John Lubbock A collection of writings and other short musings from my life

Stuck in the quicksand?

I’ve been working on Human Rights in Bahrain for almost a year now. I hate to think what it would be like to be a Bahraini who has been advocating democratic reform for 10, 20, 30 or 40 years since independence from Britain. Nothing has changed since then and Bahraini politics is stuck in a rut, held within the political orbit of the Saudi state which itself refuses to reform or modernise. It doesn’t have to because its vast oil wealth allows it to freeride the system, and until we develop alternative resources, they will always be the ones holding the purse-strings, allowing them to resist the move towards political and social modernity which has overtaken much of the rest of the world in the last 100 years.

In turn, the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (as well as Israel) was largely a result of the imperial selfishness of Britain and France and their attempts in the first half of the 20th Century to control the oil wealth of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia came into being after the failure of the British to create a pan-Arab state which would be friendly to the British and reduce Arab criticism which Britain knew would follow from their support for a Jewish state in Palestine (intended to safeguard British access to the Suez Canal and an oil pipeline to the Mediterranean).

Britain was simultaneously supporting Hashemite rulers to come to power in Iraq, Transjordan and Syria, while arming Ibn Saud in the Gulf in return for recognition of their strategic Persian Gulf protectorates. Then, as now with the US, Britain wanted strong rulers who would recognise their military and economic pre-eminence in the region so that they could safely pursue their economic goals. James Barr’s recent book, A Line in the Sand, tells the epic story of imperial avarice which led to Middle-East we know today.

I highly recommend reading it to those interested in Middle-East and colonial history. When I met Barr at the book launch, I asked him if the UK had any concerns that creating states with mixed ethnic and religious groups would create problems in the future. He told me that Britain’s policy was quite short-term and pragmatic. It was easier for British diplomats and agents to talk to Sunni leaders, who were more open and businesslike, whereas the Shia communities were more isolated, often concentrated in holy cities like Najaf in Iraq, and less interested in doing business with colonial powers. Barr told me that Churchill had once requested a briefing on the problems with creating an Iraqi state ruled by a Sunni monarch, but had requested that it be kept to less than a few pages because he had little time for such non-immediate concerns.

So this is the inflexible state-system which the West has created and supported in the Middle-East. We feign interest in democratic and human rights concerns in these states, but such problems always come second to economic ones. ‘We would consider tabling a resolution on Bahrain’, I have been told by country delegations at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. ‘But of course we will have to make sure it’s OK with the State Department/Foreign Office first.’ States should be honest about their priorities. When Obama spouts highminded, idealistic rhetoric about the US supporting the cause of those around the world who cry out for democracy, remember that the cries of those who sell the oil always seem to be heard first.

Last week I saw Marwan Bishara, Al-Jazeera’s political editor, talk at the Frontline Club in London about his new book The Invisible Arab - The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolution. He knows what he is talking about and is optimistic about the prospect of democracy taking hold in the Middle-East. He used the famous African proverb ‘When elephants fight, the grass gets crushed’ to describe the situation in Syria and Bahrain. I asked him if he thought change was impossible in Bahrain because of the influence of powers like Saudi Arabia, the US and Iran. He told me that ‘The grass will not be crushed everywhere - it’s Springtime’. I want to believe his optimism.

Skip to 16.40 to watch David Frost talk to Marwan Bishara about his new book.

And so to the current situation in Bahrain...

Bahrain is awaiting the report on the National Commission to look at implementing the recommendations of the BICI report. The date for the publication of the Commission report was put back from the end of February to the March 20th. Bahrain also postponed the visit of the Special Rapporteur on Torture from March until July after finally caving to pressure to allow a UN SR to visit the country. Meanwhile, Amnesty International has publicly stated that it will refuse to visit Bahrain due to visa restrictions meaning they cannot stay in the country over weekends, when most protests and violence take place.

All these actions combine to give the impression that Bahrain is not serious about instituting the kind of structural reforms necessary to improve its human rights situation. Cherif Bassiouni and Sir Nigel Rodley, two of the most prominent members of the BICI investigating team, have issued follow-up statements highlighting their concern that the recommendations are not being followed. Bassiouni stated that,

"If you follow the system of accountability and justice, you follow the evidence wherever it goes and whoever is responsible has to be held accountable,"

Sir Nigel Rodley stated in December that the recommendation on the release of political prisoners was supposed to be unequivocal. However, Khalid Alkhalifa, the Foreign Minister said in a response to a letter by MP Denis MacShane that ‘there is no political prisoner in Bahrain’. Presumably this is an official point of view, that the opposition leaders and activists who have been in jail since March/April last year are criminals guilty of treason, and not in jail on political charges.

However, this line is somewhat discredited by the fact that they have not been allowed a fair and transparent judicial process, been tortured and currently have no dates for their appeals. Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, the former head of Bahrain Centre for Human Rights and Frontline Defenders’ Middle East coordinator is currently on his 37th day of hunger-strike where he is demanding his freedom with the threat that he would rather die as a martyr than continue being unjustly imprisoned. The release of political prisoners like Alkhawaja is a pre-requisite to dialogue

In the background of all this, the opposition’s pro-democracy protests continue to engulf the kingdom, with a huge rally on 9th March attracting around 100,000 people, nearly 20% of the country’s permanent population. This uncertainty is causing economic problems for Bahrain, with investment falling, and as Bahrain continues to suffer this political illness, its leaders appear indecisive and divided, with no real plan to resolve the crisis.

Just as they have done in the past, they have attempted to appear sincere on reform, but they make the mistake that it is not the UK, US and international media they must convince, but their own people who are far more cynical about their true intentions.

Causes of the Arab Spring

I have tried to summarise here all the reasons and theories which purport to explain the Arab Spring, a self-generating international protest movement for democratic reform across the Middle-East and North Africa (MENA) which takes its name from the Prague Spring of 1968, when popular pressure mounted to implement political reforms which were then crushed by an invading Soviet military force.

The Prague Spring was part of a wider social and cultural movement across the West in the late 60s which rejected the old power establishment and demanded basic freedoms and reforms across international boundaries. Why have there been some times when a crescendo of voices calling for reform have broken free of the control of established political leaders, often erupting in spontaneous protests which have then been violently quelled?

Is it to do with norms of political legitimacy, the growing power of a younger generation who have been politically ignored, or a general shift in the construction of group and individual identity caused by economic, social and technological advances which have propelled the diffusion of political reform ideals?

All of these ideas have something going for them, and I don’t wish to say that there is only one answer, but a collection of different reasons which have come together and are too complex to be fitted into any traditional political science model.

Background

Mohammed Bouazizi was a Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation on December 17th, 2010 was the catalyst for the Tunisian demonstrations which marked the beginning of the Arab Spring.

Tunisians and many others in the region see Bouazizi as a symbol of their oppression by the corrupt state systems which keep them economically repressed. The main square in Tunis has been renamed in his honour, and the Paris authorities have also named a square after him there.

It is slightly surprising that Bouazizi is considered so highly in the Islamic world, as under a strict religious interpretation, suicide is a sin in Islam, even when done as a political protest.

For those who support him, his action is not ‘haram’ because he has martyred himself as a final statement of his free will in a battle with a corrupt authority opposed by the majority of his people. It is often those in the Islamic world whose power is most deeply entrenched who take the most hard-line view of religious law, as this provides a useful excuse to monitor and interfere in the lives of their people.

Bouazizi's action is all the more shocking and poignant because it appears as a negation or inverse of the practice of suicide bombing, often backed by rich financial supporters and undertaken by indoctrinated dupes with little free will of their own.

Bouazizi had no encouragement or backing, but instead of committing violence against others, he destroyed himself as a final symbol of his free will in the face of political oppression, and in doing so, stirred his people to action.

However, this is a proximal cause of the Arab uprisings. A holistic analysis needs to look at much deeper causes and broad historical trends.

Oil and the resource curse

Michael L. Ross, writing in Foreign Affairs[1], analyses the resource curse of oil rich states and the impact of this on the uprisings. He notes that those regimes who fell victim to popular revolutions were mostly those with less oil, and therefore less resources with which to buy off or militarily control their people. He notes the link between taxation and accountability, and the fact that having oil wealth allows regimes to operate free from the accountability of those they would otherwise have to tax. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Algeria have all lowered taxes, given direct handouts or invested heavily in infrastructure to placate their dissatisfied people.

Ross says that it was the increased control of MENA states over their oil resources in the 70s and the wealth deriving from that which allowed these states to avoid the global shift towards democratisation over the last 30 years. But it is not deterministic. New media can help shed light on state corruption, which the US should help with by encouraging transparency for companies floating on the US stock exchange. Fundamentally though, as long as oil provides such huge rents, rent-seeking activity and corruption will always be a temptation, and it will take a more fundamental economic shift to overcome this problem.

Religious reawakening

“Most notably, Islam (or any other religion) has not played a major role in the revolutions, where religiously-driven terrorist organizations were notably absent from the actual events”[2], said one blogger in April, showing that religious movements in the Arab world are assumed to be radical and violent.

Certainly the language of Arabic revolution is suffused with religious references. In Iran, the chant ‘Allahu akbar!’ became a symbol of the opposition which could not be seen as a direct attack on the government. Gone was the emphasis on divisive, radical Islam which dominated the ideology of organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood and led towards violent attacks on domestic and foreign governments in an attempt to spark Islamic revolutions. This failed, and as the international system slowly changed and domestic governments became weaker, political solutions became more probable.

By the end of the year, the new authorities in Libya implemented some Islamic legal reforms to please their religious supporters. Mehdi Hasan wrote in the New Statesman that the West ignored the extent to which religious belief informed the opposition movements in countries all over the world. He emphasised the extent to which protest movements in the Islamic world were animated by Islamic political philosophy, especially Jawdat Said’s The Doctrine of the First Son of Adam: the Problem of Violence in the Islamic World (1966). Hasan notes how its doctrine of non-violence contradicts the perception in the West that Muslims cannot mobilise non-violently.[3]

“Facebook and Twitter turned out to be far more effective agents of change than any "martyrdom" attack on apostates, crusaders and Zionists”[4], said the Guardian’s Middle-East editor in May, again positing rather a simplistic contrast between these two opposing ways of generating political change.

Inspired by Western liberal democratic philosophy

In his book, Revolutions and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Palgrave, 1999), Professor Fred Halliday puts forward the idea that “revolutions express the pressures placed on traditional societies by international factors”[5]. We have to be careful here, lest we suggest that the Arab revolutions have not come from the political will of the people, but have been inspired by Western culture or Westerners.

The New York Times made such a claim[6] on behalf of the American theorist of non-violent revolution, Gene Sharp. However, this claim has been refuted by a number of prominent Egyptian activists like Hossam el-Hamalawy, who said,

"Not only was Mubarak’s foreign policy hated and despised by the Egyptian people, but parallels were always drawn between the situation of the Egyptian people and their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The latter have been the major source of inspiration, not Gene Sharp, whose name I first heard in my life only in February after we toppled Mubarak already and whom the clueless NYT moronically gives credit for our uprising."[7]

Adam Curtis has called this Western credit-taking ‘techno-orientalism’.[8]

Decline of Western Hegemony

It has been said that the uprisings across the Middle-East represent a byproduct of the end of US political hegemony, as all of the governments toppled were secular US allies.

In the New Statesman on September 5th, 2011, the political philosopher John Gray played down the effect of technology and direct Western influence. He sees the Arab Spring as a byproduct of the global economic crisis and the loss of control by the West over the international economic situation:

“Much has been written about the role of social networks in powering the uprisings, and new media were undoubtedly an important factor. But, to an extent that has not been appreciated, the Arab protest movements emerged as an unintended consequence of American weakness. The demand for change had a specific cause: the steep rise in food prices that was produced by the liquidity released by Ben Bernanke, Charirman of the US Federal Reserve, into global markets.”[9]

“The protests in Tunisia”, says Gray, “began as bread riots”, and Egypt “is one of the world’s biggest importers of wheat”. Of course, this cannot be the whole story, as there are many other places suffering from food scarcity where such revolutions have not happened.

Noam Chomsky has argued[10] that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan amount to an expression of US neo-colonialism, seeking to control energy resources which give it a deciding and controlling stake in the world economy. In this view, the failure of the US to control Iraq and Afghanistan and to punish those like Iran who refuse to play by the rules of ‘Pax-Americana’ point to a situation of Imperial overstretch, where the rise of China as a rival power allows independent states like India to turn away from traditional alliances with the West towards new economic pacts with China and Russia. The fall of secular authoritarian regimes like Tunisia and Egypt show the bankruptcy of political systems ruled by longtime US allies.

Globalisation of values and demographic change.

Globalization has increased the demand for what Isiah Berlin called ‘Negative Liberties’, which seems to be a basic byproduct of economic development. We have been living through a time in which liberal democracy has been seen as a product and a goal only of Western or Northern states. Anti-reformists in the Middle-East still insist that such a system is not appropriate for their states, or say that it will take a long time to build such a system.

Perhaps we have reached a point where democratic reform appears as the only possible solution in stagnant military dictatorships which have been unresponsive to the economic and political demands of their populations. One aspect of this is the legacy of the massive oil revenues of nationalised Arab oil companies in the 70s, and the formation of OPEC. This gave Arab elites more money than they knew what to do with, and some of it had to be given to the military and administrative classes to buy their consent. An underlying attitude of Arab elites, but one that is not often openly expressed, is the bafflement at why anyone who pays no taxes would want to complain about their government. This inversion of the idea of ‘no taxation without representation’ is something that has escaped most Western observers. It may be that the middle-class in the MENA region has become large enough to want to pay taxes in exchange for more control over the policies of their governments.

As the article for the Democratist noted, “2011 may... therefore eventually come to mark the decisive point at which democractic reformism ceased to be seen as essentially a restrictedly ”Western” phenomenon, and became recognized as a potentially universal one.”[11]

This change in values is secondary to demographic change, however. French political philosopher Emmanuel Todd described three factors driving political changes:

“... the rapid increase in literacy, particularly among women, a falling birthrate and a significant decline in the widespread custom of endogamy, or marriage between first cousins. This shows that the Arab societies were on a path toward cultural and mental modernization, in the course of which the individual becomes much more important as an autonomous entity.”[12]

The consequence of these changes is “the transformation of the political system, a spreading wave of democratization and the conversion of subjects into citizens. Although this follows a global trend, it can take some time.”

Arab states only managed to avoid the democratic reforms of the 1990s by buying off their populations, a trick which was attempted throughout 2011 in states with more oil wealth, such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. One of the reasons why Tunisia and Egypt fell so easily was arguably their lack of oil wealth to buy off dissent.

