White poppies from the Peace Pledge Union

It has reached – hopefully – its zenith this year with an argument with FIFA about whether British football players would be allowed to have some poppies embroidered onto their football shirts during international football games over the next few days. Even though there has never been any desire on the part of British football players to do this before, even though to do so is clearly against the FIFA kit rules, and even though no other nation which observes Remembrance Day has been clamouring to do this, all of a sudden the wearing of a poppy has become An Historic National Tradition, the initial refusal to allow it was Political Correctness Gone Mad, and the compromise which has been reached with FIFA is a Victory For Common Sense.

Apart from my early years in primary school (when I didn’t understand what the whole thing was about, and when I was basically intrigued by the actual physical product) I’ve never worn a poppy, and I’ve never actively participated in Remembrance Day activity. Usually when 11 November falls on a work day, out of respect to the 99% of my colleagues who do wish to observe the two minutes silence I usually absent myself to the toilet around that time rather than ostentatiously sit there carrying on working, but this year it’s probably fortunate that I’m actually off on leave on that day because, the level that poppy fascism has now reached, I might end up saying or doing something somebody else might regret.

Why do I feel this way?

There are a number of reasons for it, but many of them can be summed up in one succinct phrase.

Because it’s bullshit.

The message of Remembrance Day as it was conceived was supposed to be Lest We Forget; it was instigated in the aftermath of The War To End All Wars to honour the millions who gave their lives – or rather, were forced at gunpoint to give their lives by their so-called class superiors – in what was humanity’s biggest act of utterly pointless industrial slaughter ever. In its early years it was a noble tradition, but sadly even then probably not truly believed in by those responsible for that slaughter.

But now? Lest We Forget has nothing to do with it; we Remember for precisely four minutes every year (or only two minutes if 11 November happens to fall on a Sunday). We barely Remember in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, and at precisely 11:02, after we’ve done our Remembering, we immediately Forget. The killing continues, the political grandstanding continues, and nobody in any position to actually do something about stopping the killing does anything about doing anything to stop it; our media and political class publicly and ostentatiously mourns every one of Our Boys announced to have died, whilst publicly and ostentatiously celebrating the deaths of The Baddies. And similarly the other way round; in their own communities jihaddi terrorists are fêted as Heroes Of The Revolution, whose deaths at the hands of the kafirs will be avenged, regardless of the number of children of those kafirs who were liquidised by the bomb planted on the bus or outside the pavement cafe.

Rarely does anybody stand out from the crowd to say Enough! Rarely do we hear anybody call for the madness to stop; the few who do, and the few who refuse to play the game, who refuse to stand up in a sham token of respect, are pilloried by the media and their peers.

Whilst the original meaning of Remembrance Day was about Remembering those who had given their lives in defence of Freedom, it has mutated into being about showing visible support for Our soldiers who are engaged in State-sponsored killing overseas; to question that support is framed as being unpatriotic, and of Spitting On The Graves Of Those Who Died That I Might Spit; the meaning of Remembrance Day is no longer a moment of private reflection, but instead has become a When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife? question.

But apart from anything else, why are only soldiers given a special day to be Remembered anyway? Why do we have no Remembrance Day for firefighters who’ve died saving lives? Or police officers? Or paramedics? Or accident and emergency nurses? They too risk their lives in the line of duty, but we have no special symbol or special day to remember their sacrifice. Our soldiers are acting under their own consciences on the orders of our government – but so are Their soldiers. It is patently ridiculous to assert that Our soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Right and Their soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Wrong – so whilst Remembering Our soldiers who have been killed in action, why can we not also remember Their soldiers who Our soldiers have killed? As the throwaway line in Austin Powers goes, “henchmen have families too you know”.

Some people often suggest that I might sport a white poppy instead; it’s an attractive suggestion, but actually I see it as a bit of a cop-out – whilst it promotes a conversation, it’s still buying in to the whole attitude that for the first two weeks of the year people must display their support.

Now, whilst I fit into the wider set of people called ‘pacifist’, I’m not a naïve one – I do agree that regrettably there are indeed Bad People in the world, who end up running countries, who manage to inspire other people to kill on their behalf, who cannot be stopped with strong language and the promise of a trip to the seaside if they promise to be good, and that We need soldiers to stop them. I’m the kind of pacifist who accepts that whenever a situation reaches the state of armed conflict, then armed conflict is the inevitable consequence – but that the seeds of the next conflict are always sown in the aftermath of the ending of the last one. I accept that sometimes there’s no reasoning with Bad People – but I do wonder if some Bad People might turn out to be not so Bad after all if our media and politicians were willing to make just that little bit more effort to reason with them.

