Heart of this nation

Who's with me?

We have to wake up. These forces of extremism based on a warped and wrong-headed misinterpretation of Islam aren't fighting a conventional war but they are fighting one against us - and 'us' is not just the West, still less simply America and its allies. 'Us' is all those who believe in tolerance, respect for others and liberty



We must mobilise our alliance of moderation in this region and outside it to defeat the extremists.

And mobilisation begins at home:

Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other faiths have a perfect right to their own identity and religion, to practice their faith and to conform to their culture. This is what multicultural, multi-faith Britain is about. That is what is legitimately distinctive. But when it comes to our essential values - belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage - then that is where we come together, it is what we hold in common; it is what gives us the right to call ourselves British. At that point no distinctive culture or religion supersedes our duty to be part of an integrated United Kingdom.

...

Obedience to the rule of law, to democratic decision-making about who governs us, to freedom from violence and discrimination are not optional for British citizens. They are what being British is about. Being British carries rights. It also carries duties.

...

We are a nation comfortable with the open world of today ... But we protect this attitude by defending it. Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don't come here.

One more?

The refusal to engage with opponents and the exaltation of intolerance are the ante-chamber to blind violence — and this must not be granted any space.

(OK, I cheated - that last one wasn't Blair. I'll come back to that.)



There's a point to be made here about Blair's record with regard to the rule of law and democratic decision-making, to say nothing of freedom from violence. But there's something going on here that's deeper - and stranger - than simple hypocrisy. Look at that odd formulation from earlier this month, we protect this attitude by defending it: to be open is to reject anyone who threatens openness; to be free is to reject anyone who refuses freedom; to be moderate is to reject anyone who isn't. Or look at that list where democracy and non-violence are prefaced by 'obedience to' - as if democracy were not an achievement but a duty, not something we build but simply something we're ruled by. For Blair, apparently, tolerance really is something to conform to.



You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means. But this isn't simply the eternal Anglo-American invocation of 'freedom' and 'democracy' as brand names. The terms Blair leans on most heavily are adjectives like 'moderate' and 'tolerant', which have the odd property of being positive but not absolute. You could make a case for maximising freedom for all people at all times and in every situation. It would probably turn out to be a lot harder than it looks, but you could do it - and you could do something similar with democracy, justice, equality or love, sweet love, to name but a few. Talk to me about universalising moderation and I'll ask for details of your moderate position on the death penalty or freedom of speech; talk about maximising tolerance and I'll just ask, of whom and of what? Where moderation and tolerance are concerned, it makes a difference. Some beliefs shouldn't be held moderately; some practices shouldn't be tolerated.



As for deciding what those beliefs and practices are, that's what we have politics for. But it's precisely that debate which Blair is trying to foreclose, by rhetorically turning 'moderation' and 'tolerance' into absolute principles, counterposed to their eternal antagonists Extremism and Intolerance. What's missing here is any real sense of what we're supposed to be moderate about and tolerant of - and where that moderation and tolerance is supposed to end. Of course, Blair has his own ideas about this - even in multicultural, multi-faith Britain, freedom from violence and discrimination trumps the right to practice [your] faith and to conform to [your] culture. I don't dissent from this statement; what I object to is the idea that these limits to tolerance and moderation can somehow be justified by the principles of tolerance and moderation themselves - and not, for instance, by a broader statement of liberal humanist principle.



But then, the beauty of relative virtues is precisely that they don't lead out into broader statements - or broader debates. If I could make an appeal to everyone else in the world who believes in freedom, I'd get some replies from people with very different ideas about freedom for whom from what and for what purpose, but I think we'd recognise that we were all interested in starting the same kind of argument. If I could appeal to everyone who called themself 'moderate', the chances are I wouldn't recognise half the people who reply as deserving the name. (You're a moderate Creationist?) When I say 'moderate' I mean 'moderate like me'; and when Blair says 'moderate' he means, more and more explicitly, 'us'. Where 'us' means 'not them' - or, if the cap fits, 'not you'.



Rochenko went over much of this ground some time ago. Excuse the long quote, but this stuff is hard to cut (and I know, I've tried).

The much-spoken of Manicheanism of the US and UK governments and their media supporters plays out now alongside the Israelis’ pursuit of the fantasy of the unbreakable iron wall of security. In both cases, the fantasy of incommunicability covers everything. The hatred of our values by all those who practice Terror, the existential threat posed by Hizballah.



