The International Brigades: My Novel

A while ago I set myself the goal of embarking on the project of writing a novel.  As a voracious reader, in many ways this was almost a natural progression for me.  In my late childhood leading into my early teens when I came back from living in the United States living and my family was temporarily living in my grandma’s house I didn’t have many distractions to keep me occupied.  I didn’t get along very well socially at the school so I didn’t have any friends to meet up with and do things with.  So I eventually started to write.  First of all there were small plots here and there followed by entire series of my beloved series Star Trek Voyager.  Eventually I conceived of an entire series of books about a bounty hunter in space who only took contracts to fight bad guys with a robot sidekick in tow.  This boy was, and in many ways still is, a science fiction nerd. It certainly passed the hours by.  And while many of those creations back then make me feel slightly embarrassed now (although they were pretty creative for an aspiring author so young) I still have a bit of pride in me for the results of my efforts. 

A few years ago I caught the writing bug again and attended first a short course in novel writing for a day then one that went over months.  I remember vividly coming into class in the evening from my latest soul destroying job.  Sharing ideas with people.  Being inspired by new ideas for my novel.  Getting excited when a plot twist idea came out of nowhere.  I decided to pursue a vaguely conceived idea of a police detective story including vampires, set in Bristol of all places.  Its working title was ‘West Sector Nine’.  It was mean’t to be like The Wire or The Shield with vampires.  Why vampires?  Well to be honest I was sick with the Twilight craze and wanted to try to bring vampires down to earth.  No more sappiness and portrayal of vampires as mysterious, ethereal and often improbably attractive and athletic looking (despite the long term deceased condition).  I wanted to seriously conceive of how the characters of vampires would change and how it would living as second class citizens to humans effected their view of the world.  Vampires I decided ultimately would be more startling in their similarities just a lot more world wise.  Some would be nice and some would be appalling characters who frankly wouldn’t care about suffering they inflict, either just to survive or to gain supremacy over their human rivals.  They would be a mixed bag of characters, much like ourselves.  But most intriguingly for a detective story they would have learned from human behaviour from many years and as a result become exceptionally skilled liars and master manipulators.

But the more I pursued this project the more frustratingly impractical and elusive it became for me.  Vampire stories have been done to death in films, books and TV series.  I could sense the cringe when I mentioned my pitch to certain people.  When I gave my pitch it was often inevitably followed by the inevitable “True Blood have already done this”.  In the end I decided to put the project on ice.  Not destroy everything, just shelf it until further notice.  My interest in the project waned and in the end I recognised that I had nowhere near the staying power of the writers of True Blood.  To the victor the spoils.

But at the beginning of this year the novel idea just wouldn’t let me go.  Perhaps it had something to do with this year being one which I began with the objective of setting myself ambitious personal goals.  I told myself I would not be in the same place career wise that time of year in a year’s time.  After seeing a documentary about the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa that moved me to tears I decided to do something I never did before and run a half marathon to raise money for the relief effort.  Two months onwards from then I was running 3 miles for my training, which was 3 miles more than I have ever ran before.  I continued on my merry way satisfying my acute hunger for reading, absorbing ideas as I went.  I mostly read non-fiction but now and then I would stumble on a stand out piece of fiction that gripped me and taught me lessons about novel writing that I will never forget.  The book “I am Legend” is a prime example of this.  More on this later.

But ultimately my ideas for novels tend to stem from contemporary debates and by observing the wonderful and god awful things that happen on this crazy planet, this latest project being no exception.  Looking at these things from a comparative historical point of view can also put an interesting light on things and can produce a goldmine of ideas.  With West Sector Nine I wanted to recall many issues that seemed to be hovering around the country at the time.  My own experiences of the abuse of police power and the shocking revelations that came out about the Hillsborough disaster made me want to pick up on the moral problem about giving individuals too much power.  I wanted to express the public’s cynicism about politics and the politician’s dilemma of being ever demonised by them no matter what they do.  Recalling from my own experience I wanted to play on the theme of lasting friendly relationships unexpectedly forming between unlikely people, which is pretty much the happy story of my life.  But the world turns quickly and before you know it the news cycle has turned once again.  A new strand of thought began.

The year 2014 saw the emergence in the world media of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  They seemed to spring forth from the ashes of wartorn Iraq and Syria, from the press's simplified perspective at least.  Here we have a genocidal horde who are so evil an ultraviolent that even Al Qaeda, hardly pacifists themselves, denounced them as being devils.  Their motto "we expand" seemed then to suit them well ( and in many ways still does) since they seemed to effortlessly take entire swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territory.  But one of the aspects of this threat that seemed to chill western countries including this one was the speed with which many, but mercifully not anywhere near the majority, of disaffected Muslims sought to leave this country and join this group of religious fascists.  Britain has been left dealing with the prospect of approximately 500 and growing trained jihadists coming back to our shores once the Islamic State is no more.  There seems to be a majority consensus that those fighters who return from the Islamic State must be detained in some way or another, lest they merge back into the population and become ticking time bombs.  But what most interested me when reading into this topic was the increase in reports of Britons going abroad to join groups that are fighting against IS.  An edition of BBC Question Time seemed to capture the dilemma well.  Most of those in the audience wanted to see the British IS fighters dealt with, no surprises there, but they were more divided over what do about those that went out to fight on the opposite lines.  Much of the audience was baffled.  Who would do this?  Isn't it a bit strange to just get up and fight in some far off land when you can stay at home and change the channel?  The Tory MP guest seemed to be advocating locking up all of the returning fighters up regardless of what flag they were flying.  Then a woman put her hand up and asked something that seemed to give everyone pause for thought; "Aren't those going out to fight IS just like the brave people who volunteered to go out and fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War?"

The Spanish Civil War broke out between the elected republican government of Spain and it's supporters known as the Republicans against much of the Spanish military and it's supporters under General Francisco Franco in 1936.  This was during the age of fascism where Hitler had been in power for 3 years and Mussolini had been in power for 14 years.  The Blackshirts in London started to stir too.  It seemed as though fascism was on the way up.  In response to this socialist, communist and anarchist parties within and without Spain called for volunteers to help form the International Brigades.  Volunteers from all walks of life answered the call such as ex servicemen and various members of the working class of different political persuasion, all united by their opposition to fascism.   Even a few now well known writers including George Orwell joined the fight. In terms of international support for the different sides of the conflict there was a power imbalance since while the Soviet Union supported the Republicans and the Fascist powers supported the Nationalists, the main democracies in Europe stayed neutral. 

So this all led me on to the idea of writing about the concept of a modern International Brigade.  My novel would explore various questions such as most notably how would it work?  Wouldn't such an organisation be essentially an illegal paramilitary organisation?  Or indeed technically a terrorist group?  What would separate the members of this group from terrorists?  Why would people even want to join in the first place?  Why is this idea seemingly less attractive now than it was back in the days of the Spanish Civil War.  I think the latter has a lot to do with the fact that thanks to 24 hours news the images of war and it's horrors are a lot closer.

