One of my more curious intellectual habits is to avoid reading contemporary work by public intellectuals and prefer instead to study material written two or so decades ago. This may seem perverse but experience has taught me that anyone writing in the now is usually promoting an opinion based on limited information whereas something written in the recent past can be tested against subsequent events, giving insights that would not otherwise be available. Many of my book reviews of this type can be read on my Goodreads account.
Clearing out some old boxes, I found the files relating to my time launching Demos, the 'modernising' centre-left think tank, back in the mid-1990s. I broke with it quite quickly though amicably. It was part of the post-Soviet move of revisionist Marxists into what would soon become Blairism whereas I was a non-ideological traditional English socialist more concerned with ancient liberties than theory. It was an era of struggles over who would own the 'Moscow Gold', of desperation by the political Left in its search for power and of intellectual confusion. Strange alliances were formed and old political relationships collapsed. Elements in the State attached themselves to new anti-conservative forces and old revolutionaries started their trajectory towards the moderated neo-liberalism that was to fail us in 2008 and is still thrashing around today, like a dinosaur whose wounds have not yet reached the brain as signals of its doom.
Demos produced a journal and a number of pamphlets, one of which, nearly two decades old now, was a short 50-page booklet by a diplomat, Robert Cooper, Head of the Policy Planning Staff at the FCO. This latter tells us a great deal about the mental map that was to influence the social democratic elite who surrounded Blair and who would be found in such places as Chatham House, in corporations like BP and in Government - a road map for what would be Blairite foreign policy, if you like. That foreign policy would be characterised in Blair's 1999 Chicago Speech as a duty of intervention in the world, one that was to unravel the Westphalian system that had been re-instituted in 1945, and which would lead ineluctably, sixteen years later, to a situation where the entire periphery of the European West would come to be in a state of financial and insurgent chaos. That chaos is being brought, through uncontrollable mass migration and organised crime, into the very heart of Europe.
Cooper's work, in retrospect, helps us to understand how things went so horribly wrong because the mental mapping in that pamphlet [1] gives us a plausible but ultimately flawed vision of international relations. We realists found it impossible to counter at the time because the almost faith-based commitment to idealism seemed so much nicer than what we had to offer. It was a shame, I suppose, that history proved us right. Thinkers like Cooper were able to add a theoretical rationale for emotional impulses about the ethical that provided what the idealists wanted to hear. It was a way of seeing that drove all before it and might equally be exemplified by the work of Michael Ignatieff who was explicit in his attack on the Westphalian presumptions of the past in his debate over intervention in Kosovo against Robert Skidelsky in 1999 [2].
The intellectual flaw in Cooper's work begins with the title - the assumption of something called post-modernity as a really existing permanent feature of the political landscape. This flaw derived from an oddity in intellectual thought at the time, a convergence of revisionist left-wing Hegelianism seeking a way out of the problem of Soviet collapse and a right-wing Hegelianism, derived perhaps from Kojeve, that was looking to the European Project as the natural means of assuring peace and security through ending both nationalism and socialism. Later, liberal internationalism would find itself in bed with a darker force in Schmittian neo-conservatism and then entangled with the radical 'detournement' of Trotskyism as a radical war on the same forces that disturbed the liberals - but that is a few years in the future. At this point, around 1996, before New Labour was in power and while the dodgy triangulation of Clintonism provided little more to inspire than a sort of well meaning realism with liberal rhetorical characteristics, the new politics, driven from London, emerged. It was a combination of liberal bureaucratism and the desperate desire of the official Left to reinvent itself for a post-Soviet and post-Thatcherite world. It would be neo-liberalism with a human face, perhaps as absurd and as kind an intention as Dubcek's illusion of communism with a happy smile.
Cooper's global model was simple but now seems simplistic. But simple models can concentrate the mind so long as they are critiqued against not only the facts but future possibilities. However, a naive political class did not take these theories as hypotheses to test but as articles of faith. They met certain political needs that could bind their alliance of unions, activists and liberals and make their idealism acceptable to the technocrats, progressives and bureaucrats of the State mechanism. Once the hypothesis had passed from theory to ideology and had proven effective in the acquisition of power, there was no turning back to criticism against the facts - an ideology then governed our relationship to the international community that was as irrational (though logical on its base assumptions) as national socialism in the 1930s or international socialism under the Comintern.
The central thesis was of an international system that was ringed like an onion - with pre-modern, modern and post-modern structures co-existing and requiring different ideologies of action in the relationships between them. The post-Marxist progressive model was implicitly Hegelian from the beginning - recall Fukuyama's now increasingly absurd notion of the 'end of history' which had appeared in 1992. There was no awareness of the future re-balancing of the world that would create new Powers even though there were many reasons to predict this on the facts to hand. Nor did anyone outside the PNAC neo-cons see the relative decline of old Powers (although, to be fair, Martin Jacques of Demos was always an advocate of the rise of China long before it was fashionable). Nor did anyone seem to see the possibility of a major economic crisis (as we have seen in 2008) despite the history of capitalism being a series of lurches involving bouts of creative destruction. Nor the effects of peripheral political collapse creating problems for the progressive heartlands. Yet all of these should have been understood as possibilities from a basic understanding of the history of capitalism and of past empires.
Instead, we were offered what amounted to a dream of never-ending economic (no awareness of massive indebtedness and criminal intergenerational transfers of wealth from the future to the present) and bureaucratic progress as well as the illusion of a secure democracy with no possible threats to it because the power of the radical centre was too firmly embedded in a network of activist representative bodies, corporate lobbyists, barely accountable state servants and self-appointing political elites. Given this failure of imagination, Cooper's world looks shaky but let us review it on its own terms.
The inner post-modern ring was represented by the progressive abandonment of national sovereignty to sets of supranational institutions (with minimal democratic accountability), based on rules and procedures, of which the European Union and NATO were the centre-pieces. The proposition was put forward that giving up sovereignty was the reasonable price to be paid for the security and prosperity of a post-modern West in which individuals had free-floating identities that were no longer localised, no longer feared such impositions as conscription and could leave governance to experts. The European Union would not, in fact, be a super-state so much as a transnational set of rules and regulations to which all civilised people would adhere, much like the ideal of the old Roman Empire perhaps. We might see TTP and TTIP as examples of this system in operation in the near future where democratic bodies no longer can make any decisions in areas of trade because the rules and regulations of a trans-national system make the rules for them. Contemporary European officials no longer even try to hide their disinterest in democracy which they associate with populism and ignorance. The road to that anti-democratic position was laid two decades ago.