The fantasy is fed by the belief in the incommensurability of values. I cannot communicate with you because your fundamental beliefs are absolutely at odds with mine. There is undoubtedly slippage, in politicians’ and media talk about the current ‘global situation’ between this hard Manicheanism and the kind of disagreements better represented as cases when ‘you’ don’t agree with ‘me’ about lots of things that I consider to be important. When someone mentions, usually in a racially or ethnically inflected context, ‘alien values’, they often slide very easily – and often hysterically – from a case of the latter to a case of the former.



The only thing that can overcome this situation, generally referred to as something like the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ or whatever, is held to be a reaffirmation of ‘common values’, be they ‘core British’ or whatever. Supplementing the fantasy of incommunicability with one of unproblematic communication is I suppose the natural thing to do. But it’s a highly damaging manoeuvre. Obviously we cannot locate any ‘British’ values, except either at the level of popular culture, or at the most generalist and therefore inclusive level, where their supposed Britishness and purported minimal exclusiveness immediately evaporates. But the whole gesture of trying to solve the problem of communication by commanding those you have defined as alien to subscribe to a set of values is again an affirmation of your separation from them, which simply reproduces it. We rule you, and we shall demonstrate it by defining your world for you.



But the problem with this whole fantasised solution to the problem of incommunicability is that communication doesn’t require ‘common values’ in the first place – not, at least, at the concrete level where disagreements take place. The fantasy of incommunicability mirrors the relativist concept of the untranslatability of languages ... this states that in recognising someone as a speaker of language, we already have understood that they operate with criteria of consistency and truth, and that we therefore already have the capacity to understand them. Without a commitment to consistency and truth, there is no possibility of a ‘perspective’ in the first place. What matters in such situation is not ‘common values’, but the capacity to make a creative gesture of translation ... The shift here is in possibility: from a standpoint where the only possibility seems to be separation, sealed-in individuality, the clash of civilisations, to the emergence of another space in which two or more agents are located, not yet as interlocutors perhaps, but now no longer as implacable contraries either. Such movements are always possible.

trying to solve the problem of communication by commanding those you have defined as alien to subscribe to a set of values is again an affirmation of your separation from them, which simply reproduces it. To demand a response you will understand is to demand a response you already understand, and to dismiss any other response as incomprehensible. To demand tolerance and moderation is to demand tolerance and moderation in precisely those areas where you display them, and no others.



Ultimately, as that third quote demonstrates, to demand tolerance is to offer intolerance. The refusal to engage with opponents and the exaltation of intolerance ... must not be granted any space. This wasn't written this year or in this country; the source is a front-page opinion piece in the Italian Communist Party's daily paper l'Unità, the year is 1977 and the subject is the radical youth movement of that year. Which, as I've noted before, didn't end terrifically well. Rather than granting the movement any kind of legitimacy - or even stealing their ideological clothes - the Communists repeatedly denounced 'violence' and 'intolerance' and demanded that the moderate students dissociate themselves from the violent minority. No 'moderate' student movement ever did make itself known, not least because every time a group of students did dissociate themselves from violence the Communist Party raised its demands (if they're really opposed to violence, why don't they co-operate with the police?). In the mean time, the party backed the police clampdown on the movement to the hilt. By the end of 1978 the movement had been policed into submission - but the number of actions by left-wing 'armed struggle' groups had risen dramatically, from 169 in 1976 to 1,110 during 1978.

The refusal to engage with opponents and the exaltation of intolerance are the ante-chamber to blind violence. Well, maybe so, but the thing with ante-chambers is that they have a door on each side - and if you can't get your opponent out of one door you might push them through the other.

Don't shade your eyes

I'm posting from work, because this is (unusually) a work-related question. And I do mean 'question': I will be expecting comments. Look sharp.

I'm formulating a research proposal, building on the work I've done on what went on in Italy between 1966 and 1980. Basically, you have two successive waves of protest: one which starts in the universities around 1966, spreads to the factories and goes crazy around 1969 before subsiding; and another which starts in the factories around 1972, spreads to working-class neighbourhoods and from there to the universities, and goes crazy around 1977 before subsiding.

I've made them sound reasonably similar, but there was one crucial difference between the two. The first wave died away because Communist-affiliated trade unionists got behind it, with the result that the workers basically got what they were asking for (on the condition that they stayed with the union). By the time of the second wave, by contrast, the Italian Communists were in their ultra-respectable phase: the second wave died away largely because the police forced it off the streets using armoured cars and live ammunition, with the Communists' full support. So in one case the protest achieved a lot and stopped because, for most people, it wasn't needed any more; in the other case it achieved next to nothing and stopped because, for most people, it wasn't worth the aggro any more.

