant feels that even if the full legal argument isn't loaded in the favour of the travellers, the moral and humanitarian argument undoubtedly is, and we fully support the Dale Farm community and all who volunteer to help them in defending their right as travellers to put down roots on a piece of land they have legally purchased.

As long as Cameron tramples on the rights of the poor, unemployed and disabled in this country, dismantles the welfare state, caps housing benefits without levelling private rents - thus potentially making tens of thousands of families homeless - and tinkers with both employment and human rights legislation, he has absolutely no ethical or moral right to preach the virtues of democracy to the Arab world, or any other world. No doubt the absence from our screens of Bremner, Bird and Fortune is because its writers recognise that the present government is doing its job for them - just how can you satirise satire?

But briefly again, the arms trade as part of the engine of Western 'democratic' capitalism, or 'muscular neoliberalism': this is such a hypocritical aspect to particularly British and American cultures that its proponents are seemingly careless and flagrant in advertising it whenever the opportunity arises. I started to think more about this lately since I had been invited to read at a Stop The War event at the University of London and had begun a couple of poems related to the theme of Western duplicity in the Arab world, of the irony of an Arab Spring but an English Autumn (in democratic terms that is), and of the fact that our austerity tyrants seem to have no problem finding more billions to fund foreign exploits, unwinnable wars and badly-handled, opportunistic 'liberations'. I did, like many, in theory, back the initial move to defend the threatened civilians in Libya, but anything beyond that I believe to be highly dubious in motive and arguably not actually legal in terms of the UN resolution passed. A moot point indeed and one which will no doubt be dissected in the future.

Unfortunately, due to ill health, I was unable to make the Stop The War(s) event after all, but was there in spirit, which is often how I tend to end up manifesting at public readings for some reason. However, I will be reading on 5th October at the Poetry Library alongside three other poets as part of a Smokestack Books event, in corporeal this time.

Finally, the breathtaking hypocrisy and collective self-delusion that constituted this week's Lib Dem conference can't escape special mention here. At the same time that the human rights of the Dale Farm community were being stonewalled by Basildon Council itching to evict them; the prime minister dropping hints on how his government is seeking to 'make it easier to employ people' (i.e. by gutting employment contracts and rights and devaluing wages, in order to help small-time capitalists exploit more employees to keep their profits nice and fat); that evidence demonstrating a growing public intolerance towards the disabled came to light and DWP letters warning terminally ill claimants that there benefits might be cut in six months' time.... Corporal Clegg and his Orange Book Dodos were busy congratulating themselves for safeguarding our social democracy and human rights and keeping the Tory-led government in the moderate 'centreground' (that is, as Genghis Khan might have defined it) by taking it on themselves to join in the coalition. What martyrs! And to think all Clegg, Alexander et al have got out of all this are high-ranking Cabinet jobs with massive salaries, private limos, and the promise of future peerages. What a sacrifice they have made for us. No problem for them if their party implodes at the next election - which it undoubtedly will do - nor whether this country sinks into an Osborne-driven recession - as it is likely to - since the private lives and riches and perks of these architects of an austerity they will be taking no part in themselves, will just go from strength to strength, from high office to high office, from limo to limo. They are playing a game of egos at the expense of their party's principles and all of our wellbeing and futures. That is not something to applaud.

But the real truth was betrayed at the Lib Dem conference by one belligerent member of a partisan Newsnight audience (made up entirely of Lib Dem members) when he let it slip that 'now people will see the Lib Dems can be a party of government who can make tough decisions': this is all about the Lib Dems wanting to shake off their sandal-wearing woolly image and show they have some real machismo. Well good for them. Unfortunately, their machismo is our emasculation and in many cases, ruin. Judging by the arrogant, pedantic and aggressive attitude of most of the Newsnight audience, particularly the woman who took it upon herself to round on Jeremy Paxman for daring to challenge them on their collective betrayal of the students (and I'm no Paxman apologist but in this instance I was certainly on his side), this generation of Lib Dems really are proving that 'liberalism', when at its most hair-splitting, intransigent and muscularly evasive, is actually quite frightening and entirely undeserving of any respect. If I had a Lib Dem membership card I'd tear it up here and now. All I have however - like thousands on thousands of other left-wing voters disillusioned by New Labour - is the inexorable ghost of a stolen vote for this risible little party of fence-sitters frittered away at the last election in the belief, or probably more desperation to believe, that they represented the new centre-left in British politics. How wrong we all were - but only in so much as we actually concentrated on their manifesto, which has been literally ripped up in all of our faces since the coalition was formed.