This blogger does a good job of explaining the interplay between the economic and social factors at the heart of the protests:

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I would be interested to hear from anyone who has any other ideas which I have not mentioned as to the origin of the straw which broke the camel’s back in the MENA region. I think it would be unfair to overemphasise any of these possible causes, as all of them played a role in some way in how events progressed. Who knows where all of this will lead; functioning democratic systems take time to become rooted in societies. There are a number of destabilising factors which could impede reform, such as the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which paralyses any possible progress in Bahrain.

I would contend that the most basic causes are demographic and economic, because we are not just looking at protest movements in the MENA region, but in the West as well. 2011 was a year when a global malaise at the pace of reform and disappointment at rising income inequality exploded into angry dissent.

One thing is certain: autocratic systems ruled by minority factions are unsustainable. Only societies where all sections have some say in governance can assure the consent of those they govern. The question is only how many more people have to die before reforms are granted.

I think it's important to remember how similar the goals are between reform movements everywhere. The reasons for the Arab Spring may be unique in some ways, but if we are fascinated by them in the West, it's because we feel solidarity with their frustration and want to know how we can bring some of that change to our part of the world.

I hope that the events of this year will show the West how we have been wrong and patrinising in our conception of the Islamic world, and perhaps learn to feel more cultural affinity with Muslims in our own countries. Emmanuel Todd put it perfectly when he said that "The notion of unchanging Islam and the Muslim essence are purely intellectual constructs of the West. The tracks along which the world's various cultures and religions move are converging toward an encounter rather than the battle that Samuel Huntington believed would take shape."

Brick Lane

Prologue

Brick Lane has a rich historical tradition of immigration, criminality and culture. It is a window through which you can look at the changing nature of London, and glimpse traces of the past which have not yet been obliterated by the march of time.

Brick Lane is a natural monument, built over time by the random accumulation of sediment, layer after layer of migrants, cultures, languages, great swathes of history and individual lives.

From Daniel Defoe, ‘A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’, 1724-7:

The juxtaposition of the poverty, homelessness, exploitive work conditions, prostitution, and infant mortality of Whitechapel and other East End locales with some of the greatest personal wealth the world has ever seen made it a focal point for leftist reformers and revolutionaries of all kinds, from George Bernard Shaw, whose Fabian Society met regularly in Whitechapel, to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who boarded and led rallies in Whitechapel during his exile from Russia. The area is still home to Freedom Press, the anarchist publishing house founded by Charlotte Wilson. In places you can still see the remnants of the textile trade which has been carried on in the area from the 17th century. Riots among the Spitalfields weavers were common. Any decline of prices, or opposition in trade, would lead to violence, such as the 1769 Spitalfields Riot.

The proximity of the City of London, with its financial companies and skyscrapers, is encroaching into Whitechapel, and the culture of Brick Lane is now a mélange of Bengali traditions and trendy pop-up galleries and shops patronised by art school kids.
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C17th – Huguenot (French Calvinists) silk-weavers arrived to escape Catholic persecution in France.

Early C19th – Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe start to arrive in greater numbers as a result of poverty and rising anti-Semitism.

1840s – Irish labourers arrived due to the Potato Famine.

Late C19th – More waves of Jewish immigration gave the area a predominantly Jewish character.

1960s – After the war, the area became more diverse, with Bangladeshis from the Sylhet region beginning to arrive.

1990s – After the renovation of the Truman Brewery buildings, artists arrived to take advantage of the cheap rent.

2000s – Due to this, the area became popular as a centre of arts and culture, and was taken over by trendy kids referred to as ‘haircuts’ by locals. The gentrification of the area is now leading to rising rents that are again changing the demographics of Spitalfields.
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Tour

 

Waypoint 1

Latitude and
Longitude
51.516064, -0.069832
Title Whitechapel High Street, Gallery and Library
Narrative

Old Whitechapel Library on Whitechapel High Street was founded by philanthropist and Liberal MP John Passmore Edwards in 1892. It was known as the University of the Ghetto by local Jewish immigrants. The library housed books in Yiddish and Hebrew, and Bengali and Arabic after the war. The library relocated in 2005 and the building was bought by the Whitechapel Art Gallery next door. Going into the Gallery entrance, you can explore the buildings that used to form the Library and still see some original features, such as the plaque commemorating the founding of the library.

Image 1.1

Image Title Whitechapel High Street with Mary Matfelon in the distance, 1890

Image 1.2

Image Title Whitechapel High Street, Gallery and Library, 1905

Waypoint 2

Latitude and
Longitude
51.516167, -0.069381
Title Altab Ali Park
Narrative

Altab Ali Park is built on the site of the original ‘white chapel’, St Mary’s Matfelon (built in 1250), which was demolished in 1952 after suffering bomb damage in the Blitz. You can still see the outline of  the old church mapped out by the remaining foundations springing up through the grass the natural furniture of the discerning wino. The park is named after a young Bengali tailor stabbed to death in a racist attack in 1978. This incident marked a change in race relations in the area, as locals organised  to push out the National Front and skinheads from occupying the top of Brick Lane. The park is a meeting place for the Bangladeshi community and was a starting point for many anti-war marches in the past decade. The park has just undergone renovation and now seems ideal outdoor community living during the summer months.

In the second picture below by John Galt, you can see the door of St Mary Matfelon with signs in Hebrew for the local Jewish population. Services and readings were given to Jews from the open-air pulpit on Saturday afternoons. Galt, a missionary with the London City Mission, produced this photo around 1905.

Image 2.1

Image Title Whitechapel High Street 1937, St Marys Church

Image 2.2

Image Title Gate of St Mary Matfelon

Waypoint 3

Latitude and
Longitude
51.516628, -0.070057
Title Osborn St
Narrative

This street once went under the name of 'Dirty Lane', being paved and widened c.1778. A. Elfe’s Ltd monumental stonemasons (est. 1945) is the only Jewish business left on the street. No. 32 was also the site of the Warsaw Restaurant in the 1930s, a kosher eatery frequented by anarchists and gangsters. At the end of the street before it becomes Brick Lane is the Sonali Bank, the first Bangladeshi bank in the UK.

Image 3.1

Image Title The corner of Osborn Street, 1890

Image 3.2

Image Title Osborn Street towards Whitechapel C1900

Waypoint 4

Latitude and
Longitude
51.51730, -0.07056
Title Old Montague St
Narrative

Brick Lane starts at the junction of this street. You’ll have to use your imagination here, because all of this area’s Jewish past has been washed away by the waves of time. The street was a centre of Jewish East End culture, with Bloom’s Kosher Restaurant, the Great Garden St Synagogue and Federation of Synagogue Offices which was the last to close in 1991. Garment workers congregated to find work and political meetings took place there. In a small turning called Black Lion Yard, now demolished, was a traditional place for Jewish couples to shop for wedding rings. Outside Bloom’s on the corner of the street, different political speakers would argue in Yiddish like an East End Speakers’ Corner. With the emigration after WW2 of the Jewish population to the suburbs, streets like Old Montague Street went into decline, with many derelict buildings attracting prostitutes and drug addicts. Many of the buildings and side-streets from Old Montague street were demolished in the 70s and 80s, with those on the end like The Archers pub the oldest to survive.

Image 4.1

Image Title Chevrah Shass Synagogue, Old Montague Street, 1950

Image 4.2

Image Title Old Montague Street, 1961

Waypoint 5

Latitude and
Longitude
51.51775, -0.07103
Title Flower and Dean Walk
Narrative

Just after the archway marking the entrance to ‘Banglatown’, the Shiraz Balti restaurant in the old Frying Pan Pub building sits at the entrance to Flower and Dean Walk, Through this narrow entrance is the site of Bangladeshi purpose built council estates, formerly the Rothschild tenements (4% Industrial Dwellings Company) built by the Rothschild banking family for Jewish immigrants in the late 19th century. Before that it was the site of the notorious Thrawl St slums. The Frying Pan was where Mary Ann Nichols, the first ‘canonical’ victim of Jack the Ripper, was last seen before she was found dead. Look up at the terracotta gable on the top of the building and you can see a square with crossed frying pans and the name ‘Ye Frying Pan’.

Image 5.1

Image Title Thrawl Street tenements before they were torn down, built 1885 (photo 1973)

Waypoint 6

Latitude and
Longitude
51.518367, -0.071286
Title Café Naz
Narrative

Café Naz, a restaurant on the site of the former Asian cinema, Cinema Naz, where anti-fascist protestors met before demonstrations in the 70s and 80s. In the 30s and 40s it was the Mayfair cinema, catering for the mostly Jewish population. The Bangladeshi community was targeted by the neo-Nazi nail-bomber David Copeland in 1999, with a bomb that was planted on Hanbury Street. A passer-by took the suspicious bag to the police station, which was closed, and then put it in the boot of his car, where it exploded outside Café Naz, destroying the front of the shop and injuring 13 people.

Image 6.1

 Image Title Naz Cinema, 1970s.

Waypoint 7

Latitude and
Longitude
51.518522, -0.071476
Title Fashion Street
Narrative

The name of this road is a corruption of 17th Century ‘Fossan Street’, named for the brothers who owned the estate the road stood on.. Opposite the end of Fashion St is the oldest and last textiles shop on Brick Lane, Epra Fabrics (est. 1950). Fashion St itself was populated by tailors’ workshops from the 1890s until the early 21st century. The street was dubbed ‘Rotten Row’ by Israel Zangwill, in his book Children of the Ghetto, set in the area in the 1890s. The ‘Moorish Market’, built in 1905 by Abraham and Woolf Davis, closed as a market soon after its construction and was renovated into offices in 2003. The picture below shows the space inside or behind the market where there was a workshop for Scammell Lorries, one of the first British commercial transport companies. The inner facade of the Moorish market is on the right and the picture was taken some time before the Scammell workshop moved in 1920.

Image 7.1

Image Title Scammell workshop, 1910s

Waypoint 8

Latitude and
Longitude
51.51879, -0.07148
Title Heneage Street
Narrative

A small cobbled street just past Fashion St and on the other side of the road, Heneage Street is home to the Pride of Spitalfields pub, traditionally frequented by the area’s white population. It was the victim of a petrol-bombing in 2003 alledgedly by a local Asian gang. The Eretz Chaim Synaguge formerly occupied the building opposite the pub.

Image 8.1

Image Title Heneage Street, 1980s

Waypoint 9

Latitude and
Longitude
51.518868, -0.071640
Title Christ Church School
Narrative

The school was built in 1874 in a Gothic revival style over the east side of Christ Church’s graveyard. The school is still owned and run by the Church, though, over time, the pupils have gone from being mostly Jewish to mostly Bengali Muslim. A Star of David can still be seen on the top of a drainpipe on the front of the building, probably left by Jewish builders.

Image 9.1

Image Title Christchurch School, late 70s

Waypoint 10

Latitude and
Longitude
51.519268, -0.071803
Title Fournier Street
Narrative

On the corner of the next street, you will see the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque), built for the French Hueguenots as La Neuve Eglise in 1743. In its time, it has also been a Methodist chapel and the Spitalfields Machzike Hadath (Great Synagogue). On the side of the building on Fournier Street there is a very apt sundial which carries the inscription ‘Umbra Summus’ (We Are Shadows) a quote taken from Horace's odes.

The Huguenots also gave the street its name; in old French, a Fournier was a baker, from the word ‘four’ (oven), later replaced in common usage by ‘boulanger’.

Fournier Street has many 18th century Georgian townhoses built for the Huguenot silk-weavers and textile traders (mercers). Looking at the front doors or through the windows, you can see some of the fine wooden panelling and elaborate joinery constructed by 18th century craftsmen. It is ironic that these houses are now so expensive because of their original features which the residents were too poor to change, and artists like Tracy Emin and Gilbert & George now own properties on the street.

On the other side of Brick Lane from the Entrance to Fournier Street is a Bengali supermarket called BanglaCity. This is number 86, where the Russian Vapour Baths used to stand in the early 20th Century.

Walk down to the Western end of the street to see the beautiful English Baroque face of Christ Church Spitalfields by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, who was an assistant of Christopher Wren, built between 1714 and 1729. Take Wilkes Street, which comes off Fournier Street to see some more of the weavers' houses and to go towards the next waypoint of Princelet Street.

Image 10.1

Image Title Fournier Street in 1976

Image 10.2

Image Title The Russian Vapour baths opposite Fournier Street in 1904

Waypoint 11

Latitude and
Longitude
51.51978, -0.07187
Title Princelet Street
Narrative

Turn onto Princlet Street from Wilkes Street and look at the roof lines of the historic buildings where attic rooms with wide windows were designed to flood the interiors with light. It was here the Huguenots set up their weaving looms. Close to the corner with Wilkes Street (on the right hand pavement with your back to Wilkes St) is a small coal-hole with a viola design, which probably commemorates the life of world-famous viola player Lionel Tertis who lived at no.8. The Prince’s Street Club Yiddish Theatre was located at no.3. Built to showcase the talents of Jacob Adler who was to become famous for performing at the Yiddish Theatre in New York, the theatre went out of business when 17 people were crushed to death after a man shouted ‘fire’ during a performance.

Yiddish was the language of 19th century Jewish immigrants.  Israel Zangwill referred to the Yiddish theatre in a scene where one character asks another where to see the best theatre in England. The answer is:
‘……at the Jargon Theatre, the great theatre in Prince’s Street, the only real theatre in London.  The English stage – Drury Lane – pooh!  It is not in harmony with the people: it does not express them’.  'Jargon' is Zangwill's word for ‘Yiddish’.

The Princelet Street Old Synagogue at no.19 closed its doors in the mid 1960s and is now the Museum of Immigration and Diversity. Unfortunately the building needs structural repair and is only open to visitors a few days a year.

Image 11.1

Image Title Inside Princelet Street Old Synagogue

Waypoint 12

Latitude and
Longitude
51.52030, -0.07202
Title Hanbury Street
Narrative

Continue up Brick Lane and turn left onto Hanbury St. At no. 22 there is a Huguenot church built in 1719, where Charles Dickens gave readings. It was converted to Christ Church’s Parish Hall in 1887 and still used for community projects. On the same side of Brick Lane, Hanbury St goes down to Commercial St, with notable shops like the Duke of Uke ukelele and string instrument shop and the Retro shop next to the entrance to Dray Walk, which has no streetname sign, but is a big open car park area with an entrance onto the Sunday Upmarket which is full of market stalls on Sundays.

