$illiberal_policy ‘could have stopped killers’

For all values of $illiberal_policy - in this case it was “Email spying”. Of course, there is no evidence yet that the bomber(s) used email to plot their crimes, and if they did, that the authorities could have found the relevant information in time, or that they would have used such tools as encryption, anonymisation etc. to render such expensive and time-consuming surveillance entirely useless. For all we know this plan was knocked up on the back of a couple of envelopes; the scary thing about the small-scale bombing of soft targets with home-made explosives is (just like the David Copeland bombings ten years ago) that the technology and organisation involved is not very taxing - the demand is will, rather than the means.

Now that this cat has jumped out of the bag, the same words will inevitably be spoken about internment without trial, ID cards, curbs on public protest, restriction of freedom of speech etc., etc in the coming weeks. To be fair, just after the bombing Charles Clarke, in a precious moment of tact and sanity which I doubt would have come from his predecessor, had said ID cards would not have prevented the attack, but this admission is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg: the powers-that-be have yet to realise that making more and more things either illegal or compulsory to register does very little good in actually protecting us.

The stupidest “security” law laid down recently has been the compulsory registration of protests within a kilometre of Parliament. Reversing this fallacious policy should be a priority, because if there’s any blatantly obvious conclusion that should be drawn from the attack, it is that the exclusion zone does nothing, absolutely nothing to enhance our security. Perhaps this wasn’t made clear enough at the time of the Bill was being debated, but by far the majority of terrorist attacks in recent history, from the World Trade Center (both in 1993 and 2001), to Bali, Madrid, buses and cafes in Israel, the theatre in Moscow, the many public areas and civil buildings in Iraq, are never on overtly political targets - they’re already well-protected and difficult to infiltrate. It is nearly always the ’soft’ targets that are attacked, nearly always the slaugher is of defenceless people. The buses and trains in London are another sorry addition to that list.

The protests restriction should be dropped as soon as possible. Rather than sign of weakness, it is a sign of strength, a sign that the liberties we’re so lucky to have will not be destroyed by them (for all values of ‘them’). Perhaps it can be done in time for the proposed solidarity march.

And maybe at the same time, they’ll be given a guard of honour by a squadron of airborne pigs…

One of the more annoying aspects of the initial response to/analysis of yesterday’s attacks has been the invocation of the “Blitz spirit”, and its relative, “Londoner’s stoicism”; as well as being uneasy at the comparison of yesterday’s single criminal atrocity with an ongoing wartime bombardment, there’s also the fact that the “Blitz spirit” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be - from my own father’s accounts, once death and destruction became normalised and banal in Londoners’ minds, they went back to being their normal, bickering selves. Still, it’s invoked aplenty, not just in the press but by ex-pat bloggers as well.

Of course, in actual fact the reaction of many Londoners yesterday has not been stoicism, but hedonism - everyone seems to have made a beeline for the nearest pub - perhaps its no coincidence that the meme of choice has been “London Pride”. I am a little uneasy at the invocation by some of the prohibition of alcohol by Muslims (even with caveats) - it’s a dangerous entailment to take very far, especially as, as Brian Paddick put it, Islam and mass murder are entirely mutually exclusive (and in any case, some of the perpretators of 9/11 drank alcohol and lived Westernised lifestyles, right up until the day of their attack).

It’s going to take more than a night down the pub to show that the bastards won’t win. This morning while listening to talk radio I was dismayed (but not entirely unsurprised) to hear otherwise rational and open-minded people confesss to feelings of suspicion or fear towards Muslim passengers on the bus or train they travelled on, and of accounts by British Muslims of staying in and avoiding public places for fear of reprisal. A return to normalcy can’t just be exercised by one’s outward actions, but equally needs a confrontation of our own new-found fears and irrationalities.

Update: And just as I say that, I see a phenomenally cuntish Fox News report (via BoingBoing) that merrily makes an artificial distinction between “Arabs” in London and the “regular, non-Arab people”. Fuck you, Murdoch.

Further update: Meanwhile, over at The Sun…

Britain is crawling with suspected terrorists and those who give them succour. The Government must act without delay, round up this enemy in our midst and lock them in internment camps.

(via perfect.co.uk)

A day I spent in mostly impotent horror, being stuck in Edinburgh watching coverage of the ongoing situation in London. Once the initial fears that family or friends were caught up in the carnage were allayed, the day turned into a grim spectator sport; all the while, my feelings turned from horror to anger, the thought of you bombed my home city, you fuckers. The consolation that, in terms of casualties, this was not quite another Madrid or Bali is some salvation, but it still doesn’t quite salve the (admittedly, utterly selfish) personal anger I felt at my home town being attacked.