As with all who know they are basically wrong and have been dishonest, opportunistic and cynical in their behaviour, the Lib Dems have been rounding like a pack of wolves this week on any who dare to point all this out to them in public view - but this collective self-delusion and passive aggression didn't cause so much as a tiny dent in the teflon-skin of Paxman on Newsnight. The risible hand-washing arguments of 'we didn't win the election', 'we've had to make compromises' etc. when cornered on the tuition fees rise simply doesn't wash with any of us: the point is, there's a vast difference between not being able to implement a policy due to sharing power, and doing a complete volte face on policy and going to the opposite extreme by supporting a cranking up of the fees threefold. That's not compromising, that's plain selling out on the backs of dishonestly won votes, and betraying an entire generation of undergraduates without so much as an apology. The Lib Dems are the Pontius Pilate Party in all but name as far as the Recusant is concerned.

Significant that the one ray of hope in recent weeks has been Caroline Lucas's spirited and compassionate public criticism of the government's knee-jerk imprisonments of all those caught up in the August riots. It is sincerely hoped that Lucas's Green Party, the only left-wing party with a foot in Westminster, benefits from all those ex-Lib Dem votes at the next general election.

AM, 24 Sept 2011

Kleptomaniacal August/ Kepltocratic September

The Recusant pays tribute to Green Party leader - and EV patron - Caroline Lucas for standing up and saying what needed to be said about many of the underpinning causes behind August’s national riots: the long-sustained and continually corrosive effects of ‘rampant capitalism’.

Of course a Tory-led government is constitutionally incapable of ever admitting that thirty years of almost uninterrupted ultra-capitalist erosion of social equality and individual wellbeing has created such an endemic sense of anomic despair and anarchic anger among vast sections of the most deprived in this country that the horrendous scenes we witnessed in Scorched August came about.

The still-unexplained fatal shooting of Mark Duggan was indeed the spark which finally set the tinder alight; but as we said in a previous editorial, how come scenes like these didn’t occur during 13 years of New Labour ethical blunders? Why not after the fatal shooting of the innocent Charles de Menezes? The answer seems inevitably to be related to another type of torch effect.

What seems plain is – inexcusable though many aspects to the riots, particularly the arsons, undoubtedly were – certain long-oppressed communities in this country exploded into an unreasoning rage at the growing realisation that the Westminster establishment is now quite transparently working against their community interests in practically every conceivable respect – the classic hallmarks of uncaring Tory administration and the reinstitution of the unreconstructed ‘nasty party’.

The Coalition of Cuts is ripping the very social infrastructure out from the most deprived British communities at a rapacious and unreasoning rate: in only just over a year, this Government of multi-millionaires has scrapped EMA, opened up both the University system and NHS to unfettered privatisations at users’ expense, arbitrarily capped all benefits – most heinously Housing Benefit without capping private rents proportionately, thus inevitably summoning in a mass Diaspora of new street homelessness; has truncated long-term council house tenancies, increased rent rates for social housing, cut funds from charities, CABs, Legal Aid, and is now even considering whittling down our already pretty parlous Human Rights legislation in a kind of satanic reaction to the mass rage expressed through the riots.