Image 12.1

Image Title Hanbury Street, 1918

Waypoint 13

Latitude and
Longitude
51.52044, -0.07325
Title Dray Walk
Narrative

Formerly Black Eagle Street, Dray Walk is also now known as ‘The Strip’, as it has become a centre of East London art student cool, with the Big Chill Bar, Sunday Up-Market, Rough Trade and the outdoor burger cafe. This was the loading bay and bottling site for the old brewery, with the working class labourers from the brewery drunkenly spilling out onto Brick Lane after work, as workers were allowed a certain amount of alcohol while on the job.

There are now galleries and designer shops along Dray Walk, and it is a bustling pedestrian area where people gather to eat and drink. Walk down ‘The Strip’ and back onto Brick Lane.

Image 13.1

Image Title Dray Men at the brewery

Waypoint 14

Latitude and
Longitude
51.52111, -0.07185
Title Old Truman Brewery
Narrative

From Dray Walk the buildings on both sides of Brick Lane until the next intersection were part of the Black Eagle Brewery complex, later the Truman Brewery, which operated from the mid 17th Century and provided beer to the Parliamentarian army during the English Civil War. A black eagle sign can still be seen hanging from one of the buildings. Later, the production techniques of the brewery were influenced by the Huguenots, who introduced hop fermentation. Walking up Brick Lane, you can see a blue plaque to Thomas Buxton, a Victorian philanthropist who fought to abolish the slave trade and improve conditions for East-End weavers. Buxton became the owner of Truman’s, and you can see an image of him on the Five Pound note; he is the man wearing glasses opposite Elizabeth Fry. Truman’s was renowned for good working conditions and the affluence of their workforce, which Dickens remarked upon in a passage from David Copperfield.

The former Brewery buildings, warehouses and yards were redeveloped by The Zeloof Partnership in the early 1990s after Truman’s went out of business, and now house over 250 businesses, ranging from cultural venues to art galleries, restaurants, and retail shops. It was this redevelopment which spurred the gentrification of the area in the 1990s, as artists moved in and the area became a centre of East End nightlife.

Image 14.1

Image Title Old Truman Boilerhouse

Image 14.2

Image Title Black Eagle sign and Old Truman Buildings

Waypoint 15

Latitude and
Longitude
51.52303, -0.07152
Title Goods Yard and Cheshire Street
Narrative

Further up the street is the site of the busiest part of the Sunday Market on Brick Lane. Past Pedley Street is the site of Shoreditch Station, closed in 2006 to build the East London Line extension. Opposite this is the former entrance to the goods yard which was once a network of arches and tunnels housing an underground town of kitchens, police station, storerooms and workshop. 859 ft of the Grade II listed Braithwaite Viaduct remain. The viaduct used to carry trains into the good yard and is one of the oldest brick rail viaducts in the world. It is possible to see the original brick work of this viaduct from Grimsby Street, a tributary of Cheshire Street.

Cheshire Street bric-a-brac market was always a source of basic items like clothes for local people, but since becoming popular with artists, the street can be found selling more fashionable items like fixed-gear bikes. Turning right onto Cheshire Street you will see many new vintage clothes shops, an industry which has exploded to repackage the old clothes trade for hipsters who are willing to pay more for vintage items. The best example of this is ‘Beyond Retro’, a huge vintage store a couple of hundred yards down Cheshire Street going East from Brick Lane.

The old Carpenters Arms pub, now re-opened, is located on Cheshire Street almost opposite Beyond Retro. The notorious Kray twins bought the pub for their mother, who used to hold court in it at weekends. According to the last proprietors of the pub, the Krays installed a bespoke bar surface during the time they owned the pub - the surface employed was allegedly a coffin lid. Reggie Kray's funeral procession went along Cheshire Street in 2000.

One of the oldest shops on this street is Blackman’s, which sells very cheap and fashionable shoes and where you can hear some of the most wonderfully Dickensian cockney still spoken in the East End. It is one of the few places which retains any authentic sense that it has been there for a long time. Further down is the trendy and rather more expensive vintage superstore, Beyond Retro.

Image 15.1

Image Title Cheshire Street after market, 1980

Waypoint 16

Latitude and
Longitude
51.52447, -0.07165
Title Bagels
Narrative

The two bagel bakeries at the top of the street are the last places in the area where you can eat Jewish food, although they are not kosher. In the 1930s, this end of Brick Lane was the territory of Blackshirt fascists. Later in the 70s, National Front skinheads would congregate here to sell fascist newspapers and hurl racist abuse at passing Asians. Reverend Ken Leech organised groups of local anti-fascists to occupy the end of the street, a direct action protest that eventually forced the fascist groups out of the area.

Walk up to the top of Brick lane and look across the street at 123 Bethnal Green Road, with its number 123 printed on its face. This building used to be Moderne Buckles Ltd, sellers of buckles to the clothing industry and specialists in air rifles and replicas. Unfortunately the buckle business was going downhill, so the owner’s son-in-law decided to use it as a front for converting replica guns to working models, which he then sold to the criminal fraternity. The building was refurbished recently and is now home to a fashion shop selling retailored vintage clothes, continuing the area’s traditional textiles trade in another new form.

Image 16.1

Image Title Looking up Brick Lane to Bethnal Green Rd, early 20th century.

Waypoint 17

Latitude and
Longitude
51.52485, -0.07172
Title Bethnal Green Road
Narrative

There are lots of bars around this area where you can finish the tour with a drink. Go left at the end of Brick Lane onto Bethnal Green Road and you will find Mason & Taylor with a good selection of beers and a British tapas style menu, and further down, Richmix, a cultural centre with a big bar area is often a lively place to catch music or spoken-word performance.

Image 17.1

Image Title 123 Bethnal Green Rd from the top of Brick Lane, early 20th century.

At the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

Ieng Thirith, former minister for social affairs with the Khmer Rouge, sits unmoved in the dock as judges and expert witnesses discuss her dementia. She is tiny, grey, bespectacled, like an old schoolteacher (she went to Paris Sorbonne and became an English Literature professor), or your granny. It's very difficult that such a placid and motherly figure could take part in genocide and condemn people to die in purges.

Ieng Thirith's biography.

The witnesses discuss her good levels of concentration, and I wonder if she is cognisant enough to feel much about this mental dissection.

"Mrs Ieng Thirith's long term memory is declining; during the first interview she could not remember the name of her school", she could also not remember the name of the King, or how many children she had.

The children around me are very young, bussed in from provincial schools to witness the history they are too young to remember. Some of them display a remarkable interest and attention in the dull and technical proceedings. I wonder how they feel about their country's history being dredged up like this. Where were their parents and what were they doing while Ieng Thirith was signing verbal execution orders.

The children are dressed in identical white shirts and trousers or skirts. One in front of me turns around and stares at me writing these words, more interested in the inscription of these Latin letters than the tedious medical reports.

In the end, how hard is it to know what goes on in someone's mind? How do they reach such murderous conclusions, and how do we know if they are really as mentally disabled as they claim? Thirith seems to have the ability to understand the nature of the charges against her. She understood the phrase 'crimes against humanity', and noted that the 'whole population of a country' disappeared. She was reluctant to discuss the crimes committed, understandably. All those involved are, and it has taken many a very long time to admit the truth, as I saw when I recently watched the brilliant documentary, Enemies of the People.

I wonder to myself to what extent Thirith's guilt and refusal to deal with what has happened has contributed to the decline of her mental health. The mentality which creates the basis for genocide is such a sick one in the first place that ideological and mental insanity seem to have an affinity which might easily progress from one to the other. The mental anguish of the killers themselves is obvious, but perhaps the higher cadres of murderous regimes are so disconnected from the final outcomes of the policies they advocate that it is even harder for them to understand the full implications of their actions.

The Khmer Rouge idea of Angkar is a profoundly interesting one. This word stood as an abstract symbol for the Party, its leadership, the idea of the state personified, and a Big Brother style ominous presence watching over the Khmer people all at once. The Khmer people all had to work for Angkar, give their loyalty to Angkar, had a duty to inform on their neighbours and friends in the name of Angkar, and even kill for the greater benefit of Angkar. In this way, I think the leadership diminished their share of responsibility for their crimes, and made them impersonal, in service of some greater ideological national deity.

Thirith seems to see the consequences of being found mad - she said to her medical examiners that the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) cannot touch her if she is found to be mad. So while it seems to be medically true that she is suffering from dementia, there is some cause to believe that she understands the positive consequences of this being the case. Perhaps her condition is to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It seems unlikely to me that she will be able to understand the nature of her trial enough to warrant its continuation. It would disrupt proceedings in case involving three other defendants (one of whom is her husband, who she apparently now thinks is her brother). Time is running out to carry out justice for their crimes, and after all, what justice is it to imprison a senile woman who does not comprehend that she is being punished?

Cool Places to Work

Your internet is down, you have a deadline and don’t want to leave town, you need to get your business off the ground without breaking the bank to rent an office, you just want to piss about online before meeting someone for a drink, you’re physically addicted to the internet but 3G roaming is killing you, you’re unemployed and you want to jobsearch away from home to get back into work mode. Whatever your reason for wanting to go online out and about in London, I’ve painstakingly trawled through the best places to do just that for a variety of work reasons.

Now if only I could figure out how to monetise all this writing I do on the side. Anyone wanna be my agent? I can’t afford to pay you, but I give great compliments. Hey, you’re looking great today, new hair? Dress? Shoes? Well whatever it is, it’s so subtle, but I love it. That style really works for you. Do you have a fashion blog? No? Why not?!?

7 Dials Club Community Centre (7 Dials/Covent Garden)

I Due Amici (Kennington)

Access: Free
Address: 310-312 Kennington Road, SE11 4QD
Web: www.amici-london.com

The London Hackspace (Hoxton)

Access: Free, but regular members should pay a minimum of £5/month (suggested £20)
Address: Unit 24, Cremer Business Centre, London E2 8HD
Web: london.hackspace.org.uk

Fleet River Bakery (Holborn)

Access: Free
Address: 71 Lincoln's Inn Fields, City of London
Web: www.fleetriverbakery.com/

The coffee’s good, but online reviews agree that you shouldn’t go here for the food. There is often a queue during the middle of the day, but most of the city workers who go there don’t stay to enjoy the two big rooms of tables conveniently located round the corner from Holborn station.

The Hat and Tun (Farringdon)

Access: Free
Address: 3 Hatton Wall, City of London EC1N 8HX
Web: www.thehatandtun.com/index.php

The Social (Near Oxford Circus)

Access: Free
Address: 5 Little Portland St, London W1W 7JD
Web:: www.thesocial.com

The Café at Foyles (Soho)

Access: Free
Address: 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London
Web: foyles.co.uk

Royal Festival Hall (South Bank)

Access: Free
Address: Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX
Web: www.southbankcentre.co.uk/home

Ritzy Café (Brixton)

Access: Free
Address: Brixton Oval, Coldharbour Lane, London SW2 1JG
Web: www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema/Ritzy_Picturehouse/

The Ritzy turns 100 this year and it’s really better than it ever has been. I went to see my first film (The Jungle Book) here around 1989, and remember vividly crying through The Land Before Time a short while later. Being from the area I'm quite proud of how central Brixton has changed in the last 20 years and The Ritzy is a perfect symbol of South London - refusing to be just another multiplex cinema, the restaurant, bar, cafe and terrace are lovely open spaces catering for different kinds of art events.

The Ritzy was always a classy refuge on one corner of the Brixton Road/Coldharbour Lane intersection, and the refurbishment of Windrush Square has enlarged the once shabby area with its traditionally dodgy looking types and rastas with huge bundles of dreads. If you’ve grown to miss the relaxed bustle of mediterranean plazas, sitting outside the Ritzy is the closest you can probably get to that kind of streetlife.

The Hub (King’s Cross)

Access: Basic - £15-20/m, Unlimited - £340/m
Address: Hub Kings Cross, 34b York Way, London N1 9AB
Web: kingscross.the-hub.net/public/

The Hub started in 2009 in Islington and has been growing rapidly with this new space in King’s Cross and another in Westminster, and over 10 other affiliated independent places around Europe. The Hub Amsterdam is a cooperatively owned group, while those in London are limited companies, but they are all dedicated to growing new social enterprises, especially of the green and sustainable kind. Through gathering like-minded people in one fully equipped, open and trendy modern space, they hope to cross-fertilise these ideas. The beautiful space by King’s Cross has everything a business could need

Central (Bloomsbury)

Access: Limited free access to wifi, or £35/m - 10 hours, £75/m - 1 day, £150/m - 2 days.
Address: 11-13 Bayley Street, London WC1B 3HD
Web: centralworking.com

Started May 2011, Central is a collaborative workspace just off Tottenham Court Road. It follows the new trend of cooperative working started by The Hub, and their plan to open more locations around the UK indicates their confidence in the demand for this new way of working. There is also a cafe bar for non-members with free wifi.

Central is focused on business growth, with a target of helping 1000 businesses grow in 5 years and connecting the talents of their members. They introduce new members to the other people working there, and there is a board for members profiles, events and workshops. They have held talks by the former EU MD of LinkedIN, the New Media Tech Entrepreneurship forum, and run different themes each week to help different kinds of businesses, supporting Investment, internet, music and fashion entrepreneurs. The space is really beautiful and feels very homely, especially some of the little quiet rooms.

The Book Club (Shoreditch)

Access: Free
Address: 100-106 Leonard St, London EC2A 4RH
Web: www.wearetbc.com

Lots of events, cool furniture, geeky name. Sometimes there is an ocean of fixie bikes outside when the hipsters come out at night, but during the day it has a friendly and relaxed atmosphere, aided by the table tennis side-room and pool table in the basement, which is amazing.

Richmix (Shoreditch)

Access: Free
Address: 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA
Web: www.richmix.org.uk

Richmix is a cultural centre with a cinema and lots of music and spoken word events. It’s on Bethnal Green Road at the top of Brick Lane, so it’s pretty usefully located for those in the East. It’s not the best work atmosphere during the day, as there are often people setting up PAs for music later on, but it does have a bar, cafe and wifi, so it can be a useful respite from the melee of Brick Lane.

In Istanbul

I’ve not been on holiday for a long time. Living in other countries doesn’t count. It’s not a holiday when you have to find a job and a flat. So when my friend Jessie asked me to go with her to Istanbul for 9 days because she was visiting her boyfriend there, I immediately said yes.

