Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Dangerously inert

    Jenni Russell in the Times – It’s time for Keir Starmer to exercise his power:

    Since the Cold War ended we have been happily extracting our crocodile teeth, shredding our armed forces, assuming Europe didn’t face much risk or that, if we did, America’s military would save us. Both those securities have been shattered, first by Putin, now by Trump. And yet Starmer is still blinking in shock, postponing any meaningful increase in defence spending to some distant parliament, deciding we can meanwhile safely spend that money on extending child benefits, or higher pensions, or paying Mauritius billions to take ownership of a military base we will have to lease back.

    He’s lost: out of his depth.

    Starmer is still dangerously inert — and even more reluctant to recognise that internally, Britain is similarly destabilised. If its safe, trusting society is to survive, it too must be underpinned by state force and a stronger commitment to policing, rules and order than in recent years. Curiously for a former DPP, Starmer doesn’t see this as critical. The only threat he enthusiastically recognises is from the far right.

    The country is less peaceful and predictable than 20 years ago. Crime clear-up rates have collapsed by almost half in a decade, to only one in 14 crimes, while recorded crime has risen by more than half. Courts are chaotic and overloaded, cases delayed for years, prisons don’t have enough space to keep the convicted behind bars. The age of criminal impunity is dawning — and, fatally, criminals know it.

    There are multiple causes: atomised communities, family breakdown, inequality, addiction. The recent enormous increase in immigration from many distant countries has added to the burden, as complex conflicts, angry demonstrations, novel criminal networks and culture clashes have arrived on Britain’s streets. The police haven’t the means, will, skill or understanding to do much more than tread nervously around these new problems. They cannot suddenly break in to tightly-bound Syrian, Kurdish, Albanian, Afghan or Nigerian gangs, or easily police boat migrants with uncertain identities, scarce English and unknown pasts.

    Most alarmingly, they have abandoned impartial policing in favour of nervously placating groups that are too powerful to offend, like pro-Palestinian protesters who have called for the death or rape of Jews, or the radical preachers who instruct their audience on how best to stone women, or the Birmingham Muslims who successfully had Israeli football fans banned from their city on false grounds. Because the police know there is no political will from this or previous governments to enforce the law fairly, and no resources to do so, they surrender to threat.

    This is naked weakness on the state’s part and if left unchecked it will worsen. Nobody wants the monstrous Trumpian version of law enforcement; just sensible British policing. Starmer’s vision of Britain is one that’s “open, tolerant and diverse”. But the only way to bond a diverse society of people with profoundly different beliefs about morality, religion, sex, violence, men’s and women’s rights and equality is to uphold and defend the laws Britain has argued for, voted for and passed. They provide the framework for how this country has, democratically, decided to live. They express Britain’s values, to ancestral Britons and newer arrivals alike.

    A powerful state-of-the-nation piece. I don’t see any prospect of Starmer rising to the occasion, mind. More and more he looks like a deer caught in the headlights.

    As an example – as today’s Times editorial notes – he can’t even get round to banning the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the UK. Or the Muslim Brotherhood even.

  • Iran, past and present

    Back then, it was Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre cheering on the Khomeinists in Paris, with Foucault even romanticizing Khomeini’s Islamism as “political spirituality.”

    Today, the pattern repeats. The same rotten ideology, recycled by the same privileged, bored, white Western men, is now flooding the internet with the same propaganda.

    Not this time, Satan. We’ve seen this movie before. And we remember.

  • Amanda from Greater Manchester

    Boom boom.

  • Just to be clear…

  • Singing for freedom

    “…., ordinary acts turned into resistance because freedom is forbidden.”

  • When scientific reality collides with ideology

    An interview with Robert Winston – the man whose BBC invitations ended after he dared to suggest, on Question Time, that people can’t change sex:

    In this wide-ranging and candid conversation, we are joined by Professor Robert Winston — one of the UK’s most distinguished scientists and public communicators — to discuss what happens when scientific reality collides with ideology, institutional caution, and a post-truth media culture.

    Professor Winston reflects on the moment that effectively ended his regular BBC punditry: his 2021 appearance on Question Time, where he stated that biological sex cannot be changed. What followed, he argues, was not open debate but silence — and a sharp narrowing of who is considered “safe” to platform.

  • The Moronic Inferno

    I have no idea what really happened in the Minneapolis shooting, but every American knows (well, with the exception of Jerry Coyne). It was cold-blooded murder, carried out by Trump’s fascist ICE thugs. No, it was self-defence: the woman was aiming her car straight at the man…..FAFO.

    It’s like that old internet meme of the dress – do you see it as blue and black, or white and gold? Same input; different perceptions. The answer depends on whether you’re a Trump hater or a Trump supporter. And Minneapolis again – site of the George Floyd killing. It’s a key moment precisely because, although it’s there on video footage, people’s views are just about 100% correlated with their political ideology. A parable for our times.

