Blog Posts

shamima begum

2/27/2021

744 words; 6-minute read

Yesterday, 26th February, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that 21-year-old Shamima Begum would not be allowed to return to Britain from Syria to fight to have her UK citizenship restored.

In 2019 the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid took away her citizenship on the grounds that she was a threat to national security, a stance reaffirmed yesterday by the current Home Secretary, Priti Patel. Patel said, ‘The government will always take the strongest possible action to protect our national security and our priority remains maintaining the safety and security of our citizens’.

Begum fled the UK for Syria at the age of 15 to join Isis. She married a Dutch Isis fighter (as far as we know being held in a different camp) and she has had three children all of whom have died. She was captured by Syrian Kurds in 2019 and is now in the Al-Hol detention camp, along with around 11,000 other foreign nationals and their dependants.

In a June 2019 visit to the camp, Human Rights Watch found ‘overflowing latrines, sewage trickling into tattered tents, and residents drinking wash water from tanks containing worms. Young children with skin rashes, emaciated limbs, and swollen bellies sifted through mounds of stinking garbage under a scorching sun or lay limp on tent floors, their bodies dusted with dirt and flies. Children are dying from acute diarrhea and flu-like infections, aid groups and camp managers said’. In January this year there were twelve murders in the camp.

Begum’s case for returning to the UK to have her plea heard in person was based on the claim that is impossible for her to fight her case from a detention camp where she can’t have proper contact with her legal team.

In refusing to allow her to return the Supreme Court reiterated the belief that she is a threat to national security, and that no court could overrule the Home Secretary’s judgement in that regard.

Reaction to this decision has been predictably polarised. On the one hand there are those who say that no punishment is harsh enough for Begum given her association with Isis.

On the other are those who argue it’s ridiculous to regard a 21 year-old woman in a detention camp as a threat to national security; that she was underage when she left the UK and was likely groomed into doing so; and that in any case it’s illegal to leave someone effectively stateless by taking away their citizenship. (There is some dispute as to whether she has access to Bangladeshi citizenship or not).

Whatever arguments there may be over points of law, one thing is absolutely clear: yesterday’s decision condemns a young woman who has lost three children to unlimited detention in a camp in the conditions described above.

In other words the Supreme Court has in effect sided with those who reckon there’s no punishment harsh enough for Begum.

Who are the people - the actual, individual people - who are able to sleep at night knowing that this is what they’ve done? There are lots of them in the ‘justice’ factory, starting with Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, from whom we should expect absolutely nothing except heartless cruelty (they have form).

But what about Robert Reed, President of the Supreme Court, who got to read out the verdict? Watch him do so and marvel at the equanimity he displays as he bangs one nail after another into the life chances of a damaged young woman. It’s stunning, really, the way he manages to blot out the latrines, the murders, the sewage, the worm-infested water, the skin rashes, the emaciation, the garbage, dirt and flies. It’s hard not to marvel at the capacity he displays to obliterate even the tiniest vestige of compassion.

The Supreme Court’s decison was unanimous, which means that there are ten other people in the highest reaches of the system ready to renounce sympathy, mercy, kindness, grace in the name of … what? Ah yes, of course. Justice! Look at the smiles they take home with them while they condemn a vulnerable young woman, and by implication thousands of other women, men and children, to conditions they wouldn’t condone for their dogs.

Justice is supposed to be blind. How numbing to see that it’s heartless as well.

identity politics and economic inequality

2/13/2021

348 words; 3-minute read

Yesterday I pointed out the coincidence between the rise in acceptance of the equality claims of discriminated identitarian groups and the increase in levels of economic inequality in OECD nations. I didn’t argue for either correlation or causation between these two phenomena. The possibilities range from them being completely unrelated to strict causality.

In a recent London Review of Books article William Davies asks ‘why, in an age when inequality has been rising, have work and wealth ceased to provide the grounds of political identity?’ By way of an answer he’s right to point out the structural obstacles: ‘The relationship between class and voting behaviour grows progressively weaker as society becomes economically, culturally and morally more individualistic’. But maybe there’s more to it than that.