The Recusant believes this Government is baiting the most deprived sections of society to the point of moral irresponsibility, which could, if left unchecked, trigger further protests and riots throughout the country, not less. The ‘feral’ justice meted out to all those caught up in the riots, no matter how trivial their individual offences, has stunned the Recusant in its unreasoning response and reactionary intolerance; a modern British pogrom through the courts. We believe in years to come this country will look back on these days with a deep sense of ethical shame at a time when to seemingly even to voice opinion against establishment moral rhetoric as to the causes of the August Riots was looked on as tacitly complicit with them; as if any objective analysis was tantamount to ‘though-crime’, not altogether dissimilarly to how a drunken youth’s irresponsible posting on his Facebook page was deemed a ‘virtual crime’ comparable to the literal attacks on property in the streets, even punished more severely than much of those actually acted out offences.

It is a deeply worrying symptom of a democracy in ethical that such hefty, Dickensian-style sentences as six months for nicking a bottle of water, or four years for posting a pro-riot Facebook page, have been widely condoned, even applauded, by much of the public, the establishment, and of course most of all by the prime minister himself. That all those involved in the riots, no matter how incidentally or trivially, have been tarred with one uniformed brush of absolutist retribution in the courts makes plain that this has not been the passage of recognisably conventional ‘justice’, but of political message-sending ‘justice’. [It also seems very symbolic and typical of an ultra-capitalist society that any crimes against private property are deemed particularly heinous in the eyes of (often multi-) property-owning judges, politicians and establishments; damage to shops and properties throughout the riots, the arsons in particular, of course need appropriate punishment – but one can’t help feeling there has been a marked over-emphasis on these aspects to the riots over and above any offences committed directly against other human beings]. Just compare this knee-jerk British 'rough' justice to the calm reflection of the Norwegians in the aftermath of the horrific mass shootings recently: the telling ethical difference between a right-wing semi-democratic and a truly socially democratic society.

So ironic too that such retributive sabre-rattling should occur so early in the rule of a government hitherto proclaiming itself to be libertarian in comparison to New Labour’s ubiquitous statism. Not so any more it seems: libertarianism for the bankers, ideological retribution for the rest.

Praise is also due, as ever, to the Union leaders, each of whom has openly expressed perplexity at the post-riot ‘justice’ pogrom, and equally at the establishment’s refusal to recognise that the seeds of social rebellion have long been sown by thirty years of unrelenting neoliberalism. Praise to, as ever, to the Morning Star for carrying the baton of alternative narrative to the prevailing Westminster one.

The Recusant concedes that any political aspect to the August Riots is inevitably obscured by the seeming focus of its protagonists on material rather than establishment targets (though of course we only support peaceful demonstration); but in the very ‘feral’ acquisitive nature of the riots, what was played out during that week in August was a mass opportunistic role-playing, a kind of gestalt-caricaturing of the ethically rotten tenets of our morally anarchic capitalist society. Thus, capitalism’s intrinsic moral anarchy would appear to create a sub-culture of moral anarchy, or anomie, which, in the right circumstances, can be conflagrated into the street chaos we witnessed last month, inclusive of those more morally reprehensible incidents therein; the arsons being, though obviously symbolic, the most dangerous and deplorable acts of all. But to deny what such extreme acts clearly tell us about the parlous state of our ethically and literally bankrupt society is to be wilfully blind, and guilty also of gross irresponsibility.

Cynically scapegoating certain sections of society as ‘sick’ – at least without recognising the causes of that ‘sickness’ and all of our culpability in them, the City, Murdoch-media and political establishments in particular – or reprehensibly referring to the rioters as the ‘feral underclass’, simply will not do. Daily Express-pleasing soundbites will titillate reactionaries in the short term, but only exacerbate social divisions and alienation in the long-term. The only true answer to all of this is to do what other commentators from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Prince of Wales and the acting Met Police commissioner, have been saying while our so-called prime minister has been whipping up class hatred against his half-fictitious meme of the great unwashed sub-stratas: a new covenant between government, the state, charities and the deprived communities of this country, and a rapid reversal of the austerity drive and savage cuts threatening the very existence of said communities. A new mass drive towards progressive social consolidation. In short, a very different type of ‘Big Society’ to that envisaged by Mr Cameron: a renaissance in social contract which listens to and helps enable those who feel they are ignored, even victimised, by a presently socially regressive governmental culture.