My family history is inseparable with the human rights movement of the 20^th century, and I wanted to understand how Turkish people saw their place in the modern world, and how they felt about the continued discussion of the Armenian Genocide and the Kurdish independence movement. It was because of his interest in these two issues that my father was banned from Turkey for 10 years. Even using the word genocide here will anger some people, but let’s face it, it’s just easier than saying ‘the events of 1915-23 during which many Armenians as well as other ethnic groups died in nationalist clashes within the Ottoman Empire’.

I’m not sure that it really matters what you call a massacre of a million people, because you could argue forever whether a particular situation can be proved to demonstrate “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group”, which is required by the 1948 convention on genocide. I think Turks largely agree that declaring or denying a genocide is a political act, and that the important thing is to talk about it, without preconditions. That being said, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, invented the term genocide in 1943 to describe what had happened to the Armenians.

I wanted to know how people felt about Orhan Pamuk, who has been prosecuted for ‘insulting Turkishness’ for talking about the killing of Armenians, and about the journalist Hrant Dink, who was murdered by a young nationalist for publishing a paper in Armenian and Turkish to promote dialogues about political issues. By listening and understanding the attitudes of educated young people, I hope my own viewpoint has become deeper and more complex, if not any more simple.

Turkish people are proud of their secular nation which they see as giving protection to diverse ways of life, from liberal secularism to traditional conservative Islam.

But Turks are acutely aware of criticism from the West, and for that reason, you can’t be perceived as an ignorant outsider with a political axe to grind. ‘Naive,’ was how William Hale, professor of Turkish politics at SOAS, described my father’s support for Armenian and Kurdish human rights. If you want to be taken seriously, he told me when I spoke to him last week, you have to come to Turkey, learn Turkish and become an expert in its history. I told him that that wasn’t what human rights defenders do. They advocate to governments and try to create dialogue about lots of different issues. Becoming an expert is what a professor does. But I understood his point. If you are perceived as a naive outsider, you will never have the ear of the ordinary person, and Turkish politicians will simply ignore you or accuse you of propagandism, as they did when my father helped to publish the Blue Book, a British wartime account of the massacres of Armenians.

Yet I also found some people confused by conflicting reports regarding the Orhan Pamuk case and the openness of historical archives to historians. Most people don’t seem to like Orhan Pamuk. They think he was only awarded the Nobel Prize because he talked about the Armenian Genocide. Some people I talked to believed that he directly accused the government of the killings. According to Wikipedia, what he said was “"Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." That seems quite reasonable to me. I was also told that the historical archives had been opened to historians, but that Armenian scholars had ignored this. I know this is not strictly true, because my father's friend Ara Sarafian had had many problems accessing Turkish archives.

However, it is entirely within the rights of critics to suggest that Pamuk’s political stance in some way helped him to win the Nobel Prize. Swedish politicians demonstrated a desire to recognise the massacres as a genocide when they voted unsuccessfully in 1998, and later successfully in 2010 to recognise it. The votes were narrow, and the government opposed them, but this shows the higher level of feeling about this issue in Sweden as a whole. So Turks naturally regard this as a kind of Western meddling in their internal politics.

At least Pamuk's stance has stimulated debate about the issue within Turkey. I heard a tour guide in the Grand Bazaar explaining in delicate terms to a Japanese tourist about the issue, saying that ‘unfortunately a lot of unpleasant things happened’. I’m not sure if a tour guide 10 or 20 years ago would have even wanted to broach the subject. William Hale told me that the discussion was more a product of the rapprochement and ‘football diplomacy’ between Turkey and Armenia, but I’m not so sure. Certainly Armenia needs Turkey as an economic partner, but people don’t talk about that – they talk about Pamuk and Hrant Dink.

People have very mixed feelings about Pamuk, but they are almost unilateral in their support and sympathy for the murdered journalist Hrant Dink. His murder showed that these old problems continue to have terrible consequences in the present. He was murdered after appearing in the documentary Screamers, made by the Armenian-American band System of a Down. The documentary is incredibly emotive and polemic, and is perhaps not the best starting point for a profitable discussion. See it here:

Screamers Documentary [2006]

Do you believe it was a genocide? Asked one politics student (and nephew of a Turkish ambassador) who I met. I can see it from both angles, I replied diplomatically. I naturally side with the victims of a crime, and to me, regardless of the intentions of the Ottoman state in wanting to remove the political threat which they felt Armenians posed, it seems clear that this paranoia regarding Armenians extended to the ordinary soldier who deliberately murdered or marched thousands of innocent women and children to death as a result. To me, you do not have to prove a conspiracy from the top. Murder is deliberate.

It is difficult to prove that the Rwandan Genocide was motivated by the desire to kill a particular ethnic group, as Hutus and Tutsis looked very similar, and recent scholarship (http://www.ditext.com/diamond/10.html) suggests that it was more an excuse to steal land from big landowners in a country with an acute population density problem.

And what about the Cambodian Genocide, which was not ethnic, but political? And what about the murder of Aboriginal Australians, or Native Americans? These are complicated questions, but ones that must be discussed if we want to avoid these crimes and educate people in the history of our violent world.

However, as Westerners, we must be sensitive to the perception of Orientalist bias that we inspire in Turkish people, who are caught uniquely between Eastern and Western cultures. Their paradox is to be a literal bridge between East and West, and yet be torn in both directions by these cultures. It is not helpful for our states to go around declaring a genocide to have happened just to bolster the political position of the Armenian diaspora, who are themselves seen in the same light as the hypocrisy of the US government with regards to their human rights record.

I went to the Turkish Military Museum in central Istanbul, and I was not at all surprised by the kind of ridiculous nationalist propaganda that it contained. We all have problems with the way our national narratives ignore reality and evidence in order to tell a story which paints the nation in a positive light. You only have to look at Adam Curtis’ fantastic documentary The Living Dead to see how our Western perception of 20^th Century history is shaped by the way we want to see ourselves, and the way our governments wanted to spin that history to make us seem better, more moral people.

In the museum, there was a room dedicated to Turkish-Armenian relations, which made it clear that the Armenians provoked the Turkish army by murdering Turks and betraying the Ottoman state, which had previously treated them well.

I think that most educated Turks with even a small knowledge of Turkish history would know that this room was blatant propaganda. The problem is that this historical crime is bound up with the creation of the Turkish state, which Turkish people see as a good thing, and indeed, has been positive in creating a more modern Turkey, which is secular and open to different ways of life. It’s hard for anybody to admit that the creation of something they hold to be a part of their identity could be contaminated by a dark side of violence and murder. One explanation in the museum read as follows:

“These hostile activities of Armenians who made cooperation with the enemy, assaulted to Turkish army, relentlessly killed the innocent people and “BETRAYED THEIR STATE” were hindered with the “COMPULSORY IMMIGRATION LAW” taken on May 27, 1915. This law was applied to Armenians living in the war region, making espionage and armed activities, rebelling against the state. Depending on the circumstances and the priorities of the state, every kind of needs were provided by the state to the ones applied to “COMPULSORY IMMIGRATION LAW”. Every kind of aid and facilities were given to Armenians who want to go back after the war. Armenians who came to Anatolia again after the war continued massacre in the east, south and southeast of Anatolia, and against the Turkish army. During this national struggle, while fighting against the occupation forces, Turkish army also had to struggle with Armenians.

By the way, from 1994, by changing tactics, Armenian terrorist organizations left the bloody assault method and by the help of “Armenian Diaspora” making activities in USA and EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES, Armenians started to apply pressure policies by SO-CALLED GENOCIDE CLAIMS against THE REPUBLIC OF TURKIYE and THE TURKS. The aim of these “UNFOUNDED GENOCIDE CLAIMS” is to decrease the power of TURKIYE in the region by leaving TURKIYE isolated in the international arena, to separate the country by taking some part of east and southeast Anatolia, to establish SO-CALLED GREATER ARMENIA and to sentence TURKIYE to pay indemnity.”

You can see the excessive protestation of innocence, the paranoia that the nation will be broken up if the admission of genocide is made. But it would be totally wrong to accuse ordinary educated Turkish people of this kind of ignorance. Most of them are just as disappointed and alienated from their national politics as we are in the West. While I was in Istanbul, there were many political protests going on, including one to advocate for the removal of internet censorship. Youtube was banned at one point, as well as indymedia, and other obviously political and cultural targets, including most pornography. Turkish people feel embarrassed about this kind of government paternalism, as it doesn’t conform to the kind of secular libertarianism which they want to see in their country. Within this whole debate, the Armenian issue is symptomatic of the State’s desire to control and form the ways in which people think.

We cannot force Turkish people to come to a better understanding of the history of their country before they are ready to do so, and we are patronising them if we think they are not going to do it on their own. The cases of Orhan Pamuk and Hrant Dink show that there is an appetite for a reconciliation and discussion, and while I as an individual do think that a genocide occurred, I also think that there is no point advocating for our governments to recognise the genocide, which they will not do for economic reasons. There are better, more conciliatory ways in which we can change attitudes, by educating ourselves and our friends, by going to Turkey or Armenia, by reading and writing about history.

This is why the Turkish government is afraid of the power of the internet. It is something that it cannot control, a tool for people to make up their own minds, and their attempt to control it will only make Turkish people demand the right to know and understand history and politics for themselves. I feel that we have passed the stage where our governments can affect political change on an international level. The world has changed, and we as individuals have more power than ever. It is up to us to change minds, one person at a time if necessary.

Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic

Alan Moore has been largely responsible for the establishment of the graphic novel as a respectable medium for the narrative form. His four most famous creations have all become Hollywood movies - Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. Even the use of the term graphic novel over comic book has been attributed to his influence. Oh, and he is also a ceremonial Magician. Now he is reinvigorating the underground comic of the 60s Robert Crumb era. Apparently we've got it better than it was back in the 60s.

Dodgem Logic at the London Word Festival

"Back in the 60s, it wasn't that great. It was very divisive. We used to say don't trust anybody over 30. Look at the marches, which dwarf anything in the 60s - I think it's great. There's a radicalisation in ordinary everyday culture. But there's a rough consensus - that's what Dodgem Logic is about; the things that unite us." So it's the 60s again now, not the 80s? Sounds good to me.

Something Alan Moore said earlier escapes me now. It was a response to a question about whether the underground comic writers and artists ever felt afraid to tell the truth as they saw it.  No, he said, because you could say anything you wanted when nobody was paying attention to you.

“Let’s just be ourselves and forget about the government. They don’t do anything for us. They just take our money and expose us to foreign wars... Take control! If you want something done, do it yourself... I know a bunch of unemployed Welsh drunks who went over to Romania and built an orphanage... Don’t vote for people who say they will do more for people. Do it yourself... I think everyone should be the leader of their own country.”

The only reason why people think there are no more heroes is because they don’t go around calling themselves heroes. They just do heroic things, but people don’t see them because they’re expecting a handsome fireman coming out of a burning building carrying a baby, not a man who looks like Hagrid, dressed like a wizard writing comic books. That’s why the stories he writes have the ring of truth. The anti-heroes of Watchmen and V For Vendetta, the social commentary of From Hell, the call for sexual equality and liberation of comics like Lost Girls, the Steampunk Victorian world of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; they are all socially conscious in a more visceral and raw way than the majority of modern book fiction, and deserve to be considered literature. Or maybe the idea and word ‘literature’ just needs to be discarded as an elitist anachronism.

If you want to know Moore (sorry), watch this 2003 documentary:

I especially like his discussion about time and information, around 55 mins in, where he says we will move from a liquid culture to a "culture of steam" when human information in the world is doubling every 1000th of a second, which will apparently be sometime around 2015. Yay, I think?

Not only was Alan Moore decidedly heroic in his support of underground and radical culture, of which Steve Aylett is a great example (his graphic novel, Lint, is particularly highly rated), but Stewart Lee and Robin Ince were also on hand to provide stand-up accompaniment.

Steve Aylett, bizarro fiction, oddball sci-fi writer, also has a compendium of ways to irritate people. My favourite: “I’ll pray for you. Goodbye.” Stewart Lee, meanwhile, has some great jokes about Osama Bin Laden. I say jokes. He’s got one joke. “Did you hear about that horse that bolted on Sept 11, 2001? Do you remember that horse? Well, they just shut the stable door.” The rest of his set was a little bit lacking in jokes, more a list of things said by drunk Americans celebrating the death of Bin Laden, some of which he made up. I’m hoping his new series has more jokes – the first episode is out on iPlayer now:

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Series 2, Episode 1

He’s good at being awkward, that Stewart Lee. On his way out of the Round Chapel venue, a somewhat tipsy woman accosted him. “Oh, hi,” she said, “What’s your name?” “Stewart Lee”, said Stewart Lee. “I’ve seen many of your things,” said the woman. “Oh, alright. Bye then”, said Stewart Lee. It was actually quite embarrassing to watch. Not nearly as funny as if it had been on stage, because life isn’t really like that, is it? It’s more of a rubbish, awkward place, but there are more jokes than in the average Stewart Lee gig. See what I did there, Stu? With the callback thing like what you do in your stuff? Nah, he’s great though, that Stewart Lee. Master of the comedic artform. I say master...

All round, a pretty fun evening, which ended with Alan Moore singing metal (no doubt the lyrics were great) with a live band. And I didn’t even have to buy a ticket because I was volunteering for the London Word Festival which organised it. I love you London.

Performance

I have been volunteering for the London Word Festival, a spoken word/performance art festival held in various locations during April.

The Quiet Volume is a ‘whispered, self-generated performance for two at a time’, which takes you on an intertextual journey between different books, interacting with the reader next to you as unsettling soundscapes unfurl in your ears and the noises coming from the headphones seem to leak out into the surrounding environment. It reminded me of Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, in its meditation on reading and the roles of the author and reader.

The Quiet Volume by Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells at London Word Festival from londonwordfestival on Vimeo.

Another interesting performance at the festival is Cybraphon, an “autonomous emotional robot indie band”. Cybraphon is comprised of numerous instruments played by robot musicians who continually monitor Cybraphon’s online profile to see how much it is being talked about on Facebook, Twitter and Google. It is very self-conscious and increases in digital activity affect its mood from despondency through to elation.

Cybraphon on the Culture Show from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

Early Technology from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

It seems like there are more and more interesting projects that reject the traditional reverence for the performer or the glass-cased work of art. In theatre, the vanguard boundary-pushers have been for a while now the theatre company Punchdrunk. They manage to do such spectacular projects and have become such a big name that they have little problem recruiting an army of theatre-designing slaves to get work experience building their giant sets. Here are some stills from their current show, Sleep No More, a Macbeth/Hitchcock mashup with a 1930s aesthetic.