In many ways this novel concept is my cheeky act of revenge against the parts of the political left who don’t fail to disappoint me.  Years after the wars in Libya and Iraq it seems many voices just can’t help themselves and say a little too smugly “I told you so”.  Those voices even go so far to talk up the leaders who came before those wars, making Gaddafi sound like Mother Theresa with a secret police force.  It is not that those people’s opinions don’t have a point about raising cautionary tales about interventions, to me what I find distasteful is the extent they take them to.  What is more frustrating is that it works more as a mental roadblock more often than it works as a practical argument when it comes to working a way out of the difficulties we face today.  For instance in a typical argument on a political forum on Facebook, any discussion about IS and what to do about them is met by the overheard “well we created the conditions that brought them there”.  Thanks for that Sherlock, any suggestions about what to do about this awful situation.  Essentially then the person espousing this view will argue to do nothing, either by referring to their initial answer described or by implying that anything we do is useless since we are ultimately selfish.  Yes the standard of debating is set that low on the internet.

But if you dwell on the concept of an International Brigades group formed for the sole purpose of fighting against tyranny and promoting democracy you find there is definitely not a shortage of tyranny out there.  In Equatorial Guinea a tinpot dictatorship has been in place longer than I have been alive.  After the not so affectionately named previous president Mad Uncle Macias was executed his nephew took charge of this tiny African nation.  After discovering massive oil and gas reserves in the country the lions share of the oil money went to the President’s family and government officials.  The President’s son Teodora is famous for spending the country’s annual education budget on luxury cars, yachts and hotel suites.  All the while the country is ruled by a climate of fear.  In The Gambia President (formerly general) took power in a military coup in 1994 and has since not left.  He is notable for making outlandish comments such as claiming that he can make herbal remedies for AIDS and Yellow Fever.  Police violence is endemic as is corruption through all levels of society.  The most well known African basket case at the moment is Zimbabwe, on which my planned novel will focus on (albeit with a fictionalised variant).  Robert Gabriel Mugabe the man once lauded as a freedom fighter and a beacon of hope has now pretty much become the complete opposite.  Betraying every ideal he seemed to stand for Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is a democratic society in paper only.  The economy is a mess.  The health system is near hopeless.  Corruption is everywhere, especially centred on the President’s family and loyalists. Democratic elections may as well be relabelled civil wars given the scale of government supported violence that occurs during them.  As one student opposition activist says “As peaceful revolution becomes impossible, it makes violent revolution inevitable.”

Character wise I am very excited at the prospect of developing the African dictatorship angle.  The dictator (for simplicity’s sake I will refer to him as Mugabe) has a lot of potential to develop as a frightening but at the same time very diverse character.  He will be portrayed as someone who is outwardly charming and polite in one on one interactions, but someone who at the same time is slowly losing their grip on reality.  He would be someone who is constantly planning ahead, checking potential threats in the immediate and long term.  He will often be nostalgic given his elderly age and at the same time persistently worried about his vulnerabilities, which are most obviously manifest in his physical ailments.  His firey and often blood curdling speeches will hide an inner addiction to violence as well as an inner insecurity, but at the same time serve its purpose to fire up loyalists.  But as his age advances he becomes more aware of his rivals; his defence minister and heir apparent and now more worryingly his wife the First Lady.  The former is an outwardly charismatic but inwardly Machiavellian character who is playing a quiet but ruthless long game for the presidency.  The latter who was before dismissed as no more than a corrupt debutant is now gaining in political confidence, destroying rivals unexpectedly at a rate that worries even her husband whom she nonetheless has a massive influence on.  As the conflict with the International Brigades gets more heated, so do the tensions between these players.

And what of the International Brigades myself?  Whose idea was it anyway?  In the novel I plan to have this most unlikely of organisations assembled by some of the most unlikely and motely collection of individuals you could imagine.  This would include hated figures in British society such as a tabloid journalist and a corrupt and flamboyant City banker (as well as his long suffering PA who loathes him).  A disillusioned Secret Intelligence Service Case officer will also lend their expertise to the project as will a South African ex apartheid-era assassin.  They will be accompanied by a less flamboyant and humble figure who is a taxi  driver by trade but also voluntary relief worker.  This taxi driver figure is based on a real life person who was tragically killed  by IS, so if this novel becomes a reality and goes towards being sold, I will need to consult his family out of respect for them.  I read about his story in the BBC News and I found his story a touching one, and his warm character one that other people would likely learn to appreciate and connect with.  As you can see some of these people do not sound like the most selfless people in the world.  It is hard  to imagine all of these people being in the same room, let alone organising a paramilitary group with altruistic intentions.  But this is when the central themes of my novel come into play. From  a personal point of view, there is no real definitive type of person I am friends with.  My friends are a humble and diverse coalition of the strange.  Some people I get on with and others I do not.  Often with the former this tends to happen with people who are from completely different backgrounds than my own.  To this end I wanted to play on the theme of a group of seemingly random (and sometimes antagonistic with the banker and the journalist) group of people, putting up with each other’s eccentricities and faults and working towards a common cause.  The theme of redemption will also be very important, with some characters seemingly against their nature trying to fight for it.  Sometimes this craving for redemption is prompted by a life changing event, such as it does with the banker, or the acknowledgement of feelings that have been building up in them for a long time, such as the case with the assassin.  With some of the originally most selfish characters, the nature of the enterprise that they are in leads them into unavoidable moral conflicts.  After all the group has been formed to create violent struggles, albeit for good causes.  This does not always run smoothly alongside their mission to make the world a better after spending most of their lives doing the opposite.

So there we have it; my novel.  Please do not ask when it is going to be done because I do not have a bloody clue.  This is not on a strict timetable and the story arcs may evolve over time into a direction I haven’t considered before.  Either way I am confident that this will be a personal challenge worth embarking on.

The Labour Party Leadership Contest and the Future of Labour

The Labour Leadership Contest and the Future of Labour

It was a surreal experience.  I was waiting to board my flight to Dublin from Bristol Airport.  As I stood facing a small group of stag night lads dressed in drag my fiancé Anna kept feeding me the results of the UK General Election 2015 as they came in.  The prognosis wasn’t good but at that time the Conservatives did not have a controlling majority.  By the time we landed in Dublin they had.  The holocaust of Lib Dem MPs included many familiar faces from my time canvassing and attending Lib Dem conferences.  Even the hardworking constituency Steve Webb was chucked out of Thornbury for some young faced cookie cutter self-made businessman Tory.  I still remember the sheepish look on Steve’s face when after he accidentally stood in some drying concrete on the front patio of a person’s door he was about to knock on.  The person wasn’t happy but he at least resisted the urge to have a go at Steve or report this anecdote to some Fleet Street rag like The Sun.  Very swiftly after the results came the stream of resignations.  Lib Dem Nick Clegg, seemingly suffering from the curse of immortality having kept his seat against the odds, fell on his sword.  UKIP leader Nigel Farage resigned allegedly honouring an earlier pledge he made, only to apparently have his resign bounce like a bad cheque off the UKIP Executive.  And then there was the long suffering Ed Miliband who in a pretty moving and humble speech also stepped down.  I couldn’t help thinking that poor old Ed took it all a bit too hard on the chin in owning all of the responsibility for Labour’s defeat.  To be sure the buck has to stop at the leader, but the Labour Party is by no means a one man band and as such the responsibility for the defeat should be collectively shared.  After all it’s not UKIP.