But the ‘feral’ elites never learn of course: still clutching to what they see as their more abstracted arsenal of ‘moral anarchy’ via fiscal means, the banking report is giving the City until 2019 to reform itself – so, eight years of ducking the issue, liquidising assets and channelling them elsewhere will undoubtedly ensue.

In the meantime, the people of this country, whose tax was used to bail the banks out in the first place, have been given more like eight months to prepare for the austerity onslaught. Tens of thousands already lost jobs, incomes, benefits, even homes, before the first Con-Dem year was up; and towards our Olympian 2012, tens of thousands more will likely be facing the same. That really is ‘feral’ justice: ringing proof that we truly live in a kleptocratic society masquerading ever-untenably as a ‘democracy’.

In the meantime, the Unions prepare for another national strike in November, against the predetermined plans of the Con-Dems, whose ‘kangaroo court’ of a negotiating table has through unthinking brinkmanship inevitably pushed the matter of public sector jobs and pensions to another stalemate. The Recusant fully supports the industrial action to be taken by the Unions.

Finally, on the truly sore issue of the NHS Bill. The Recusant is thoroughly disgusted – though not really surprised – by the seemingly smooth passage of possibly the most devastating bill passed through Parliament for decades. In spite of tokenistic rebellion by four Lib Dems, and ten toothless abstentions, this risible bill still got through with a majority of 49 votes. Further ringing evidence of the pretty deplorable moral calibre of contemporary MPs. As these automaton suits shuffle off their green benches through their wooden lobbies to blindly give their backing to the destruction of the NHS as we know and respect it, without even consulting the public who rely on it, I wonder how many of them think of the incalculable damage they are doing to the very health and lives of future generations? Very little we would think, since nowadays politicians seem only to be concerned with political expediency, appeasing the party whips, and keeping their well-remunerated jobs – their ethical ‘rotten boroughs’ – at all costs.

Unfortunately with the NHS Bill, the cost is to all of us, and could be potentially apocalyptic in the long-term, ruinous to our health, wellbeing and very longevity. Without Nye Bevan’s NHS and its implicit ethical settlement – a covenant with the people of this nation who thus should have been consulted through a referendum on this particular Bill – scores of us might not have even been alive today!

The Recusant urges all readers to get involved with the various online petitions to halt this atrocious bill in its tracks – what a depressing irony that all that now stands in the way of the oblivion of the NHS as we know it, is the House of Lords. If only filibustering could sustain itself for another four years… But it will take more than filibustering to defeat this catastrophic assault on our public health system: it will take a real fight from the progressives in the Lords, and of course more demonstrations and protests by the public.

Either that or we can take the Fabian long-game approach, and just presume that eventually the Tory-corrupted NHS will implode automatically in time, once its true character emerges to wreak havoc throughout our lives; and then hopefully, crucially, sent back to where it came from any future incoming Labour/progressive administration. Labour should categorically promise this in advance of the next election at the very earliest opportunity, and in the memory of the great Nye Bevan, who must truly be spinning his grave by now.

AM, 13 September 2011

The Hunting of the Foxes

Firstly, I would like to draw all Recusant readers’ attention to the online GoPetition which calls for less moralising and more understanding in society’s response to the recent riots. The Recusant has already signed it and we urge you all to do the same. This initiative is one much-needed oasis of sanity in an otherwise retributive mainstream ‘moral panic’ in the aftermath of what everyone agrees – on the left and the right – were horrendous, frighteningly chaotic and dangerous scenes of a week or so ago, but the tackling and diagnostics of which the ideological wings are deeply divided on. The Recusant also highlights the new Compass initiative In the Public Interest (whose logo along with GoPetition are now extra links on the Recusant front page; we do note the coincidence of the News of the World style lettering of this new campaign, but the Recusant’s own NoW logo-pastiche of Good Bloody Riddance at the demise of said paper a few weeks’ back is probably coincidental). This looks like an eminently sensible and intelligent campaign which rightly reminds us of the ‘feral elite’ at the top of our ethically atrophic society – somehow images of rubicund-cheeked fox hunters astride their horses hunting urban foxes springs to mind at the moment, hence our latest cover image.