They have pioneered a kind of site-specific immersive theatre where the audience is free to come and go as they please, aside from one or two set-pieces. The performances are mostly physical theatre-based, rather than dialogue-based, and this works very well for audiences, who feel empowered by their liberation from the stalls watching actors pretending that a fourth wall exists. In Punchdrunk’s performances, you get to dance with the actors, follow them, and they acknowledge your presence.

My friend Ed Saperia has been commissioned by the Old Vic theatre to generate a concept for a performance/nightclub in the Old Vic Tunnels at the end of 2011. The space is similar to what the first Shunt venue used to be like - dark, cavernous rooms intended for storage beneath the overground train arteries of Waterloo and London Bridge. People came to these places to escape from the Blitz, and wine barrels were stacked high to supply London’s restaurants, and these historical absences are present in the atmosphere of these dark old spaces. The presence of oldness is a smell that hangs in the air; dust, dirt and the memories of the long forgotten people who inhabited Victorian London.

The old Shunt bar

The Old Vic tunnels

Ed ran a pop-up cabaret nightclub in the West End last summer called Salon d’Été. Now he wants to create a post-apocalyptic ‘Steampunk/Japonica’ world within the Old Vic tunnels where the audience can explore the shanty towns, beaches and other disaster strewn areas of the future, maybe after witnessing an earthquake and tsunami. Mutant salesmen and voluptuous whores populate the landscape, drawing the audience into interactions with them.

Once the performance finishes, the whole big set becomes a bar/club. “It is a steampunk wonderland of pipes and jets of gas and large, broken machines”, says Ed. The project is just in its planning stage, and the Old Vic will likely spend 6 months raising the necessary funds, but I think it’s a very exciting project.

In other theatre news, Shunt bar, run by the Shunt theatre company, closes its Bermondsey Street warehouse location this weekend. It is a good space, though not as atmospheric as their previous location in Joiner Street, beneath London Bridge overground, which closed because the space was reclaimed for the Shard building project. Here's a video for the show they did using the Machine at their most recent venue. It ties in with the whole Steampunk aesthetic which seems to have swept through London in the last few years.

In truth though, the quality of performance and the atmosphere at Shunt bar have been going downhill for a while. At first it attracted the great and good of the theatre world, with lots of exciting site specific performances put on by new and up and coming artists. But as its reputation grew, it got more and more popular, and began to attract different, more populist crowd. So it’s probably no wonder they seem to have lost heart and are moving on to other things. If you’ve not been there for a while or want to catch their huge steampunky Machine before it probably gets dismantled, Saturday is your last chance.

Blindspots and Despots

There are too many things in life. Infinite things in fact. There are Skittles, tesseracts, Axolotl, there are men who marry pillows and there’s even a Glenn Beck and a Charlie Sheen. Faced with so much advertising and demands to look at and concentrate on all these things, what is one to do? What do we concentrate on?

We concentrate on things we find beautiful because our genes tell us to, because they want us to survive. We find our lovers and children beautiful because of genetics, according to this great TED talk.

Similarly, what we concentrate on politically is intended to increase the chances of our preferred ideology’s survival.

To fully understand any situation, you need to see it from the perspectives of all involved, even if you disagree with those perspectives. If you just watch Fox News all day, or just the BBC for that matter, you’re going to get a worldview which is skewed towards the priorities of the people who run and pay for that service.

Which is why Press TV, set up and paid for by the government of Iran, are nevertheless quite a good news organisation. They have bureaus in many countries, and their English language service is a good source of information on the underbelly of Middle East politics that the BBC isn’t covering while it’s telling you who got stabbed in South London last night.

Aris Roussinos is a former BBC journalist who has been doing some real frontline reporting in recent weeks. He conducted interviews with EDL members on a recent march, a clip of which has become a YouTube sensation by virtue of the staggering level of ignorance demonstrated by a hobbit-like man who claimed that ‘they’re trying to get their Iraqi, Muslamic law over here’, and then mumbled something about Muslamic ray guns (or rape gangs, it’s somewhat hard to distinguish because of his reluctance to use the English language properly). Stifling laughter, Aris interjected in order to clarify what Iraqi law he believed was being imposed, which the scary troll-man was unable to answer.

Even more impressive than this meme-creation (see remixes of the interview) is the fact that he has just returned from two weeks undercover reporting in Bahrain, where he had to pretend to be a tourist, staying in the houses of people brave enough to risk prison by letting him stay with them. Hotels in Bahrain are to be avoided because they are all owned by the royal family or the secret service. Journalists all think that the hotels are bugged and they’re being watched, and ordinary Bahrainis are even more paranoid. There have been a number of summary executions which have shocked the Shia communities, and police conduct punitive raids into their rural villages sometimes twice a day. Aris covertly filmed police arresting people in the streets, and at one point had to run away quickly when a police informer spotted him with filming equipment. Here is his report about his time in Bahrain from Press TV:

I met Aris last week when he interviewed my dad who has been an advocate for the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain to the British government over the past 15 years. Here is a video I took of the interview last week:

Bahraini society has been divided socially along religious grounds. Most of the security forces hired by the Al Khalifa government are Sunni Muslims from Pakistan and Syria. These people get citizenship and government housing, while Shia Bahrainis are prevented from working in many government services. More than 28 people, including children, have been murdered by government security forces since the violence began in February. For a country as small as Bahrain, this is quite a shocking escalation of violence. Part of the problem is that many of the mercenaries employed by the government do not even speak Arabic, and this has probably led to levels of misunderstanding that have resulted in people being killed. These political problems are driving a wedge into Bahraini society which will take a long time to repair. There hasn't been so much coverage of the continuing atrocities in Bahrain since they started - here's a video from the initial demonstrations last month.

It would be nice if we all had the option of being exposed to points of view which we dislike, but this is not how the market works. You only buy The Sun if you think it’s worth 20p, which it’s not, but I would still like to read it to see what these people actually think and believe, and to force myself to hear views I don’t like. Similarly, it should be easier for people in the UK to watch television in other languages for free. This is what happens in Scandinavian countries, and it one of the main reasons why they all speak such good English. If we did this with foreign language television, we might create a generation of kids who are actually good at other languages.

We shouldn’t be blind to the perspectives which are outside of our immediate, everyday concerns. As I mentioned in an earlier post about the UN event I worked on, the BBC believes that people can only stand a certain depth of news reporting, which is why when you watch News 24, you get the same stories over and over again, never going into any depth about the background of these events, but presenting them as “episode 803 in the world’s most complex soap opera”, as Charlie Brooker put it on his Newswipe show (at 2.18 below).

I think it’s patronising to believe that people only want or can handle a certain level of complexity. If you treat people with respect and assume their cognitive capacities can handle new information, they will probably respond positively. Believing that people are stupid and lazy, and catering for that kind of audience is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People are neither good nor evil, but have the capacity of both, and no simple reductionism of the world into these black and white terms will really capture the true nature of people. Surely we should encourage the best in people by giving them the tools they need to be the best they can be.

Adam Curtis has been recently talking about the concept of humanitarian intervention in his brilliant BBC blog.

The founders of the humanitarian intervention movement, like the French doctor Bernard Kouchner who founded MSF, believed that the victims of violence were good and innocent people, and to support them would invalidate the old political divide between left and right wing. They found out they couldn't transcend this problem, and that removing a dictator or supporting a rebel movement doesn’t necessarily lead to a peaceful outcome.

Curtis is a master of finding obscure archive footage, and I urge you to look especially at the clip of Tony Blair in Kosovo being greeted as a hero with shouts of ‘Tony! Tony!’ As Curtis says, it’s here in his conceited and inanely happy grin that you can see the seeds of the Iraq invasion. It’s good to remember also that Blair isn’t a solely evil bastard. What he did with the NATO intervention in Kosovo was a good thing, but he got drunk on the success of that mission, as well as the one in Sierra Leone in 2000 and decided that Iraq would also be a good idea. Any idiot could see that it was a bad idea, but Tony Blair isn’t any idiot, just a power-drunk PR man who thought he could carry on throwing his power and influence around without creating any serious problems.

I sometimes feel like it’s a burden knowing so much about politics. The more you know, the more difficult it can be to make any type of unequivocal statements about anything. Yet at the same time, considering all points of view is the only way to make any valid statements at all, or arrive at conclusions which are a compromise between different actors’ preferences. Perhaps it’s just a bourgeois luxury to spend this much time thinking about all sides of a problem, but someone’s got to do it if we’re not going to spend the next century in pointless arguments about illegal settlements in the West Bank. The only thing that matters is peace and security; whose relatives got there first is irrelevant to all but a few extremists.

Doug Stanhope

"Pay close attention and cover your noses. I'm going to shred some guts. A caveat: shit will come out, and it will stink. In case nobody's told you, shit stinks."
~Pedro Juan Gutierrez

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act".
~George Orwell

Doug Stanhope is a comedian at the very top of his game. My friend Lydia interviewed him for the London Comedy Guide and he apparently hates touring his standup. He drinks a lot when he's onstage because drunkenness is the only way he can inject spontenaity into his material. The main joke he returned to throughout the long set was that a guy in one of the front rows was there for the third night running, which bothered him because he couldn't just do the same material as the other nights. His playful anger at the man (who when asked why he kept coming, called Stanhope his 'deity') was tempered by a genuine concern to give that particular guy something different from what he had seen the previous evenings. I can imagine that that level of respect for your audience can be tiring.

There are so many ways in which Stanhope reminds me of Bill Hicks. But Lydia made a very good point when I said that, which is that club comedians who just do hackneyed jokes about relationships and superficial cultural differences have a lot more in common than alternative anti-authoritarian misanthropic comedians. There's not much competition in that category, and generally only one comedian ever occupies that position at any one time. Lenny Bruce was the template, then George Carlin and then Hicks and now Stanhope is plowing that rich field all by himself. It looks lonely out there, but my god does it make a hillarious spectator sport.

I wanted to write a dissertation for my English degree on a comparison between William Blake, D.H. Lawrence and Bill Hicks, about artists who have pushed back the barriers of what is considered acceptable thought, especially in the areas of religious and political philosophy. Like Hicks, Blake believed that 'all religions are one'. This is a philosophy that says that all religions are equally valid because they all emanate from the 'creative genius' of man which is god given. Hicks' rhetorical style owed much to the idiom of the southern preacher, and his comedy is spiritually rich and emotionally cathartic.

D.H. Lawrence, like Hicks, suffered from continual censorship of his work. Hicks' final Letterman performance was completely cut because advertising companies who sponsored the show didn't like him talking about abortion, Jesus and sexual hipocrisy. It was recorded in the same theatre where Elvis was censored for his sexy hip-shaking in the 50s. “Presley was not allowed to be shown from the waist down,” said journalist John Lahr, “Hicks was not allowed to be shown at all.”

Lawrence last book was a critique of the Book of Revelations, the last and most controversial of the New Testament's books, the most fire and brimstone one which tells the Jehova's Witnesses the exact dimensions of heaven so they know that only 144,000 people can fit inside it. Accoring to Lawrence, it's the most pagan book of the New Testament, as it is largely drawn from astrological mythology. Hicks' criricism of fundamentalist religious groups stems more from the scientific illogicality of their claims rather than from a historical critique of the texts at issue, but the issues they cover are similar and the controversy generated saw them both denied the public acclaim their work deserved.

There is another strange coincidence within this anti-authoritarian tradition. D.H. Lawrence was displaying some sexually explicit artworks at a gallery during the first world war. The police, who already had it in for him, sent some clueless bobbies over to shut it down and confiscate the 'obscene' artworks. They not only confiscated Lawrence's drawings, which shockingly showed glimpses of nipples and pubic hair, but also prints by Blake and others, which they also considered to be obscene.

Stanhope vibrant and gritty imagery, especially when talking about sex, particularly reminded me of Hicks. Hicks was once asked why he talked so explicitly about sex in his act. He responded in a typically erudite manner by saying that the ancient Greeks put a lot of sexually explicit material in their plays as a form of catharsis - 'to exorcise the demons of shame'.

Stanhope said 'What if I went up to someone and said 'Hello, cunt''? Stanhope, like Hicks, knows that it is not natural to be so offended by a collection of sounds which we have imbued with a shameful meaning. That it should be offensive to brand someone with the a name for the female genitalia is ridiculous in itself. Why doesn't the word mean 'beautiful', 'sexy' or something else positive? 'My, you're looking very cunt today, dear.' To question these norms of our world is one step deeper into a more meaningful level of comedy than Frankie Boyle could ever conceive of, or could get away with performing on TV. "

The BBC once asked Hicks why he couldn't write material that appeals "to everyone", he said that such an act was impossible. He responded by repeating a comment an audience member once made to him, "We don't come to comedy to think!", to which he replied, "Gee! Where do you go to think? I'll meet you there!"

I think it is a good thing for comedy in general that Stanhope is becoming more well known. Like Hicks, he is becoming more and more famous in the UK while remaining largely unknown at home. Maybe his success will encourage comedians to credit their audiences with more intelligence with the subjects they approach, as well as encouraging comedy bookers to take chances on alternative comedians.

Part of the reason Hicks was so posthumously adored was because there were few comedians around in 2003 who were directly challenging the official explanation for what the US and UK were doing in their foreign policy. Hicks was dead and he still managed to criticise the hypocricy of our leaders. We needed Hicks because of the lack of dissenting voices in comedy, with the exception of David Cross and a few others.

So it's good that Stanhope has emerged to fill this void, and fill it so painfully funnily. It's also touching to watch Stanhope perform and see a little bit of the soul of Bill Hicks speaking from his mischevious lips. Therevada Buddhism considers this to be reincarnation, not in a literal sense, but in the way in which the Buddha described the idea of self. Nothing is constant, he said. There can be no soul because the soul is eternal, and everything about you changtes all the time. We have 5 aggregates which define everything about us as individuals. If there is nothing else to a person but these characteristics, there can be no soul. But these aggregates can be passed on, to our children or in writing, ideas, thoughts and feelings.

This is a positive and optimistic way to look at the world which Hicks often promoted. In this, Stanhope is different. He is resolutely pessimistic. 'Coming to a comedy gig isn't going to change anything'. It might make you feel better, he said, but missionaries are going around trying to convert people, so comparatively comedy does nothing. But I disagree. Demonstrating doesn't change anything overnight either, but it informs the boundaries of the debate, and it can change hearts and minds, just like good comedy can, not in a great public revolution, but in small revolutions in the way we all think.