I am a long suffering Lib Dem supporter and as such I am fully used to the knives coming out to stab the former leader when the carcass of their leadership is barely cold on the slab, but even I was amazed by the brazenness of the Night of the Long Knives that followed Ed’s fall.  Many of the leadership candidates didn’t wait long till the “I told you so” quotes started to come out, most notably from the front runners in the Labour leadership.  Their reaction to the inevitable ‘why the bloody hell didn’t you say or do anything if it was so obvious you would lose oh oracle?’ is followed by the inevitable protestations about having to maintain party unity.  OK, there is some truth to this.  To be frank the public are as brutal as they are hypocritical on this point.  I would personally argue that truth should trump consistency, but sadly I cannot speak for all voters.  But arguably sooner or later those leadership candidates who were close to Miliband or even worse closer to Brown will have to answer some difficult questions, more on this later.  The rest of this article will be about first of all assessing the Labour leadership candidates, their policy points and how desirable I see them as future party leaders and possibly future PMs.  The last part will be a general assessment of where the Labour Party should go from here in my opinion.

Andy Burnham seems to hail from a notably Old Labour tradition.  Much of his background is from the Trade Unions and he comes from a working class family in the Labour heartlands of Liverpool.  Burnham is also one of the most experienced candidates in terms of work in government as a former Health Minister.  It should be noted though that his Ministerial tenure has notable skeletons in it’s closets.  For one under Burnham’s tenure the Mid Staffordshire Hospital scandal broke out, which he responded with a closed government inquiry.  Pushing for a full public inquiry later on is likely one of David Cameron’s good ideas, a very rare example to be sure.  How much Burnham can be blamed for the scandal itself is limited to be sure, but the handling of such scandals has a tendency to make people measure someone up as a leader.  What is also notable is that during his tenure Labour pressed on with it’s Public Finance Initiative’s (PFIs) which are basically private contracts for specific jobs within the NHS.  Recent Tory reforms have generated a lot of public wariness about such limited privatisation initiatives.  Not only has PFI schemes in the NHS displayed varying levels of effectiveness they have in many places not only warped accountability but also lead to a lot of public money being spent, often with limited returns in value.  As for Burnham personally if I am honest I am as yet not particularly impressed by his recent media performances and statements.  To start with the positives he has in fairness raised the concept of spreading economic reform outside of London to the ‘regions’.  The only problem I have with that is that ‘regions’ often turns into just taking care of certain hyped cities or regions in the north (yes I am looking at you Manchester) that are regularly mentioned in the media or to one of the devolved nations.  Meanwhile the west country gets ignored while in the wake of the Lib Dem collapse it’s council and MP seats get colonised by the Tories for the long haul.  To be sure the north in many places needs a lot of attention, but not at the expense of other places.  I did appreciate his mention of rent to buy schemes which are basically initiatives where renters can eventually buy their homes.  Such support for these schemes is well overdue from politicians who are continuously obsessed with those of us who are trying to get mortgages.  Meanwhile those of us for whom getting a mortgage is a long way off we feel shunned like an ugly sister left in the shade.  Picking up on the whole northern angle Burnham does unfortunately have a cringeworthy way of displaying himself as an everyman northerner who “goes to the pub”.  Alright Burnham good for you.  But here is the thing, I don’t give a damn.  I wouldn’t care if you went home and donned your pipe, dressing gown and slippers and went to bed at 8pm.  If you had some ideas worth mentioning and you seem to be a well balanced leader, you could be a spotty and overweight stereotype of a comic book nerd for all I care.  I am sick to my back teeth of politicians acting like they are ‘normal’.  This is mostly in reaction to comments made by the public, so their response is to act like they are someone they are not.  My response in his position would be to say “yeah I am a strange guy, deal with it.”  Rant over.  So far so bland for Burnham.  My main concern is unsubtle whispers from Unite’s General Secretary Len McCluskey that indicate that Burnham is the ‘right’ leader of the Labour Party.  With respect to Len he should shut up or he will give another excuse for Cameron to rant on about McCluskey being the puppet master of the Labour Party.  If elected Burnham will have to prove he is his own man, and once or twice that may involve telling old Len a few things he does not want to here.

What can one say about Yvette Cooper?  Well for one she has a fair amount of experience in cabinet and shadow cabinet, but to my mind no notable achievements to credit her with.  She has kept up sniping fire on Home Secretary Theresa May, but considering how incompetent she has been in her portfolio that looks like fish in a barrel to me.  If it wasn’t for Cameron’s obstinate, at times frankly arrogant and stupid, tendency to hang on to his ministers no matter how much trouble they cause May would have left long ago.  For another Yvette Cooper is a woman.  Surprised?  No, me neither.  But for some reason she saw fit to mention this during a leaders debate when asked to make her pitch for the top job.  To my mind this was a very ill judged move since she is not the only woman running, and her rival seems to have a more compelling case than she does.  Yvette recently made the case that Labour has to be more “pro business”.  Be that as it may she in a classic Yvette Cooper way made the pitch in such a way as though she had been a pro business underdog all along, something her record doesn’t back up.  While she is not as bullish as her husband Ed Balls she has a tendency to all too often to display the self-important, vindictive and hypocritical side of Labour.  In debates on the programme Question Time she displays a remarkable tendency to answer questions without answering them at all, but seems content to stick a few customary barbs at the Tories anyway.  This is the Punch and Judy politics that is making people do stupid things like not vote or vote UKIP, simply put I want to see such cheap politics punished severely.  The thing is half the time these dirty tactics boomerang right back at her.  Take for example the claim she made that some of her rivals had “swallowed” the Tory manifesto too much.  She never claimed who had done this but everyone knew it was directed at Liz Kendall.  Demonising the Tories without direct policy arguments being used didn’t work before, why does she think this will demolish Liz’s campaign?  If anything it will elicit more interest in her campaign.  Overall Yvette has done nothing to make me shake my old suspicions of her.  I may be being hard on her, but I wish she would give me a reason not to be.

The wild card in the deck of candidates is of course Jeremy Corbyn.  Corbyn is a dying breed in the Labour Party who a part of me can’t help but root for.  It is remarkable how old Labour warhorses like him still have their seats.  That they still have them seems to be among many things due to the strong and honest convictions they have and their dedication to their constituency.  During the awful election of 2015 Old Labour MP Dennis Skinner aka the Beast of Bolsover increased his majority by 20%.  Such figures are a call back to Tony Benn a man, and I say this as someone who isn’t a socialist, who I believe could have made socialism work.  Corbyn seems to go through the usual Old Labour tickboxes.  He is a member of Stop the War, is in favour of nationalising the banks and is thoroughly against austerity.  But one of the things I first noticed about him is the directness of his delivery.  He has a rare and refreshing sense of no nonsense about him which I and I imagine a lot of other people admire in a politician.  And yet people like Corbyn seem frozen in time.  It is almost as though him and his late friend Tony Benn went to sleep in the 80s and didn’t witness their leader Michael Foot going down in flames.  Don’t get me wrong I do not fully trust the Blairites for falling into line with Thatcher’s legacy just a little too readily.  But when I hear people like Corbyn speak I get the unmistakable feeling that a part of him or perhaps all of him respects ideological purity over truth.  One example of this is a video I saw in which Corbyn gave a speech to the Anti War movement.  In the video he described the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as “social reformers.”  I think in the end Corbyn is better served either in the cabinet as a balance against the Blairites or within the party as a backbencher doing the same thing.  Either way it seems to be a shame to allow an honest and hardworking  if misguided soul like Corbyn be ignored.