I was touched by the immediate reaction of some - Blair’s speech said some of the right things, Brian Paddick of the Met gave an excellent press conference, but the best words of the day came from Ken Livingstone in Singapore. Meanwhile Adam Ingram and George Galloway decided to descend to a pathetic slanging match in the House of Commons - neither MP I held in much regard anyway, but it was still immensely distasteful.

Unlike so many other horrors, there’s been an extraordinary amount of detail recorded straight away, from a wide range of correspondents. The liveblogging of the event, from the Guardian, The London Line, Londonist, Going Underground (Update: and perfect.co.uk and Europhobia, while Shot By Both Sides does a good job of picking off moronic opinions), as well as the additions to the Flickr photo pool and the evolution of the Wikipedia article about the attacks, better capture the flow of the day’s events - from initial confusion, to horror, to reflection and defiance. The marking of rumours and hoaxes (particularly the ones of suicide bombers in Canary Wharf) will probably be excised from the more polished ‘official’ accounts in the newspapers and mainstream media (the TV coverage is already resorting to hackneyed clichés and death-by-analysis). The personal hints and touches in people’s accounts add much-needed detail and colour (including, perhaps in my case, my own misguided and confused first feelings), which should be remembered and considered when recounting this horror in the days, months and years to come.

Ack, I’m probably going into bollocks mode, so I’ll stop. While some of my colleagues on the Line are defiantly off to the pub and a curry, as I’m on my own up here, I’m going to reflect and count my blessings over some comfort food. For now, that’s all…

Christ, it sounds like an ongoing nightmare in London - a well-planned simultaneous attack on several sites - not just tube stations but buses. While a lot of the Met’s best public order/counter-terrorism personnel are in Edinburgh or Gleneagles. Latest news is that a tube train is trapped in a tunnel deep under King’s Cross… a rush hour tube train carries thousands of people… I’m starting to feel really quite sick.

I don’t know about you, but I am shocked, utterly shocked, at a totally unforeseen consequence of Live 8, namely that the artists’ record sales have leapt* since Saturday’s concert. I’m sure the performers concerned are equally horrified at this unintended side-effect.

Pink Floyd’s Roger Gilmour laudably says he’ll donate the personal profits he’ll make (other artists yet to follow), but that still leaves the question of the money taken by the shops, distributors, record companies etc. It could all get rather complicated working out who has to give what. Fortunately, I have a solution. A website, say, fileshareforafrica.org would distribute the seed files for pirated donated copies of the respective artists’ albums, in exchange for donations to development & debt relief charities, up until the point that the number of pirated donated albums cancels out the extra ones sold. Problem solved!

Of course, technically this would be encouraging ‘theft’ from millionaire rockstars and billion-dollar record companies to give to the needy but, you know, desperate times, desperate measures. Remember - it’s not about money, it’s about justice.

* The only exception to this rule has been records by the Libertines, which is rather cruel of the British record-buying public, considering how many needy Afghan poppy farmers are dependent on the ongoing success of Pete Doherty.

Aaaargh. The broadband-in-the-new-flat saga stretches into its third week (Previous occupants did a runner without closing their broadband account or settling their bill, thus my phone line is still “assigned” to their provider, meaning I can’t switch mine over - it’s got to the “stern letters to Ofcom” stage but hopefully within a week it will now be sorted), which means I’m still on dialup… which really, really restricts one’s ability to blog, I’ve found. All the useful background research and side-references that make a sketchy blog post into a good one take time… always-on Internet connectivity is great for filling in all the little gaps. And with the University in scary security-paranoia mode this week, it means I can’t just nip to the library when I feel like it instead. It’s made me quite cross…

Aaanyway, just like Phil, I’ve amassed a load of topics that I’ve had initial thoughts on, but need the mortar of extra research and background to make any good, such as Peak Oil*, the racial divide in Big Brother, the LSE report on ID cards, the Grokster decision, what makes Wikipedia great and what makes it crap, etc, etc…

But…they’re gonna have to wait. At the moment speedy internet access is restricted to during the daytime and I need that to do the research for my Master’s dissertation… I may eventually blog fragmented thoughts on the above, but I’d be less keen to defend them without additional research. So again, sorry if this is a bit barren over the next week.

* In the meantime, this Sharpener piece on Peak Oil is pretty well-researched, and is also perhaps slightly more optimistic than one I’d write…

G8 unrest erupts in Edinburgh. Although the violence (if there is any) is to be deplored, I am miffed that Edinburgh University decided to lock down all of the buildings in George Square, which is a good mile and a half away from Shandwick Place, which is where it’s all kicking off. Which is why I am now sitting outside in the cold on a bench trying to grab a wireless connection from the library…

Update: After a little while, they let me in out of pity. Which has given me the opportunity to upload my photos of Saturday’s rally - they start here.