Davies also refers to the classic Marxist distinction between a class ‘in itself’ which has objective interests as a class, and a class ‘for-itself’ where that class becomes self-conscious of these interests and acts to get them realised. The progress from ‘in-itself’ to ‘for-itself’ is rocky and unpredictable and it depends on a combination of (shared) lived experience and intellectual work (‘consciousness-raising’). So another way of putting Davies’ question is why is it proving increasingly difficult for the economically dispossessed to realise its ‘for-itself’ identity?

All politics is identity politics in the sense of collectives coming to be aware of shared interests rooted in a shared identity. But it seems to be easier to mobilise collectives grounded in ethnicity, gender, and religion than those with shared interests as a social class. Members of the former collectives seem to ‘know’ and recognise each other more readily than members of the latter.

Is it fair to say that it’s harder work to ground political identity in economic inequality than in ethnicity, gender and religion? More particularly does it require different work? If so, what is that work and have we forgotten how to do it?

Hate speech, democracy and economic equality

2/12/2021

444 words; 4-minute read

‘One of the principal problems of democratic co-existence is the proliferation of so-called ‘hate speech’”. So begins a recent Serge Champeau and Daniel Innerarity article in El País (7 February 2021), reproduced here.

There’s certainly plenty of hate speech about and social media have made it a lot easier to dispense it. There’s also no doubt that hate speech does real damage to individuals and - this is Champeau’s and Innerarity’s point - it can have a corrosive effect on the ties that bind democracies together.

But there’s more to be said about hate speech and democracy. The clue is here: ‘This debate is less about classic ideological confrontation and more at the level of the personal’. The suggestion is that where we used to argue about issues that divide left and right, issues around poverty and economic equality, now we dish out and - and take - personal offence instead.

Lots of political capital has gone into combating hate speech because it’s not just personal: it’s directed at individuals by virtue of their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. Progress has been made, at least as far as law-making goes, in regard to protecting these identities and the people who wear them.

Whether all this has damped down the centrifugal forces threatening democratic cohesion or exacerbated them by shining the bright light of the law on what separates us, is a matter for conjecture. More to the point here is whether this attention to the personal has crowded out the political in the traditional, ideological, sense of the word.

Three observations on this:

1. At the same time as there’s been huge progress in recognising the equality claims of discriminated identities, income inequality has risen across all OECD countries
2. Right-wing parties (though not all of them) have found it easier to ‘modernise’ and accept LGBT equality claims (for example), than claims for economic equality. The UK Conservative Party is a good example.
3. I have no idea if there is a causal link between the increase in equality for discriminated groups in OECD countries and a decrease in economic equality in the same countries.

However (3) turns out, economic inequality is surely as much a threat to democratic co-existence as hate speech. In fact, if there was less of the former we might see less of the latter, a strategy that seems not to have occurred to the French government as it pursues its laicité agenda while leaving the Muslim banlieues to their economically marginalised fate.

Flu and covid-19: numbers, trust and owen jones

1/3/2021

387 words; 3-minute read

I like Owen Jones, the Guardian journalist. He’s generally close to my political opinions and he’s written three first-class books dissecting aspects of the corrupt and moribund state of British politics and society.

So I was a little surprised when I read in a recent article of his that Covid-19 is ‘at least 10 times deadlier than the flu’. Even to my untrained eye this looked rather on the high side given what I’ve read elsewhere, so I opened the link. It turns out that Owen’s source was a May 14th 2020 article in JAMA Internal Medicine. This was some time ago - quite near the beginning of the pandemic in fact, and it was based on Worldometers data rather than primary research.

I wondered if there was any more recent evidence that Jones might have used. A quick search turned up this December 17th 2020 article in The Lancet comparing flu and Covid deaths in France. There I read that, ‘In-hospital mortality was higher in patients with COVID-19 than in patients with influenza (15,104 [16·9%] of 89,530 vs 2,640 [5·8%] of 45,819), with a relative risk of death of 2·9 (95% CI 2·8–3·0) and an age-standardised mortality ratio of 2·82’.