The second ring of the system was the remaining Westphalian system of powers outside the post-modern world of the Atlantic system, the European Union and NATO. There is no doubt that these powers were seen as second order powers representing potential threats and that, therefore, there was no more 'Mr. Nice Guy' as soon as the borders of the imperium were reached. Liberal idealism existed within the Empire but realism was directed at the states that were not in the Empire because that is all they understood. Russia was, in 1996, effectively a defeated second rank state and China was nowhere near the economic arbiter it is today so the logic of the situation was to ensure that the centre held the biggest stick and beat any recalcitrant states into line from a position of superior power. This is the road that led from Blair's Chicago Speech to the imbroglio in Iraq within four years and has lead to a trail of destruction from North Africa through Greater Syria to Central Asia before and since. However, the weaker states of the second rank have proved not only that they can stand up to the West but that they are quite capable of creating a rival Empire in response to what has often amounted to patronising passive-aggressive bullying (the SCO) and of undertaking missions both to resist Western claims (Ukraine) and to resolve international problems (Syria) with more effectiveness than the confused post-modern bureaucrats in Brussels, London and Berlin (and Washington).
The final ring of the system was positioned as pre-modern with a somewhat patrician neo-colonialist stance that reminds one of the rhetoric about the 'heart of darkness'. This was the world of so-called failed states. Cooper was clear, to his credit (as would be Ignatieff) that intervention in this space should be limited to not only what was right but what was feasible. Unfortunately, the genie was let out of the bottle here - or would it be better to say that Pandora's Box was opened. The rational bureaucratic approach to an interventionary approach that was really liberal Imperialism by Nice People was obviated almost immediately by two factors. The first was that 'post-moderrn' democracy gave a voice to irrational and half-educated populations led by media and NGOs who demanded (or resisted) imperial actions. This instigated half-baked actions in which the spin and manipulation destroyed any trust in the good will of the people undertaking them. The second was that the interventionary approach was hijacked by some Not So Nice People in Washington with an ideological and economic motive for selective regime destruction: again, the post-modern bureaucrats lost trust because they preferred to associate with a powerful devil and compromise on their values rather than turn back from the brink. The fall of New Labour took time but it lies not only in economic failures but a failure to understand that it was no longer trusted to administer a system that had failed at this level of national security.
So, at every level, the new world order proposed in different forms by liberal internationalists and neo-conservatives alike collapsed on a poor reading of reality. It was a faith-based system that failed to ask fundamental questions about whether post-modern politics was viable and whether the Westphalian system was, in fact, over. But, if the Westphalian system was over, it meant the extension of the pre-modern (to use Cooper's mode) sphere of influence rather than the second order eventual integration into a global post-modern system led by the West. The Westphalian elements have reasserted their status as sovereign powers outside the 'post-modern world' (and we must never forget that the US never actually bought into this theoretical model which was a British and European conceit) while some of those within the post-modern system (Greeks, British, various national populists, Hungarians) are beginning to pine for the old ways already. Meanwhile, the pre-modern has not remained on the periphery but has begun to by-pass the modern Powers and affect, indeed infect, the post-modern system through mass and uncontrollable migration, economic degeneration and, above all, organised criminal networks accumulating significant capital at a phenomenal rate.
The entire Cooper system is hanging by a thread ... it is only bureaucrats with a fixed ideology and false confidence in their own control over the levers of power who persist in believing that everything will turn out for the best as crisis after crisis hits the core system. The European Union blundered in Ukraine and caused the gravest security crisis in modern times. It and indeed the US have proved themselves totally ineffective in dealing with serious security threats in Greater Syria. 'Modern' allies are beginning to make their own own arrangements and hedging their bets in dialogue with the rising rival powers. The cohesion of the European Union is threatened by an appalling anti-democratic intervention in Greece and the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants without adequate planning or a coherent policy. Above all, 'post-modernity' has meant that millions of people no longer trust their rulers, whether politician or bureaucrat. They have no intention of being guided by them into post-modern policy decisions. If anything, increasing numbers are pining openly for a return of variants of national sovereignty and of socialism in a way simply incomprehensible to the generation that came to power in the 1990s. Worse (from the perspective of career diplomats like Cooper who retained a strong sense of realism in 1996), the discussion of international relations is increasingly led by ineffectual and counter-productive liberal idealists who seem to be blind to the economic consequences of patronising non-European powers and to the domestic political consequences of migration and job losses arising from globalist idealism.
It is, in short, a mess. Mr. Cooper is certainly not to blame for that mess. He simply put forward a thesis for discussion and criticism, a model for exploration. How could he possibly have known that his ideas and those of people like him would be taken up by people of lesser intellect and more cunning whose purposes would be divided between their short term hunger for domestic office and a narcissistic desire to paint the global canvas with their mythologies. Somehow, I suggest, we are going to have to start all over again ...
[1] Robert Cooper, 'The Post-Modern State and the World Order' (Demos, 1996)
[2] The somewhat acrimonious debate between Skidelsky and Ignatieff took place as a series of letters published in Prospect, then a significant intellectual liberal-left journal, in early May 1999. It can be read in full in Ignatieff's 'Virtual War' (London 2000). In the exchange, Skidelsky (though I happen to think he was to be proved right) argues less ably than the impassioned but disciplined Ignatieff who had all the moral passion of someone who had seen the Kosovan refugee camps at first hand. All the fervour of the 'something must be done' school of liberal politics faced arguments that lacked force because they could not jump out of the box of liberal conventionalism to speak in consequentialist terms of the probable harms of action undertaken without adequate planning, preparation and commitment. Every intervention that took place after Kosovo compounded this central fault within liberal internationalism that it acted first and thought second, without being able to rely on the mobilisation of total war to ensure that every act could be followed through and history be firmly written according to the dictates of the victors.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Saturday 24 October 2015
Sunday 18 October 2015
The Mail Is At It Again ... But What Is Really At Stake?