Don’t get me wrong – I accept, respect, and support right of you, the 99%, to hold your Remembrance Day commemorations. Why do so many of you have such difficulty in accepting my right to dissent from them?

(Further reading: Adrian Short on the crass commercialisation of the Poppy Appeal, and Dan Slee recounts a moving personal family tale)

Mock-up final NOTW front page by Adam Westbrook

With yesterday’s announcement that the News of the World is going to be printed for the last time this coming Sunday, now I’m outraged.

There’s a disgusting irony in that the closure of the paper – with the loss of 200 direct jobs – has been prompted by the sustained campaigning of the political left; the people who have a political mission to save jobs have caused a whole bunch of jobs to be lost. Not just any jobs, though – innocent jobs. Remember, the phone hacking scandal took place 5-10 years ago – none of the people who are losing their jobs this weekend were responsible for what took place back then, indeed, of the people losing their jobs this weekend only about five of them (according to the News of the World’s outgoing political editor) were even working for the paper at the time of the scandal. 200 innocent jobs are being scapegoated in order for The People of Twitter to feel like they’ve secured an historic victory, sticking it to The Man.

Yes, 200 innocent jobs – one thing I missed out of my post on Tuesday was my increasing cynicism about being told to be outraged by Twitter; more often than not (and I’ve been guilty myself), when Twitter tells me to be outraged about something on the Monday, information which comes out by the Wednesday reveals that there are other important aspects of the story which put a different slant on the outrage. So whilst this Tuesday, Twitter was effectively calling for the News of the World to be shut down, once it secured its victory we learn that different slant. Whilst the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the News of the World at the time the criminal activity started who must surely have not only been aware of what was going on, but must have signed off on it, escapes (so far, at the time of writing) completely free.

The 200 jobs which are being lost on Sunday were not responsible for the phone hacking scandal – those 200 jobs were the people responsible for uncovering Sarah Ferguson’s flogging time with her ex husband Prince Andrew to people hoping to gain business advantages as a result of such meetings; they were the people who proved corruption within FIFA and who uncovered the corruption within Pakistani cricket.

As an educated middle class left-leaning person, I’ve never been a fan of the News of the World’s editorial style or stance, but one less newspaper for sale on Sunday is hardly of benefit to our society. Much as my hyperlocal blogging friends like to see themselves as plugging the gap left by the gradual withdrawal of the mainstream media from local journalism, a few possible high-profile examples aside, keen amateurs simply don’t have the skills or resources to undertake the kind of sustained investigative journalism needed to keep those in power accountable to those who aren’t – and to those who are calling for more statutory regulation of the media, do you really think a State-regulated press is healthy for democracy?

There’s also the question of the wider effects of the News of the World’s closure – although a mere 200 people were directly employed by the paper (some of whom may get the opportunity to apply for other jobs within News International), the paper has been reported as being the most widely read newspaper in the English language; as well as the direct employees, there are also the indirect employees – the paper suppliers, the distributors, the newsagents and other shops – who will lose a significant portion of their livelihood overnight.

So, do we feel proud of ourselves?

Venn diagram by Mr Wowser

What’s that, you say? That since I don’t normally buy the News of the World (or subscribe to any other Murdoch media products), and my rubbish isn’t taken away by the council anyway, that me proudly declaring my boycott of them is a completely empty gesture?

Well, quite. And ultimately, that is why boycotts fail, and why calling for boycotts is usually an empty gesture – because the people who call for them are far more often than they aren’t not actually customers of the Bad Company(tm) in question in the first place, and if they’re customers of another company in the group rarely do they extend that boycott to their own purchasing when to do so will cause themselves more than the slightest inconvenience. I suspect many of the people calling for a NOTW boycott – who are also extending their outrage to the whole of News Corporation and calling for Rupert Murdoch’s intended purchase of the remainder of BSkyB that he doesn’t already own to be blocked – are also Sky subscribers. For their outrage to be genuine rather than empty, they’ll also be cancelling their Sky subscriptions and suffering a bit of personal inconvenience – that’s what a boycott is about, not about telling other people not to do what you don’t already do anyway.

Similarly, those who call for a boycott of companies involved in the disputed territories of Israel/Palestine actually have it quite easy – there’s bugger all that they might want to buy in a shop which is actually produced there, so ultimately the boycott of standard retail goods boils down to looking at the label to see where one’s avocado comes from. And not buying SodaStream any more, for anybody still living in the 1970s. If one really wants to take a stand, if you live in a municipality which uses Veolia for rubbish processing you’ll opt out of the council’s rubbish collection and take personal responsibility for disposing it elsewhere (and probably not to the council tip, because that itself is probably operated by Veolia as well). I will however allow them to continue to have their sewage taken away by t’Corporation (even though a lot of the specialist valves used are manufactured in settlements in the disputed Golan heights) – emptying my own toilet myself on a twice weekly basis is one of the few aspects of my own lifestyle I wouldn’t wish on others.