So in the light of this most recent evidence Covid-19 is three times, rather than ten times, more deadly than flu. I would imagine that Jones did the same as me when he was looking for flu/Covid-19 comparative figures - he carried out an internet search - and I would imagine he came across the Lancet figures, just like I did.

So why did he use seven-month-old research based on secondary data rather than two-week-old research based on primary data?

Could it possibly be that the Lancet figures didn’t fit his narrative, summed up in his article’s title: ‘Giving people false hope about the pandemic isn't “balanced” – it's dangerous’? As dangerous as cherry-picking figures to suit an unexamined position, perhaps. 'The media should not promote disinformation under the guise of debate', says Jones.

In keeping with the polarised state of public debate on most things nowadays we’ve all (me included) got a bit entrenched in our Covid-19 foxholes. Perhaps Jones has too.

sweden reprised

12/23/2020

482 words; 4-minute read

On the 10th July I wrote a blog called ‘Two Cheers for Sweden’, arguing for a broader range of criteria for success in dealing with Covid-19 than just counting Coronavirus deaths. So how’s that going? On the face of it things don’t look too good, and even the King of Sweden is now putting the boot in. The Swedish light-touch approach was criticised at the outset for the country’s much higher death-rate then neighbouring Scandinavian countries. This remains the case. (But it’s also true that Sweden’s Covid death figures are still better than heavy lockdown countries such as the UK, Spain and Italy).

It’s fair to point out that my airy claim on 10th July that the Swedes would experience no second wave has been proved completely wrong. Along with much of the rest of Europe Sweden is in the grip of a second spike of cases, hospitalisations and deaths - with more deaths at the beginning of December than at any other time during the pandemic.

It’s also true that the Swedes are adopting measures that look increasingly mainstream: reducing public gatherings from 50 to 8, banning sales of alcohol after 10 pm, moving high school teaching online, and advising mask wearing.

So does this mean that the Swedish experiment has failed, and that those of us who held (hold?) a candle for it have been sadly misled? It’s only honest to say that things are less clear-cut and more complicated than they looked back in July.

But what seems to be happening is something like policy convergence in the short term. So just as Sweden is taking baby steps lifted from the lockdown playbook, so lockdown countries are moving their own red lines in the Swedish direction. This is most obvious in the schools context. Where Sweden was the outlier in keeping schools open at the beginning of the pandemic, now virtually everyone is doing it.

Beyond the short term, the Corona jury should stay out for a few months - maybe years - yet. The evidence on other criteria - the economy, children missing out on school for months, the mental health problems that go with lockdown and isolation, lonely deaths, divided families, the non-Covid patients missing out on treatment, an increase in domestic violence, and the corrosive effects of policing lockdown - will take a while to come in.

What the last few months do seem to have shown unequivocally is that calls to eliminate the virus are utter fantasy. The question remains how to live with it, and it could be that experience and experiment are distilling a series of practices that will serve us well in the next pandemic.

Because, give the total unwillingness to address the root causes of this one, there surely will be more.

the great conjunction

12/19/2020

411 words - 3 minute read

While the particle a millionth of an inch long whose defences are destroyed by washing our hands in soap and water for 20 seconds, also known as Covid-19, continues to wreak havoc around the world, the cosmos is doing its best to entertain us.

Since the summer I have been watching Jupiter and Saturn closing in on each other in the night sky. Back in England I had a telescope, good enough to see the Jupiter’s four biggest moons (just like Galileo), as well as the rings of Saturn. Even with the telescope, the planets look tinier than my little fingernail - but it’s like the difference between a photo of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and seeing the original in London’s National Gallery.

So I could see the planets getting closer but I had no idea until a few days ago that they were heading for a Great Conjunction, appearing side-by-side in the night sky. And closer than they’ve been since 1623 when Shakesepeare’s First Folio was being published.

Now I’m in Valencia, Spain, without a telescope, but with pretty much guaranteed clear skies every night. Saturn is bearing down on Jupiter, or so it seems on the two-dimensional canvas that’s the night sky. Last night they were half a fingernail’s width apart, and at 19.37 on the 21st December they’ll be indistinguishable with the naked eye. Yet looked at ‘from the side’ they’ll be about 650m kms distant from one another. Then they’ll begin drifting apart and won’t be so close again until 2080. For me this is very much a one-off event.