Unfortunately at the moment it would appear according to a Guardian poll that the majority of the British public support ‘tougher than usual sentences’ for anyone involved in the riots, irrespective of how minor their individual offences were (as to the visceral severity of such punishments we are aware the Guardian did not provide tick-boxes for the various possible options, though no doubt calls for public floggings or the cat’o’nine tails will be covered by right-wing blogsites, even government online petitions such if its punitive suggestion of stripping all rioters of their benefits, and virtual referendums on restoring capital punishment are anything to go by).

The Recusant does not agree with retributive notions of ‘justice’, nor do we believe that such blinkered attitudes 'feral' in themselves are sincerely felt beyond the reflexive jerk of a computer mouse ticking a box – in the same sense that we do not believe the ‘actions’ of the two youngsters who set up pro-riot Facebook pages amounted to anything more than reckless ‘reality testing’ – if many of these voters were to see first hand the potentially devastating effects on the lives and psychologies of those ‘opportunistic’ youngsters who misbehaved in the heat of the moment but whose ‘lootings’ amounted to such prosaic moral lapses as pinching a bottle of water, an ice cream cone, or, as in one reported case, a violin. Community service orders, in our view, would have sufficed as punishments for the minor offenders, which would have been far more constructive, rehabilitative and healing of the wounds of the affected communities than the simplistic Tory 'bang them all up' response straight out of the Tudor Guide to Civil Justice (no doubt much to Dr Starkey's pleasure). Yes, forgiveness might be a much easier option for those not directly affected by the riots, but we would also point to the vast field of difference between the mature humility and compassion expressed by many riot victims and the zero tolerant retribution championed by establishment absentees such as the prime minister. The Recusant absolutely respects the right of those most horrendously affected by the riots whether through losing their homes, shops or in the worst cases, loved ones; our hearts go out to them, with even greater respect for the fact that they are at this time among the least judgemental and retributive of commentators. In that, they are a lesson to us all.

Alongside GoPetition, In the Public Interest, the Guardian, the Morning Star, and the liberal and left-wing media in general, the Recusant resists any nursery-level moralising that tacitly insists all commentators must punctuate their commentaries with tokenistic howls of condemnation every few sentences; such gestures are trite and beyond the point at this moment, since practically anyone, whatever their ideological standpoint, would agree that obviously these are not behaviours to be condoned. We all know this. What we don’t yet know is just how complex, nuanced and labyrinthine the various multifaceted reasons behind this outbreak of mass anarchy are. The Government, as ever, does not want us to even think of fathoming this out; nor, seemingly, at this time of flaring tempers, do the courts. But this atmosphere of moral absolutism risks the reputation of the British sense of justice if this second ‘riot’ of retributive sentencing isn’t reined in fairly soon just as the conflagrations of August were ultimately stamped out by tougher police measures.

The Recusant takes note of the flagrant contradiction and hypocrisy of a government which came into power on a spurious wave of ‘libertarianism’ against the perceived authoritarianism of New Labour, only to do yet another massive volte face at the first opportunity and not only whip up an atmosphere of hysteria in which Dickensian-style punishments of imprisonment are handed down to such pigmies of ‘criminality’ as water-bottle purloiners, but on top of that, even some of those who took part in ‘virtual’ riots have been given very real and hefty sentences (even exceeding those of many who actually took part in the riots), which in turn has sent a wider message to any who dare to speak up against such draconian punishments as being somehow complicit in August's wave of consumer anarchy. Such Orwellian atmospherics, of non-conformist opinion almost equating to ‘thought-crimes’, as culpable 'tulpa', has never been felt so tangibly before as now, even under New Labour’s ASBO-labelling reign. And as for David Cameron’s recent claims that he believes in the ‘old-fashioned’ notion that ‘someone is innocent until proven guilty’ in relation to his increasingly culpable ex-spin doctor Andy Coulson – who it is now learnt was still being given massive cash payments by News International even after he had been hired by Cameron – it seems clear that his alleged liberalism only applies to those behind the door of No. 10; whereas harsh hysterical ‘justice’ applies to the rest. The government, the Met and the courts all apparently complicit in this new regimen as revealed by the Guardian yesterday: that all involved in the riots are to be treated systemically as ‘guilty until proven innocent’. The ConDems have been applying this politically motivated, classist dogma to the poor, sick, disabled, unemployed, Unions and public sector workers over the past year, and now appear to be applying it even more draconically to those behind or caught up in the riots, no matter how miniscule their individual offences.