    Camilla Long:

    To read anything about this appalling tragedy is to be dragged, with full force, back into the depths of America’s culture war. It is to be spat at, again, in the face. It is to be flooded with videos of these agents — a newly expanded praetorian force that’s now been told it can arrest anyone it suspects of being an illegal immigrant — screaming at people, pushing them to the floor, arresting them, bloodying them, marching them around, dragging pregnant women along the street, just because they think, sometimes on sight, they shouldn’t be in America.

    But — how do I put this? — it is also to be brought, once again, face to face with the country’s screeching victimhood and paranoia.

    “Get the f*** out of Minneapolis,” bellowed the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, just after the killing on Wednesday — a strange, turkey-necked man last seen weeping at the coffin of George Floyd, who died less than a mile down the road. An excited Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, most famous as Kamala Harris’s dundering VP pick, went one further: he’d issued a “warning order” to the state’s national guard.

    “We’ve got about 7, 500 troops in training … across the state,” he boasted, mostly “teachers” and “business owners”, ready to repel Trump’s ICE agents. I do wonder how scared Trump will be of thousands of geography assistants. Doesn’t matter: pushing back, said Walz, is Minnesotans’ patriotic duty.

    “It was Minnesota’s 1st that held that line for the nation on July 3, 1863,” he said, “and I think now we may be in that moment.” What moment? Good had barely been dead 24 hours — and now it’s civil war?

    I don’t think civil war is out of the question, by the way. In fact, now, to many, war might come as a relief. Walz encouraged Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago — all in big Democrat states — to “stand with us”, while hoping (not at all hoping) they’d do it “safely”. Who will help them? Any number of disturbed people who still worship these failed Democrats: the shaking, weeping woman who dropped by the place where Good died, for example, and told a TV crew she thought it was “wrong” for her to cry because she was “privileged” as a white woman and “white tears are not helpful”, even though the victim herself was white.

    Trump’s behaviour was not “normalcy”, suggested Walz. But neither is his.

    How is it that the richest country in the world finds itself here: the democracy closest to self-annihilation? Is it the money? Do they conform to the Roman example: we’ll do it because we’re bored and we can? I think it is more because Trump, Walz, Clinton — well, they’re all of a piece: lucky, cushy middle-class people who, drunk on power, think nothing of winding people up, and then grab everything for themselves.

    Walz is accused of indulging Somali fraudsters while they diverted more than $1 billion from the needy in Minnesota. The sums of money are vast: more than the state’s whole prison system spends in a year.

    So it’s a bit strange to watch him nod along to Frey’s hokey, sentimental, let’s “build cities” and “love … citizens above any ideology” rhetoric, when you know that none of them — not Frey, nor Walz, nor Clinton — has any intention of “building” anything with Maga. They’re actively looking to erase Maga entirely, choking off their jobs, livelihoods and rights, while championing 20 million “undocumenteds”. It’s civil war already, really: that is why ICE was in Minnesota.

    You could say this is what happens when you hollow out a democracy’s intellectual inner life and replace it with a whole load of seething, worthless political emotions and wants. Walz, for example, has in the space of a decade turned super-white, geeky Minnesota — famous for its water — into a flaming crucible of progressive madness, a “trans refuge” where Walz fought to make trans surgeries easier for children.

    When a democracy gets to this point, when it feels comfortable enough to vote in Mr Reality TV twice, but to also prance around saying men are women, I think you have to accept that no one is any longer serious about it. All rational thinking is replaced by people moronically scrapping over micro-assets like cavemen, while elected politicians compete to be horrible.

  • Kowtowing to fanatical antisemites

    Hadley Freeman in today’s Sunday Times on the West Midlands Maccabi Tel Aviv farce:

    There has been a very “don’t mention the war” approach to the liberal media’s entire coverage of this story, although the BBC and Guardian are more adept than Basil Fawlty at sidestepping the elephant in the room. They determinedly avoided the word “Muslim” in their reports, even though the West Midlands police consulted eight Muslim organisations about the ban (in the game of Muslim versus Jewish groups consulted by the police about banning Israelis, the score is 8-0). Nor was it mentioned that the SAG committee included two local councillors who said banning the Israeli fans was a “proportionate response to Israel’s actions in Gaza”. You’d have thought liberal media organisations might have learnt from their experience of covering trans issues that ignoring the obvious truth out of fear of looking bigoted never works. But, of course, they have not….

    Muslims outnumber Jews in this country by more than ten to one, and while the vast majority are lovely and peaceful, domestic Islamist terrorism is real, and Jewish terrorism is not. To placate the violent thugs, and the sectarian local politicians, West Midlands police kowtowed to some of the most fanatical antisemites in this country, who use Gaza as an excuse to bully Jews.