The 21st December is also the Winter Solstice, so some eight hours before the Great Conjunction the earth’s northern hemisphere will begin to tilt back towards the sun and the days will get longer. And the universe turns another notch, insensible to our trials and tribulations.

So here are we humans, stuck somewhere between a tiny particle that threatens to undo us in the short term and the motion of the quantic universe leading inexorably to heat death. The cosmos doesn’t much mind what happens to us. But on the other hand we may be the only beings in the universe capable of that thought, so we should take care of ourselves and all that sustains us.

death row and rehabilitation

12/12/2020

(376 words; 3-minute read)

As Donald Trump ends his presidency with a round of legalised murders, ex-prisoner Adnan Khan tells of a show of solidarity, empathy and humanity that invites reflection from those of us on the outside who turn our backs on offenders, whatever they may have done.

Khan tells how 700 men live in the ‘Condemned Row’ units of San Quentin Prison, California. As they’re escorted round the prison, other inmates are forced to face the wall so as not to look at them. Khan wonders how they feel at this literal turning of backs, confirming the rejection they’ve already experienced from society at large.

‘But we would still find a way to attempt to acknowledge their humanity and offer some sort of solidarity when facing the wall’, says Khan. ‘We’d slightly turn our faces, peek, try to make eye contact and give them a nod. Sometimes the nod was just with our eyes. That subtle. And they’d nod back the same way. That was our only contact with them and our only form of communication … And that simple, subtle nod relayed a message of care, empathy and moral support and most importantly, each other’s worthiness of humanity’.

Who knows what risks Khan and his fellow inmates ran as they strove to give death row prisoners a moment’s respite from the relentless routine of rejection? Removal of privileges? Reduced chance of parole? Solitary confinement? Whatever, they reckoned it was worth it to return a smidgen of pride and self-worth to those whom a dehumanising system of ‘justice’ has permanently ostracised.

So what of those of us on the outside who can make Khan’s gestures of care, empathy and moral support to casualties of the criminal ‘justice’ system at absolutely no risk to ourselves? More particularly what of those of us who deliberately refuse to do so, even when handed the opportunity on a plate? Because it happens …

We could try taking a leaf out of Khan’s book, coming down off our high horses and doing a bit more of what we profess to do: care, empathise, and spread some love.

Covid success criteria - what should they be?

7/27/2020

637 words; 6-minute read

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to an episode of the Alex Salmond show on Russia Today.

The main message from the programme (or at least the one I picked up) was that the New Zealand approach to Covid is a model for others to follow. Leaving aside the particularities of the NZ case that might have given the country an advantage to start with (small population widely dispersed, relatively few entry points that are easily covered and closed), NZ was clearly incredibly successful in keeping case numbers and deaths very low.

So, assuming the criteria for success are reduced to one - suppression of the virus - NZ was (and is, to date) clearly a massive success story.

I think, though, that measuring success by this one criterion is a mistake.

First, it’s extremely reductive as an interpretation of what ‘public health’ means. It’s been interesting to see how epidemiologists and related health professionals have come to dominate the political and mediatic interpretation of what ‘public health’ is. There is obviously much more to public health than treating Corona patients, from the mental health issues caused by lockdown to the thousands of cancer patients whose symptoms have been missed and treatment delayed because of the relentless Covid focus - and everything between and beyond.

If we take ‘public welfare’ to be the criterion for policy-making rather than ‘public health’ (however widely we interpret that term) then leaving the field to epidemiologists and virologists seems even more odd. My sister has lost her job in New Zealand as a direct result of the collapse of the NZ tourist industry brought about by the severity of the lockdown there. She is a Covid casualty too. From their public pronouncements it is hard to avoid the impression that the 650,000 people who have already lost their jobs to Covid in the UK are regarded by epidemiologists and the like as collateral damage to be put up with in the name of a greater good, much as civilian deaths in a war are regarded as a regrettable price to pay for winning the war.

