Tag Archives: United Kingdom

All this environmental stuff

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I know I’m meant to be worried. Sometimes I do worry. And I’m glad that the news is talking about climate change and pollution again. I do consider it to be a far greater risk to my life than, say, ‘international terrorism’.

But when it comes down to it, I’m not planning to do much to help to deal with climate change, CO2 emissions, etc etc. There are a few reasons that I’ve come to this conclusion and the first is that stupid one I always criticise other people for using: I cannot make any difference so there’s no point bothering.

Now, before you say I’ve lost my mojo, just think. Given that I already conserve energy in a loose, easy sort of way at home, I’d say that my energy consumption is probably average for Spain. The new TV uses a lot of juice but then I never drive. If I managed to reduce that energy use to nil, the resulting effect on the overall consumption of energy in Spain (or in Catalonia or Barcelona, for that matter) would be so infinitesimally useless and pathetic that all I would really have succeeded in achieving would be ruining my quality of life by forcing myself to eat raw vegetables and lentils soaked in (spring) water over night. Never mind the emissions that a diet like that would cause.

A popular statistic around at the moment is that if the UK closed down all their CO2-emitting power stations, it would take China only six months to fill in the gas gap that we’d left behind. What about India and China together?

The problem with climate change is that there is literally nothing any of us can do to help the situation. Why not recycle? Did you know that most of the stuff you recycle ends up in land-fill? Gemma and I recycle religiously… it’s something to do, you know? And yet I know that it’s a complete waste of time.

When it comes down to it, the single worst thing I ever do to the environment is air travel. I like to fly to places. It’s much quicker than taking a canoe or a bullock-cart. It’s selfish of me and I know it’s not helping but I like to see my parents once a year if I can. How else am I going to do that? If I forswear that I’ll no longer fly then I guess they’d eventually fly out to see me here. So what would I have achieved then? I’ve got two sets of parents (both parents and both step-parents), a brother, a sister, a step-sister and two half-sisters. By my refusing to fly, I’d force them to fly. So there’s no point bothering with it.

My other reason for not helping any more than I already am is skepticism. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that things aren’t quite as bad as Al “I couldn’t even beat George Bush in an election I’d won” Gore would have us believe. The initial warnings on climate change, emissions and environmental damage which came out thirty years ago warned about very similar consequences and that it would be too late by 2006. Well, we haven’t done a single thing about it and now we’re being told we’ve got more time, even though the picture being painted is that things are even worse than we thought they were.

My point is: either we’re already screwed, or the science isn’t completely right. If the science is right, we’re already too late to do anything. While this doubtless smacks of lazy refusal to do more to combat climate change, it’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time. I was a real environmentalist a few years back and I’m still pissed off that Bush didn’t ratify Kyoto. So what’s changed? I got so sick of the religiosity behind the environmentalist movement that I started to question it. My central belief when it comes to politics has become: whatever people keep saying over and over again, mistrust it.

So that’s it. I’ll keep up with the useless recycling, the energy saving light-bulbs, the public transport and the support for green alternatives to burning coal for electricity production. But I’m going to keep up with my air travel, my expensive, energy hungry gadgets, the coal fire at home in Devon in the winter, putting the heater on, using the tumble-dryer etc etc etc. I make no apologies. I’m just sick of the whole business.

Wine, wine, wine

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I’ve just discovered that Spain is the world’s third largest producer of wine. Behind France and Italy (I must admit that I can’t remember the time I last tried a glass of Italian), Spain produced nearly four million tonnes of wine in 2005. I suppose that it makes sense: from the ubiquitous Rioja, through Cava to the Valencian fare sold for four pounds a bottle in England, almost every region in Spain produces its own variety of God’s greatest gift. Personally, I’m a great fan of Priorat. The Catalan county which gives Priorat its name has a minuscule population of fewer than 10,000. And yet it manages to produce a wine whose quality and richness is even now being ‘discovered’ by the bodegas of New York City and London. Read more about Spanish and Portuguese wine at Catavino.