    [West Midlands chief constable] Guildford is too cowardly or too stupid to understand this, but British Jews do. We already knew we don’t count, as David Baddiel’s book put it. And now we know the police will throw us under the bus so willingly they will be shocked to be called out on it.

    Not only using Gaza as an excuse to bully Jews, as here, but actually getting pro-Gaza MPs selected by bringing out the Muslim block vote.

    Meanwhile, the plot thickens:

    A controversial mosque involved in a police force’s decision to ban Israeli football fans from a match in Britain was represented on the panel that appointed its chief constable.

    Kamran Hussain, who was chief executive of Green Lane mosque, was part of the interview team that assessed Craig Guildford before he was made chief of West Midlands police three years ago.

    Last autumn, the force consulted the mosque before banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending a Europa League fixture against Aston Villa. This was disclosed by Guildford in a letter to MPs on the home affairs committee.

    Quite why the panel to appoint West Midlands chief constable should include the leader of a mosque which hosted antisemitic preachers, including one who said that it was fine to beat disobedient wives, remains something of a mystery. But it does help to explain a few things…

    Added:

  • This is a revolution

    I urge everyone, especially those with influence to not call this “protests”.

    Does this look like protests to you?

    This is a revolution…

  • The decolonising impulse

    Nigel Biggar, in the Telegraph, on our decolonising institutions:

    Ever since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, cultural institutions in Britain have been falling over themselves to signal their virtue by “decolonising”. Among the first were Jesus College, Cambridge and the Horniman Museum in south-east London, which sent back to Nigeria “Benin Bronzes” taken by the British in a military expedition of 1897.

    Never mind that the bronzes were icons of African enslavement of other Africans, forged out of brass objects used as currency in the intra-African slave-trade. Never mind that Benin then practiced not only slavery, but mass human sacrifice. Never mind that the British military expedition was launched in response to the slaughter of an unarmed embassy and resulted in the abolition of slavery in Benin. And never mind that the bronzes weren’t looted but taken according to the laws of war, to defray the expedition’s costs and fund pensions for war widows.

    Never mind the historical truth, the bronzes were surrendered in a heedless mania of atonement for imaginary sins. 

    And yet, since their celebrated return, not a single bronze has gone on display in Benin city’s purpose-built Museum of West African Art, partly funded by the British Museum. This is because Nigerians cannot agree to whom the bronzes belong – whether it is the federal government, the Edo state, or the descendant of Benin’s ruler in 1897. As MOWAA’s director Phillip Ihenacho has commented, “In the West, there was a race about who was going to be the first institution to restitute… there wasn’t enough of a focus on to whom they would be restituted”.

    Recently the British Museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, has developed a more thoughtful, less craven way of responding to “decolonisation” pressure. Instead of surrendering objects allegedly stolen from India by the British, he’s dispatching 80 items from ancient civilisations contemporaneous with that of the Indus Valley on loan to Bombay, enabling a museum there to show how India was one of the cradles of civilisation. As Cullinan puts it, “You don’t have to embarrass your own country to do something with another country”.      

    That won’t stop Cullinan’s Hindu nationalist partners from making “decolonisation” capital out of the loan. The director of the Bombay museum, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, has already claimed it will help to “correct colonial misinterpretation” of India’s past. “Through this exhibition, there is decolonisation, an attempt is made to decolonise the narrative. We suffered for many years and colonisation penetrated into our education, our culture”. 

    Never mind that it was Britons like Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings who rescued classical Sanskritic civilisation from oblivion in the late 1700s, undermining the Eurocentric assumption of the primacy of Greece and Rome. Never mind that, according to Nirad Chaudhuri, they “rendered a service to Indian and Asiatic nationalism which no native could ever have given. At one stroke it put the Indian nationalist on a par with his English ruler”, giving him the material out of which to build “the historical myth” of a Hindu civilisation superior to Europe’s. 

    It was also British scholars, like Sir Alexander Cunningham, who established the Indian origins of Buddhism – forgotten by the Indians of the time after centuries of Hindu and Islamic rule – and rescued a forgotten culture, and its ancient sites.

    Nirad Chaudhuri was a passionate advocate of the positives of British rule that helped produce modern India – notably in his most famous work “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.

    We’ve recently had historian David Olusoga’s Empire on the BBC. It was , as you’d expect, a damning look at the iniquities that the British imposed on their colonised subjects. Fair enough. I couldn’t quite manage all the talking heads telling us how they’d suffered but, you know, they forgave us – but yes, it was a solid piece of television. The paternalism involved in helping the unenlightened natives to appreciate how lucky they were to be ruled by their cultural and racial superiors, apart from being offensive in itself, did of course involve plenty of brutality.

    But there is another side to the story.