As an aside to the boycotts issue, I must confess to be now suffering from Twitter Outrage Fatigue Syndrome; I’m sure back in the olden days of Usenet outrage was there (especially in the darkest corners of the talk.* hierarchy), but it seems practically a day doesn’t go by without half of Twitter telling me to be outraged about the latest outrageous thing. Frankly, I think the phone hacking scandal is a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s an outrageous thing. The arms trade, the ongoing banking crisis, and our government’s continued eagerness to spend money on wars which should be spent on the NHS, they’re worthy of outrage. I’m even inclined to be more outraged that two Birmingham MPs are campaigning to relax the ban on smoking in pubs. Dodgy practice by a handful of journalists 5-10 years ago is not remotely on that scale.

Picture credit: BBC News

Of course, it’s still too early to say right now at the time of writing how this will pan out, but so far the signs are at least positive; the caretaker military administration have promised open elections as soon as practicable, they’ve promised to abide by all the existing treaties which are in effect (which is hopefully a good sign for the Israel-Palestine process), they after all chose not to suppress the protests in the first place, and, following Tunisia’s starting of what might prove to be a Middle East domino effect, protests are now starting in Algeria.

But what can we learn ourselves from the events of the last three weeks?

Most of all, we learn perhaps the most important thing, that (broadly) peaceful protest, even in the face of a 30-year oppressive regime, can work – that ultimately, even when the regime is backed up by tanks, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets, the people really do reign supreme; if the people can be arsed. When a million people turned up to march on parliament in 2003 intent on stopping our government from going to war in Iraq, we turned up, we shouted at the bricks and waved our banners, and we went home. Subsequent protests about various issues in Britain have had similar effects – a lot of people have turned up, shouted, waved flags, thrown bricks, and buggered off home. In contrast, in Egypt a million people turned up in Tahrir Square and stayed there. They stayed there and refused to go home until their demands were met – and they knew that their demands were righteous, and those who could have stopped the protests in a stroke, the army, also knew their demands were righteous. Rather than act as agents of the oppressive state, the army remembered what their first and overriding priority is – to defend the nation. The People held their nerve, and The People ultimately won.

We also learn that effective protests are ones which are owned by The People, not by professional agitators. The message for us in the UK is clear – Socialist Worker, you’re not welcome. Whenever you and your crowd turn up to a protest, all you do is poison it. You have no interest in creating a fair and just society, your sole interest is in replacing one unfair and unjust system with another unfair and unjust system. Whenever you and your ilk turn up to a protest, you’re there with violence and mayhem as the goal, not the means of last resort. It’s because of the likes of you that modern protests are accompanied by an equally obnoxious response by those tasked to police them. So go home, and don’t come back until you’re prepared to camp out in the cold for three weeks.

What can our government (and by that I do not restrict myself to those who happen to be living in Downing Street this week) learn from the Egyptian protest?

How might they respond to a three week occupation of Trafalgar Square by a million people?

One of the reasons why is summed up neatly by Laurie Penny in her article ‘Inside the Whitehall Kettle‘:

I didn’t understand quite how bad things had become in this country until I saw armed cops being deployed against schoolchildren in the middle of Whitehall. [my emphasis] These young people joined the protest to defend their right to learn, but in the kettle they are quickly coming to realise that their civil liberties are of less consequence to this government than they had ever imagined. The term ‘kettle’ is rather apt, given that penning already-outraged people into a small space tends to make tempers boil and give the police an excuse to turn up the heat, and it doesn’t take long for that to happen. When they understand that are being prevented from marching to parliament by three lines of cops and a wall of riot vans, the kids at the front of the protest begin to moan. “It’s ridiculous that they won’t let us march,” says Melissa, 15, who has never been in trouble before. “We can’t even vote yet, we should be allowed to have our say.”

When talking about democracy, it’s usually understood to be basically just about the vote we have every year / every four or five years, in which we select our politicians to run our cities and our country, and the lucky few actually get the politician of their choice representing them.

Democracy is about more than just voting in elections, though – democracy is about participating fully (or at least to the best of one’s ability and interest) in civic life; jury service is an essential act of democracy, as is serving on the bench as a magistrate. It’s a common complaint of younger people that the magistrates are all a bunch of posh old duffers – but actually, the pool of magistrates in any given city is supposed to be representative of the population of that city, be it young, gay, black, single parent, whatever. So why not give an application a go?

But I digress. The other important pillar of a fully democratic society is the right to protest. In a democratic society, the Government is not the master of The People, it’s the servant of The People. And – vis the magistrate point – the Law is also not the master, but the servant. Where the Government and the Law are out of step with the will of the People, the People have a duty to make their views known through the medium of protest.

