Come and get hot sex, says schools minister

Some years back we suffered the mental indignity of being haunted by the image of David Mellor getting back to basics in a Chelsea Shirt. Now - and a do advise my more sensitive readers to look away now - we have Michael Gove uttering the words 'hot sex'.

Insert risque caption here

There's ample room for justified outrage at this city being marketed as an erotic playground for the rich at a time when average workers find it increasingly difficult to live here. And there's proper concern to be had about the education system being run by a man who seems more and more like a Harry Enfield character every day. 

Right now, however, I'm positively salivating at the thought of all the Youtube spoofs that will appear over the next few days.

Bombs for life

Ain't Twitter grand?

The account @paulawyd belongs to Paula Thompson, a member of the group Catholic Voices. Now, lest the hearts of the over-excitable elements of the liberal-left get pounding, this organisation is an organ of the Roman Catholic Church in much the same way that Progress is an organ of the Labour party.

With no official ecclesiastical recognition, and obsessed with abortion and same-sex marriage, Catholic Voices is making waves in the media. This in spite of the fact that the capacity of its collection of wannabe theocrats to be a 'voice' for a predominantly Labour-voting and socially tolerant religious constituency might be doubted.

Founded by a member of Opus Dei along with a man whose qualifications to defend the intrinsically marital and reproductive nature of sex could be questioned, CV has been making waves as a kind of religious Right equivalent of the Living Marxism/ Sp!ked group. They are incredibly good at getting into the media. They're even incredibly good at getting into the media when not invited. Here's a Voice on Question Time (7:37 onwards):



CV epitomise a worrying trend towards the growth of a religious Right in Britain. Thompson's tweet echoes an American tradition of making abortion clinics sites of conflict. Another bunch of righteous warriors, capable of doing far more damage than the odd lunatic tweet, follow this through to its geographical conclusion. I give you Forty Days for Life.

All of this is really quite irritating in all sorts of ways to me as a socialist, a Christian, and someone who just thinks folk should broadly be able to get on with their lives without people being arseholes to them. It deserves more thought and engagement than I can give it this morning. I leave you, though, with a question. If you were a Labour Party member in Oxford, would you be very about one of your councillors being a member of CV?

Neither London nor Brussels

Since Margaret Thatcher shuffled off to the great free market in the sky it seems a credible guess that Nick Clegg is the least popular politician in Britain. Therefore, to state what should be blindingly obvious, there is no achievement in winning a public debate against him. In the face of all the 'UKIP comes of age' hype to which we've been subjected since Clegg and Farage locked horns on Wednesday, it needs to be stressed that the public considering that you've won against Clegg in debate is only a victory in the fashion that being voted a better GP than Harold Shipman would be.

On UKIP I have nothing really to say. The best analysis I have seen came last year from Lenin, and I refer the inquisitive reader to him. I think Miliband is pretty stupid to call for him to be excluded from leaders' debates. These debates are a depressing marker of a descent into presidential politics, so I really shouldn't care too much about what happens at them, but there we are.

What I do care about is the lack of any serious Left voice over the EU. What we witnessed the other evening was an internal row within British Capital. To over-simplify a little, Clegg (and 'progressive' opinion more generally, including the Labour front-bench) speaks for an alliance between those elements of the bourgeoisie proper whose profit depends on access to European market, Farage for more Atlantic-orientated Capital and those parts of the petty bourgeoisie who can't be tempted into the Brussels club by Guardianista noises about the bright new international peaceable future.

The section of the population who don't find representation in this otherwise admirably inclusive dichotomy are the vast majority - those dependent on wages to survive. Confusion abounds in this area, it is not unusual to hear people claiming the Social Charter (the role of which as a kind of insurance policy for competing national Capitals deserves more analysis anyway) as a great victory for workers handed them by the EU, in spite of it having nothing to do with that institution, instead being a treaty of the distinct Council of Europe. Less obviously inaccurate advocacy of the EU as good for workers has a more delusional character. Billy Hayes here seems to think that neoliberal policy is accidental to the developed EU, as though sufficient will-power on the part of social democratic parties could bring about some kind of continent-wide analogue of the post-war consensus. He's not the first person to suggest this, the only problem being that the institutions he envisages being claimed for Beveridge and Keynes were set up precisely to drive a stake through the heart of those thinkers.

A Left voice on the EU is lacking. We have to start saying loudly, more clearly, and less nationalistically (*cough* No2EU), that neither Clegg nor Farage have anything to offer the workers of Europe. The EU as a project serves to sustain profit, not the workers who produce those profits. Even moderate ameliorative measures are ruled out of court by EU legislation - in particular, any government seeking to reverse privatisation would find itself severely constrained. The Eurozone crises following the crash of 2007-8, with austerity imposed centrally on the poorer periphery of the Union, give a taste of the direction in which further integration on the EU model leads. Workers nowhere in Europe have a long-term material interest in the EU, nor in any country's continued membership of it.

