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.

Just like they said they would

There's a point in some political arguments where opposition turns into personal antagonism, which itself is liable to turn into smouldering, resentful bitterness - normally I wouldn't think anything of it, but seeing that he's one of those people.... We're lucky in this country - as compared with, say, the USA - that it's very rare for people to view other people's political allegiances as this kind of personal threat or affront. I've had Tory friends, and while I'm quite sure they thought I had idiotic and dangerous ideas, I never had any sense that they thought I was a dangerous idiot. (Is there an inverse correlation between levels of political activism and the tendency to take politics personally?)

There are exceptions, of course. The miners' strike of 1984-5 was one; Ireland has often been another. I remember one day in 1988 when the office where I worked ground to a halt for a morning while we debated the 'Death on the Rock' shootings in Gibraltar - and Michael Stone's attack on the victims' funeral in Milltown cemetery. Everyone had an opinion - and a strong one, which coloured their view of anyone who disagreed. Not that many people did. The view with regard to Gibraltar was that the SAS commando were reacting on the spur of the moment to an imminent threat, and had no choice but to act as they did; I was in a minority of two in dissenting from this. The view with regard to Milltown, on the other hand, was that there were all kinds of murderous headcases on both sides, and Michael Stone might well have been working for the IRA to gain them public sympathy by making them look like victims. I was in a minority of two on this one as well, although I had a different fellow-dissenter this time. Things were a bit tense in that office for the next few days.

But not as tense as they must have been in a lot of other workplaces, a short hop from Holyhead. My other memory of 1988 is the New Statesman column which reprinted a poem in praise of Stone that was circulating in Loyalist areas of Northern Ireland - a broadsheet, really. It consisted mainly of a list of the various Sinn Fein worthies who were at the cemetery, each of them described as panicking, running away, soiling his pants and so forth as the noble Stone took them on. (A completely fanciful description, incidentally - Martin McGuinness for one reacted by heading towards Stone, showing what can only be called courage under fire.) The poem ended by apostrophising Stone:

Your brave deed today
Against Sinn Fein/IRA
Put you top of the heap - BOY YOU'RE GREAT!

Michael Stone was a folk hero in certain circles - a symbol of intransigent opposition to the 'Shinners'. And this despite the fact that this symbol had not only attempted to murder McGuinness and Gerry Adams while they attended a funeral, but succeeded in killing three other mourners.

Eighteen years on, Stone is clearly a troubled man:

“Michael had become obsessed with the idea that the IRA were going to shoot him with the gun they captured from him [at Milltown] before any peace deal was finally concluded. That is why he turned against the Good Friday agreement after initially supporting it. He was totally paranoid and receiving treatment.”
...
“He saw a deal between the Democratic Unionist party and Sinn Fein coming, and he believes there will not be a deal until he is dead. He has been trying to get put in jail for about the past nine months.”

There are two bitter ironies here. On one hand, Stone's current state of mind isn't a million miles from a rational response to his particular situation; if he is paranoid, he's got more than most to be paranoid about. On the other, his current condition isn't so far removed from a state of mind which - as that poem suggests - many people over many years have been quite happy to condone, even celebrate. Quoting from the same piece in the Times:

He wrote a book and launched a career as an artist, mainly based on his notoriety. The signature on the back of paintings was the print of his right index finger, which he told buyers was “Michael Stone’s trigger finger”.