What I'm looking for is examples of the same scenarios happening in Britain. Either:

1. Protest starts
2. Protest spreads
3. It all kicks off in a big way
4. Demands are more or less met with a little help from Labour
5. Protest dies away because most people don't see the need any more

or

1. Protest starts
2. Protest spreads
3. It all kicks off in a big way
4. Public order clampdown with full support of Labour
5. Protest dies away because most people don't think it's worth it any more

I don't think I'm going to have an enormous amount of difficulty thinking of examples of the second scenario - the 1993-4 period springs to mind straight away. I could do with some suggestions for examples of the first scenario, though. There have to be some...

Never be your woman

Will:

Yesterday I was giving a talk on the egocentricity of the digital revolution ... and afterwards stood around chatting to some media lecturers, all seemingly left wing intellectuals. They were dolefully discussing how their students showed no interest in criticising brainless, celebrity-obsessed and pornographic magazines, deeming it to be purely a matter of choice what one reads, and whether a woman chooses to be photographed naked. One of these academics said that it is only around five years since every class contained at least one out-spoken feminist, but that these have either disappeared, or been silenced by a new majoritarian view that it is arrogant/pretentious to take up political positions in such a way.

Five years. The Blair government has coincided with an important generational-cultural shift, just as the Wilson government did 30 years earlier. If racism and sexism started to become unacceptable in the late 60s, thanks to a post-war generation that refused to accept them, then perhaps the defence of rights started to become unacceptable in the late 90s thanks to a post-Thatcher generation that refuses to accept it, on the basis that political rights arrogantly trump consumer rights.

Today the newspapers report that sexual harassment of teachers and pupils in schools is widespread, and that girls are starting to accept sexist language as the norm ... Have I simply dragged some value set from the distant past, which I want to see imposed upon this new social avant garde? My sense of frustration about this is doubtless no more morally sincere or keenly felt than that of the 60s conservatives, who despaired at what the kids were doing then. In each case, a moral gulf opens up, and politics struggles in vain to bridge it.

If history really is repeating itself, expect to see a 'conservative' backlash, whereby those born between 45-79 seize power and attempt to force some traditional values on the youth (more or less what we're already seeing, even from Ken Livingstone), followed by a bright new political dawn around 2020, in which a young fresh-faced child of Thatcher marches down Downing Street in a hoodie, swigging from an alco-pop, and announcing in faux-cockney tones that he's a pretty straight guy who used to be into 50 Cent.

The horror, the horror.

I don't know about the last paragraph - I just kept it in because it's funny. The part about sexism is interesting, though. Here's a comment I posted on Will's blog:

I am not a Hegelian... oh all right then, I'm a recovering Hegelian... but I think there's more historical cunning at work than your academic friends allow. As little as thirty years ago, it was widely assumed that women's only roles were to be decorative and look after children; women who 'made it in a man's world' were freakish oddities. (When Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, a popular slogan on the left was 'Ditch the Bitch'. Right on, brother.) If seventies feminists did a lot of shouting, they had a lot to shout about.

So it's true on one level that magazines like Nuts and FHM take us back forty years, to the days of Titbits and Reveille - and it's true that pornographic imagery is degrading, oppressively so when it's ubiquitous. But it's also true that some of the core feminist arguments have been won, or at least conceded. The very language in which these students defend those magazines reflects the radical liberalism of mainstream feminism, or of the mainstreaming of feminism: why shouldn't a woman be a doctor/bus-driver/MP/astronaut? why shouldn't a woman go where she likes and wear what she likes? why shouldn't a woman take her clothes off for the cameras if she wants to?

Feminism also meant a much harder set of arguments, having to do with dignity rather than freedom of action. These are questions of what's good for women as women - and, more importantly, who gets to decide. I'd say that the problem on this front isn't that the gains of women's liberation have been rolled back, so much as that they were never really made. "Women shouldn't have to look sexy all the time" is a fine liberal argument - it's a subset of the belief that nobody should have to do anything. "Women shouldn't be expected to look sexy" is another matter, and finds a lot of liberals on the other side of the fence - after all, why shouldn't people have expectations of one another, and why shouldn't people sometimes choose to comply with other people's expectations?

It's an argument which was never really won - and, I would argue, it's come back to bite us in the shape of the hijab debate. Twice over, in fact: advocates of hijab play a distorted and sexist version of the dignity argument ("why should a woman be expected to put herself on display?") while advocates of other people's right to wear hijab play a version of liberalism that seems equally distorted by sexism ("why shouldn't a woman have the right to shield herself from prying eyes?").

So I think you can add to your list of prophecies that feminism will be back, but it won't be so liberal next time. And it'll probably be wearing a pinafore dress over jeans. (Why do people do that? Women mainly.)