The last candidate is also the most controversial; Liz Kendall.  Now I have had my eye on Liz for some time.  Usually the Labour Party send some hack on Question Time like Rachel Reeves or, even higher on the hack-metre, Yvette Cooper.  But now and then Liz has made an appearance on the show and what I have seen of her impressed me.  For the most part she nailed questions instead of tip toeing around them with fluffy and meaningless rhetoric like Cooper.  She also subtly but firmly puts down Dimblebys’ casual sexism as well as that by occasional sexist Cabinet Ministers, such as Hammond who insisted on calling her ‘Rachel’.  In any case starting as she has mean’t to carry on Liz has not minced her words when talking about Labour’s defeat calling it a !catastrophe”, which it bloody was.  Cooper et al by contrast seem to show a faded disappointment like they have just missed a bus or a train.  The programme that Liz seems to be outlined looks notably Blairite, that is very centist.  Free schools are here to stay she says.  Some cuts will have to be accepted she says, which while I partly agree with her on this I am still a bit nervous about whether she and I see eye to eye on where they should fall.  For instance not many political figures have had the courage to call for state pensions and associated benefits to be reformed and means tested, for fear of losing the grey vote.  Her approach instinctively tries to woo the soft UKIP and Tory voters an general undecided who for the most part went to the latter during the election.  To my mind going after the latter two is a lot more important than going after the former since I sense UKIP will collapse into factional bickering soon after they have lost an EU referendum which will take place before the 2020 election.  Who knows maybe the refugees from that disaster will drift to the Tories and reopen wounds that have not healed since the Maastricht Treaty?  One can dream.  Speaking of Europe Liz seems to be wanting to play an intriguing game of harrying on the Tories to get a solid deal before any referendum.  Such a move may increase pressure between the Tory cabinet and back benches, but it does beg the question how this would ultimately effect Labour’s positioning with regards to the EU referendum (ie would a weak deal lead to Labour campaigning for ‘No’?)  I still need a lot of clarity on Liz’s plans before she gets my endorsement (which I am sure is very sought after by her).  She recently seems to have shored up her left flank by pushing for the minimum wage to be raised to the liveable wage, which is long overdue in my perspective.  She has also specifically pledged to overturn any anti union laws that the Tories introduce, which in these days of electoral revenge in the face of broken pledges won’t be easy to back down from.  She also backs keeping Defence spending at 2% of GDP which I thoroughly agree with, although I would prefer more tough talk on Russia and IS.  You may gather from this that my instincts are leaning towards Liz as my candidate.  Things may turn out that way, but whoever takes over the leadership of the Labour Party has big shoes to fill.

I remember watching the TV when the results came in back in 1997.  I was too young to understand the implications of the win, but I got caught up in the excitement bordering on ecstasy all the same.  What happened since then?  PFI contracts.  Two shags Prescott.  Millennium Dome fiasco.  Mandelson Scandals.  Cash for honours.  Greasing Bernie Eccleston’s palm. Detention without trial.  Torture Flights.  Record spending.  Hubristic boasting about curing capitalism from it’s ills.  And then there was the Iraq War, which with me the jury is still out.  But alongside this we have the many good elements of those 13 years including the Good Friday Agreement, stopping ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the minimum wage and support for former nurses going back to work.  To be sure memories of New Labour are mixed at best so the question remains if we go back it’s legacy as Liz Kendall seems to be leaning towards, what should we take away from it?  More importantly what should we leave behind in the past? To my mind the Labour Party while keeping it’s eye on the centre ground needs to look back on it’s past with more pride, not embarrassment.  Too many times I have talked to Blairites who talk about the Corbyn’s of this world like they are their drunk uncle’s who one can find lurking at the back of the room during a wedding.  Like it or not they allowed Labour to get where it is and it’s identity today does owe something to them, even if their stake on it is more tenuous than it used to be.  While I recognise New Labour/Blairism’s advantages I am worried that it’s most devoted followers are not aware or willfully ignorant of it’s limits.  PFI schemes in particular are starting to look more like an embarrassing legacy.  Sooner or later too there will have to be a reckoning between Labour and it’s earlier worshiping for the money lenders in the temple of the City of London.  Holding those vested interests to account is not the same as advocating socialism and Blairites should not run away from tough but constructive regulation for fear of scaring away a few voters here and there to the Tories.  Our economy cannot indefinitely rely on this one lucrative though fragile sector, the reckoning needs to be faced and not postponed again.  It is not enough for the followers of New Labour to think they can mimic Tory policies indefinitely.  Sooner or later genuine innovation will have to take hold and the private sector won't hold all of the answers.

As for me I have a big decision to make.  Do I stick with the shattered remains of the Lib Dems or do I cross the aisle to the Labour Party?  This is not an easy decision for me.  I have invested a lot of time with the Lib Dems, and met a lot of good people who I cannot bring myself to think ill of.  Despite the smearing (and it is for the most part smearing) by Labour and other people with an axe to grind against the Lib Dems after the coalition, I still believe they went into this arrangement for the most part with the best of intentions.  Being incredibly naïve is not the same as wanting to cause harm and this view of mine won’t change regardless of the outcome of my decision regarding my political allegiance.  On the other hand I can’t ignore that the Lib Dems have been hit hard and won’t be back on it’s feet for many years if at all.  That is too long for the people who will be effected by the policies of this government.  I feel a need to be in the main fight and not knipping at the heals.  I have no illusions about Labour’s faults.  The party is far too arrogant, centralised and machine like  by far.  It is too willing to trade off precious civil liberties for the cause of security.  The recent clampdown on peaceful protesting started under Blair and has got worse under the Tories.  And yet I feel like after many things my party supported in the coalition a need to atone for hardship caused by among other things this ill conceived and unethical crusade known as welfare reform under Ian Duncan Smith.  Something will have to give.  I will make this decision with a heavy heart shortly.

Zac's Top 10 Video Games Part 1

1.  Deus Ex

2.   Half Life 2

3.  Grand Theft Auto Vice City

4. Fallout 2

5.  Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

6.   Civilization V:

7.  Grand Theft Auto IV

8.   Max Payne

9.  Bioshock

10.  Mass Effect 2

1. Deus Ex

Deus Ex is a giant bowl of Science Fiction nerd nectar.  There is an obvious Blade Runner influence about the dark and paranoid world you inhabit.  Most conspiracy theories out there are referenced in the storyline including the Illuminati, Men In Black and Majestic 12.  While this game that was made in 2000 looks crude by today’s standards it delivers well on 2 fronts: 1. Rewarding the player in exploring places off the beaten track. 2.  Reminding the player that choices have consequences that are not always obvious.  Both of these mean that hacking a certain computer in a locked office or befriending a certain character can make the difference between a hard gunfight with a boss or destroying them instantly with their unique ‘kill phrase’.  The choices that you make in building up your character’s skillset also determine the kind of game you play.   As a cyborg the possibilities are open to you on the one had deploying a drone that can knock out enemy robots with an EMP, or giving yourself a set of lungs that can allow you to breath underwater.  A compelling and constantly twisting storyline makes you constantly uncertain about your alliances and the choice you make.  And in the end there is no set way to complete the game.  There are 3 possible endings encouraging you to embark on the adventure all over again.