Identity, conformity, advertising

Young people are supposed to be angry, apparently. Although, personally I feel neither young nor angry most of the time, I suppose it’s still a fair stereotype. Youth is frustrating, after all. Not as frustrating as being a baby and thus unable to do anything for oneself, but frustrating in the sense that you are born into a life and culture that is not of your own choosing and that comes with pre-existing rules and modes of thought.

All we ask for are symbols of rebellion and non-conformity who can cut through the everyday, banal music of life with their dissenting noise. We demand icons who exemplify these impulses, and we are not best pleased when these icons reject our wishes by doing adverts for margarine and car insurance. Sell outs, we cry; Mr Rotten and Mr Pop, if indeed those are your real names!

I recently saw an advert for a new biography of Christabel Pankhurst. The tagline said something like, ‘She shocked her age, she defined her era.’ It reminded me of a book I had been reading – Subculture, the Meaning of Style, by Dick Hebdige. The book quoted a 1978 article about punk style in Cosmopolitan, which concluded, ‘To shock is chic’. This was the moment punk died, apparently.

Subculture and production are intimately connected, according to Hebdige, because subculture is the production of new identities. This partly explains the dual mainstream response to many subcultures: moral panic followed by incorporation and acceptance through commodification.

Johnny Rotten and Iggy pop may think they are ‘being punk’ in some way in defying expectation by selling their image for product branding, or maybe they just don’t care about being punk anymore. Since identity is a commodity, they are not doing much more than they were in propagating the punk ‘brand’ in the first place. It’s just that now they’re getting a lot more money for it.

Even the iconoclastic hero of anti-advertising, Bill Hicks (‘If you’re in advertising or marketing, kill yourself.’) said that he would do a commercial for Aloe Vera because he believed in it.

So if Johnny Rotten actually likes Country Life butter, I don’t have much of a problem with it. His brand of modern British identity is probably a good choice for a company wanting to differentiate a product that is hard to make consumers feel differently about. Iggy Pop, on the other hand, does not have car insurance with Swiftcover, because they do not insure musicians, and his choice to front the campaign is just bad. Apparently it was because people associate him with having a ‘fast’ life, because obviously people cannot be bothered to spend more than a minute of their time choosing their car insurance. You just go, ‘what does Iggy Pop have to do with car insurance? I didn’t think I could hate car insurance adverts any more than after Michael Winner, but now I do.’

In short, advertising isn’t inherently evil, sometimes it’s just really stupid.

Anti-Cuts March, the Left-Wing and Liberalism

I don’t know when the left wing died as a political force in Western representative democracies, or whether it was always at an inherent disadvantage because it encourages free-thinking and non-conformity, while the right wing seems to be geared mainly towards a narrow goal of economic growth at any social cost.

Yesterday I was at the anti-cuts ‘March for the Alternative’. It remains a very good question as to just what the alternative to spending cuts consists of. According to most of the people I talked to or saw interviewed (even those carrying ‘no cuts’ signs), the alternative is just basically slower cuts. Nevertheless, the front of the Socialist Worker newspaper was calling for people to ‘Fight All Cuts’, except, one suspects, those to the military. If you start adding small print to slogans, they’re just not as catchy, though, are they?

Bubbling below the surface of this vague rage are specific frustrations at government policies to introduce competition into the NHS and privatise the Post Office, as well as a continuing high level of anger at bankers, banks and other corporations which don’t pay all the tax they are supposed to. Topshop and Fortnum & Mason were invaded by direct action protesters, and in a repeat of the 2009 G20 protests, banks and cash points were targeted for vandalism by the black brigade. I understand why people are frustrated at the pace of political reform, especially when you look at the Middle-East, but they are fighting against dictators, while we have to fight much more complicated and subtle political and economic forces. Still, we need someone to inspire us to such feats of political prowess, like Obama, or Charlie Chaplin:

As I listened to speaker after speaker in Hyde Park denouncing the political ideology of the coalition government, and saw the traditional cow-towing of the TUC to its former ideological parent, the Labour Party (Milliband sychophantically brown-nosing the audience by calling it a ‘profoundly moving moment’ – profoundly stomach-churning more like), I realised that all these people spouting their tired rhetoric have no new ideas and are just going through the motions, getting angry but not trying to think of any realistic answers.

It’s like we’re all waiting for something new, some new, powerful political force or ideology that will challenge the hegemony of neo-liberalism among the political classes. When I watch Ed Milliband or one of the other disconnected robot people who pass for politicians carefully answering the public’s questions, trying to appear pally and approachable, and I see them considering what they need to say to stay on-message and away from controversy, I wonder where the politicians are who will tell you the straight truth as they see it without desperately clamouring for the public’s love and attention like a dolled-up child beauty queen. Or at least I wonder where are the politicians who we can invest with our hopes and dreams, like we did with Obama.

What happened to the Liberal Project, which offered the possibility of unifying the left liberal and social democratic ideologies in a single political coalition? The Tories have conveniently disarmed it, making the Lib Dems the scapegoats for their policies like some kind of political human shield. How do they do that? Are they really that bloody sneaky, or did they just get lucky? It reminds me of The Strange Death of Liberal England, Dangerfield’s 1930s account of how the Liberal Party destroyed the power of the House of Lords, introduced social benefits for the first time, and then got caught in the crossfire of Irish Nationalism, Womens’ Suffrage and the burgeoning Trade Union movement, leading to schism and 70 years in the political wilderness before its merger with the SDP.

The problem with the Liberal Project is that it has always been a somewhat ambiguous movement. As I see it, there are four interconnected kinds of liberalism:

Political Liberalism stems from the question asked by many philosophers since the Enlightenment, ‘under what conditions can the state have authority over the individual?’ The primary answer has been ‘not without the authority of majority consent’. At its most basic, this means the support of a representative Democratic system. Of course, the franchise was limited in all Western democracies (by race, gender and property) until the suffrage and socialist movements of the early 20th century.

Economic Liberalism developed alongside Political Liberalism, since for individuals to have equal opportunities and rights, they must be allowed to own property and use it as they choose. Free trade strongly differentiated Liberalism from the autocratic and totalitarian states to which it was opposed.

Less well defined than these established strands of Liberal thought are two others which I believe are their modern heirs, and can be differentiated by their positive and negative applications by the state.
First, Social Liberalism, a descendent of Political Liberalism, is the positive right of individuals to demand minimum standards of education and healthcare from their governments. Although these ‘economic and social’ rights are rightly associated with the labour movement, it was the Liberal governments of the late 19th Century which first began to implement such reforms.

Secondly, Cultural Liberalism, begins with J.S. Mill’s ‘harm principle’, that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” [Mill, J.S., On Liberty and Other Essays, OUP, 1998, p14] This strand of Liberalism is a kind of extension of deregulation from the economy to all other aspects of human interaction and production, confirming the autonomy of the individual in areas such as art, sexuality, abortion, euthanasia and drugs. It could be called Libertarianism, but this word has a connotation in the US which does not include the ‘harm principle’, and therefore allows individuals to own guns and do other generally anti-social things that right-wing libertarians believe their freedom should guarantee them.

I think that, like the gradual progress towards full Political and Economic Liberalism, Social and Cultural Liberalism are incomplete projects which the Liberal Project is working towards. This dynamic nature shows a fundamental contrast of Liberalism to the Realist paradigm, which says that states and individuals remain fundamentally the same throughout history.

Many Renaissance thinkers, like Montesquieu, Rousseau, Erasmus and Crucé beleved that man was “by nature peace-loving” [Howard, M., War and the Liberal Conscience, 1978, p22], and many also believed that it was only the social contract that gave men (especially the aristocracy) a sense of strength and the desire to exercise it. From a Marxist perspective, this philosophical development clearly attested to an impending class struggle in which the powerless bourgeoisie developed their economic power in order to challenge the political hegemony of the aristocracy who they considered to be corrupt and incompetent. War did not pay and was thus incompatible with commerce, which would engender interdependence and lead to peace between nations with Liberal economic systems.

Thus, Liberals like Kant proposed to change the structure of society to a Republican system of ‘perpetual peace’. However, some war does pay, and today states view arms dealing as one of the cornerstones of their financial power, and a way to maintain influence in autocratic states like Saudi Arabia. The Liberal idea that man is inherently peace-loving remains in conflict with the Realist position that man is inherently power-hungry and that his nature is the cause of conflict.

Kant argued that liberal republics would fight wars for popular, mostly defensive reasons, because “if... the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war should be declared, it is very natural that they would have a great hesitation” [Kant, in Doyle, M.W., Liberalist and World Politics, American Political Science Review, Vol.80, No.4, Dec 1986, p1160]. Kant’s ‘Pacific Union’ of Republican states would move towards achieving perpetual peace only after long struggle, during which each state ought to “demand that its neighbouring nations enter into the pacific union of states.” [Doyle, M.W., Liberalist and World Politics, American Political Science Review, Vol.80, No.4, Dec 1986, p1160] These ideas form part of what is now called Democratic Peace Theory, which was seen in the ideology of the US neo-cons. This shows that the neoliberal movement, identified with the ideology of the neo-cons, as well as the economic policies of both the modern Labour and Conservative parties, is a descendent of Economic Liberalism and Political Liberalism.

I contend that to be truly Liberal, you have to be committed to the as-yet unfulfilled promise of the Liberal Project, to Cultural and Social Liberalism, not just to free markets and democratic elections. Classical Liberals could not have conceived of the economic system we have created today, and the fact that “economic liberty and political equality are frequently opposed” [Dunne, T., The Globalization of World Politics, Baylis, Smith, eds., OUP, 2006, p198] Firms are by nature amoral. The externalities they create are outside of the market, to which alone they are responsible. Applying the logic of the market to the individual is a fallacy. Individuals do conceive of morality, empathy and respect.

For Neoliberals, Coca-Cola is justified in opening plants in South America to tap the abundant supply of cheap labour, who are in return choosing to work for the company because it provides a competitive wage. But as the Social Constructivists suggest, the more that socialisation of identity is introduced into this market model, the less these economic acts seem like choices. In turn, states’ actions are not always rational, but depend on their relations to other state, as well ideas and norms.

Constructivists like Ruggie pose the idea that Neoliberalism has abandoned the traditional ‘ideational’ ground of Liberalism in attempting to show that a market based rational choice approach to international politics can apply as much to states as firms. Neoliberals have hijacked some of the core ideas of the Classical Liberal tradition in its political analysis. But those on the political ‘left’ have realised over the last few decades that the realisation of individual rights involves more positive action from the state to ensure the ‘freedom of the individual’, the most iconic goal of Liberal ideology.

I feel that Liberalism has been dismembered by the governments and corporations who have taken the parts they found useful and discarded the more inconvenient parts which try to protect individual and group rights. Liberalism is not a collection of principles valid only within their respective realms of politics, economy, civil society or academia. It is a project, an ideal, a goal, a dynamic movement. As once the forces of liberal secularism sought to remove the religious institutions from the political arena, so Liberalism must now hem the corporate institutions back into the economic realm and out of politics, where they have far too much influence. Winston Churchill, who was a Liberal MP until the party committed political suicide, said that “Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty... Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly” By all accounts, this goal has not been fulfilled. There still exist near-monopolies like Coca-Cola, Nestlé and News International who hide their plurality of products in a false veil of competition and remain immune from anti-trust laws.

It is not that Liberal economics cannot be harmonised within the spectrum of Liberal values, but that it suits the privileged oligarchs of the globalised world to pretend that they alone hold the secret of wealth creation. These oligarchs sit more happily with those willing to tolerate the status quo, rather than the progressive realisation of the equality in dignity and rights of all human beings. We’re all looking for something to challenge the power of the prevailing economic ideology pursued by Western politicians since the late 70s. We should go back to the Liberal Project, remember its emancipating, dynamic ideals, and realise the political power which we have at our disposal to change things, not just to shout ‘No!’, but to organise for achievable goals, such as electoral reform.

Speaking of which, Political Betting currently has the Referendum projection at 51% Yes, 49% No. Too close to call, it’s going to be interesting...

What Does Democracy Mean?

Here's an essay I wrote when I left university in 2009. It was written for the Thomas Hare/Electoral Reform Society Essay Competition, and won me second prize. It's quite text-heavy but I hope you find it interesting.

Is democracy essentially about the majority or the minority?

Abstract

In this essay, I will examine an ambiguous and contested question which goes to the heart of grand theories about politics and society. I will begin by historicising the concept of democracy and the debate on representative government. I will argue that the paradox of the bourgeois liberal project centres around dual anxieties over the capture of the state by either powerful minorities or the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Political philosophers like J.S. Mill thus tried to conceptualise a state that was weak enough to be unable to oppress its people, but strong enough to implement liberal reforms. I will then discuss what this inherited concept of democracy means for us today and how to approach this liberal paradox which is still at the heart of government and electoral reform.
__________________________________________________________

From the late 19th century, many Western, capitalist nation-states became pro-democratic as the word shrugged off its connotations of ‘direct people power’, and the orthodox view of a representative parliamentary system became democracy’s primary definition: “Bentham formulated a general sense of democracy as rule by the majority of the people, and then distinguished between ‘direct democracy’ and ‘representative democracy’, recommending the latter because it provided continuity and could be extended to large societies.” (Williams, R., 1988, p95) This was a different form of democracy than the Greek root word suggested with its connotation of popular rule.

Aristotle wrote that “a democracy is a state where the freemen and the poor, being in the majority, are invested with the power of the state.” (Williams, R., 1988, p93) This was a naturally worrying prospect to the military and productive classes, and the concern that the rule of the people would be mob rule continues to this day. This has led to a conflict between those who take representativeness as an index of democratization, and those for whom popular intervention is seen as dangerous, and prefer that a division of labour exists whereby democracy is seen in the responsiveness of the political elite to the will of the people. These groups are synonymous with the Idealist/Realist or Liberal/Conservative traditions. (Parry, Moyser, in Beetham, D., 1994, p46)

Today, democracy in many parts of the world means little more than the suffrage. States like Cameroon and Zimbabwe are superficially democratic, but have returned the same president to power for over 20 years. In the UK, the 2005 election was won by Labour with 36% of the vote on a 61% turnout. That meant that just over 20% of people in the UK were able to elect the government in that year. Supporters of our plurality electoral system say that this allows the largest party to implement reform even when opposed by a significant majority, while critics will say that it allows a minority party to ride roughshod over the wishes of the majority.