Speaking of wine, Gemma and I watched the film ‘Factotum’ tonight. An adaptation of one of Charles Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical novels, it tracks the jobs, drinks and women of Henry Chinaski who weaves his way between work and bed and racetrack in the form of Matt Dillon. I hadn’t read Factotum before. I loved Post Office and Ham On Rye and so knew – more or less – what to expect. I wasn’t disappointed. The direction and acting in the film were smart and well adapted to the subject material. I laughed my head off at parts. And it stars Marisa Tomei… always a good sign, right Costanza?

Graeme at South of Watford drew my attention to the mad ravings of a Libertad Digital blogger today. Pio Moa (or Pio Mio, as I call him) wrote a piece yesterday which basically argued for the use of violence to wrest power from the democratically elected socialist government. The justification he offers for starting a new civil war is that the socialists conspired to bring about the Madrid bombings two years ago in order to steal the election which followed days later. Naturally, this theory is totally lacking in evidence but then most crazy conspiracy theories are. It would be easy for me to say that this guy needs to drink either more wine or less wine, depending on his current wine consumption.

Pio, I’d be more worried about the crack if I were you.

Melanie Phillips is a terrorist

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One of the current stars of the right-wing (or rather, neo-con) blog circuit is the English columnist and author, Melanie Phillips. Her vociferous hatred of Islam, her certainty that, left to the pansy-liberals, Britain is doomed to become a caliphate (her book’s called Londonistan) and her… vociferous hatred of the left have all earned her a certain cachet among the broadly American neo-conservatives whose praise she courts. Personally, I think they like her even more because she’s English and serious-looking: far easier to like than the dangerously blonde and completely mad scourge of common sense, Ann Coulter. Oh, and because she’s very good at telling certain people that their ill-fouded beliefs about Britain are correct.

Well I guess that’s enough praise for Melanie. The reason I’m writing is to have a look at some of her writing. Specifically, her recent article ‘Suicide Of The West‘ in the National Review Online.

The main gist of this article is that the British ‘establishment and chattering classes’ are making a huge mistake in their understanding of Islamist terrorism when they consider that it might be influenced by foreign policy. She states that this attitude ignores the fact that this terrorism has a religious aspect and that,

There was an al Qaeda plot in Birmingham to blow up Britain back in 2000 — before 9/11, let alone the war in Iraq. Similarly, jihadi attacks on the U.S. began 22 years before 9/11 with the Iran embassy hostage crisis in 1979, followed by two decades of further attacks.

It is undeniably true that Islamist terrorists existed before 2001 (they would have had to form their cells long before then in order to carry out their earlier attacks on the WTC, the east-African embassies etc etc). What she omits to mention is that US/UK foreign policy also existed prior to 2001. For example, the ‘war in Iraq’ didn’t begin in 2003. It could reasonably be stated that the war began as early as 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Our military took up positions in Saudi Arabia (at the behest of the regime there) and continued assaults on Iraq throughout most of the subsequent thirteen years.

Prior to the Iraq war, the United States supported Iraq in its war against Iran, supported jihadis in Afghanistan against the Soviets, supported the Shah in Iran (this was before it was all about ‘freedom and democracy’) – all policies which had their as their base a fairly sound (if unpleasant) strategic intention but which undoubtedly fomented anger and hatred against the west long before 2000. When remembered, these facts make it clear that while it’s perfectly obvious that al Qaeda started before 2000, so did the foreign policies which allegedly enraged them. I’ll go further and say that Melanie Phillips knew all of this perfectly well but chose to ignore historical fact in order to pursue her central theme: that we are facing a religious war rather than the hangover from decades of meddling, bombing and assassinating.

Why does Phillips think that she can get away with this? She is a journalist of many years’ experience with an excellent academic reputation. It’s puzzling that she can be rigorous while constructing arguments based utter mendacity. Well, it’s not really. Her rhetoric has been carefully honed to fit its intended audience: the American right-wing. Who else would believe the myth of the religious war when no war has ever really been about religion?

