Perceptive readers will be aware that your host is none-too-well at the moment, which isn't exactly a state conducive to political activity. I've decided to make a virtue of a necessity and write a book.
The Fires of Molech will be published by Zero and is about religion, politics, and violence. It's an attempt to think through these issues, which are of pretty obvious contemporary relevance, from a left-wing perspective. It will include, for instance, stuff about the place of religion in modern society, a critique of liberal approaches to religion, reflections on Islamophobia, and discussions of the potential for left-aligned religious thought and practice.
What, other than narcissism, causes me to tell you this? Well, partly it's a thoroughly generous forewarning, so that you can save up your pennies, leave space on your Christmas lists, and so forth. But also, it's pretty likely that my blogposts over the coming month will focus on this area. So apologies in advance if it ain't your bag - I'll throw you the occasional bone of economics or irrational loathing for Jim Murphy just to keep you hanging on.
Whilst everyone's been fretting about which privately-educated white person will succeed David Cameron as leader of the Tory party, a significant economic statistic was published. The Consumer Price Index was 0% p.a. in February, down 0.3% from January, raising the spectre of deflation, falling prices.
This is the first time on record that the CPI has been zero. George Osborne's response was upbeat:
Osborne said zero inflation was “a first for the British economy” and good news for family budgets.
Is he right? Well, suppose the downward trend continues - you'll be able to buy more stuff in British shops for the same amount of money. In this very minimal sense Osborne's clearly correct. It's also pretty clear that interest rates aren't going to take a hike any time soon. So credit where credit's due, there's two positives for every family budget*.
But whenever I hear a multi-millionaire talk about something being good for 'families', I ask myself 'which families?' Suppose your family isn't so rich that no member of it will ever need to work or claim benefits in order to maintain a non-destitute standard of living. That is, suppose you are one of the vast majority of people in Britain.
You have good reason to be worried by the inflation statistics. First, employers are far less likely to make wage concessions if prices are falling: they have an excuse handed to them on a plate by the economy - "you are already better off on the same amount of pay". Deflation weakens the bargaining power of labour. Likewise, political pressure to increase benefit payments, already minimal, will be muted.
More alarmingly, deflation can wreak havoc on an economy in a way that threatens jobs themselves. If deflation settles in, people defer purchases, in the hope that prices will fall. Why should I buy that new TV this month, if I think that it's likely to be cheaper next month? Demand for goods and services falls, and so does output and employment. Similarly, firms defer capital investment, and those structural weaknesses of British capitalism, investment and productivity, will take a hit they can ill afford.
Now imagine you're in debt - like most people, and for that matter most corporations. If prices are falling, the purchasing power of a fixed amount of money increases. In particular, the real value of debt increases. Once again, hardly good news for most families.
The line amongst orthodox economic opinion about the possibility of development in this direction seems to be relaxed. The line is that low unemployment will put upward pressure on wages, and thus prevent persistent deflation setting in. The problem with this way of looking at things is that 'unemployment' isn't simply a number in an economic model, which correlates in a law-like fashion with the bargaining power of labour. Behind these abstractions lie real human beings, in real jobs, in real power relationships with their employers. And the nature of the jobs that have decreased unemployment in recent years does not look encouraging for wage settlements - they are insecure, often part-time, zero hour contracts proliferate. This is not a situation that lends itself to confident wage demands. Once a general lack of confidence, low unionisation, low levels of strikes and successful (from a trade union perspective) wage settlements is factored in, the picture looks bleak.
Or at least bleak for families unlike Osborne's.
*And for the budgets of people who don't happen to have families, who seem to have fallen out of the political picture of late.
So there was a total eclipse this morning. I wonder, I found myself thinking, what Richard Dawkins thinks about this. As luck would have it, he took to Twitter to tell us:
Solar eclipse visible in Medina, Jan 632. If only the true nature of eclipses had been Koranically 'revealed', that would be impressive!