The Mail on Sunday has obviously failed to do its homework - again! It referred to me today (as before) as a friend of Jeremy Corbyn. It clearly implies that my original creation of Exaro was partisan. Apparently, Exaro is now a 'rogue' news site though, in fact, the roguery is coming from the Mail itself. Its journalists are lazy. They not only failed to contact me for fact-checking but they completely ignored an extremely clear statement by me that was drawn directly to their attention on their web site. It is, of course, for Exaro and not me to comment on Exaro's editorial position but it is reasonable for me to comment on references to me and to have opinions as an outsider on what may be going on here.
My statement was explicit about my non-relationship with Jeremy Corbyn (basically, I knew him somewhat in the 1990s but have not seen him since) while the journal failed to note that I had also stated clearly and unequivocally that I had no control or influence over editorial decision-making and that Exaro was strictly non-partisan. Maybe they thought I was lying ... if so, they should have at least had the decency to say so to my face.
The latest bit of hysteria includes an assault on the Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, another politician I rather admire, alongside Tom Watson, for his basic integrity and for reasons that have little to do with the child abuse investigation. Although I am now a Labour man again (as of a few weeks ago), I am not so shallow as suddenly to cease to admire someone if they are on the opposing side. For the record, I have never met Goldsmith.
The campaign that is going on week after week appears to have some purpose - ostensibly to restore the reputation of certain persons, in fact it increasingly looks as if it is designed to force the Metropolitan Police to close down or contain their child abuse investigation. The latest wheeze is to pressure the High Tory Command in Government not to reappoint the redoubtable Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe (current Metropolitan Police Commissioner and a committed reformer). In an accompanying article, the Mail leads:
This may be part of a political struggle of immense importance to our country. Operation Midland is only one of many investigations across the country - if it is taken down, all the others are weakened. We might even add the suggestion of an investigation into complaints about police behaviour at Orgreave to the mix - as reported by Exaro - as a sign that reform is in the air. In this latter case, as others, the issue is community trust in the police which leads us on to the possible 'why' of all this.
Why might reformers want to be so active in their turning over of stones other than because it was the right thing to do? The 'ulterior strategic motive' is standard procedure in public life so why not here as well. I would suggest that it is because trust in the police, alleged police corruption and even links to organised crime have become a much more vital national security issue in recent years on two grounds: a) a public that does not trust the police will not come forward and provide vital intelligence on crime and, indeed, terrorism, and b) organised crime is no longer a national business contained within its limited remit and left to prey on those without a voice (like the kids in the care system).
Organised crime, for example, is now a multinational operation, accumulating capital at a ferocious rate, capable of suborning lower paid public servants at every level, involved in human and arms trafficking as well as more conventional crime, drugs and the sex trade, and even holding the potential to be an armed state within the State in extreme conditions. What happened in Northern Ireland could happen in British cities if the Police do not get a grip on things. And alliances between crime and terrorism are at the back of every security official's mind. The relatively new National Crime Agency exists to deal with this threat. Running any major investigation without infiltration by well-funded organised crime is now a key part of the reform agenda.
The point is not that there is any necessary connection between corruption allegations and organised crime and child abuse and turning a blind eye to the actions of our political police (there may or may not be) but only that all are examples of things that require thorough investigation and reform if our trust in the police is to be maintained. And, at times, these things may, indeed overlap and, if they do overlap, we need to know about it.
I retain considerable faith (perhaps stupidly in the eyes of some) in the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office to continue to do what is right - which is to investigate allegations without pressure from any party, including (though it undertakes no such pressure to my knowledge) Exaro News. If the current Commissioner is forced out (or rather his mandate is not renewed) by a politically-directed media campaign based on implicit political threats, questions must be raised about who runs Britain and whether the rest of us can feel safe in our beds if we cross those who do. This is not to say that we should not be concerned about 'excesses' by reformers (we should be) but only that the correction of any alleged excesses must not fall into the trap of damaging the reform process.
The corruption issue cross-connects to the child abuse investigation and this is shown in Duncan Campbell's piece which appeared in March 2015:
My statement was explicit about my non-relationship with Jeremy Corbyn (basically, I knew him somewhat in the 1990s but have not seen him since) while the journal failed to note that I had also stated clearly and unequivocally that I had no control or influence over editorial decision-making and that Exaro was strictly non-partisan. Maybe they thought I was lying ... if so, they should have at least had the decency to say so to my face.
The latest bit of hysteria includes an assault on the Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, another politician I rather admire, alongside Tom Watson, for his basic integrity and for reasons that have little to do with the child abuse investigation. Although I am now a Labour man again (as of a few weeks ago), I am not so shallow as suddenly to cease to admire someone if they are on the opposing side. For the record, I have never met Goldsmith.
The campaign that is going on week after week appears to have some purpose - ostensibly to restore the reputation of certain persons, in fact it increasingly looks as if it is designed to force the Metropolitan Police to close down or contain their child abuse investigation. The latest wheeze is to pressure the High Tory Command in Government not to reappoint the redoubtable Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe (current Metropolitan Police Commissioner and a committed reformer). In an accompanying article, the Mail leads:
Scotland Yard chief Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe is under pressure to quit after the force admitted it refused to drop a baseless rape claim against former Home Secretary Leon Brittan over fears of a public backlash.You might like to note at this point that news has broken in the last day or so that the National Crime Agency had started an investigation into alleged corruption in the Stephen Lawrence case. This may seem wholly unconnected to the child abuse investigation but, as we shall see, allegations of police corruption are a material element in both sets of investigation. The State is becoming very active in dealing with aspects of policing that are troubling if only through active investigation without prejudice.
This may be part of a political struggle of immense importance to our country. Operation Midland is only one of many investigations across the country - if it is taken down, all the others are weakened. We might even add the suggestion of an investigation into complaints about police behaviour at Orgreave to the mix - as reported by Exaro - as a sign that reform is in the air. In this latter case, as others, the issue is community trust in the police which leads us on to the possible 'why' of all this.
Why might reformers want to be so active in their turning over of stones other than because it was the right thing to do? The 'ulterior strategic motive' is standard procedure in public life so why not here as well. I would suggest that it is because trust in the police, alleged police corruption and even links to organised crime have become a much more vital national security issue in recent years on two grounds: a) a public that does not trust the police will not come forward and provide vital intelligence on crime and, indeed, terrorism, and b) organised crime is no longer a national business contained within its limited remit and left to prey on those without a voice (like the kids in the care system).