2.    Half Life 2

Half Life 1 was scary at the best of times.  A quiet day at the office as a Theoretical Physicist ended with you accidentally opening a door to another dimension, turning your mundane work environment into a living hell littered with vicious aliens out for your blood.  Talk about a bad day at the office.  The crude graphics were made up by the nightmarish sounds you heard as you roamed the blood stained halls of your workplace.  Around each corner is another nightmarish scenario that can’t be tackled in the same way as the last one.  How do you top that?  For a start Half Life 2 explodes the size of your world to many times the size.  This world is full of many different environments from the dark and disturbing zombie infested town of Ravenholm, to the terrifying calm of a sandy beach wear a wrong turn can summon aliens from underground who will tear your face off.   Throughout these places ingenious environmental puzzles block your path, effectively making this game a puzzle game as well as a First Person Shooter.  These environments are also filled with non-player characters who you unexpectedly bump in to, smoothly and somewhat informally moving along the story, which makes a difference from the direct approach of many games (making it more believable).  But to my mind this game’s unique selling point is the believability of it’s world, from the remarkably life like facial gestures the characters shoot you, to your cold introduction to life under a totalitarian alien regime as soon as you step off the train.

3.     Grand Theft Auto Vice City

I admit it!  I was under 18 when I played this which obviously explains all of those hookers I beat to death.  It must be true, I read it in the Daily Mail.  What this game has in spades is style from the 1980s soundtrack to hurtling down a highway into the sunset on the back of a motorbike………….until you crash into the back of a truck and die a bloody death.  When I got into my first car (one of the few I obtained by peaceful means) I could hear Michael Jackson’s ‘Billy Jean’ on the radio, and I knew that this was a confident game full of swagger. The premise is quite simple; you are a mobster Capo sent out to Vice City (basically Miami in the 1980s) to start and empire for your boss back home, inevitably your empire outgrows your boss and the story advances accordingly.  Film references are everywhere from Carlito’s Way to Scarface and the satire is full on and darkly funny.  GTA games to not encourage perfect driving or even careful driving.  A fun challenge can be to see how many vehicles you can get through to get from one end of the city to the next.  But if you cause too much mayhem the cops are on you.  This is followed by more cops, the plain clothes vice cops (like Miami Vice), the FBI and then finally the Army.  Missions range from multiple assassinations, frantic races, blowing up buildings with remote controlled helicopters and dropping advertisements for a porn film from a seaplane.  It is incredibly silly and often offensive but the engaging world and multiple things to do keep you locked in.

4.      Fallout 2

Fallout 2 is the definitive cult game.  Newcomers look at it with and it’s fans with  hints of curiosity and confusion.  Why are people so into this incredibly crude looking game?  And indeed it is crude looking, the game may have been made In 1998 but it’s graphics make it look a lot older.  And yet this game pretty much wrote the rule book of how to make compelling, challenging and awesomely entertaining Role Playing Games (RPGs).   As the name of the game suggests it is set in the context of a post-apocalyptic world that has survived a nuclear holocaust.  You are your tribal village’s ‘Chosen one’, the descendant of the ‘Vault Dweller’ from Fallout 1, your quest is to leave the safety of your village in order to save it.  Between that main quest there are many settlements and sites to see, loads of weird and wonderful characters to meet and tons of side quests.  Sometimes places you go to play on contemporary topical themes such as Broken Hills, where interracial tensions between humans and Super Mutants.  Do you heal the rift and allow Broken Hills to thrive or spread racial tension to the point of pogroms breaking out?  In a mafia infested New Reno do you join one of the mobs and rise to the top or ignore the families completely.  Or you do as I did and rise to the top of the ranks to gain experience and loot, and then come back to New Reno once you have ridiculously powerful armour and weaponry……..and massacre all of the families without exception.  The script in your interactions range from an incredibly silly burping competition to a tense stand-off with the President of the United States who is disturbingly arguing in favour of ethnic cleansing.  The turn based combat promotes careful thinking, making you feel like a chess player armed with a Gatling Laser.  Careful strategic planning allows you to get out of some very sticky situations with finesse, while simultaneously rewarding you with some goofy and spectacularly ultraviolent death animations.  The sheer scope of the game encourages replayability, never mind the parts of the world you never quite find the time to explore first time around.  Only in Fallout 2 can you become a Boxer, Made Man, Porn Star, Grave Robber, Karma Sutra Master and a Muck Digger all in the same game.

5. Assassin’s Creed Iv: Black Flag

The third Assassin’s Creed was not what many people expected or even wanted.  A part of the problem was that the bar had been raised so high by Assassin’s Creed 2 and it’s follow up Brotherhood.  The main character from the third one was pretty boring, no one really had the patience for the economy system on the homestead and no one particularly cared for the hunting element.  But the idea of naval combat was introduced in the third instalment and players were only disappointed that it didn’t feature more than it did. So Ubisoft listened and the natural follow up as an Assassin’s Creed in which naval combat ran through most of the game.  And so Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was born, putting you as a pirate captain in the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy; the period immediately after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession from 1715 onwards.  You play Edward Kenway a pirate who stumbles upon the long running conflict between the Assassin’s and the Templars (standard-bearers for freedom and order respectively).  Along the way in this tale you meet legendary pirate figures such as Edward Thatch aka Blackbeard.  But ultimately the story reveals that you are in the present day a test subject for a multinational corporation owned by the Templars, making you explore Edward’s ‘genetic memory’ allegedly to make an entertainment product.  In reality you are a pawn of the Templars who are hoping to use what you experience to accumulate more power.  But Black Flag’s ultimate selling point is it’s genuinely convincing and accessible approach to making you a pirate.  Fighting ships and raiding them is very fun and swift with some quick and smart thinking.  Long voyages between destinations are lightened up by your crew singing genuine sea shanties (including my favourite ‘Drunken Sailor’) that you can collect more of.  Violent storms at sea can turn up the tension when you are facing off against multiple opposing ships, some of which are only barely visible by their cannons roaring into action on the top of a towering wave.  The frantic pace of the action and the score of activities and places to explore means that you can get a lot done in a very short amount of time.  In fact busying yourself by doing your own thing can be much more fun than following the story.  The fact that you have to acquire materials for upgrading yourself and your ship by raiding and exploring means you have every excuse to get lost in the vast expanse of the Caribbean.  

Where Now For the British Left Wing?

It is not always reassuring to have what you already know confirmed.  And so it was with the release of the UK 2015 General Election manifestos.  As the sound bites of ideas came drip fed out I started listening.  The ideas I heard ranged from the occasionally good bordering on original, the cynical vote grabbing to finally the profoundly worrying.  The profoundly worrying was perfectly encapsulated in the pledge by the Green Party to increase income tax to 60% for those earning over £150,000.

It is tough being left of the UK political spectrum.  We are a fractious, frequently morally self-righteous and scatter brained bunch.  We seem to have so many causes and so many things we want to put right.  But often amidst the fog of war we stir up as we use our frantic energy to do the right thing, we ironically end up too often losing sight of what is fundamentally right and fundamentally wrong.  The ends seem to always justify the means for us leftists as we go about our vigilante-like crusade to do things differently.  In one sense this is a courageous mind-set and it often does work out that way.  But I fear that too many times nowadays we get a pretty inappropriate bloodlust from sticking it to our enemies, or more accurately those we believe to be our enemies.

It feels like on the left side of the pond that we have forgotten two important values; those of listening and those of self-reflection.  This author who is hard of hearing would like to assure you that listening is underrated.  Incidentally feel free to ignore allegations from this author’s fiancé about supposed “selective hearing”, on  which I naturally couldn't possibly comment.  But listening is important.  Taking in opinions that are not your own and learning something new every day are both very important.  But it seems the more politically extreme anyone gets, left or right, the more angry one becomes.  And the angry person is famous for opening their mouth as they close their ears.  Preconceptions and beliefs I had thought ridiculous before have been blown away simply by myself allowing them to be challenged.  This means putting an idea out there and not worrying too much about being wrong.  People are sometimes wrong, get over it and learn from it.  But the more extreme you get it seems the more unacceptable it is for you to have some humility, admit that you are wrong and go back to the drawing board.  This is one of the major lessons that brought me back from the extreme left once upon a time.  No matter how dogmatic I became it didn't make me immune to the human condition.