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 20, 2015
My immediate thought was that this exhibits the philistinism of the man. Well, my first thought was in fact, "you utter wanker". But the philistinism one was definitely near the top of the list. The point is that the mirror-image fundamentalism with which Dawkins approaches religious texts betrays an incomprehension that people might use language to do anything other than communicate facts, or at least purported facts, about the physical world. There's nothing peculiarly religious to this line of criticism. For much the same reason you wouldn't want to read a critical essay on Middlemarch by Dawkins, and wouldn't bother to turn up to a rap-battle at which he was a contestant. In fact, when you think about the range of human endeavours that must for him be as baffling as the Quaranic text, the title of his autobiography An Appetite for Wonder seems about as apt as that of Mel C's little known memoir An Appetite for Twelve-Tone Serialism.
The purpose of this blog is to talk about left-wing politics, rather than to slag off Richard Dawkins, laudible though that activity always is. There is, I think, a political question along the lines of: what is it about our contemporary society that produces public intellectuals like Dawkins and how do we get rid of it as quickly as possible? But the real action is elsewhere.
Because what's really wrong with Dawkins' tweet is the Islamophobia. Because be in no doubt that is what's going on here. The irrational other, Islam, bays for blood at the gates of Western civilisation, whose only hope is that the beast be tamed by Reason, as dispensed by the likes of Dawkins. So far, so much a standard orientalist trope (I am so tempted to use the word 'meme' here, but I'd feel dirty). But this irrational dark-skinned other is a particularly dangerous one. For Islam, by Dawkins own admission, is a uniquely dangerous inhabitant of the religious zoo. So much so, that he has even flirted with the idea of supporting Christian missionaries in Africa to stem the tide of Islamicisation he, like his sound-alikes at the EDL, sees everywhere. He presumably thinks Islam is the most evil religion in the world, since he declared Catholic Christianity to be only the second most evil a few years back. I myself am devastated by this under-par performance by the home team, and am certainly hoping we can get our hands on Anjem Choudary before this season's transfer window closes. Islam, this non-too-subtle line of thought goes, equals irrationality, equals violence. For the slow learners amongst us, Dawkins spelled it out post-9/11:
It [9/11] came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying
source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of
this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and
not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a
world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like
littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are
used.
All of which conveniently lets imperialism, capitalism, and good old-fashioned racism off the hook. In any case the piece is disingenuous: by "religion of the Abrahamic kind", he means first and foremost Islam, as he makes perfectly clear elsewhere, and as his fellow New Atheist Sam Harris emphasises like a racist on speed. The political cash value of this is twofold. First, a bevy of impressionable followers are left with an utterly inadequate understanding of the contours of power in the world. Marx's plea to turn the criticism of heaven into the criticism of earth certainly wouldn't be out of place here. Second, Dawkins, Harris, et. al. (whatever their intentions) provide a secular variant of the clash of civilisations narrative that, in its Pentagon version, is normally littered with evangelical Christian theology. They supply a legitimatory weapon to the occidental warriors in far off lands. It's almost as though, well, they were littering the streets with loaded guns.
A wag on Facebook suggests that, with Jeremy Clarkson's suspension leaving the future of Top Gear in doubt, the programme's title could be re-used for a show that samples and rates legal highs. In a similar vein, I suggest, 'top gear' might well be the explanation for why the powers-that-be at the BBC weren't sufficiently compos mentis to get rid of Clarkson several years ago. After a series of racialincidents, and a bizarre call for striking public sector workers to be shot, it seems that in punching an underling Clarkson has gone too far.
What deserves comment is not the man's arseholery. Arsholes, like the biblical poor, are with us always, and the law of averages means that from time to time one or two of them will find their way into the broadcast media. Rather, what's interesting is the amount of support this particular arsehole has found in his adversity.