Organised crime, for example, is now a multinational operation, accumulating capital at a ferocious rate, capable of suborning lower paid public servants at every level, involved in human and arms trafficking as well as more conventional crime, drugs and the sex trade, and even holding the potential to be an armed state within the State in extreme conditions. What happened in Northern Ireland could happen in British cities if the Police do not get a grip on things. And alliances between crime and terrorism are at the back of every security official's mind. The relatively new National Crime Agency exists to deal with this threat. Running any major investigation without infiltration by well-funded organised crime is now a key part of the reform agenda.
The point is not that there is any necessary connection between corruption allegations and organised crime and child abuse and turning a blind eye to the actions of our political police (there may or may not be) but only that all are examples of things that require thorough investigation and reform if our trust in the police is to be maintained. And, at times, these things may, indeed overlap and, if they do overlap, we need to know about it.
I retain considerable faith (perhaps stupidly in the eyes of some) in the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office to continue to do what is right - which is to investigate allegations without pressure from any party, including (though it undertakes no such pressure to my knowledge) Exaro News. If the current Commissioner is forced out (or rather his mandate is not renewed) by a politically-directed media campaign based on implicit political threats, questions must be raised about who runs Britain and whether the rest of us can feel safe in our beds if we cross those who do. This is not to say that we should not be concerned about 'excesses' by reformers (we should be) but only that the correction of any alleged excesses must not fall into the trap of damaging the reform process.
The corruption issue cross-connects to the child abuse investigation and this is shown in Duncan Campbell's piece which appeared in March 2015:
"Now [March 2015] the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating 14 separate referrals of alleged corruption in the Met relating to child sex offences from the 1970s to the 2000s. Offers of immunity need to be made to any police officers still with information so that, finally, the jigsaw puzzle can be completed in all its dark and depressing detail."This gets to the heart of the matter - only half the probes into alleged child abuse cover ups (according to the Daily Mirror) result from claims by 'survivors' and non-police officers. It is not right to imply (as the BBC appears to have done) that the 'survivors' who have retracted or may be questionable are all the 'survivors' who 'matter' nor that an allegation or claim is false when it is merely unproven. The other half of probes apparently come from former serving police and security officers. This is devastating and perhaps scary to those who have a stake in keeping a lid on things. We can legitimately ask what sort of governance do we have that left an investigative journalist to uncover the disgust and rage of decent men at what they were (allegedly) asked to do. If they are not all fantasists, their lack of a voice in itself tells us something about a culture of 'cover up' and it is only fortuitous that a 'secret' forum in which concerns were expressed came to light.
Tuesday 13 October 2015
Tom Watson and the Planet of the Apes
There is a fascinating culture
clash to be seen in the demands that Tom Watson, Deputy Chairman of the Labour Party, apologise for what may or may not have been a mistaken judgment. This judgment certainly caused distress to one family just as much as it was part of a total project attempting to help many historically abused and psychologically vulnerable individuals. The political struggle that we are seeing is probably better seen as one between two sets of value
that are incommensurable, based on class and education, than through the prism of short term party advantage and the growing terror of an establishment faced potentially with its biggest crisis of confidence since the Profumo affair.
The Tories (and middle class Labour MPs) are not being silly when they expect Watson to apologise to the family for 'casting a slur' on Lord Brittan. In their world, the 'facts' are only those that are evidenced. This is also the culture of a journalism that misses half of history because it so well hidden. The missing half is often the half that matters in allowing a democratic society to make rational decisions but, in fact, our democracy is as guided as that of the Chinese, just richer and with a longer history of adequate internal stabilisation But it is true that there are no facts that the upper middle classes can see that say that Brittan was 'evil' (the sort of language that is regarded as wildly intemperate in 'society' but which expresses the passions of people angry and frustrated at their treatment in that society). Because there are no 'facts' before them, they expect Watson to apologise. But matters are not as simple as they appear.
A victim (we call them 'survivors' now but we all know what we mean) who cannot prove what happened to them must, by the rules of this standard issue game, remain silent. If they make a claim that they cannot articulate well (articulacy is as important here as evidence) or for which they cannot show the evidence, then they will be humiliated or forced to submit, much like beta apes by alpha apes. Indeed, the darker side of the campaign against Operation Midland is clearly directed at terrorising vulnerable people and nervous retired state servants from giving evidence because of what may happen to them subsequently. It is assumed that they cannot easily cope with the stress of the scrutiny - hearts may give out and black depression result in the taking of lives. They will be deterred and no cases will come to court.
My ape analogy is perhaps crude and not intended to be insulting to anyone but we are still animals at heart. Our civilisation is built on the circulation of elites (the alpha apes come and go as individuals but there is always an alpha class). Individuals rise or fall but only within a much more slowly changing system of expectations and rules, punctuated (as in 1917, say, in Russia) by revolutions that change the expectations and the rules - for a new set of alpha apes to command and rule.
The laws of society, honed over thousands of years, will always give enormous advantage to the person who can assert authority, cover up their traces, argue their case more effectively, bluster and, if necessary, bully. In previous eras, this might include using their fists, having access to the hangman or damning a soul to hell but we have progressed - somewhat. However, these people also have managed to create in liberal society, over time, rules that stop those abuses that can be evidenced (the rule of law) and even, in some cases, merely articulated (the free press). So things are definitely getting better. But is it enough?
Tom Watson perhaps represents a more working class conception of power relations in which authority and the middle classes (the upper class in Britain is actually the upper middle class) set rules that may have an element of protection for all (which is good) but give no scope for the victim of anything that cannot be evidenced to speak freely and get justice or recompense without placing themselves at risk of humiliation or destruction. The fact may be that they suffered appalling bullying or abuse which if they can articulate but not prove only means that that fact may be wholly disregarded and the abuser protected. The rules of society continue to protect the powerful and authority in perhaps more subtle ways than they once did but grants protection nevertheless. If the victim is not articulate, they are twice-damned - as 'ignorant' or as 'unworthy' on the one hand and as unable to provide what the rules require on the other.