Phillips goes on to say that the radicalisation of British Muslims is the fault of (wait for it…) the BBC. By bombarding the British people with anti-USA, anti-Israel propaganda, the BBC is ‘culpable’ for al Qaeda terrorist attacks.

[The BBC] powerfully incites hatred by persistently misrepresenting Israel’s self-defence as unwarranted aggression, and giving air-time to an endless procession of Islamic jihadists, propagandists, anti-Western activists and bigots with rarely even a hint of a challenge.

While I am unable to review every minute of the BBC’s news coverage over the last ten years, I can remember plenty of interviews and airtime given to Israeli officials, US Army generals and modern neo-conservatives which I have seen with my own eyes. If you watched the BBC at the time of the invasion of Iraq, you too will remember the ghoulish blood lust that seems to overtake every news outlet at times of war. The Guardian had rather too many graphics of how laser-glide bombs work for my liking. My point is that it’s unreasonable to accuse the BBC of prejudice unless you’re willing to accept that ‘when it counts’, the BBC always backs up ‘our boys’.

Add to that the campaign led by the BBC against the Taliban regime in Kabul (extensive reporting of human rights abuses, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a Despatches documentary about the religious/moral police force), joyous reports of democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq… I’ve looked hard for this alleged bias in the BBC but I’ve never found it.

For Israel’s fight is the world’s fight. Lose Israel, and the world is lost
…

…yes, that’s true. But how do we best secure the safe future of Israel? By deciding that we’re locked in some sort of esoteric ‘religious war’? Melanie Phillips is committed to selling the concept of a clash of cultures, a war of ideals. This war exists but it’s not between Christians and Muslims. The war of ideas in the west is between truth and lies, between power and democracy, between terror and debate, between reason and hate. Those of us dedicated to truth, democracy, debate and reason – from accross the political spectrum – need to stand up soon to prevent these people from controlling the dialogue.

‘Islamism’ in Swansea University

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The Guardian reports today that many universities across the UK house extremist and Islamist groups which ‘pose a threat to national security’. Swansea University is listed as one of the institutions where Islamist groups have been found to operate by professor Anthony Glees, head of Brunel University’s centre for intelligence and security studies.

While I haven’t been a student at Swansea for some time now, it’s true that there was a fair degree of student activism on campus. I took part in campaigns for the abolishment of university tuition fees, to prevent the closure of university departments and on behalf of the Socialist Workers’ Party against the war in Afghanistan.

At around the same time, a motion was put before the student union council to boycott Israeli academics and institutions because of acts being committed by the Israeli state against Palestinians. These were the days of Ramallah and Jenin where crimes against humanity were carried out by the Israeli army.

The main critics of the motion to boycott Israeli academics and institutions were American and Jewish students, understandably fearful that the left wing of the student body were turning to an anti-Semitic position. A synagogue was damaged in an attack in 2002 – and though it was never proven that this was connected with Muslim or socialist students – the suggestion was that the socialists had helped to create a culture of hatred in the town.

Naturally, I think that this was the wrong conclusion. At a time when the BNP were trying to claw their way into local politics, race riots were taking place in Bradford and Leeds, the US had started its racist war against Muslims in Asia, there were a lot of violent and malicious incidents occurring. I believe that the intellectual boycott brought about by the student union was one of the best considered political acts I have witnessed. It was absolutely not anti-Semitic, and I find it personally insulting that whenever there is any discussion of the wrongs that have been committed on either side of the Palestinian conflict, accusations to that effect will be made.

The reason I have brought this up is that I have a sneaking suspicion that Swansea’s ‘extremism’ and ‘Islamic’ will be found to be intrinsically linked with the boycott of Israeli academics and institutions – which just isn’t the truth. As ought to be expected in the climate of fear that the British government is doing its best to create, any free thinking or direct action is automatically challenged as a threat to security.