But we must not forget the moral offence committed against the Tottenham community which triggered the protests that sparked the riots in the first place: the very disturbing police measure which resulted in the still-unexplained fatal shooting of Mark Duggan. According to yesterday's Morning Star, an eyewitness has said that the police pinned Mr Duggan to the ground and then four shots were heard – apparently Mr Duggan was shot in the face. What on earth is going on here? That is the same kind of lethal tactic which was used to kill Charles de Menezes on the London Underground a few years ago – so, why have the police used a tactic for terrorist suspects on a young father from Tottenham? We need answers.

The Recusant also notes with glaring irony – and by no means for the first time since this ethically illiterate Coalition came to power – that David Cameron, Boris Johnson and their fellow silver-spooned troopers have continually belittled and intimidated any who dare to apply anything other than their own Victorian moralism to the issue of the riots while themselves encouraging a national atmosphere that is a textbook example of ‘moral panic’! The very doyens of this discredited and decadent ultra-capitalist cattle-market of a society slam what they see as ‘sociological justifications’ whilst their own very narrow responses to the riots incontrovertibly validate such theories. The irony, as usual, is only lost on David Cameron and his well-heeled ubermanchen. It is not lost on the thinking press, the liberal and left media, the sociologists, the established and minority churches, the charities and community workers – all those, in short, who actually know a bit about the issues of truly tested morality in the face of social deprivation and merciless austerity cuts gutting the social infrastructures of scores of British communities at this time. The Prince of Wales too, through his social outreach work via the Prince’s Trust, also understands far more than the likes of Cameron could ever manage, and demonstrates the kind of dignified analysis, empathy and compassion to riot victims but also to those marginalised citizens who choose crime or gang life in order to instil some kind of ‘structure’ – whether legal or illegal, in their lives otherwise besieged by a complexity of impossible choices or lack of choices from day one – which puts our out-of-touch prime minister to absolute shame.

This is a prime minister who has not stopped for one moment to question the clearly destructive ethical trajectory of his uncompromisingly draconian administration, in spite of experientially critical interventions from a string of leading Establishment figures – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Prince of Wales – petitioning him to rethink his policies and approach. Cameron then laughably suggests by seeking to tinker with our already flimsy Human Rights legislation, he is somehow standing up to the Establishment – whatever planet Mr Cameron inhabits you can be sure it isn’t Terra Firma with the rest of us: if Eton, the Bullingdon Club and Brasenose College Oxford, and, well, actually being prime minister, aren't conducive to 'Establishment' then the Recusant is at a loss to know what is.

With a Neronic sense of priority and the Ricardian hubris of Francis Urquhart, Cameron is fast becoming his own satirical doppleganger, a living Spitting Image caricature governing our country from within the frame of a political cartoon. His Urquhartian hubris gives him the sense that somehow being an Eton and Oxford educated son of a stockbroker and landed aristocrat gives him greater moral authority than charities, community volunteers, social altruists, Archbishops and the incongruously humane heir to the throne. Well we never! And in spite of the Coulson-shaped cloud mushrooming over his own sense of propriety and transparency which is practically near to bursting point as he proclaims his moral superiority to the plebs and hoi polloi at his Downing Street podium. The hypocrisy of this prime minister is indeed breathtaking. When he speaks of a 'slow-motion moral collapse' in our society, to which he seems oblivious as to causes or solutions, he is also missing the screaming meta-narrative in the mass lootings as almost figurative symbolisms of the invisible pillaging of our nation by gambling banks, private profiteers and their poodling austerity tsars: a 'feral' acting out en masse of the 'grab all you can' rampage of unregulated capitalism and the consumerist materialism it promotes and feeds on to the detriment of our common values and morality.