Cuddly liberal types generally tend to baulk at the idea of protest (except when the topic of protest is something they have a personal interest in), preferring instead to advise people to write strongly worded letters to their MPs, being horrified at the idea of other people breaking the law. But actually, important as writing a strongly worded letter to one’s MP is, no bad law ever got repealed by the power of green ink. That law which Henry VIII instigated mandating every adult male to do an hour’s archery practice every Sunday morning? It was people breaking it which eventually got it repealed. More pertinently, that law which made every adult pay a flat fee in order to have the right to even exist in this country (aka the Poll Tax) – it wasn’t people writing letters to their MPs which got it repealed – it was people, in mass numbers, in the first instance refusing to pay it, and ultimately the People turning up to a mass protest in Trafalgar Square to make their views unavoidably heard.

Over the last 25 years, there have been a number of laws – and amendments to laws – introduced which have further and further curtailed the right to protest; in fact, those laws in their letter are actually so restricting that the Public Order Act 1986 technically makes it a criminal offence for a group of more than six people to walk down the street together. It’s a testament to the high ethical standards our police forces (much maligned, with good reason, in the 1980s) have maintained that, by and large, they’ve wilfully refused to make use of powers they’ve had at their disposal.

But in the last couple of years there has been a much uglier undercurrent around protests developed where police and mindless anarchists alike have each upped the ante, with the result being that reasonable protests are emasculated at birth by the appearance of the riot squad, and what should have been a reasonable protest has been needlessly turned into a riot because that’s the only way the protesters have been left as the way to get their voices heard.

And as Laurie Penny says, when the same policing techniques that are used against a bunch of anarchist G8 rioters are used against a bunch of schoolchildren, you know there’s something gone badly wrong. And something needs to be done.

An emergency notice has been served on an illegal gypsy camp, which was set up at the weekend on greenbelt land in Meriden. It is believed the travellers had purchased the plot of land from a landowner but did not have permission to build on the site.

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Travellers bulldozing a field in a peaceful Solihull village to create a caravan site have been ordered to stop work by the authorities. Angry residents set up a road block with farming trucks stopping lorries taking building materials to the site.

This is not, as is often the case, travellers just moving onto a piece of common land and setting up, or even a case of them moving on to somebody else’s land without permission. This piece of land, they have legally bought.

Admittedly, they haven’t got planning permission to set up a camp on the land – intending instead to try to gain retrospective planning permission part way through the work. This is of course still illegal – but is a common practice carried out by big time developers and small time homeowners for their rear extensions alike. Overwhelmingly, when applied for, retrospective planning permission is granted.

But in this case, planning permission for the travellers’ site probably won’t be granted – even though it probably would have been for a block of nice little boxes on the hillside flats for rich people. And had it been flats for rich people, the people of Meriden almost certainly wouldn’t have turned out in force to block the road.

Why?

Because racism against travellers is the one remaining socially acceptable form of racism. Not only is it acceptable, it’s almost mandatory. Call somebody a nigger, wop, or paki and you’ll be quite rightly castigated for it. Call them a gypo or a pikey and your friends will laugh approvingly; take somebody to task for using the word gypo and they’ll tell you not to be so sensitive, that it’s Political Correctness Gone Mad(tm).

Now it’s true that many illegal traveller encampments need an awful lot of clearing up when they are eventually evicted. It’s also true that they shouldn’t move in illegally in the first place.

But if councils met their obligations to provide a certain number of travellers’ sites in the first place, there would be less of a problem of ‘illegal’ encampments. And ultimately, if you treat people like pariahs, then like pariahs they will behave.

So when can we see the end of this last socially acceptable form of racism?

“The home secretary has said he will back any request from police or local government to ban an Islamic group marching through Wootton Bassett. Alan Johnson said he felt ‘revulsion’ at the thought of Islam4UK’s proposed march through the Wiltshire town”.

Now indeed, it is quite offensive that the group is indeed planning on holding its protest march in the town which has become synonymous with returning dead soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, and by choosing to hold their protest march there – regardless of their rationale that by proposing to hold it their they well get maximum publicity which they almost certainly wouldn’t have got anywhere else, by choosing to protest in such an inflammatory manner, they will almost certainly drive more people away from their point of view than bring them to it, especially in the current climate of broad public sympathy for members of the armed forces regardless of broad public opposition for what those forces have been sent to do. If they have any sense, Islam4UK will reconsider.

However, what I do find even more offensive and repugnant is that the home secretary wants to ban the march, simply on the grounds that he doesn’t like it. So much for freedom of speech.

BBC News, Daily Mail, and Sunday Mercury articles on the disturbances.