A socialist and internationalist alternative is needed - that much is just a trite slogan, but true in spite of that. At no time since the 1975 referendum has advocacy of any such alternative been weaker in Britain. Given that the EU as an issue is likely to dominate increasingly in coming years, this should concern us.

Friday Video Corner

Stunning

That was a party political broadcast

...on behalf of anyone who isn't Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman.

Yes, the BBC have being putting some of that much talked-about licence fee towards a hatchet job on one of Britain's most prominent Asian politicians in the run-up to May's election. Broadcast as last night's Panorama, the best they could get on Rahman was that he ignored the advice of council officers, and doubled council funding for Bengali run charities. The BBC join the dots for us telling readers of their website that, "Almost two-thirds of those who turned out to vote [last election day] were from his own Bangladeshi community."

One anticipates hearing next year that David Cameron has been returned as MP for Whitney by members of his "own white British community". 

Now, this should be a non-story. It is entirely correct that elected politicians be able to over-rule unelected officers. What does deserve comment is the glee with which some Labour figures have greeted the attack on Rahman. 

Panorama shows why Tower Hamlets deserves a different kind of Mayor http://t.co/4HZ18HXEWz @johnbiggs4mayor
— Tower Hamlets Labour (@TH_Labour_Party) March 31, 2014

Two points here.

First, Rahman himself is correct. There is more than a hint of racism about Panorama's report. Labour should distance itself from the programme and refrain from using it if it doesn't want to be accused of putting short-term electoral gain ahead of basic anti-racist principle.

Second, the whole anomalous situation in Tower Hamlets is entirely the fault of the NEC, who removed the duly selected candidate in a fit of pop-Islamophobic frenzy.

Ken Livingstone stood as an independent and was subsequently readmitted to Labour, serving as a Labour mayor. The same approach should be adopted towards Rahman. The divisions in Tower Hamlets need healing, not deepening.

ETA: Dave Hill here is worth a read. As is Reuben Bard-Rosenberg here.

Graceless Islamophobia : Bashing the Archbishop

The nearest thing the British political blogosphere gets to a 'national treasure' is probably Archbishop Cranmer. Purveying a now quaint brand of Tory Anglicanism, a blog whose strapline is "examining politico-religious agendas with politico-religious objectives" doesn't immediately strike one as a recipe for success. However, Cranmer has a wide, and influential following. The denizens of Twitter play along with his habit of referring to himself in the third person as 'his grace', a nod in the direction of the dead theocrat whose name he has borrowed. Hold on, by the way, to the fact that Cranmer 2.0 is perhaps the only significant advocate in English politics for a tradition emphasising the identity of the State as religious, specifically Protestant -  a tradition whose bloody origins and historic advocacy of State-enforced religious uniformity cannot be entirely buried by any amount of tweeness. This awkward truth is not insignificant when assessing his grace's criticism of other religio-political traditions.

Anyway, I digress. Cranmer has an exalted fan club. His blog comes with a long list of approbations from MPs, bishops, and others (including a baffling imprimatur from the late Christian Socialist Movement). Not all of the reviews are entirely positive, it has to be said. Damien Thompson is quoted by the spectral archbishop as calling him "the ghastly Cranmer". Still, insults are signs of impact (nobody takes time out of their editorial schedule to ridicule the West Worthing Jigsaw Club) and there can be little doubt that Cranmer has impact.

This, to name the elephant in the room by jumping up and down very loudly shouting 'look, there's a bloody elephant', not withstanding the fact that his views on a whole range of topics are extremely nasty. Take his offering on Sayeeda Warsi and Sharia finance here.

Entitled "Baronness Warsi's Sharia priorities", the piece commences with a picture of Warsi in a hijab. I leave the semiotics of this to more qualified readers for analysis ("Beware, Here Be Muslamic things" is my best guess), he begins by noting Warsi's words after the meeting of a new Foreign Office group on Freedom of Religion and Belief:

Freedom of religion or belief is a personal priority for me. Across the world, people are being singled out and hounded out simply for the faith they follow or the beliefs they hold. The persecution of people because of their faith or belief has, I believe, become a global crisis. I want to make sure we have the best advice available. This is why we have set up this new Advisory Group, made up of real experts in the field, and of those who are working every day in practical ways to defend the right to freedom of religion or belief. I look forward to working with them as we seek to move towards a world where no-one is persecuted for what they believe.

