Brandless bliss

I like pubs with crap decor and a limited range of beers, with bacon fries for sale behind the counter. Pubs with old men that come in and shakily put the coins in the machine for a packet of 25 Major. Pubs with three regulars drooping over the beer-circled counter, who eye you as you come in.

I love them for their idiosyncracies. They're a respite from the creepy impersonality of chain bars. Any chain which offers you an endless choice of products personalised to your taste, imposing no strictures, exists in a cultural vacuum. To experience culture is to experience an interesting restriction of choice: "this is what we eat here."

Today I discovered a treasure. It's called 'The Cafe'. A cup of tea costs 60p, and meals start from £1.80. The most expensive thing on the menu is the daily roast, at £5.

It was like stepping into the past. Sausages, eggs, fried liver and mushrooms, tea. Men coming in and out, greeting the chef George and barking for a plate of chips. The toilet is in the owners' house, upstairs.

Orwellian

A device on British buses that shows a live recording image of yourself, so you know you're being watched.

Was the AHRC 'forced' to adopt the Big Society as a research priority?

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is the body responsible for distributing funds to academic researchers in the arts and humanities in Britain. On March 27 2011 the organisation was accused of ordering research on the 'Big Society', a Conservative Party slogan, by The Observer. The newspaper quoted Professor Peter Mandler, of the Cambridge history faculty, to say that the AHRC had been forced to adopt the 'Big Society' as a priority research point, and were threatened with funding cuts if they refused.

The AHRC then released a statement denying the claims and defending their inclusion of the 'Big Society' as a proposed area of research. The statement said that the council had been working on a programme called 'Connected Communities' for two years prior to the slogan's adoption by the Conservative Party; and that the slogan's later appearance only proved the relevance of their earlier selection of 'Connected Communities' as a research theme.

I do not believe that the AHRC was forced to adopt the 'Big Society' as a research priority. I believe that they adopted it of their own volition in an attempt to win the favour of the government, and perhaps in the hope of avoiding funding cuts in the future.

This powerpoint presentation entitled 'Building the Big Society' was given by guest speaker Dr. Bert Provan at a conference on a 'Connected Communities', held by the AHRC in Birmingham on June 2010. It quotes David Cameron throughout. Provan is a Deputy Director at the Department of Communities and Local Government, a governmental organisation which states on its website that its mission is "helping to end big government and create a free, fair and responsible Big Society". It shouldn't be surprising that this government official touts the party line. But why did the AHRC choose to host him as a speaker?

Dr. Provan's presentation was preceded by an opening speech by Professor Shearer West, the Head of Research at the AHRC, and Head of Humanities at Oxford University since February 9 this year (her background is in Art History). Unlike Provan, West did not mention the 'Big Society', though she did quote four pages of coalition statements about communities "coming together" and becoming "self-reliant".

But when opening the following conference on December 8, West mentions the Big Society on page 15. And whoever put together the presentation copied and pasted three photos from Provan's June 'Big Society' presentation into Shearer's new one (compare page 5 and 7, Shearer, and pages 5, 7 and 11, Provan.)

Furthermore, it appears to me that speakers at the December conference were asked to discuss the Big Society in their presentations.

One presentation is called 'Beauty and the Big Society', and quotes David Cameron in its first pages. It was given by Tom Bolton, Senior Research Advisor at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). CABE's website explains that it "was the government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space" until February 2011, when its government funding was cut and it effectively ceased to exist. Bolton was about to lose his job, and he probably knew it. This presentation looks like a plea for mercy ahead of the impending 'bonfire of the quangos' (mentioned by Shearer in her opening address).

But less understandably, someone named Professor John Hartley, of the University of Technology of Queensland, Australia, was flown approximately 16466.51 kilometres to give a speech on 'Connected Communities and Creative Economy: Clash, cluster, complexity, creativity'. His job in Queensland is presumably safe from coalition cuts, yet in a footnote on page 3 he makes the claim that Enoch Powell articulated an early vision of the 'Big Society' in 1962, and he mentions the buzzword again on page 4. To me, it appears that he has tacked the words 'Big Society' into the introduction of a preexisting speech. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that someone at the AHRC suggested he include it, as one of the conference's key themes.