---

While I'm in philosophical mode, a swift plug for Clive's dissection of Blair's weird and sinister maunderings on the 'social contract', which he seems to want to replace with... well, an actual contract (only this time round they would impose it on us, not the other way round). I rarely succeed in getting through Blair's statements, what with being overcome by outrage, panic or sheer pedantic irritation (no, look, it doesn't mean that...). Fortunately Clive is made of sterner stuff.

---

Q: Why is the Italian government letting convicted fraudsters out of prison?
A: It's all because of the Christian Democrats.
Q: But the Christian Democrats ceased to exist over a decade ago, didn't they?
A: Indeed they did, my knowledgeable questioner. But they're still making the political weather.
Q: Oh. What's that about then?
A: Read "Open up the nicks", new from me at the Sharpener. The second in a six-monthly series of commentaries on Italian politics. Possibly more interesting than it sounds. (I can't really tell - I mean, it sounds pretty interesting to me...)

Just the power to charm

Dave:

In a post yesterday, I pointed out that Tony Blair - currently in Pakistan to meet president Pervez Musharraf - at least did not feel the need to salute the military dictator's 'courage, strength and indefatigability', as George Galloway famously did on meeting Saddam Hussein.

But I've just heard the World at One on Radio Four. There was Blair, praising Musharraf's 'courage and his leadership in taking Pakistan on this journey of change and modernisation'.

Modernisation, eh? This touches on something Chris wrote recently:

[the] invocation of modernity is one of Blair's common rhetorical tropes ... Managerialists like Blair don't like the language of value judgment and choices. So they try to pass these off as things that are inevitable, modern. David Marquand has said that this is the "myth" of New Labour:

There is one modern condition, which all rational people would embrace if they knew what it was. The Blairites do know. It is on that knowledge that their project is based, and by it that their claim to power is validated.

One more quote, this one from myself back in 1997:

Perhaps the strongest theme in the repertoire of New Labour - certainly the most inspirational - is that one word: New. Curiously, among the true believers - many of whom seem to be former Communists - the fervour for 'renewal' coexists with a passion for 'realism': a fierce disdain for anyone advocating reforms which would actually redistribute power or wealth. Ultimately the two enthusiasms seem to spring from the same source: the convulsive, triumphant abandonment of all those things Kinnock and Smith spent years edging away from. It must be quite a relief to admit that you don't really oppose the status quo - nuclear weapons, privatised railways, 40% top rate of tax and all: it must feel like coming home. What is new about New Labour, in short, is that the party doesn't plan to change anything fundamental and it admits it. (This combination of ideas also enables the party's ideologues to claim that Labour's policies had to change because they were 'old': a deeply dishonest presentation of a transformation which was entirely political, and by no means inevitable.)

Like David Marquand, I think there's more going on here than 'managerialism'. 'Modern', in its New Labour usage, reminds me strongly of the old Communist term 'progressive'. Both terms have an emptily circular quality - the leaders of New Labour (or the CP) call for commitment to the progressive cause (or modern values), but the only way to find out if a specific policy is modern (or progressive) is to ask if it's supported by the leadership of the Party (or the Party leadership). At the same time, however, progress (or modernity) is seen as a real political value, rousing genuine commitment - even fervour - in Party loyalists. To be modern, as Marquand suggests, is to be cutting with the grain of history. Things are changing, in ways nobody can resist; great forces of historical change are working their purpose out in the world. (The pseudo-religious language is deliberate; Christopher Hill suggested in The world turned upside down that one way to understand the Puritanical sense of being part of a blessed revolutionary elect may be to think of the Marxist sense of working for the forces of historical progress. And, perhaps, vice versa.) 'Modernisation' (or 'progress') is both a world-historical force and a tangible fact; the only question is whether we are going to let ourselves be crushed by the steamroller or climb aboard - and, posed in those terms, the question answers itself.

But the emptiness of the concept remains. In 2006 as in 1997, for Blair to describe something as 'modern' means nothing more specific than that he supports it and anyone who opposes it is deluded. The positive content of 'modernity', in other words, is all in the type of commitment it evokes; the term itself is purely rhetorical, and can be applied to any policy, any regime, any change, any resistance to change. What interests me about Blair's invocations of 'modernity', in other words, is not the indiscriminateness with which he sprays them around, but the reverse. If we could track the specific ideas, things and people Blair has identified as 'modern' over the years, I suspect it would give us a pretty good picture of how Blair's thinking has evolved - and of which specific all-powerful historical forces have populated his personal cosmology at different times. In 1997 'modernity' had something to do with Thatcherism; now, apparently, it has something to do with Pervez Musharraf.