Self-reflection is linked to listening.  We hear new information and opinions and we reflect on the positions we take.  Sometimes this reflection brings us to places we don’t want to go.  It is very hard as a person, some may argue particularly as a man, to admit when you are mistaken.  It is even harder to believe that you have been mistaken for some time.  Days, months and even years.  But it is all a part of growing up.  Much of the new experiences you take in may force you to re-evaluate and possibly change your positions.  The last time this happened on a major political scale in the UK leftist spectrum was when the Labour Party became New Labour.  Since then among many it is still an open question in the public area about whether Labour is still leftist.  But for me this completely misses the fundamental question.  We shouldn’t be asking whether Labour is still a leftist party.  We should be wondering about whether it matters.  When it is all said and done the Labour Party had to make a profound change which undoubtedly did reconnect the party with much of the country it wished to govern.  In doing this the party and it’s leaders had to confront hard truths and make bold decisions about how to go forward.  Even harder, they had to admit that stances they made in the past were wrong.

As I have said before at the start of this article, none of the manifestos in the 2015 general election on the whole really represent anything groundbreaking.  Mainly we are looking at reversals of the incumbent government with one or two exceptions here and there.  There isn't much adventurous, especially not in terms of foreign policy, more about this in a later blog entry.  But there as a concerned leftist, now 10 years away from his fringe revolutionary socialist days, I can see some disturbing red flags about of the none Bolshevik kind.  The programme of the left today looks tired and unoriginal.  We seem so constrained by ideological purity. We can’t seem to make ourselves think outside of the box for fear of unconventional ideas not looking radical or leftist enough, or even worse of looking like we have certain crossover points with the right.  This leads us to fall back on uninspiring ideas, even ones that we have already seen the negative consequences of such as cheap gimmicks like price freezes. 

But what I find profoundly worrying is that in the name of making our society more fairer and more tolerable for many, we expand our lists of those whose lives we would make harder, often with far too much glee.  This for me is what the 60% tax represents.  Even with my university education I would be profoundly surprised to reach £150,000 per annum.  Who knows maybe I will hit that gong one day.  Maybe once I finally write that novel or release my political memoir (probably entitled something along the lines of ‘Lessons in modesty: how I abolished the monarchy, made leftists and rightists hug each other, stopped climate change, made everyone well off and brought about world peace’) I will hit that peak.  The modest side of me wonders how that would alter me as a person.  If we are honest having more or less does effect people profoundly, you would have to be a strong person for it not to.  But I wouldn't for a second believe my greater wealth made me somehow more immoral.

But this is the trap the left has fallen into.  In trying to create a more accepting and tolerant world we have begun continued to hound those who don’t need or want our help.  Instead of our respect and understanding these people always seem to get the worst treatment from the left.  And in dishing out this treatment we dehumanise those who have worked to become more well off than ourselves and others (notice the “worked” which is the clause that alludes to my republican leanings).  And what for?  Well surely it cant be to show how morally superior before, but in a weird way  that fundamentally is the reason.  If that sounds ridiculous that is because it is!  This is the wall the UK left has ran into and if it wants to evolve more it must burst through it.  That walls is emphasised by the ridiculous and completely unethical notion that anyone deserves to have more than half of what they earn taken away by the government.  As soon as that sort of move is justified, beyond lies madness.

So what is next for the left?  Well to a certain extent I am working on that.  But I am modest enough to admit that I don’t have all of the answers (really you wonder?).  But I am saying to you know that we cant go on like this.  We cant go on loudly waving our banners and shouting about how much we hate them who dare to not vote for us.  We can’t go on being satisfied bringing out the same slogans and half baked ideas just for the sake of taking the reigns from an incumbent government.  We can’t go on not considering why people dare to ignore us.  We can’t go on not challenging accepted norms about our society and about why people act as they do.  We can’t go on not considering certain solutions because those we deem as being on the other side are flirting with them.  A very wise man once said to me that “we need to be as economically right wing as we can possibly be and as socially left wing as we can possibly be”, which is a sentiment which I feel carries a certain wisdom about it.  We need new and dynamic ideas that challenges conventional wisdom, including our own.  Overall it is time for us to grow up.  And sadly I don’t think the British left are there yet for this election.  Till then there is always next time.

UK Parliament: What is in a place?

The Houses of Parliament are broken.  I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense as in the wider state of UK politics (corruption and broken promises etc), physically the building is actually broken.  Paint is peeling, wires are exposed, damp is everywhere and  overall refurbishment and renovation work is needed just about everywhere.  The place in short is a mess and if the mess isn’t sorted out the building may well be on the way to being condemned.  So the question is, what should be done?

The first option is to pay the necessary public money for the renovation works, patch the building up and life will go on.  The second and third option is to either stay in the building till the building starts to fall apart, which conversely may cure the over representation problem if a piece of the ceiling falls on some MPs, or simply close the building down and seek another premises.  The motivations behind the last two arguments tend to fall into be divided between concerns about finances and about values.  Renovating Parliament will be expensive.  To put it bluntly the place is bloody old and has been through a lot.  From Guy Fawkes to the Luftwaffe the building has endured for better or worse.  Perhaps more emotively some MPs have even died on or near the site.  In living memory Airey Neave MP was killed by a car bomb planted by the Irish National Liberation Army in Parliament’s car park. 

But time moves swiftly on and falling voter turnout at the polls and the abandonment of the big 3 parties in favour of alternatives have sounded alarm bells that British politics as we know it cannot go on.  A recent documentary on the BBC about the day to day workings of Parliament, far from making people more sympathetic to the place and the people who work there,  seems to have had the opposite effect.  The place is spoken of as being frozen in time in a bad way, which strikes me as a tad bit hypocritical when I hear people admire nearby Buckingham Palace for the same quality. 

OK so following the above argument we would abandon the old Houses of Parliament and make a brand new building.  We would henceforth lead the monument to a corrupt and old era of politics to a brand and spanking new beacon of truth and virtue (being deliriously optimistic).  We could make the building more open up to the public.  In an ingenious modern quirk the Germans have built a huge public walkway in the new dome of the old Reichstag, allowing Germans to keep an eye from above on their elected representatives.  Perhaps this could be emulated here in the UK? The Commons chamber itself was designed specifically to foster an adversarial attitude to debate.  Perhaps a new chamber, such as a circular one (eg Reichstag or Holyrod) may foster a more cooperative mentality.   A  broad debate could be started off about what this new Parliament building should look like and where it would be located.  At first this break with the past looks very hopeful and bold.

However after careful reflection I have decided that I am not in favour of abandoning Parliament as a building.  I have a number of reasons for this standpoint so I shall start from the financial.  After all of the planning, clearing land, building and furnishing of a new site I doubt much money if anything will ultimately be saved.  Physically there is no escaping the fact that the building is iconic.  It is the centrepiece of many tourist postcards, much more so than the Queen or Buckingham Palace.  To me throwing it all away because of our current disillusionment seems short sighted, bitter and more than a little futile.