The two other presentations in the conference, 'Connecting excluded communities?' by Dr Paul Benneworth, and a speech by another professor from Queensland, do not mention the 'Big Society'.

To me it appears like this: the AHRC held their first conference on 'Connected communities' in June 2009. They were happy to tie in their work on 'connected communities' with the new coalition's 'Big Society' slogan, and to host guest speakers to give 'Big Society'-titled presentations, from June 2010. They further incorporated the 'Big Society' slogan into conferences in December.

It seems to me that the AHRC, perhaps anticipating future cuts, obsequiously included the slogan as a topic in an ongoing project that was somewhat related to it without needing to be asked, and encouraged speakers to mention it.

I think the Daniel Boffey, the Observer journalist, unintentionally flatters the coalition by portraying them as a competently devilish foe who has successfully enforced their carefully preconsidered, evil aims. In reality, I doubt if their influence on the AHRC constituted anything so deliberate.

The question is: did the AHRC violate principles of academic research, and if so, if this was at its own volition.

The torturable and the untorturable

Interestingly, the Urabi Revolt (see my previous post) was preceded by a period which saw a great increase in literacy and a raising of public political consciousness in Egypt. Attention is often drawn to the political satire newspaper Abu Nazzara Zarqa (The Man in the Blue Spectacles, 1877, pictured right). It was published by Ya'qub Sanu', an Egyptian of Jewish background; and written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic rather than classical Arabic, so as to be understandable to all. It's lampooning of the establishment and of European control greatly annoyed the authorities. Sanu's printing operations were frequently interfered with.


Something similar has happened in our time, though on a gigantic scale. The internet has come to Egypt. Egypt now has 160,000 bloggers in Arabic and other languages, some of whom have been arrested and detained by Mubarak's government for their dissenting views, as Wikileaks revealed on Friday 28th January 2011. The American Embassy's leaked report emphasised the role of blogs in opening up public discussion on previously taboo subjects:

"One can view posts ranging from videos of alleged police brutality, to comments about the GOE’s foreign policy, to complaints about separate lines for men and women in government offices distributing drivers’ licenses... Blogs have spread throughout the population to become vehicles for a wide range of activists, students, journalists and ordinary citizens to express their views on almost any issue they choose. As such, the blogs have significantly broadened the range of topics that Egyptians are able to discuss publicly."

This morning on the way to work, I was reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. The British spy protagonist, Mr Wormold, is playing a game of checkers with the Havana Chief of Police, Captain Segura. Segura is in charge of torturing prisoners at the police station: if you will, a small-time equivalent of Egypt's newly appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman, left (kudos to Jane Mayer for flagging up his role in the US's rendition to torture programme in the New Yorker). Segura proposes that there are two classes of people: the torturable, and the untorturable:

'Did you torture him?'
Captain Segura laughed. 'No. He doesn't belong to the torturable class.'

'I didn't know there were class-distictions in torture.'

'Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea... Dr Hasselbacher does not be long to the torturable class.'

'Who does?'
'The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable... One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don't recognise class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons... I see that you have enlarged your staff.'
'I need someone to superintend accounts. Lopez is reliable.'
'Be careful, Mr Wormold. He is one of the torturable.'
They laughed, drinking daiquiries. It was easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.

I would suggest that what makes the poor torturable is their inability to communicate and publicise their grievances to a community that would come to their aid. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect to their lack of power. Unlike in earlier, more brutal periods of history, as a rule torture does not occur in public, but hidden away in dark underground chambers and the like. This tendency declares just as strongly as article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that torture is no longer commonly considered acceptable. The nations who claim to be good humanists can only accept its perpetuation by themselves or those over whom they have influence if they are credibly able to claim ignorance of it. And surely, on a human level, few would be comfortable with the routine rape and brutalisation of other human beings, if they were baldly confronted with it?

Internet access has changed this. Easy access to means of communication has meant that the torturable are able to publicise their plight. Fewer people are able to ignore it, but not only that: evidence of injustice can reach those who oppose it easily. The same free communication furthermore allows those interested groups to rally together to take action.