When he speaks for the abused in Parliament with passion, Watson speaks, in his mind's eye perhaps, in a language that is incomprehensible to the editors of newspapers and the professional classes but one very comprehensible to anyone who has been institutionally bullied, worked for a bad boss or been abused inside a family or church group. There is nowhere such people can go in most of these cases - institutions are governed by authority and low level fear and anxiety, bad bosses until the rise of modern human resources skills could act with impunity, families are a no-go area for the State except in exceptional circumstances and the churches often appear to be another no-go area for investigating authorities.
The bullied and abused used to be fobbed off with the Church and a loving Jesus but, however comforted privately by religion, they generally have to cower and, literally, 'suffer in silence' in this world in the hope of the next - they have to submit as betas before the alphas. I once was stuck for a couple of years with a bully of a boss, a psychological thug of the worst type. I was trapped by the need to feed my family and yet if anyone is a natural alpha in terms of almost Nietzschean drive it is me. I was temporarily trapped by the power relations of a particular type of society with no escape - in that case, he was fired and I took his job so there was something of a happy ending. But the experience marks you. People stuck in abusive families, care homes, institutions and so forth are deeply marked by their experiences. And it is even a bit more complex than that - between the betas and the alphas lies a 'kapo' class of willing servitors whose psychological brutalities are conveniently unseen by their masters. The worst of abuse is always that it happens outside the sight of the people who are supposed to maintain the rule of customary law. It is a secret matter of gross impunity.
And, of course, the poor prey on the poor. The Rotherhan abuse case is a case study in thuggery perpetrated on the vulnerable where the rules and processes of a system designed by the alphas for their own protection as much as that of their charges proved wholly incapable of protecting young people. There are suspicions in this case that blind eyes were turned because local electoral considerations handed power to a 'kapo' class of vote providers who were then allowed to protect their community in return. The vulnerable margin was just handed over to the abusers as a type of the sacrifice of the outsider to preserve the cohesion of a closed community - a human approach to social cohesion that can be traced back to the Iron Age and perhaps to the bog bodies.
The Labour Party, of which Tom Watson is Deputy Chairman, may crudely be characterised as having been created to give the betas, the ordinary person without power, a chance in life. Indeed, the early trades unionists in particular grew their own alphas who would represent them through the Party. In the last few decades, this 'Movement' has become nothing more than another bunch of competing alphas at the top of the gibbon troop: the Rotherham child abuse case is proof enough of that. The leaderships of the Left have not spoken for the vulnerable and changed their conditions directly through struggle in which the vulnerable can participate so much as empowered a rather nice liberal 'kapo' class of social managers that feathers its nest at the highest levels. Things, of course, are more complex than I imply but something has gone wrong with the Left Project. In speaking for the abusers and refusing to obey the rules of the alphas (represented earlier today by the expostulations of an outraged Nicholas Soames), Watson speaks against the norms of the system he had entered on behalf of the betas. He has returned to the spirit if not the practice of the lost radical beginnings of his Party which, in many ways, is out of character for him.
This is (roughly) perhaps at the core of his reasoning for not apologising beyond the 'distress to family' apology that he has already made. It is at the core of the essentially political (that is, related to power relations in the community) aspects of the case, the driving insistence of editors and politicians that he say more, that he kow-tow to their aspirations and their rules. Above all, he perhaps (I cannot speak for him) knows that the alpha class, of which he is one through hard work and diligence, which is in command of the rules of society, are combining here to bully an upstart ape within the troop. He is 'letting the side down'. He must be brought into line - it is about much more than an apology to a family, it is a struggle for the commanding heights of national morality.
I prefer to see Watson as someone who chose not to abandon his roots but to keep fighting for those he was sent to Parliament to represent. But I do not want to be misunderstood here. I have no opinion on the late Lord Brittan. I have no emotional position on him. I genuinely feel sorry for a family who, even if he did do something bad (which we do not know), might have no inkling of it. All I recognise is the fact that the jury that has never met and will probably never meet may have to remain open until two things have happened - the exhaustive enquiries into what appear to be credible complaints of abuse and credible corroborating statements from state servants about cover ups of elite child abuse has been gone through and a system of abuse within the elite proven or not proven. Even if it is not proven, this is not the same thing as proven to be not true. We are stuck with ambiguity unless there is a killer punch that demonstrates that the claims come from liars or fantasists and it is as wrong to dismiss claimants as liars and fantasists as it would be wrong to assert that the accused are guilty rather than the subject of investigation.This alone makes it imperative that Operation Midland is permitted to proceed and to be resourced without attempts to interfere with the witnesses.
This is all deeply tragic (in Hegel's sense of tragedy being the conflict of right with right) because the ambiguities and difficulties of such cases mean that somebody is going to get hurt under any scenario. Full acceptance of the rules of the alpha system simply means that the 'hidden history' (as it is being termed by the ESRC-funded academic study of official attitudes to child abuse) will continue and that the survivors will continue to be treated as second class human beings. Full support for the claims of all 'betas' without adequate investigation could mean possible injustices to perfectly respectable and decent members of the elite - in other words another form of injustice entirely.
The answer, of course, is partly in-depth investigation ass Operation Midland is undertaking. Unfortunately, we have good historical reasons for believing that such investigations have been mishandled or subject to influence in the past. Personally, Operation Midland strikes me as determinedly independent but Watson scores a point here. Conveniently for the advocates of the survivors' case, the Bishop of Lewes has got sent down this past week for sexual exploitation. The court heard that, in the early 1990s, a surprising number of elite figures wrote to give character references that helped to ensure that justice would not be done at that time - the alpha apes look to the rest of us as if they look after their own. And if this case is proven as it is, why should not there be many others? And how was it that Savile was not investigated for so long? - and so on and so forth. The BBC as recent cultural lord and master of alpha morality in this areas may be predictable but also faintly repulsive in this latter context.