How did we get to this point? One factor is the composition of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) - and, more broadly, the triumph of science over the humanities in regard to what’s regarded as useful, worthwhile and actionable knowledge. SAGE is stuffed full of people whose expertise lies in narrow fields of medicine. Where are the historians, philosophers, sociologists and - yes! - musicologists? (A philosopher might at least have brought up the possibility of a utilitarian approach to Covid - ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ as opposed to the deontological ‘save every Covid life’).

It might be that a more multidiscplinary SAGE would have come up with a more balanced approach to Covid, in which ‘public welfare’ rather than virus suppression would have resulted in a different policy mix (and maybe people like my sister would have kept her job).

More broadly, the severe lockdown approach to Covid, recommended by Salmond’s epidemiologist, prepares us very badly for crises such as the Climate Emergency and for participatory politics more generally. There might be a top-down, do-as-we-tell-you approach to climate change but a) I doubt it would be successful in the long term, and b) I doubt I’d want to live in the paternalistic kind of society that took such an approach.

In sum, if some malign force had been asked to design a method for sowing fear, suppressing public participation and inducing a sense of helplessness, such a force would be hard pressed to come up with something better than Covid and the SAGE-type response to it.

two cheers for sweden

7/10/2020

(796 words - 7 minute read)

For the past few months I’ve held something of a candle for the Swedish approach to Covid-19, mostly because I think that, in the Anthropocene, living with the non-human world - yes, even the lethal bits - is in the long run better than fighting it. One way or another, that’s what the Swedes have been trying to do.

Support for the Swedish approach is regarded as misguided - at best - on the grounds that it’s killed more people per head of population than its Nordic neighbours. A friend sent me an article - and there are plenty - confirming this just the other day.

Debate over? Well, no. Even if Covid success were judged solely on deaths per head of population it wouldn’t be an open-and-shut case, as Sweden has fewer deaths per 100,000 inhabitants than Spain, the UK, France or Italy, all of which went through periods of total lockdown.

But this has never been Sweden’s pitch anyway.

It’s been much more about avoiding the disadvantages of the mainstream lockdown approach to dealing with Coronavirus: collapsing economies, children missing out on school for months, the mental health problems that go with lockdown and isolation, lonely deaths, divided families, the non-Covid patients missing out on treatment, an increase in domestic violence, the threat of second and subsequent waves, the crazy Great Escapes when lockdowns are eased and the sun comes out, and the corrosive effects of policing lockdown.

Sweden has done its best to keep the economy going while other countries have shut theirs down. Has it worked? It certainly did to start with: at least in March it performed better than much of the EU as it recorded a decline of just 0.3 per cent, compared with a 3.8 per cent fall for the Eurozone.

But in today’s interconnected world Covid in one country is as tough to pull off as socialism in one country. Sweden’s small, open economy has been a victim of Covid-induced disruption of international supply chains. Truckmaker Volvo Group and carmaker Volvo Cars were both forced to stop production for several weeks, not because of conditions in Sweden but due to lack of parts and difficulties in their supply chains elsewhere in Europe. If only the rest of Europe had followed the Swedish example?

Even so, according to the Financial Times, Swedish prospects post-Covid are better than the rest of Europe, with a 7% decline in GDP comparing favourably with numbers for Germany, Belgium, UK, France, Spain, Italy, and neighbouring Nordic countries.

Sweden has kept its schools open (up to age 16), avoiding the interminable squabbles in lockdown countries between government, teachers, parents and unions. Swedes support the policy for helping with children’s mental health as well as allowing parents to keep on working.

Crucially, Swedes reckon that public health is about more than preventing Covid deaths - the opposite of the notion that has taken a vice-like grip in countries like the UK where only Covid seems to count. There are the well-documented mental and physical health problems associated with lockdown, for example, as well as the health problems that have gone undiagnosed or untreated during lockdown, including 18,000 possibly dying from cancer in the UK sooner than they should have because of Corona delays.