Anyone familiar with Swansea university, Swansea City Council and the Swansea Police’s attitude towards leftist student activism will already be aware of the attempts made to silence lecturers, terrorise students and prevent demonstrations. It seems that the next attempt might be to refer to Muslim student activists as ‘terrorists’. This is exactly the sort of thing warned about before, throughout and after my brief time in Swansea.

The defamation of any politicised student or worker body has reached such a degree of acceptance in the UK that we may well have gone beyond the point of no return. It’s imperative that anyone who can, speaks out against this attitude.

The legality of the war never mattered.

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Recent leaks and admissions over exactly what Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General said in his two bits of advice to the PM about war in Iraq has been generated by the Labour party to cloud our memories of why it is we opposed the war.

Legality was never the factor that bothered us. It was the only argument that could have been used to physically prevent our troops going into battle; but the argument against the war was always a moral one. And we were right. Today, Iraq still barely has a government, is under foreign occupation and suffers continual attacks from foreign insurgents. It seems trite to mention all this again, but there were no terrorists in Iraq until the US and the UK let them in. 21,000 civilians have died because of our greed. Half a million children died because of the hopelessly corrupt and inept UN Oil-for-Food programme and the allied air-strikes which went on for 10 years.

So now, Tony Blair says that he is happy to fight the election on trust, but at the same time, he makes the insupportable claim that if 10% of Labour voters stay at home, the Tories will get in “by the back door”.

We can trust Blair on some points: he’s committed to curtailing human rights in the UK; he’s willing to support the phoney wars started by the US; he will intentionally mislead the government and the electorate to pursue policies he believes are right; he cannot be trusted.

Of course, Michael Howard is no better.

So it makes sense to vote for smaller parties. England would benefit from an increase in the number of parties asking for support in the election. The Lib Dems might well still be interested in introducing proportional representation as a replacement for our current system.

Give Labour a bloody nose, but don’t let the Tories back in! Is what I think.

Christmas in Foreign Lands

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“Instead of the placid ox and ass of Bethlehem, we have for companions the ravening tiger and exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant” (Evelyn Waugh, A Handful Of Dust)

Christmas in a foreign country is always slightly absurd. Traditions, food, the correct time for opening gifts – everything is turned on its head so thoroughly, you could almost believe that Christmas isn’t an English festival.

But Christmas is English, just like Hallowe’en and Guy Fawke’s day. What could be more English than roasted meat, boiled vegetables, gravy, silly hats and dodgy jokes? As Orwell wrote, “Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own“.

This passage always reminds me of Modbury, Devon and home. Old fashioned? Yes. Stereotyped? Absolutely. But like it or not, that is a major part of the England I grew up in – a place which still has a feeling of continuity which I only rarely sense in Barcelona. If we travel to some of the more remote country towns here in Catalonia, I sometimes get a whiff of that continuity. Cerdanyola, however, has no redeeming features – especially not at this English time of year.

It seems to me that the reason Christmas seems so quintissentially English to me is that most of the ‘classic’ images of Christmas (except for those odd nativity scenes) are themselves quintissentially English. The snowy village with Victorian streetlamps, the frosty roofs and windows misted up, glowing with warmth against the bitter winter, holly and mistletoe, fights in the pub – all images typical of England. Well, my England anyway. And that’s the problem. When you grew up in a town so staid, traditional and olde-worlde picturesque like Modbury, Christmas actually is exactly like an old fashioned Christmas card to the tune of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’. And Christmas in Tarragona isn’t.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining about the opportunity to spend Christmas with Gemma’s family in the family town. I enjoy that. All I’m trying to do is explain how whatever they do, however much fun we have, however many fights they have in the local cerveceria, Christmas for me is English and old fashioned. I’m all for change but I’m really looking forward to next year.


Bon Nadal!


 [This post was edited and updated on December 15th 2010]