In the more general context of cases like this, Tom Watson looks eminently reasonable in doubting whether justice can be done for the abused without he exertion of political pressure. A calculation that is culturally political may be being made here that justice for the abused trumps justice for alpha families let alone individuals. It comes down to a fairly brutal decision on where you think your moral responsibility lies. For one cultural system perhaps, the ultimate crime is armed resistance by their underlings (now labelled as terrorism and turned into the darkest of all dark crimes) but to the other the ultimate crime is cover up of the misuse of power and especially of misuse of power that turns a blind eye to, and perhaps condones or even organises for its own purposes, the rape of children and harms to the weak. The war on terror led to ambiguities of justice and so, it would appear, does the 'intifada' that is the war on elite child abuse.
In many ways the Left has submitted to the Right under the recent hegemony of rights liberalism - it has abandoned all struggle except within the law - but the Right has not responded in kind in its arrogance of power. It continues to resist transparency and lacks a basic integrity that places certain human values above protection of their own kind, indeed core values above the law itself as it stands. Liberal-minded Left and Tory MPs alike are not changing the law actively to protect the vulnerable - if anything, thanks to 'austerity', they are rapidly eliminating those protective infrastructures that do exist. Watson asked MPs today to search their own consciences but he was faced with rows of blank faces and dead eyes because most of them have no conception of the radical action required to protect the vulnerable in our society. The truth is that most of them don't really give a damn enough to initiate action and those few that do come from all parties. Giving a damn about the your own vulnerable is not a Left thing in the real world any more - it used to be but not any more. Mrs Jellyby is alive and well and living in Parliament. The vulnerable of the world can cause lengthy impassioned posturing on the benches but the state of the vulnerable at home regarded as an embarrassment. For those of us on the Left, Watson has offered us, rather clumsily, a way back to the recovery of our souls.
If Watson apologises any further than he has done, he will have betrayed the vulnerable. He will have adopted all the rules of the elite and then be forced to slink to the back of this troop of unpleasant gibbons and hope to remain accepted. He must, in short, stand and fight or lose his place forever. The distress of one family is certainly regrettable, especially as relatives may not be alphas at all but fellow betas. But if he believes (which I think he may do but is problematic as a matter of faith and judgment in the prevailing system) that the survivors who came to him as their representative, that is, to their own dedicated alpha ape, did not lie and that there is reasonable cause to believe that, despite the lack of direct evidence (according to the rules of the game), the Noble Lord was, shall we say, 'problematic' (since it may be a matter of faith that he is not problematic) then he also knows that not only would he not be true to himself but that he would do irreparable harm to the tens of thousands, maybe many more, people who look to him and his increasingly rare type in Parliament if he compromised beyond a certain line. They have hopes and now expectations that they never had before that they can be represented against a system of mostly unintentional but sometimes cynical bullies. Again, it is true, the late Lord Brittan himself may be the victim of an injustice but ... something is up and it needs investigation.
These two world views are thus incommensurable - perhaps you are of the genuine Right or Left, as opposed to the ersatz Left, to the extent that you understand this and take the appropriate side, that of order through rules with the risk of occasional cruel injustice at the margins (Right) or that of struggle against tyranny at the risk of creating worse and unstable conditions in response to the resistance of your opponents (Left). Personally, I would like a balanceof some sort - but not at the xpense of the weakest and most damaged in society. We have ended up in a world where, thanks to social media liberating the masses by cultural means, one culture bays for Watson's blood and the other begs him to stand firm no matter what.
This is what he clearly will do, backed implicitly by his own Leader - any other recent Labour Leader would probably have caved in rather than hurt the system that sustained them but things have changed. You can almost smell the panic in the elite air about this new form of passionate demotic resistance which extends far beyond this case. Even Watson himself is a possible victim of it within his own Party as Momentum gains momentum. His Party may be a victim of it as 'Red UKIP' challenges the Labour middle classes over Europe. Revolutions perhaps must always eat their young. Eventually an internal Party struggle, a Referendum and then a General Election will pit the two cultures against one another for the first time since perhaps the 1960s. Then we will see what happens, how the thesis of one culture and the antithesis of the other culture will synthesise.
In the meantime, although I do like a society of rules and I do not like armed struggle, criminal behaviour and cover up by the elite (I am persuaded that this is what the police are investigating in good faith and that it is credible that bad things have been done) offends me. I shall back Tom without assuming that any claim is proven yet. But proven or not proven has, regrettably, no necessary link to the reality of things. The law constructs an alternate probabilistic reality within the framework of its rules. It is closer to the truth than blind assertion or faith but it is never necessarily the truth as many proven cases of miscarriages of justice have shown. Sometimes even the system corrects itself with sufficient facts but the purpose of law is only incidentally justice. The purpose of law is order tempered by justice.
I shall personally also feel sorry for Lord Brittan's family under all probable scenarios while considering the investigation that caused pain during his last days to be the 'lesser evil' in terms of human suffering. This is one for Dostoevsky on a dark and stormy night. But crushing the spirit of the weak by forcing their Leader to bend his knee on one possible error (not yet actually proven to be an error) is too great a price to pay for good order in a broken system.
The Tories (and middle class Labour MPs) are not being silly when they expect Watson to apologise to the family for 'casting a slur' on Lord Brittan. In their world, the 'facts' are only those that are evidenced. This is also the culture of a journalism that misses half of history because it so well hidden. The missing half is often the half that matters in allowing a democratic society to make rational decisions but, in fact, our democracy is as guided as that of the Chinese, just richer and with a longer history of adequate internal stabilisation But it is true that there are no facts that the upper middle classes can see that say that Brittan was 'evil' (the sort of language that is regarded as wildly intemperate in 'society' but which expresses the passions of people angry and frustrated at their treatment in that society). Because there are no 'facts' before them, they expect Watson to apologise. But matters are not as simple as they appear.
A victim (we call them 'survivors' now but we all know what we mean) who cannot prove what happened to them must, by the rules of this standard issue game, remain silent. If they make a claim that they cannot articulate well (articulacy is as important here as evidence) or for which they cannot show the evidence, then they will be humiliated or forced to submit, much like beta apes by alpha apes. Indeed, the darker side of the campaign against Operation Midland is clearly directed at terrorising vulnerable people and nervous retired state servants from giving evidence because of what may happen to them subsequently. It is assumed that they cannot easily cope with the stress of the scrutiny - hearts may give out and black depression result in the taking of lives. They will be deterred and no cases will come to court.