This narrow orthodox conception of democracy as little more than an electoral system surely contributes to the disconnection and apathy with which it is treated by many people. Neoliberal economic reforms since the late 70s and the correspondingly limited ‘negative’ liberties (Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty) which have attended them have debased the once emancipatory promise of democracy. This led to a growing feeling among academics that “The limited scope in contemporary politics for the active involvement of citizens would have been regarded as most undemocratic.” (Held, D., 1993, p17)

When representative democracy was conceived in Britain, the suffrage was limited, and the parliament represented the views of the landed aristocracy. With universal suffrage, the numbers of people whose views had to be represented increased dramatically, and in our plurality system, minority parties are afforded little power. The stagnation and apathy of the democratic system in the UK is worrying – like the Roman Republic, our democratic forum is theoretically open to all, but a steep decline in social mobility risks making politics the sole domain of the new patrician classes. I will argue that while British society has moved on, democracy is seen as a fait accompli. But democracy is a project, or as Nehru said, “Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not an end in itself.” (Jay, A., 1996, Dictionary of Political Quotations, OUP, p270:10)

This orthodox definition is “a modest conception of democracy as a set of guarantees that can prevent a leader from coming to power or holding power in defiance of the will of the majority.” (Touraine, A., 1997, p1) In the past half century, a system of civil society democracy has spread through Europe linking NGOs and public opinion polls to government policymaking through consultations and focus grouping. It is felt necessary for ministers to consult on policy, even if they do not take their own expert advice. However, the UK electoral system has failed to keep pace with these other democratic innovations, and has resulted in oligarchic minority administrations who find it easier to ignore public opinion, both on everyday policy concerns, and exceptional decisions of global importance, like going to war. Why has this happened? I believe it is because the liberal project of social transformation took such a series of blows during the 20th century that it is only now beginning to flourish again, having ridden the successive waves of fascism, communism and neoliberalism.

The development of democracy has been inextricably bound up with that of liberalism. Many thinkers have tried to define Liberalism by reference to its putative essence; freedom, or equality, for example. David Williams prefers to define it as a ‘project of social transformation’ (Williams, D., 2008). This project comprises an ontological theory about the nature of human beings as free and autonomous individuals; a sociology of the current obstacles to a liberal society, and a set of tools to achieve this transformation. I believe, like Nehru, that democracy falls into this latter category. Yet there are many who would disagree, and for this reason, “liberalism has historically provided both a necessary platform for democracy and a constraint upon it.” (Beetham, D., in Held, D., 1994, p56)

Liberalism has struggled with this theoretical paradox since the Enlightenment: how to make individuals the free, rational agents which they are thought to be? Rousseau typified this philosophy in the famous opening line of The Social Contract: ‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains’ (Rousseau, p1). For political scientists like Mill, this problematic centred on the discussion of the ‘ideal’ form of government. But here again the liberal paradox laid a trap for Enlightenment philosophers. A strong state poses a threat to autonomy and individuality, but liberals like Mill also want to see their liberal reform programme enacted through government action. How then to ensure that the state apparatus avoids capture by either majority or minority groups, but works in the general interest of all?

Mill approached this problem from a classically liberal standpoint; specifying the rights and responsibilities governing the relationship between individual and state – the social contract. Next to this fundamental question of liberal thought, the place of majority and minority are seen from a purely utilitarian view. Majority and minority are groups, and groups as such do not have legal rights. It is the individual which is paramount in liberal philosophy:

“There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism.” (Mill, J.S., 1998, p9)

As Mill famously suggested in a later passage from On Liberty, this limit should be treated in reference to the ‘harm principle’, that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (Mill, J.S., 1998, p14). For Mill, this principle can only be assured in an equal democracy. Thus, “In a really equal democracy, every or any section should be represented, not disproportionately, but proportionately.” (Mill, J.S., 1998, p303)

Mill advocated universal suffrage and proportional representation (PR) in an age when both were looked on by political and economic leaders as dangerous radical ideals. Yet while universal suffrage movements could no longer be resisted after 1945 in most democratic nations, PR was only adopted in states that had undergone wholesale political reformations, like West Germany and Israel. In those states, sensitivity to the rights of minorities was especially important to the new political leaders. In the UK, we had fought and won the right to retain in large part a pre-war status quo, which, economically weakened, was forced to entertain the popular social democratic reforms called for by the first powerful Labour majority government. The voices of minorities were drowned out by a new national popular consciousness forged by war and the narrative of the noble (almost entirely Anglo-Saxon) fight against tyranny.

Since then, the mirror of British identity has fragmented into a thousand shards reflecting people of different colours, cultures, beliefs, genders and sexualities. Now, more than ever, it would be wise to revisit the question of electoral reform, or we run the risk of exciting minority groups who could use violence to get their voices heard, as the Suffragettes did in the years leading up to the first world war. Like those years, it is hard to see how a majority government would consent to a reform that they know would result in the dilution of their ratio of popular support. The Conservative Party, who flirted with electoral reform in the 90s, has inconspicuously dropped this banner in recent years as their return to power looks increasingly likely. The question is not high up on the list of popular concerns, and its intricacies are understood by too few to make the debate of interest to many.

Any other electoral system than PR, Mill states, is “contrary to the principle of democracy, which professes equality as its very root and foundation”. (Mill, J.S., 1998, p304) If democracy is to represent the will of the majority, “there are no means of insuring that but by allowing every individual figure to tell equally in the summing up.” (Mill, J.S., 1998, p304) Mill knew then, and it is just as true today, that such deficiencies are regarded as necessary evils in a free society, and thus we hear the fatalistic defence, voiced by Churchill, that “democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” (Jay, A., 1996, Dictionary of Political Quotations, p93:1)

In answer to these problems, Mill presents Thomas Hare’s ideas in his Treatise on the Election of Representatives as an antidote ensuring equality in democratic representation. This form of PR is similar to the Single Transferable Vote in Multi-Member Constituencies, advocated today by the Electoral Reform Society and the Liberal Democratic Party. Mill would not argue that this system is either pro-minority or anti-majority. He is for proportional equality between all parties and points of view as the essence of democracy. Yet it is clear to see that any government concerned with social order and effective governance would see this system as a crippling blow to the unity of the society they preside over, and to their own power. It might mean that the BNP or radical Islamic groups could return a representative to parliament for the first time, which could cause disruption and obstruction to parliamentary processes.

The question of electoral reform was important to the political intelligentsia at the end of the 19th century. It was a time when three major political movements combined to shake the foundations of British democracy, and full blown revolution was perhaps only averted by the sublimation of these forces into the war effort in 1914. The Irish Republican, the Labour and the Women’s Suffrage movements all began serious political agitation, and their main concerns were eventually consented to. Crisis averted, these powerful minorities felt that they had been listened to, and failed to combine into a larger force for reforms that would benefit them all. Although there was sympathy within political elites for these causes, parliamentary democracy failed to respond to the exigencies of the time, and we should learn this lesson before we are forced to confront violent division again.

The eminent Tory statesman, Lord Salisbury, showed his anxiety at the tyranny of the majority when he said, “By a free country... I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like.” That kind of unqualified coercion is thankfully rare, but cases that could so be described are not hard to recall from recent memory: the Iraq War, the Poll Tax, the miners’ strikes, to name the most serious. Just because we may look around the world and see feeble democratic states, and powerful non-democratic ones, should we be complacent in self-examination of our political system? Because liberal democracy ‘won’ the Cold War, leading Fukiyama to declare it ‘the end of history’, should we throw away the entire socialist tradition and belief in ‘direct democracy’, which was after all the original meaning of the word? The comedian and activist Mark Thomas, once called to a Commons select committee on appointments to government QUANGOs, said “do you think [a member of the public] could sit on a committee about wine? I think so!” He was not preaching a socialist doctrine, but objecting to the way politics appears to the public as a dishonest, exclusionary class in itself, as recent controversy over MPs expenses has shown.

It is very telling that in all of the collections of academic essays on democracy published during the 90s, there is precious little discussion of making western liberal democracies more representative, yet there are many writings with titles similar to ‘the limits of democratization’. There is little doubt that growing dissatisfaction with our orthodox and conservative definition of democracy will lead this debate to flourish once more.

Democracy, therefore, could argue for the supremacy of the majority, or the recognition of the minority, depending on the advocate; but liberalism is very much centred on the individual. It is argued by Mill that Hare’s ‘Personal Representation’ would allow individuals to choose the best candidates, whose beliefs corresponded to their own, thus liberating them from party monism and maybe even fragmenting the traditional party structures and loyalties entirely. I for one find this prospect radical and exciting. Mill’s anticipation of a partial trial of STV in a multi-member constituency is still to be fulfilled, but where better than London and other urban centres, where Conservatives and Lib Dems (who are most likely to support PR) are in minorities disproportionately less than their share of the vote. Surely this will not be another hundred and fifty years in coming.

Bibliography

Beetham, D., 1994, Defining and Measuring Democracy, SAGE
Berlin, I., 1988, Four Essays on Liberty, OUP
Dangerfield, G., The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1935
Held, D., 1993, Prospects For Democracy, Polity Press
Mill, J.S., 1998, On Liberty and other essays, OUP
Rousseau, J.J., 1998, The Social Contract, Wordsworth
Williams, D., 2008, The World Bank Social Transformation in International Politics, Routledge
Williams, R., 1998, Keywords, Fontana
Jay, A., 1996, Dictionary of Political Quotations, OUP

Sound of Rum

Sound of Rum are the best band most people have never heard of. They are getting a lot of love from all quarters, largely because their MC, Kate Tempest, is the most eloquent person to pick up a mic and rap since Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount (he didn't need a mic, he had supernatural amplification). I really hope it went down like that anyway, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to believe that that's how it really happened.

I studied English at university and for three years I was told that the best way to use my language skills was to sell them to advertising and marketing companies. Poets were in the past, and there was little point trying to be creative with your talent, because creativity doesn’t sell. Which makes it all the more impressive that Kate Tempest has had no formal training. But maybe she never had her childlike love and wonder at words removed by the surgical study of dry academia. She certainly quotes her influences (especially Blake) more than any English student I’ve ever met. “If you want to write, first you’ve got to read; I read Shakespeare, Blake, Beckett, Sophocles”, she raps on Rumba, making me wish that every English teacher in the country cared that much about literature.

But the words themselves are only one part of why Sound of Rum deserve to be huge. When I hear something that sounds new and original, it makes me particularly happy, and it’s the marriage of performance poetry to the quiet/loud guitar and percussion of the band that makes you understand that you’re listening to a kind of music that nobody thought to make until very recently. The way they present themselves is like a manifesto for originality and ambition in a sea of bland popular music which has largely given up trying to have any new ideas. “Give Archie his amps and give Ferry his drumkit, we ain’t got no time for dumb shit, we’re all about that Sound of Rum shit!”, Kate says, setting out her musical politics in the picaresque poem, Line in the Sand.

I got into hip-hop when I lived in Washington, DC in 2004. My flatmate listened to a lot of Talib Kweli, Common, Slick Rick, Outkast and others. I had never really heard non-commercial rap and hip-hop until then, and probably had quite a stereotyped view of it. From the documentary Scratch, I learned that hip-hop is not a style of music but a culture or a way of life which includes graf art, MCing, DJing and B-Boying (3.40 in the Scratch video below).

It doesn't matter who you are or where you come from, anyone can be part of that culture. The fact that Kate Tempest challenges perceptions about what it means to be hip-hop shows the strength of her character and hopefully encourages other people to try to find their own true nature rather than pretending to be someone else. “It’s all about the substance, not about the image, at all! You might be saying words, but you ain’t spitting lyrics,” she tells bad rappers with good haircuts on Would Be, Has Been.

The Guardian recently reviewed the band for its new band of the day feature, and the reviewer didn't get what the fuss was about at all. He had never seen them live as far as I know, and compared them to all kinds of other artists in an attempt to pin them down. I think it’s very difficult to compare Sound of Rum’s style with anyone else. I’m not a huge British hip-hop aficionado, but I know that Kate takes influence from many British rappers, such as Chester P of Task Force. To me, being better versed in US hip-hop, she often reminds me more of Talib Kweli, but only tangentially; there are too many differences, but the subject matter is often similar.

There’s something about Sound of Rum so uniquely British, uniquely London, uniquely modern, now, outspoken, honest and confident in its reflection of our society; something that should appeal to anyone struggling to find the words to describe all the sublime and ridiculous things we see around us every day. “What cannot be said must be passed over in silence”, said Wittgenstein, and to me, the power of art is in giving voice to something that you had perceived only as a latent and indistinct feeling searching for expression. The biggest compliment I could give to any writer I respect is to say ‘well done, you found the words to voice something I felt but couldn't say.’ That’s how I feel every time I see Sound of Rum or Kate Tempest perform.

I probably 'get' Sound of Rum for a whole host of reasons not apparent to established Guardian writers. I'm 20 years younger, I'm unemployed and frustrated as hell with our stagnant political and economic system. I studied English and I love intelligent hip-hop. When Kate Tempest says in her poem Line in the Sand 'I'm South East til the death of me, I'm never going to swallow all this bullshit you're selling me, so stop telling me that my way ain't the right way', I am right there with her, happy to have her as a spokesperson for the renegade attitude of me and my peers. Speaking of which, her poem ‘Renegade’ (“This one’s for the hopeless romantics, the broken, the stranded, the pure, the puerile , the pedantic, the fearless, the frantic”), mixed with a dubsteppy remix of Temper Trap’s Drum Song is one of the strongest things Kate has done and shows how forceful her rhymes can be over more electronic music as well as jazzy guitar loops.

Having said that, when you see SoR live, there is little better than the drop into the loud drum and guitar after the intro of Prometheus, and there is something forceful about hip-hop backed by a real live band rather than by drum loops or a DJ.

It's hard to know if the mainstream music industry will ever accept such a rebellious voice, but it doesn't really matter, it's not music for old people or the X Factor or teenyboppers. It's music for us, now; the people who feel the same way, and it should be heard by everyone out there who craves something different and knows that there must be a voice out there who speaks for them better than anything they hear on the radio. It’s easy to root for SoR. They’re very accessible and prolific. For the last two years I’ve seen them at almost every festival I’ve been to, often not on stage, but just playing out in the open air in the middle of a field to anyone who will listen; I’ve seen Kate get up in the middle of political protests and encourage the demonstrators with her words. Her modesty with the lionization she often receives from crowds is very endearing. “Kate, you’re genius!”, shouted one infatuated girl at the first night of their February 2011 residency at the Old Queen’s Head in Islington. “No, you’re genius,” she replied, blushing slightly. “I’m well aware that brilliance is still far away, ‘cos the minute you are satisfied you start to fade”, she says in her poem The Becoming, and I for one hope she is never satisfied with what she produces, because, like many of my friends, I'm rooting for her to get better and better, destroying fake MCs with vicious battle raps and making beautiful modern poetry which will pass the test of academic criticism and commercial success.