In avoiding lockdown, Sweden is also set to escape the problems that come with releasing it. The idea of a ‘second wave’ makes no sense, for example. While there may be fresh outbreaks like those in Germany, Italy, South Korea, Beijing, Melbourne, Leicester, and Galicia, there will be no accompanying disruptive lockdowns. There won’t be any riots protesting a second lockdown, as there have been in Belgrade. Nor will there be any need to police quarantine hotels after breakouts, as in New Zealand.

More positively, Sweden is operating a citizen-centred, everyone-for-the-community strategy that is a better model than top-down lockdown for dealing with crises like climate change. ‘Treating citizens as children lacking the judgment to make wise decisions is not a sustainable approach’, writes Elizabeth Braw of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. ‘Addressing a prolonged crisis, or one that comes in repeated waves, will require citizens to be active and responsible participants in their security — not mere recipients of government instructions’.

So when it comes to judging a country’s Covid success, let’s allow a wider range of criteria than Covid deaths per head of population. And let’s not make snap judgements. As Chinese Premier Chou en-Lai is supposed to have said when asked about the impact of the French Revolution: ‘It’s too early to say’.

whose identity?

6/24/2020

(717 words - 6 minute read)

In a recent article in the London Review of Books surveying feminist manifestos, Joanna Biggs says that it’s always been clear what women want: ‘girls just wanna be human, not other’.

Indeed, but what does being human mean?

It’s been pointed out ad nauseam that ‘human’ all too often means ‘man’, so the question ‘what do women want’ is frequently answered with, ‘what men have.’ This is a bad answer. It’s bad not only because it’s wrong to define a generic term (human) in terms of a particular (man), but also because a) ‘man’ is itself a generic term, and b) what men have isn’t always good anyway.

The same might be said of the movement against racism. What do BAME people want? It’s surely not enough to answer, ‘what non-BAME people already have’. Again ‘non-BAME’ covers a multitude of different conditions, and even if we could identify some representative non-BAME person, who’s to say that that person’s life is the model on which to base BAME demands?

Let’s take a specific example of what happens if we model identity-based demands on the experiences of the dominant identity.

In a review of the BAME experience of the criminal justice system Labour MP David Lammy found that ‘between 2006 and 2014, 41% of black defendants pleaded not guilty in crown courts compared with 31% of white defendants. Consequently, black defendants lose the opportunity of reduced sentences through early guilty pleas and distrust in the system is reinforced.’

This looks unfair. It looks as though equity demands that the same proportion of blacks as whites should be able to plead guilty so as to get a reduced sentence.

But what Lammy doesn’t point out is that solicitors will often advise defendants to plead guilty to crimes with which they’ve been charged but haven’t committed, so as to be sure of a reduced tariff.

In what sense, exactly, would giving more black defendants a longer sentence than they deserve be an improvement? But that’s where Lammy’s version of fairness takes us in the absence of non-identity based criteria for fairness.

It looks as though identity-based politics needs criteria drawn from outside any already-existing identity if the aspiration to ‘be human’ is to be fulfilled.

Where is this ‘outside? One possibility is that one identity can speak for all the others. If the most downtrodden identity can be emancipated won’t that entail the emancipation of everyone?

I’m not sure any identity can claim special privileges in this regard. Marx thought that the proletariat was the universal class, so once it was freed everyone would be freed. Maybe, but might not proletarian freedom always be proletarian freedom?

The black feminists of the 1974 Combahee River Collective similarly argued that black women are the carriers of a universalist freedom on the grounds that ‘If black women were free it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression’.

Perhaps. But first, there will always be someone lower down the pecking order who will argue that their particular form of oppression has been left out. Second, and linked, because as long as our understanding of freedom is tied to any identity’s interests it can’t and won’t be universal.

So if the ‘outside’, the universal, can’t be the property of any particular identity, where is it? Currently the best bet is ‘intersectionality’ where it’s recognised that different forms of oppression - race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender - intersect and overlap. But intersectionality has yet to show that a movement that multiplies difference can point us towards the universal.

And that is surely what we need, because the choice is clear: ‘Feminism can ask for the things men have,’ writes Biggs, ‘or it can ask for the world to be organised differently’.

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