My ape analogy is perhaps crude and not intended to be insulting to anyone but we are still animals at heart. Our civilisation is built on the circulation of elites (the alpha apes come and go as individuals but there is always an alpha class). Individuals rise or fall but only within a much more slowly changing system of expectations and rules, punctuated (as in 1917, say, in Russia) by revolutions that change the expectations and the rules - for a new set of alpha apes to command and rule.
The laws of society, honed over thousands of years, will always give enormous advantage to the person who can assert authority, cover up their traces, argue their case more effectively, bluster and, if necessary, bully. In previous eras, this might include using their fists, having access to the hangman or damning a soul to hell but we have progressed - somewhat. However, these people also have managed to create in liberal society, over time, rules that stop those abuses that can be evidenced (the rule of law) and even, in some cases, merely articulated (the free press). So things are definitely getting better. But is it enough?
Tom Watson perhaps represents a more working class conception of power relations in which authority and the middle classes (the upper class in Britain is actually the upper middle class) set rules that may have an element of protection for all (which is good) but give no scope for the victim of anything that cannot be evidenced to speak freely and get justice or recompense without placing themselves at risk of humiliation or destruction. The fact may be that they suffered appalling bullying or abuse which if they can articulate but not prove only means that that fact may be wholly disregarded and the abuser protected. The rules of society continue to protect the powerful and authority in perhaps more subtle ways than they once did but grants protection nevertheless. If the victim is not articulate, they are twice-damned - as 'ignorant' or as 'unworthy' on the one hand and as unable to provide what the rules require on the other.
When he speaks for the abused in Parliament with passion, Watson speaks, in his mind's eye perhaps, in a language that is incomprehensible to the editors of newspapers and the professional classes but one very comprehensible to anyone who has been institutionally bullied, worked for a bad boss or been abused inside a family or church group. There is nowhere such people can go in most of these cases - institutions are governed by authority and low level fear and anxiety, bad bosses until the rise of modern human resources skills could act with impunity, families are a no-go area for the State except in exceptional circumstances and the churches often appear to be another no-go area for investigating authorities.
The bullied and abused used to be fobbed off with the Church and a loving Jesus but, however comforted privately by religion, they generally have to cower and, literally, 'suffer in silence' in this world in the hope of the next - they have to submit as betas before the alphas. I once was stuck for a couple of years with a bully of a boss, a psychological thug of the worst type. I was trapped by the need to feed my family and yet if anyone is a natural alpha in terms of almost Nietzschean drive it is me. I was temporarily trapped by the power relations of a particular type of society with no escape - in that case, he was fired and I took his job so there was something of a happy ending. But the experience marks you. People stuck in abusive families, care homes, institutions and so forth are deeply marked by their experiences. And it is even a bit more complex than that - between the betas and the alphas lies a 'kapo' class of willing servitors whose psychological brutalities are conveniently unseen by their masters. The worst of abuse is always that it happens outside the sight of the people who are supposed to maintain the rule of customary law. It is a secret matter of gross impunity.
And, of course, the poor prey on the poor. The Rotherhan abuse case is a case study in thuggery perpetrated on the vulnerable where the rules and processes of a system designed by the alphas for their own protection as much as that of their charges proved wholly incapable of protecting young people. There are suspicions in this case that blind eyes were turned because local electoral considerations handed power to a 'kapo' class of vote providers who were then allowed to protect their community in return. The vulnerable margin was just handed over to the abusers as a type of the sacrifice of the outsider to preserve the cohesion of a closed community - a human approach to social cohesion that can be traced back to the Iron Age and perhaps to the bog bodies.
The Labour Party, of which Tom Watson is Deputy Chairman, may crudely be characterised as having been created to give the betas, the ordinary person without power, a chance in life. Indeed, the early trades unionists in particular grew their own alphas who would represent them through the Party. In the last few decades, this 'Movement' has become nothing more than another bunch of competing alphas at the top of the gibbon troop: the Rotherham child abuse case is proof enough of that. The leaderships of the Left have not spoken for the vulnerable and changed their conditions directly through struggle in which the vulnerable can participate so much as empowered a rather nice liberal 'kapo' class of social managers that feathers its nest at the highest levels. Things, of course, are more complex than I imply but something has gone wrong with the Left Project. In speaking for the abusers and refusing to obey the rules of the alphas (represented earlier today by the expostulations of an outraged Nicholas Soames), Watson speaks against the norms of the system he had entered on behalf of the betas. He has returned to the spirit if not the practice of the lost radical beginnings of his Party which, in many ways, is out of character for him.
This is (roughly) perhaps at the core of his reasoning for not apologising beyond the 'distress to family' apology that he has already made. It is at the core of the essentially political (that is, related to power relations in the community) aspects of the case, the driving insistence of editors and politicians that he say more, that he kow-tow to their aspirations and their rules. Above all, he perhaps (I cannot speak for him) knows that the alpha class, of which he is one through hard work and diligence, which is in command of the rules of society, are combining here to bully an upstart ape within the troop. He is 'letting the side down'. He must be brought into line - it is about much more than an apology to a family, it is a struggle for the commanding heights of national morality.
I prefer to see Watson as someone who chose not to abandon his roots but to keep fighting for those he was sent to Parliament to represent. But I do not want to be misunderstood here. I have no opinion on the late Lord Brittan. I have no emotional position on him. I genuinely feel sorry for a family who, even if he did do something bad (which we do not know), might have no inkling of it. All I recognise is the fact that the jury that has never met and will probably never meet may have to remain open until two things have happened - the exhaustive enquiries into what appear to be credible complaints of abuse and credible corroborating statements from state servants about cover ups of elite child abuse has been gone through and a system of abuse within the elite proven or not proven. Even if it is not proven, this is not the same thing as proven to be not true. We are stuck with ambiguity unless there is a killer punch that demonstrates that the claims come from liars or fantasists and it is as wrong to dismiss claimants as liars and fantasists as it would be wrong to assert that the accused are guilty rather than the subject of investigation.This alone makes it imperative that Operation Midland is permitted to proceed and to be resourced without attempts to interfere with the witnesses.