I was chatting to someone on Facebook recently about how the Communists in East Germany tore down a royal palace to replace it with a big ugly modern (by 1970s standards) monstrosity of a Parliament building.  I thought it was a shame that the Communists had torn down a historic building for a superficial political point.  My friend pointed out that he was a republican.  I said so was and I have no problem with royal palaces, just the occupants.  I feel the same way about Palace of Westminster.  Put simply changing the setting is just too shallow.  Politicians don't take hints, large or subtle.  So putting them out of the office is unlikely to change anything.  Making them lose their job for not listening however is likely to make them take notice.  As a republican I believe that the last safeguard against tyranny is not the crown. It is us; the people.  If we want change we need to focus on our politicians themselves and not the physical place they work.  If we want change we must demand it and keep up the pressure; by voting, lobbying and constantly debating about the future of our country.  The last one is very important.  Too many people nowadays debate politics like it is some abstract thing that doesn't exist and they have no place in.  Put simply it isn't and we do.  If we don't want to be products of our environment, we have to step up and make our environment a product of us. One has to wonder if we resort to building Parliaments every time irritation with politics gets to a certain level, how many Parliament buildings are we going to have to build, until we be brave and get our hands dirty?

De-clawing the British Lion

One of the lesser acknowledged people who have passed through my fair city of Bristol is a man called Ernest Bevin.  Bevin knew what it meant to be poor, working as a manual labourer on the docks for pennies and then working as a driver at the same place for not much more.  He rose up to become an effective and passionate trade union organiser, becoming instrumental in organising a huge trade union confederation the Transport and General Workers Union.  However while he prided himself in standing up for the working man against a government seemingly dominated by an oligarchy of the ruling class, he refused to swallow the rhetoric prevalent in the socialist movement about all threats being manufactured.  He used his influence and his own fiery rhetoric to denounce George Lansbury at the 1935 Labour Party Conference.  George Lansbury and his supporters only saw a ruling class conspiracy in rearmament, a line supported by a wide spectrum of leftist authors and celebrities including Virgina Woolfe.  Ernest Bevin meanwhile saw the world as it was.  Italy was invading Ethiopia.  Hitler who had been in power for only a few years had already begun to violently crack down on trade union activity.  The German leader incidentally was almost in stitches of laughter after meeting George Lansbury.  Bevin’s courageous stance lead to the end of Lansbury’s resignation from his position of the Labour Party.  After a distinguished term serving as Secretary of Labour during World War 2, upon Labour’s victory in 1945 Bevin became Foreign Secretary. During his tenure has Foreign Secretary, recognising the threat from the Soviet Union Bevin was instrumental in cofounding the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation better known as NATO.  And today that organisation still stands.

 Bevin helped form NATO because while he recognised the need for major domestic reform he knew that Britain could not afford to ignore the strategic map.  Divided and disarmed Europe was prey to danger.  However united, ready and able Europe would be ensured that it could enjoy the fruits of the postwar peace.  Bevin realised the truth that both guns and butter are needed and ultimately one can’t survive without the other.

 Our present leaders, in the government and without, are not strategic thinkers in the least.  They act more like managers and mis-managers at that.  When they look at lists of our strategic interests next to lists of our armed forces.  They look at both of those lists and in place of what they should see they see pound signs.  And that creates the need for efficiencies, cost saving measures, expedient minded solutions and ultimately cuts.  The armed forces are really just an inconvenience to them.  Something to be patted on the head next to the cenotaph and to provide a musical accompaniment to the opening of the Ashes at the Lords grounds.  They talk so much about how much the members of the armed forces sacrifice while they dismember their regiments and close down their bases.

 So why do they get away with this?  Well at the moment it appears the answer is, because the balance of the British public support it.  Leon Trotsky once said “You may not have an interest in war, but war has an interest in you.”  But the problem is not so much that we are not interested.  The British are simply tired of war and the military that comes along with it.  They are tired of sharp suited politicians sending the armed forces to fight in far flung places only to see the shooting carry on long after they have left.  They are tired of being given multiple reasons why they our forces are being sent to a certain place when one solid golden reason would do.  And most of all the British are tired at seeing their money seemingly being ploughed into the military while public services are cleaved.  The peace dividend in short is looking very allusive and all too far away.

 But the problem is the world doesn’t stop being a dangerous place just because we have had enough of it and the problems within it.  We don’t even need to look on the world scale to realise that, looking at our region is bad enough.  President Vladimir Putin of Russia has thrown down the gauntlet to Europe.  It’s vastly outnumbered eastern neighbours are fearful while the central European powers do what they always do; make a lot of noise and postpone a challenge without meeting it.  And meanwhile we go about our paper tiger business as our hard power declines every day.  Vladimir Putin is a remorseless and determined nationalistic fanatic who targets weakness and exploits it.  From the start we have shown weakness.  We treated and still treat Alexander Litvinenko’s assassination in London like some kind of minor diplomatic inconvenience, like an ambassador’s outstanding parking ticket.  As Euromaidan started coming into force and the Russian supported Ukrainian President Yanukovych’s thugs started launching themselves at protestors, Vladimir Putin was having his pictures taken in front of Number 10.  Only now the rhetoric from our government has started to heat up.

 But Putin must know this rhetoric is empty.  Either as our government is spouting it they are tying themselves in knots strategically.  British bases are closing in Germany in a region where our commitments are increasing, while a base is being opened in Bahrain in a region where our operations were allegedly powering down.  How can we hope to deter our enemies when we give off such mixed signals.  How can we reassure our vulnerable allies, including those in Eastern Europe, when we are so lacklustre when it comes to defence?  Despite the fanfare, they realise that a NATO ‘spearhead’ force of 5,000 strong is pretty puny when set against the Russian Western Military District’s 65,000 strong.

The public rightly do not want war with Russia.  Such a war would be devastating for everyone, although by numbers (not in the least 3 NATO nuclear weapon owning states versus one) Russia would lose.  But wanting a peaceful endgame and going out of your way to show how little resolve you have to stand a challenge are two different matters.  If you are confronting a determined foe such as we are with Russia, it is unwise and dangerous to lay all of your cards down on the table at once.  An open public acknowledgement of our desire to only go so far until Eastern Europe is on its own is a very unwise stance on our part.  We are a part of an alliance that commits us to help those in need and in distress.  Now is the time to own up to that commitment.  If that upsets Vladimir Putin (and there isn’t much “if” about it) then that is too bad.  There is no honour or satisfaction to be had in appeasing a bully.  Historically it is not what our country is known for.

The Iraq War has left a toxic legacy in this country.  It has stoked the fires of isolationism and in it’s aftermath terrible and frankly wrong narratives have emerged from it.  One of which is that all military action not sanctioned explicitly by international law is wrong.  Tell that to the Kosovans alive because of NATO’s intervention in 1999.  Another is that every single humanitarian intervention we have been involved in has failed.  Tell that to the people of Sierra Leone.  Those forces conspire to tell us that the UK has never been and can never be a force for good in the world.  I for one believe that they are completely wrong.

In the upcoming general election the future of our armed forces will hardly be discussed.  To be sure there will be a few patronising remarks about how much good they do, probably by the same powers that be who want to carve them up.  It isn’t popular to talk about defence or about using our defence capability to help others.  It is much more popular to be ashamed of our power, or rather our former power.  On the right we have UKIP who want a massively financed military to go virtually nowhere.  Perhaps more persuasively we have the Greens who want to go nowhere too but for good measure hack away at their financing too, so they will hardly be equipped to go anywhere.  I wouldn’t vote for UKIP regardless of what their defence policy was, unless I had a frontal lobotomy.  But I do fear the momentum of the Greens.