Top gear runs through this story like a thread, for a former prime mover in the acid house scene, Guido Fawkes, or Paul Staines as the man is in fact called, has started a petition calling on the BBC to reinstate Clarkson. In itself this is to be expected. There is honour even amongst aresholes, and it is almost touching to see one member of the arsehole community prepared to help out another who has got himself into a bit of a scrape. No, what demands attention is the fact that over half a million people to date have signed the thing. What on earth is that about?
It is not, one assumes, that half a million people are so devoid of any moral sensibility to think that it's OK to go around hitting staff who fail to supply you with hot dinners on demand. Instead, what the petition reflects is Clarkson's popularity. The man is well-liked by a significant proportion of the British population, much though it might pain the more pollyannaish kind of liberal to admit it. Why?
Well, since the 1960s British society has changed for the better, as well as for the worse. The past half century hasn't just been all about closing coal mines and selling council houses. There have been strides forward in opposing racism, in securing gains for women, for LGBTQ people, and in many other ways the adoption of more humane approaches to a broad spectrum of human situations. This is in no small part owing to the victories of liberation campaigns. And, guess what? Not everybody likes this.
However much I might be, and I am, signed up to the views that patriarchy is bad for men as well, that racism damages white workers by dividing them against black workers and so on, these positions are true only, as they say, in the final analysis. Prior to that, men - #yesallmen - benefit from sexism. We are more likely to get jobs, and be paid more than women. We might well find ourselves in situations where we benefit from women's unpaid domestic work, and so on. White people - yes, all of us - benefit from racism. And so on. You get the idea.
Now it's by no means inevitable that someone who benefits from oppression in the short-run seeks to defend that oppression; things like experience and politics can play a part here. Never the less, it's entirely unsurprising that a good number of people who in various ways have done rather well out of unequal relations to others resent the fact that those relations have been eroded. Hence the backlash against feminism, hence the rallying cry 'political correctness gone mad', and hence Jeremy fucking Clarkson. He is a standard bearer for reaction against the trendy view that foreigners aren't all that bad, or the bleating communist insistence that women can drive sports cars too. He provides a voice for the unspoken resentments behind many a suburban front door. He is the arsehole of all our hearts.
And the fact that he is so popular serves as a timely reminder that there is a job to be done defending the gains of the last fifty years.
The woman the media are calling "Justine Miliband", married to Ed, is not standing for election in May. She just happens to be the spouse of somebody who is. Why, you might then wonder, is she being subjected to pre-election interviews?
The political wife, and it is always a wife, has been a feature of the American political landscape for years. She exists to stand beside her husband, to express concern for him and stick up for him-
"I think over the next couple of months it's going to get really vicious, really personal, but I'm totally up for this fight," Justine told the BBC's James Landale. Above all she reassures us of the persistence that most feminine of spheres, the domestic, which lurks behind the front doors of even the most powerful. In possibly the most banal caption ever published on a reputable news website, the BBC tell us that "The Milibands share the family chores, such as loading their dishwasher". Look here, they are:
Notice that in order to make the, apparently weakly feminist point, that Ed does some housework, his wife is required. For the domestic is her sphere. Now this is all so much sexist claptrap. It is no doubt a by-product, along with those wretched leaders debates we're hearing a lot about, of the presidentialisation of British politics during the Blair era. It is encouraged by a collective flight to the maternal and homely, of proportions large enough to keep Freudians in PhD theses for a generation, in response to the anxieties of the age. There may be recessions, Ebola, and the growth of ISIS, but at least we have cupcakes and the option to watch people decorating their dream homes on TV (even if we can't actually afford homes of our own). Anyhow, the indignity of Justine Thornton, as she in fact calls herself, a barrister, having to talk to journalists about household chores is by no means the worst effect of the rise of the political wife. When Sally Bercow, married to the Speaker, did a photo-shoot for the Evening Standard, her husband is reported to have "read the Riot Act" at her. Certainly the none-too-subtle subtext of right-wing sniping about Bercow's Twitter activity and appearance on Big Brother is that the Speaker can't control his wife.