Cameron's 'Big Society' is all about superficially and cynically preaching many fundamentally Christian and socialist ideas by those least willing to practise them but who expect the rest of us to: it is, in other words, a PR putsch to stuff the 'opium' back into the mouths of the 'masses', along with bread and circuses, to 'let us all eat cake' while our overlords cream off the icing. To carry something like the 'Big Society' to true fruition, one has to lead by example: Cameron should first refuse his massive salary, donate it to the charities he is ruthlessly cutting, and become a voluntary prime minister. He expects the poor, unemployed and incapacitated to become volunteers, so what excuse has he got not to do so himself when already wealthy beyond most of our comprehension? None whatsoever of course. Even his 'Big Society' Tsar couldn't hack volunteering a couple of days a week and resigned announcing he 'wanted his life back' - not much of a recommendation for the rest of us to follow suite.

Only the out-of-touch uninitiated upper classes from which Cameron, Johnson, Osborne et al hail, are apparently still oblivious to the moral atrophy made inevitable by the valueless Thatcherite revolution which they all supported thirty years ago. How ironic too that given the last three decades' corrosive wearing down of our welfare state, our prime minister's conclusion is that this country has been 'soft' for too long and that too many people now have an 'inflated sense of entitlement'. Well, the Recusant notes that this prime minister intent on finally stripping the unemployed, incapacitated and poor of their previous benefit 'entitlements', community services, CABs, EMAs, IBs, DLAs, free legal aid, employment rights etc., hails from a background of the utmost 'sense of entitlement' which is arguably rooted historically in the ancient land-grabs that cleared and enclosed this country into a patchwork of hedged interests. Has Cameron no ounce of humility whatsoever? Seemingly not, as he blinkeredly whips up a new culture of propertied retribution.

It is indeed a deeply worrying sign of a reactionary society losing all sense of proportion that this week hundreds on hundreds of 'rioters' from those who opportunistically pinched the odd low-priced mass-produced product from already raided shops to those who committed far more serious offences such as violent assault or arson, have been systematically patrolled through Dickensian-style courts of the land and dished out what one can only describe as 'feral justice' in response to their widely perceived 'feral behaviour'. That our Tory-led government has cheered on the irrationally punitive sentences meted out to such a vastly varied list of offences and motives, comes as little surprise to the Recusant, mindful as we have been since the beginning of the Con-Dem Age that we have effectively fallen under the hooves of a new fiscal Falangist generation among our political classes leaving austerity and social breakdown wherever it stampedes. The 'new politics' it seems is less a renaissance than a retrenchment back to the Victorian era where only those with property have a real say in society, and any elbow-room in determining their fates, while those without property or money are defenceless, and those among them who step out of line, prey to 'the full force of the law' whose very long-arm none can eschew.

In what appears increasingly to be more a mass political statement by the representatives of our elites and their inalienable dogma of property ownership than a recognisable and respectable expression of a fair and balanced justice system, the 'riot' courts are risking this country's already pretty ropey reputation for fair justice through an outburst of disproportionately punitive sentences imposed on a vast swathe of prosaic offences committed in an unusually chaotic context which, bizarrely, has worked against rather than in favour of said minor 'felons'. One would think given the enormous contrast between pinching a bottle of water or an ice cream cone while others were smashing shop windows, looting, even committing arson, would put these relatively juvenile misdemeanours sharply into their proper perspective. But no, instead, every one who so much as shouted at a policeman or wore a Palestinian scarf over half their face are all systematically condemned as equally culpable as if they were one big rioting gestalt.