This is all deeply tragic (in Hegel's sense of tragedy being the conflict of right with right) because the ambiguities and difficulties of such cases mean that somebody is going to get hurt under any scenario. Full acceptance of the rules of the alpha system simply means that the 'hidden history' (as it is being termed by the ESRC-funded academic study of official attitudes to child abuse) will continue and that the survivors will continue to be treated as second class human beings. Full support for the claims of all 'betas' without adequate investigation could mean possible injustices to perfectly respectable and decent members of the elite - in other words another form of injustice entirely.
The answer, of course, is partly in-depth investigation ass Operation Midland is undertaking. Unfortunately, we have good historical reasons for believing that such investigations have been mishandled or subject to influence in the past. Personally, Operation Midland strikes me as determinedly independent but Watson scores a point here. Conveniently for the advocates of the survivors' case, the Bishop of Lewes has got sent down this past week for sexual exploitation. The court heard that, in the early 1990s, a surprising number of elite figures wrote to give character references that helped to ensure that justice would not be done at that time - the alpha apes look to the rest of us as if they look after their own. And if this case is proven as it is, why should not there be many others? And how was it that Savile was not investigated for so long? - and so on and so forth. The BBC as recent cultural lord and master of alpha morality in this areas may be predictable but also faintly repulsive in this latter context.
In the more general context of cases like this, Tom Watson looks eminently reasonable in doubting whether justice can be done for the abused without he exertion of political pressure. A calculation that is culturally political may be being made here that justice for the abused trumps justice for alpha families let alone individuals. It comes down to a fairly brutal decision on where you think your moral responsibility lies. For one cultural system perhaps, the ultimate crime is armed resistance by their underlings (now labelled as terrorism and turned into the darkest of all dark crimes) but to the other the ultimate crime is cover up of the misuse of power and especially of misuse of power that turns a blind eye to, and perhaps condones or even organises for its own purposes, the rape of children and harms to the weak. The war on terror led to ambiguities of justice and so, it would appear, does the 'intifada' that is the war on elite child abuse.
In many ways the Left has submitted to the Right under the recent hegemony of rights liberalism - it has abandoned all struggle except within the law - but the Right has not responded in kind in its arrogance of power. It continues to resist transparency and lacks a basic integrity that places certain human values above protection of their own kind, indeed core values above the law itself as it stands. Liberal-minded Left and Tory MPs alike are not changing the law actively to protect the vulnerable - if anything, thanks to 'austerity', they are rapidly eliminating those protective infrastructures that do exist. Watson asked MPs today to search their own consciences but he was faced with rows of blank faces and dead eyes because most of them have no conception of the radical action required to protect the vulnerable in our society. The truth is that most of them don't really give a damn enough to initiate action and those few that do come from all parties. Giving a damn about the your own vulnerable is not a Left thing in the real world any more - it used to be but not any more. Mrs Jellyby is alive and well and living in Parliament. The vulnerable of the world can cause lengthy impassioned posturing on the benches but the state of the vulnerable at home regarded as an embarrassment. For those of us on the Left, Watson has offered us, rather clumsily, a way back to the recovery of our souls.
If Watson apologises any further than he has done, he will have betrayed the vulnerable. He will have adopted all the rules of the elite and then be forced to slink to the back of this troop of unpleasant gibbons and hope to remain accepted. He must, in short, stand and fight or lose his place forever. The distress of one family is certainly regrettable, especially as relatives may not be alphas at all but fellow betas. But if he believes (which I think he may do but is problematic as a matter of faith and judgment in the prevailing system) that the survivors who came to him as their representative, that is, to their own dedicated alpha ape, did not lie and that there is reasonable cause to believe that, despite the lack of direct evidence (according to the rules of the game), the Noble Lord was, shall we say, 'problematic' (since it may be a matter of faith that he is not problematic) then he also knows that not only would he not be true to himself but that he would do irreparable harm to the tens of thousands, maybe many more, people who look to him and his increasingly rare type in Parliament if he compromised beyond a certain line. They have hopes and now expectations that they never had before that they can be represented against a system of mostly unintentional but sometimes cynical bullies. Again, it is true, the late Lord Brittan himself may be the victim of an injustice but ... something is up and it needs investigation.
These two world views are thus incommensurable - perhaps you are of the genuine Right or Left, as opposed to the ersatz Left, to the extent that you understand this and take the appropriate side, that of order through rules with the risk of occasional cruel injustice at the margins (Right) or that of struggle against tyranny at the risk of creating worse and unstable conditions in response to the resistance of your opponents (Left). Personally, I would like a balanceof some sort - but not at the xpense of the weakest and most damaged in society. We have ended up in a world where, thanks to social media liberating the masses by cultural means, one culture bays for Watson's blood and the other begs him to stand firm no matter what.
This is what he clearly will do, backed implicitly by his own Leader - any other recent Labour Leader would probably have caved in rather than hurt the system that sustained them but things have changed. You can almost smell the panic in the elite air about this new form of passionate demotic resistance which extends far beyond this case. Even Watson himself is a possible victim of it within his own Party as Momentum gains momentum. His Party may be a victim of it as 'Red UKIP' challenges the Labour middle classes over Europe. Revolutions perhaps must always eat their young. Eventually an internal Party struggle, a Referendum and then a General Election will pit the two cultures against one another for the first time since perhaps the 1960s. Then we will see what happens, how the thesis of one culture and the antithesis of the other culture will synthesise.
In the meantime, although I do like a society of rules and I do not like armed struggle, criminal behaviour and cover up by the elite (I am persuaded that this is what the police are investigating in good faith and that it is credible that bad things have been done) offends me. I shall back Tom without assuming that any claim is proven yet. But proven or not proven has, regrettably, no necessary link to the reality of things. The law constructs an alternate probabilistic reality within the framework of its rules. It is closer to the truth than blind assertion or faith but it is never necessarily the truth as many proven cases of miscarriages of justice have shown. Sometimes even the system corrects itself with sufficient facts but the purpose of law is only incidentally justice. The purpose of law is order tempered by justice.
I shall personally also feel sorry for Lord Brittan's family under all probable scenarios while considering the investigation that caused pain during his last days to be the 'lesser evil' in terms of human suffering. This is one for Dostoevsky on a dark and stormy night. But crushing the spirit of the weak by forcing their Leader to bend his knee on one possible error (not yet actually proven to be an error) is too great a price to pay for good order in a broken system.
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