The following day Warsi chaired a meeting of the Global Islamic Finance and Investment Group, a body concerned with the growth of sharia-compliant financial products which, if nothing else, is testimony to capitalism's thoroughly cosmopolitan potential. There are all sorts of interesting economic and financial questions around Islamic finance, but these do no detain Cranmer. She tweeted a lot about the meeting, which does seem to have upset him a little bit; it was certainly sufficient to bring out a sneering disdain for the Islamic, 'thank Allah that we're "Discussing how world finance centres can work together more closely to develop global #Islamicfinance market"'.

But the somewhat ironic irritation by a premier league blogger at the use of social media is only the hors d'oeuvre of outrage. Cranmer changes gear sharply,

His Grace can't help feeling that if Baroness Warsi exuded as much fervour and zeal about the persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East as she manages to conjure for sharia finance, HM Government might just begin to identify ways of alleviating the suffering, trauma and bloodshed that is occurring, as the Baroness observed last year, "on a biblical scale". It is utterly unacceptable that the only statement issued following the meeting of the Foreign Office group on Freedom of Religion or Belief was "Thought provoking". What are they going to do? When are they going to do it? How will foreign policy be geared toward the objective? 

Do not misunderstand my intention; the persecution of anyone (Christian or otherwise) by anyone else (Muslim or otherwise) is something that deserves attention, although that attention would be better focused if it were informed by an analysis of sectarianism which went beneath the surface of religiously-motivated persecution. The idea that religions just can't get along, or that one religion in particular is prone to oppress non-adherents, for all its shallowness serves a useful function in deflecting attention from the fragmenting effects on Middle Eastern societies of both military imperialism and struggles over oil wealth. That, however, is a left-wing commonplace. More interesting is the structure of Cranmer's rhetoric here. He has been talking about one issue involving some Muslim people, a discussion of Islamic finance, and has seamlessly shifted to another, the at once tragic and deeply complex reality of religious persecution. Baronness Warsi serves as a kind of middle term, simply by having jobs that require her to address both topics, but the deafeningly silent link is Islam. Cranmer echoes a standard line of Islamophobic thought: how come we are so accommodating to Muslims, when they are killing our brothers and sisters over there? What mugs we are.

An essentialised Islam faces down an equally essentialised Christianity. In this, and in many other ways, the Islamophobic Christian Right exactly mirrors the thought world of the most fundamentalist variants of Islamic thought. There need to be, for this particular bit of ideology to get a hold on our minds, such things as Muslim countries and Christian countries: in some sense every Muslim then needs to share in the guilt of countries coded as Muslim (there is an asymmetry here, of course, since Cranmer and his co-religionists are free to distance themselves from Western governments, and any suggestion that they share any kind of culpability for Fred Phelps or the Shankhill Butchers would be angrily dismissed. The situation regarding Muslims and such non-State agents as al Qaeda is, one imagines, less straightforward). This being so, the psychological stage is set for outrage on cue: why should they get mortgages when Christian coverts are in prison in Pakistan? This is only a question that makes sense within a certain ideological space, undermine that and it is as incomprehensible as asking why I am allowed to eat cake when there are cars parked on double yellow lines in Dalston.

For the slow-learner, the Christian-Muslim opposition is rendered explicit in the final paragraph:

And so the Baroness's Twitter feed becomes a metaphor for her real priorities: the pursuit of religious liberty is worth a photo-tweet and is "thought provoking"; sharia finance is worth a photo-tweet and a stream of tweets, with identifiable plans, opportunities, determination, tipping points, communications and a prime-ministerial speech. This, apparently, is #thoughtleadership, and in that Foreign-Office realm of faith, the suffering God is subject to Mohammed's Mammon.  

There you have it: this Muslim woman is crushing Jesus under the heel of the grasping Prophet. How dare she? The parallels with historic anti-Semitic discourse, by the way are fascinating: an opposition between Christian decency and the venal, worldly, Other, coming to a head at the Crucifixion.

 The use of the persecution of Christians as a lever for Islamophobia is by no means confined to the Cranmer blog. Consider the case of everyone's favourite retired right-wing Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali. It shouldn't need saying that it uses those victims as political fodder in a way that insults rather than expresses solidarity. It shouldn't need saying that it undermines efforts to do anything genuine to help these victims, not least by preventing a proper understanding of the causes of their plight. And it shouldn't need saying that it is the cassocked and surpliced outworking of the controlling ideology of the War on Terror. But, such are the times we live in, I felt the need to say those things anyway.

 His Grace sings Evensong

Friday Video Corner