Anyone who cares to can now read about the "literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone" in this leaked American cable. The case of bus-driver Imad El-Kebir, who was beaten and raped by police, "became notorious" after cell-phone footage of his assault was posted on YouTube. This was, the cable reads "a turning point in influencing the government to permit the sentencing of police officers".

The picture on the right is of a young businessman named Khaled Said. He was (allegedly) beaten to death by police officers in Alexandria this summer (extremely gruesome photographs of what happened to him are easily discoverable online - be warned, these cannot be unseen). He has become a rallying figure in the Egyptian uprising: cartoons circulate on Twitter portraying the protests as his revenge: January 25th would have been his 29th birthday. As Newsweek has pointed out, Iran's internet martyr was a young woman named Neda; Tunisia's was Mohamed Bouazizi.

That is why the Mubarak regime unplugged the internet when the unrest started. They knew very well what was catalysing the unrest. But their plan actually backfired: with no Twitter feed to follow, people got out onto the streets to find out what was going on. It's not enough to simply blog about injustices. To force change, the people have to actually go out and agitate for it, like they're doing right now in Tahrir Square.

The Egyptian uprising and the West, then and now

Protesters young, old, male, female, Egyptian, Tunisian: all gathered together to protest outside the Egyptian embassy in London on Saturday 30th January 2011. They chanted the popular refrains of the ongoing Egyptian revolution:

"Asha'ab, youreed, esqaat elnezam"/ "The people want to get rid of the regime"
"Taghreer, horreya, adala egtemaiya"/ "Change, freedom, social justice"
"Aish, horreya, karama insaniya"/ "Bread, freedom, human dignity"

Though people were passionately angry, the atmosphere was jubilant. People handed around KitKats and bottles of water "as a celebration of our people's uprising".

Listening to the statements coming from the US, Europe and Israel in reaction to the "unrest", I have an almost dizzying sense of history repeating. I've been reading a little of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, an anti-imperialist writer who lived from 1840-1922. He was a supporter of the Urabi Revolt in Egypt. This uprising took place from 1879-1882. It was led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi against the authoritarian Khedive and European interference in the country.

Blunt supported the Egyptian nationalists, and even travelled to London to try to convince Gladstone that Urabi's revolt was a genuinely popular movement for liberal reform, and that Britain shouldn't interfere. Most British, however, preferred to view the Urabists as a threatening alliance of 'fanatics' - today's equivalent term would be 'extremists'.

Riots of uncertain cause broke out in Alexandria on June 11, 1882. Some say these were engineered by the Khedive to give a pretext for a crackdown - just as, it is alleged, the recent looting in Egypt was initiated by plainclothes policemen at Mubarak's behest. About 50 Europeans and 250 Egyptians died; shops were looted. The British invaded in order to stop the "anarchy". From that day, Egypt remained under British military occupation until 1954.

Of course, all the while the British protested that they were in Egypt against their will. They made various arguments for their presence there: their fear that Urabi's government would default on Egypt's huge debt to European financiers; their need to keep the Suez Canal secure for trade; even a 'philanthropic project' to civilise the Egyptians into rational beings capable of self-rule.

 The Earl of Cromer, the defacto ruler of Egypt from 1883-1907, wrote in his book Modern Egypt (1908):

• "It may be that at some future period the Egyptians may be rendered capable of governing themselves without the presence of a foreign army in their midst, and without foreign guidance in civil and military affairs; but that period is far distant."

... here's Richard Spencer in The Telegraph, 30 January 2011:

• "Do you trust 80 million Egyptians to determine their own foreign policy, in this most vital of regions? It takes a braver superpower than Britain to say yes." 

And here are Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's already infamous comment to Time, 28 January 2011:

• "I'm not sure the time is right for the Arab region to go through the democratic process"

For his 30-year rule, Mubarak has been propped up by $2 billion yearly installments from the US, most of which goes to the military (and is in turn spent on US-built weaponry, including on tear gas canisters, in case the people agitate for bread). This is the price at which the country has been bought. But the US is bankrupt, and reluctant imperialist Barack Obama is in charge (is it going too far to compare his suceeding George Bush to Gladstone's ousting, on an anti-imperialist platform, of Disraeli in 1880?). Could we dare to hope that the "far distant" period when the Egyptians might be allowed to rule themselves could at last be drawing near?