The Greens have a toxic and corrosive view of Britain with regards to international security.  They support the sadly popular leftist moral relativist philosophy of the day that basically traces the source of all suffering in the world back to our doorstep.  It also seemingly advocates the appeasing of bullies like Putin.  In short the legacy of George Lansbury is alive and kicking, so it is time to invoke the spirit of Ernest Bevin.  So my parting advice with regards to confronting this terrible and enduring philosophy is simple: don’t stand for it.  Be proud of us being committed to the defence of the little guy.  Instead of only  decrying the unfairness of the UK’s Permanent seat on the UN Security Council, we should think about the good we can do while have it, and consider carefully whether our successors may prove as altruistic in their motives.  Our country has made mistakes with regards to military intervention, but that is no excuse for isolationism.  In the face of mistakes we should endeavour to do better, not endeavour to do nothing at all.  Our philosophy should be similar to Thomas Paine’s “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

 

Standing Up For a British Presidency

Mentioning the possibility of Britain becoming a republic and one day having a president to someone can often provoke a surprised and somewhat dumbfounded response.  It is almost as though you said “hey I think it would be a good idea if I crossed that main road at rush hour doing a handstand.”  It is seen in the mainstream as simply a bizarre idea and often portrayed as against British values.  As a republican I believe this reaction is somewhat typical of the human condition.  People after all can get used to pretty much anything, especially if they are lead to believe they can’t change something or more controversially that they shouldn’t.  “If it ain’t broke why fix it?” is the usual response from royalists, who then usually ignore the multitude of ways the institution of the British Monarchy is broke.  But this response is often prompted by the fears of what could replace the monarchy, which as far as Republic is concerned would be a democratically elected British President.  President; that title has many controversies around it.  And yet all it means nominally is the not so very an radical idea, these days anyway, of electing your own leader.  But it stands to reason that if we republicans are for a presidency, we need to tackle the stigma that is attached to it.

 The past is continuously mythologized and the characters and actions of past leaders along with it.  But curiously the myth making seems to be different when it comes to mythologizing monarchs on the one hand and mythologizing Presidents on the other.  When one king annuls marriages or executes their (former) spouse this is largely overlooked to preserve is greater legacy, politics is separated from the personal.  Yet with Presidents this separation doesn’t seem to exist.  If a President cheats on his wife, who cares about them stopping genocide or passing life changing reforms?  Many Kings and Queens practiced corruption and torture on a gargantuan scale.  Their greater legacy remains intact while a single corruption or spy scandal can bring down an entire presidency in historians and the public’s view.

So why do we have these double standards?  The conclusion I have come to is that Presidents are just too close to home while most monarchs are silently in their grave, hardly vocal witnesses to a controversial history.  Put simply Presidents just remind us too much of well……us.  But we have fell into this narrative where we apparently don’t want Presidents to be like us.  We don’t want them to be fallible.  We don’t want them to say the wrong thing.  We want them to reflect the power and status of our country as it was, to take our minds off our continuous decline.  We want them to be confident and to know what to do and when to do it.  In other words we want our leaders to be special.  How much more special can you get than a line of people trained from birth to be leaders? 

Politics for all its good and very visible ills is at the end of the day a product of the human condition.  Like it or not we are responsible in one way or another for the way politics has developed.    Confronting the problems synonymous with contemporary politics will lead us to have to deal with many difficult issues.  The biggest issue that our paradoxical fixation on the monarchy highlights is our completely unrealistic and warped view of human nature.  We expect the best from the leaders we don’t choose, but we expect the worst from the leaders we don’t.  We have come to the point where we are so frustrated and ultimately dumbfounded about where politics should ultimately go, we give ourselves an escape from reality in the form of the Monarch.

“Its (British Monarchy) mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants” Walter Bagehot

 The “mystery” element is pretty alien to a democratic system, ordinarily.  Could you imagine a member of the US President’s staff being called into a Senate hearing and when asked a question refraining “sorry, can’t say anything.  We have mysteries to keep.”  If this was heard the questioners would be forgiven for wondering what the staff member had been smoking.  Royalists tend to reflect on human nature as it should be.  Republicans see it for what it is.  Presidents aren’t corruptible, people are corruptible and Presidents of course are human (although some may not live up to the name).  But in functional and transparent republics the President is seen as the leader but is ultimately bound by the strains of the constitution of their country and ultimately the ability of the public to renew or cut short their job’s duration.  And of course monarchs are just as human as Presidents.  But the difference between them is that while monarchs perpetuate the myth that people are born leaders the legacy of Presidents prove time and time again that leaders are not born, they are made.

The life experiences and challenges of monarchs are reflected on and mythologized, while those of presidents have by contrast often been taken for granted.  This is a great shame since these stories humanize the characters we describe and give colour to lives that on reflection look a lot more inspiring and at the same time less remote.  These experiences have lead Presidents to make bold leadership decisions.   Here are a few examples.  Please forgive the mainly male selection.

 US President Abraham Lincoln was accustomed to loss from an early age with the death of his mother in childhood.  At the same time he learned the virtue of patience as he worked himself up from being a common labourer, to a lawyer and eventually President of the country.  While he lead his country through the bloody American Civil War, he had to put his own loss aside when his young son died during the war of natural causes.  He did this since he thought it was hypocritical to visibly mourn for his own son while he ordered hundreds of others to fight and die for the country.  This caused an massive strain on his marriage that never really recovered.  This also contributed to what many historians speculate was acute depression that Lincoln had to live with among his other burdens.  To add to those burdens he was likely a closet homosexual, no doubt contributing to his depression.  Another experience when he was young tuned him away from slavery for life.  He went to work for a slave owner, didn’t like what he saw, then turned around and went home in disgust.  One of his successors was Ulysses S Grant.  Grant struggled with alcohol and depression all his life.    This struggle ended his army career once.  Then when the American Civil War started he became a patient, modest and yet determined general.  He got support from his friend and colleague William Tecsumeh Sherman who himself suffered from depression, leading them to help keep their mutual demons at bay.  Ultimately they became successful generals and won the war.  As President Grant promoted reconciliation with the south, but deployed the army against the violent Ku Klux Klan.  French President Charles De Gaulle was fully accustomed to loss due to his country falling prey to fascism.  His experience of fighting against overwhelming odds steeled him for tough fights later.  Many people recall from history King Juan Carlos of Spain telling the soldiers to stay in their barracks, but he stole that act off De Gaulle.  As paratroopers threatened to land on Paris De Gaulle went on TV and demanded they pledge allegiance to their leader and preserve the French Republic.  And in a more modest though not in the least important example, President Mary McAleese of Ireland sought reconciliation in a country where it has all too often been absent.  When she stated her intention to celebrate Protestant heritage as well as Catholic heritage, an American Catholic Archbishop denounced her.  Undaunted she turned around and said that his comments were out of line and she would do what she thought was right for all of her people, not just those who were Catholic.

If we republicans truly want a President we have to be prepared to argue and fight for one.  That does mean dealing with some controversial history.  There are people who empower and taint the presidential legacy.  But if the legacy of Presidents is controversial then that is the least that can be said of monarchs.  The main difference between the two positions is that we are ultimately responsible for Presidents since we choose them.  That is a big responsibility.  But shouldering big responsibility is what being a republican is all about.  Starting a British presidency and giving it a worthy legacy will be hard and it will take time.  For myself personally I relish the challenge and can't wait to start.