The Tories may be licking their lips as ridiculously large numbers of 'rioters' and 'opportunists' (what an ironic term to use given both politicians' and bankers' behaviours in recent years) are arbitrarily banged up to make a storming political point about the sanctity of property as the cornerstone principle of capitalist 'democracy', they'll be biting them in a couple of months' time when it becomes clear - as is already imminent - that our already overcrowded prisons may very well burst through their rafters. What on earth chief punishment-cheerleeder David Cameron thinks he's playing at is anyone's guess: but the prime minister who believes in giving people 'second chances' clearly doesn't extend this liberalism any further than No. 10's doorstep, and would rather have short-term hardline retribution than anything approaching the rehabilitation so ostensibly integral to his 'Big Society' sophistry. Again, one rule for the propertied, another for everyone else. Perhaps Cameron's just in a foul mood because he had to drag himself back from his Tuscan tennis holiday to sort all this out - three days' too late of course, and rather than sorting it out, he simply got the Met's backs up, yet again, and subsequently lost what little credibility he has left. So here we now are: the 'Big Sentence Society': rough justice for anyone who rattles the Daily Mail, Express and the Telegraph (with its old buddy the NoW now gone the way of all trash, the Tories are seemingly more keen than ever to mop the lowbrows of the remaining right-wing papers – which is still most of them of course – in order to keep in with them). One wonders whether Cameron will be leaving out London, Birmingham and Manchester when he starts diseminating his 'wellbeing' surveys; he'll probably only tout them round the Home Counties.

But the liberal backlash is on the ascendant now and one can only thank sanity and reason, not to say empathy and compassion, that so many are now speaking out against the almost Stalinistic 'speedy justice' we've witnessed in recent days, which has been almost as chilling and disturbing on a more abstract level as the horrendous rioting we witnessed last week. The New York Times has now added its voice in ethical opposition to the Tory-whipped witch-hunts in an eloquent editorial; the Guardian of course continues to voice its shock and even disgust at some of the more severe sentences; while Lib Dems, even right-wingers such as Peter Lilly and IDS, are raising concern over proposals to strip benefits and even council housing from 'rioters' and their families. As for the Recusant, this isn't the first time we've said we're ashamed of this country.

But true justice, reason and compassion will prevail in the end. Already today the young mother who simply received one item of stolen goods from a rioting friend and was sentenced to a ludicrous five months in prison has won her appeal and been allowed to walk free. Sanity has finally prevailed, though at great and unnecessary suffering to the woman in question, and expense to the public purse, all so the Tories can 'send a very clear message' as to the fact that they value property over people. The judge who inexplicably sentenced the young Facebook 'virtual rioter' to four years in prison apparently summed up at his trial by saying that he had committed 'an evil act'. Without wishing to be at all hair-splitting here, surely this was a 'virtual act' as opposed to an 'actual act'? Reprehensible and potentially dangerous though this lapse in moral sense might have been, the fact remains that no riot ensued from the posting, nor did the young man who posted it actually take part in the riots. Surely a community service order would have been more than sufficient in this instance? Ditto all the other minor offences; and even in some of the cases of property damage and looting - if we had a more humane and rehabilitative justice system, surely it would have been more than enough to impose community orders on the felons whereby they had to work unpaid for a specified amount of time making recompense for their actions by tidying up and repairing the communities they vandalised? Apart from the issue of disproportionate punishment and possible emotional and psychological hazards for those minor first time offenders unaccustomed to the prison environment, what possible social use does this mass criminalisation serve but simply to push prison numbers to breaking point, induce a deeper sense of resentment among those ‘rioters’ already socially marginalised, and to appease Tory punishment-lust?

The aforementioned judge also glibly referred to the ‘riots’ in the Tory-esque shorthand of denial as ‘collective insanity’: not only is this tacitly insulting to those who suffer severe mental ill health since it effectively equates perceived criminality with psychiatric pathologies – but it is also absolutely typical of the very culture of denial of responsibility and example-setting so glaringly exemplified recently through the bankers’ crisis, MP expenses and NoW hacking scandals. When it’s those in positions of power and influence, it’s all about ‘mistakes’ and semantically removing oneself from culpability at any price; but when it is about those without power or influence, it is just ‘plain and simple crime’ for which there are ‘no excuses’. Pathetic. This country is not only in dire need of reform to our broken political establishment; it is also now clearly in dire need of reform to its very sense of justice.

AM, 23rd August