I promised myself I wouldn’t get too worked up about the pop concert that was happening in London the same time as the 200,000-strong demonstration in Edinburgh, but then you start to read some of the absolutely infruriating imbecilities being batted around about Live 8, like:

• “They managed to create a very hard hitting message without compromising the music.” Because you wouldn’t want your day spoiled in any way by pictures of dying Africans, would you? Fuckwit.
• (on the £1000-a-seat front row tickets) “It’s completely hypocritical, we are trying to save people from poverty and they are here having bought the privilege. If we had wanted to watch it on TV we would have stayed at home.” - well then why the fuck didn’t you stay at home and donate the money that you spent on the text message(s) that you sent in, which are just as much buying privilege as those in the front row? Idiot.
• “I’m here to see the old school acts like Pink Floyd and Madonna, and hopefully make some menial difference through a text message”; “It’s all about the music today. I’m looking to see U2, Coldplay, Pink Floyd and the Scissor Sisters” (both in infoboxes in today’s Observer, though the web version hasn’t included them) Neither of these quotes needs any further comment.

Okay, perhaps I’m being harsh, you might say, and cherry-picking the most moronic soundbites, just to prove a point. And you’d be right, because I did. But there’s a more fundamental point - what really was the point of all those concerts yesterday? There’s the defence that they’re not there to raise money (especially as the Hyde Park gig has had to pay off the Prince’s Trust to the tune of £1.6m for treading on their toes), but to raise “awareness”. But awareness of what? We all know Africa has been pretty fucked over, but how has it come this way? And how can we help Africa out of it? While it might be unfair for me to isolate individual hapless concert-goers and demand they know all the ins and outs, it’s at least reasonable to expect some sort of leadership from those who have organised it, for them to tell us what they feel has gone wrong in Africa and how it can be put right. Well, here’s Bob Geldof’s (and Bono’s and Richard Curtis’) message to the G8 leaders:

“For God’s sake, take this seriously. Don’t behave normally. Don’t look for compromises. Be great. Do more than expected, not the least you can get away with. You know what will really make a difference, what will turn extreme poverty around, what will actually begin to save the lives of millions of men, women and children. Do it. Please do it. The world is watching.”

Thoe first five sentences would not look out of place on a motivational poster in an accountancy firm’s office; the rest is equally vapid. There is nothing, not one single word in the entire letter admonishing past failures of the G8 (or the World Bank, or the IMF) in Africa, not one demand to change existing policy, in fact nothing about what to do at all. The phrase “Make Poverty History” has been turned from an expression of a worthwhile goal into a meaningless mantra. It has been hijacked by a series of millionaire publicity-hungry preening primadonnas who haven’t the wit or talent to do anything but “I know, we’ll organise another fucking pop concert and make ourselves look like angels”, instead of trying to grasp the very real issues that need to be debated.

At the same time as the self-congratulatory love-in in Hyde Park, a Guardian commentator noted about the rally in Edinburgh:

“This is a very strange protest - a mass mobilisation that is essentially in support of government policy to cancel developing world debt and double aid.”

This is the second-most bullshit statement quoted here, after Geldof’s fairy-tale letter. Because as someone who was there, who not only marched but attended the stalls and tents and heard a few of the speeches at the rally, I can say that this was not the case. There was plenty of acknowledgement of all the good action done by the government so far, but also plenty about the good things it hasn’t yet done. People were campaigning against the strings attached to debt relief, such as ruinous privatisation of public utilities. They were calling for further increases in aid, for the outright scrapping of farm subsidies, in the EU and the US, not just gestures at “reform”. There were questions about seed patents, retroviral drugs, clean water, fair trade, protection of capital markets and corruption as well as broader issues such as the environment, the pax Americana and the “war on terror”. While in London people sat back and let Geldof spout half-understood, over-simplified pro-government sentiments at an infantilised audience, in Edinburgh there were plenty of people with the intelligence and the enthusiasm to question such simple gestures and understand the nuances and complexities of the issue, who actually got off their arses and did something about it.

It’s easy to sneer, you might think. But it’s even easier to mouth empty platitudes and remain ignorant of the real problems. Put simply, when it comes to issues like this, good intentions are not good enough. And Bob Geldof is an attention-seeking idiot. But the point about intentions is the more important one.

Partly inspired by this quite good John Harris article on the ‘Dianification’ of the global development movement.