Like all music, it has to be heard live, and luckily, Sound of Rum are prolific live performers. Upcoming dates are listed on their website - http://www.myspace.com/soundofrumband, and I urge everyone to see them where the full force of their noise and poetry can be appreciated best, directly into your ears from 10 feet away.

Ode to Drinking

My friend Jessie used to work at a bar in Edinburgh. They know how to drink up there. “When I worked in Bells, we had no respect for the people who didn't have a 'usual', it was like they were shady, untrustworthy people.”

I have to admit that I don’t have a usual. I like cider, but it’s a summer drink. Beer in general does little for me. I like to drink a little of everything, to be honest. I guess I’ve still yet to find my drinking character. I feel that there is something more to the enjoyment of a drink when it has a kind of romantic allusion beyond the simple rendering of inebrieatedness, and the depiction of drinking in art, especially literature, film and television can cement a drink within a cultural world, making it comic, romantic, archaic, cool or sexy.

So in order to ‘speak within tradition’ and take inspiration from great drinking characters of the past, I have cobbled together with the help of numerous learnéd friends a list of the drunkest, most praiseworthy alcoholic writers and characters at work in our collective popular consciousness.

Beer

Hunter S. Thompson (or one of his autobiographically inspired characters) seems to order a Ballantine's in almost every one of his books. But then, with the amount of other mind altering substances he takes over the course of Fear and Loathing alone, beer is pretty much like water to Thompson. It’s tricky to find this one lying around in the States, but when you do it’s like finding a cultural relic that is still quite a fine ale. ‘Tis a shame that their outdated slogan America’s Largest Selling Ale is no longer true.

Duff – Well, you can buy Duff, but not in pubs. Duff is really just a symbol for bog-standard beer that any old fat dad might drink while escaping from his family life, but it’s still a million times more comic than drinking a pint of Fosters.

Pabst Blue Ribbon – Can only be bought in the US, I believe, but Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet has the last word on this:

Unfortunately it has become a trademark drink for another distinctly ugly symbolic mutation of American culture gone awry: hipsters.

Whiskey

Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s noir detective, frequently drinks large quantities of whiskey, but is not too fussy and also downs brandy and bourbon, which makes it difficult to say that whiskey really defines his character. Whiskey tends to go along with these other similar drinks in an alcohol haze where nobody really seems to care what they’re downing, just like Don McLean’s good old boys drinking whiskey and rye after the plane crash which killed Buddy Holly. In fact whiskey seems to get a much better hearing in popular song than other kinds of modern art; for example Irish folk song Whiskey in the Jar (see also Johnny Cash, AC/DC, Willie Nelson...).

Martini

My friend Andy was having a drink with a poetry Don (who we will proceed to call simply ‘Don’) in a bar in Oxford when ‘Don’ ordered a Martini. In a long winded way, ‘Don’ proceeded to ask for it to be mixed over crushed ice. He felt very embarrassed that he had had to resort to the corny phrase of asking for it to be ‘shaken not stirred’, but insisted that it really was better this way.

"I like to have a martini, Two at the very most. After three I'm under the table, after four I'm under my host." Dorothy Parker, 20th Century US poet and satirist.

Gin, aside from the Martini, does not have strong modern film or literature connotation. However, every time you enter a traditional British pub, you are unwittingly stepping into a space influenced by the early 19th century ‘gin palace’. After Hogarth had depicted the folly of outdoor gin consumption in Gin Lane Gin Lane, 1751, the great and good of London decided that they should move their revelries to a classier location, and thereby created the first lavish modern bars whose style was imitated by the late Victorian pubs on which our modern establishments are modelled.

Being drunk, it makes me rather angry that Darwin never bothered to get around to describing the evolution of pubs, and if he wants to challenge me to a game of shotglass chess (very genteel, definitely his style), I bet five English Pounds that I could drink that bastard under the table! Right, now where was i?

Rum

In a land where Balantine’s was not so available, a young Hunter S. Thompson settles for rum before doing practically everything that occurs to him in the quote below. Such proto-Fear and Loathing (in Puerto Rico) best embodies a young adult’s impulsive restlessness and dissatisfaction with being trapped in one place with only a glass of iced rum for company.

"It's still light in Mexico City, I thought. I had never been there and suddenly I was overcome by a tremendous curiosity about the place. Several hours of rum, combined with my mounting distaste for Puerto Rico, had me right on the verge of going into town, packing my clothes, and leaving on the first westbound plane. Why not? I thought."

Gutierrez’ autobiographical character Pedro Juan in The Dirty Havana Trilogy  is constantly downing rum and shagging his way through anecdote after dirty, filthy, dishevelled, drunken anecdote. His hard-boiled style makes the drink seem gritty, hedonistic and romantic.

“The first thing I did was buy a bottle of rum. It had been a long time since I’d had a drink. I went to an acquaintance’s house and bought it from him. It was black-market rum, expensive but good. I opened the bottle, and we had a few drinks. He asked me why I was so fucked up, and I told him part of the story. Not much of it.”

Moonshine

My friend Marcus brews his own moonshine. He always offers it to me when I go round to his house, but I’m somewhat afraid of it’s potatoey, vodka like smell and lethal strength. But perhaps drinking it would turn me into a Drunken Master. It certainly has this effect on Jackie Chan:

Richard E. Grant in Withnail & I is so desperate for booze, his will drink anything. This might as well also fall under the category of Moonshine:

Wine

Speaking of Withnail, we demand the finest wines available to humanity! We want them here, and we want them now. And we are not drunks, we are multi-millionaires!

Give me women, wine and snuff
Until I cry out “hold, enough!”
You may do so sans objection
Till the day of resurrection;
For bless my beard they aye shall be
My beloved Trinity.
- John Keats

Bourbon

Just take a look at how creepy Kubrick and Nicholson make ordering a bourbon in a deserted bar in The Shining. If you’re going for the weird-homicidally deranged style, this would certainly be the drink to carry it off with.

“So here’s what, you slip me a bottle of bourbon, little glass and some ice. You can do that, can’t you Lloyd? You’re not too busy, are ya?”
“No, Sir, not busy at all.”
“Good man, you set ‘em up and I’ll knock ‘em back, Lloyd, one b’ one. White man’s burden, Lloyd, my man, white man’s burden.”

Cosmopolitans

Sex and the City is pretty much the only place I can think of this occurring. It’s good that not all of the characters here are male. Women can be hardened alcoholics too, but it’s a shame that there aren’t more classic female drinking characters than this bunch of irritating narcissists. Edith Piaf does a good job of drinking herself to death in La Vie En Rose, and being French, she should probably go under the wine category. But the problem with alcoholics is that it's not one drink that defines them, it's drink in general.

White Russians

The Dude in The Big Lebowski drinks ‘Caucasians’ so constantly from about halfway through the film that it becomes pretty fertile ground for a drinking game. His loyalty to one drink alone is part of his endearing nature. “Careful man, there’s a beverage here.”

Brandy

After Jimmy Stewart saves the “possessed” Kim Novak from having fallen in the San Francisco bay in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the sly gent brings her back to his bungalow. Here Stewart subtly mixes cold remedies with a little 1950s homegrown seduction by offering her a brandy. This is of course, he tells her, to prevent a cold as she takes off her wet clothes. Stewart’s character must stand alongside Cary Grant in North by Northwest as an influence on James Bond.

Vodka

‘I’m Nick Belane, Super Dick’, declares Bukowski’s alcoholic mess-of-a-hero in Pulp, trying to gear himself up for another fruitless day of chasing meaningless leads as he hurtles inevitably toward the narrative finality which he calls the Red Sparrow:

“‘God damn it,’ I said.
Then the other parts gradually began to loosen up. Finally I took one step. Two steps. Then more steps, toward my desk. I got around behind it. Opened a drawer. Found the pint of vodka. Unscrewed it. Had a good straight hit. Decided to call it a day and begin all over again tomorrow. “

Absinthe

Absinthe has a notorious affiliation with the visual arts, appearing in works by Rafaelli, Gaugin, Toulouse Lautrec and Hemingway, who mentions it in Death in the Afternoon and For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, I consider Hemingway to be a boring novelist with a love of borderline homoerotic machismo who consistently damaged his mental and physical health with his excessive drinking. He was not a lover of alcohol, he was an addict, and therefore it’s difficult to respect his particular predelictions.

Champagne

It may not be obvious in the films, but the literary James Bond is portrayed as a frequent drinker of Champagne prestige cuvées. A count of over 22 Bond films reveals 35 occasions on which the character was portrayed drinking Champagne, of which 17 were Bollinger, preferably Bollinger R.D., and 7 were Dom Pérignon.

Since I’ve included Sex and the City, one might as well mention Absolutely Fabulous under champagne, much as it pains me to include this fluff in the same breath as Picasso and The Dude.
___________________________________________________________

Having already written the majority of this article, I discovered by coincidence that Bruce Robinson, writer of Withnail & I, and Johnny Depp have just finished filming an adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s The Rum Diaries, set to be released in September and to be the most alcoholic film ever produced. Therefore, I shall henceforth adopt rum as my drink of choice, since, out of all the beverages above, it probably has the coolest associations, and will hopefully form some kind of subconscious link between me and Johnny Depp in peoples’ minds, leading me inexorably toward relieving him of responsibility for Angelina Jolie. Foolproof logic. Now, time for some rum... where’s the waiter gone? Oy! Maestro! Traeme otro cuba libre que las chicas se estan empezando a poner feas! Jajajajaja..

P.S. Many thanks especially to C. Weeks, A. Hughes-Onslow, J. Makinson and J. Arizu, and the collaborative skills of Google Docs.

UN Event

The UN event went off pretty much hitchless today. We got some good publicity, with Ed being interviewed by the BBC and our event being officially opened by Mira Sorvino, Hollywood actress and UN 'goodwill ambassador'.

There was a lot of wooly talk about what our installation represented, and Ed, who was proclaimed 'The Artist' on all the publicity material (as is only his right given his central role in organising everything), had to talk rather diffidently about how the chainlink fence, like, represented the lack of freedom of trafficked persons and stuff, man.

So it was interesting to see how media establishments (in this case the BBC) treat you when you are presented as 'The Artist'. We talked to the BBC journalists about how the coverage of this event will be presented, and they volunteered the fact that due to the overriding narrative of democratic revolution in the Middle-East and North Africa, our human trafficking event would be likely to get little coverage, except on the BBC website. The BBC editors feel that people can only handle news in 15 minute segments, and so all the extra material they film just goes on the website where only those with a particular interest can find it. If it doesn't fit into the general zeitgeisty narrative, it's not getting on air. Is this really any better than what Fox News does? I guess it is, because Fox News is not even news, but they both pursue an agenda of sorts. It is clear that the BBC knows how it wants to spin these revolutions, and other subjects are unlikely to get much of a look in while this is going on. I almost feel sorry to criticise the BBC, because they are so much less objectionable than other media organisations, but you can't protect something you believe in by being totally uncritical of it.

So here is our exhibit in all its glory, our beautiful, expensive mannequins representing how much we have alleviated our Occidental consciences by pledging to give some money to fight human trafficking. I apologise, but it's late and I'm feeling cynical.

UN Event Get-In

As I may have mentioned before, I'm helping my friend Ed put on an event for UNODC (Office on Drugs and Crime - sounds like an exciting office, huh?) to launch the Blue Heart campaign, a fund to combat human trafficking. It takes place tomorrow morning in the opulent surroundings of Lancaster house, which as someone pointed out on the book of faces, looks like the place where James Bond had a swordfight in the terrible Bond film Die Another Day.

With all the setting up done, we escaped to eat Thai food on Haymarket.

Now I just have to turn up in a suit tomorrow and introduce myself to as many NGO people as possible, being careful to mention that I did a large amount of work to put on this event and that they should let me work for them because I'm all intelligent and that. Though obviously I'll say it in a sycophantic and ingratiating way in my best RP accent.

Band Names

I went to see the Iranian Band Radio Tehran at Cargo on Saturday night with my friend Ed. Jason, the drummer in Ed's band Clockwork Quartet is also the drummer for Radio Tehran, so we got free tickets.

Ed needs a name for a new band that he's managing. He describes their sound as 'Dubstep Portishead' or Dubstep/Trip-Hop. He has bought a decommissioned tank (or Armoured Personnel Carrier, to be more precise) that he wants to convert into a sound stage whch can be taken to gigs and which would act as a platform and PA system for the band. It certainly would be good for generating free publicity (aside from the cost of the tank, which has already been incurred), and it would be pretty hard to forget that band who entered the venue in a tank.

I love it when friends want to brainstorm band names. Last summer I drove with my friend Foxy from London to Bilbao and back in 4 days to buy a Halo, a kind of Hang Drum . We were approaching Bordeaux, and Foxy was tired from driving all day.

To keep him awake, we discussed band names for his 3-piece (hang drum, double bass, sax). Unfortunately for him, my suggestions are what I would like to name a band, and I generally follow the philosophy that the more ridiculous or amusing a band name is, the better. There are some really boring band names out there (The Killers, anyone? Oasis? This may be the reason both bands have disbanded, but we thank them both for making the right decision).

The Beatles must have been high when this happened, but it's a good thing Lennon was in charge of band naming and not McCartney:

February 10, 1964, Plaza Hotel in New York.
Included on THE BEATLES TAPES VOL. II: EARLY BEATLEMANIA 1963-64 CD.

Ringo:  John thought of the name Beatles, and he'll tell
        you about it now.

John:   It's just that it means Beatles, isn't it, you
        know?  That's just a name, like "shoe."

Paul:   "The Shoes."  See, we could've been called "The
        Shoes," for all you
        know.

Foxy has a McCartneyesque quality to his band name choices, but as far as I know he has still not found a name for his band and is instead concentrating on his festival tent/event company called Autumn Shift. His suggestions for band names included:

• The Tousled Ape
• It's Our Civic Duty
• Timber and Steel (stolen from The Cat Empire song The Chariot)
• Mario is Our Cat's Name

I know, right? Where#s the pithiness, where's the pazazz? He should have gone with one of mine, like,

• Gay Hitler
• Fancy Wank
• The Shit
• Flange
• Stupid Hat
• and on a more sensible note, City of Glass (from Paul Auster's New York Trilogy)

Which is why you should not come to me with your band name brainstorming problems if you require a sensible answer.

Nevertheless, Ed did just that. Some suggestions from the both of us for his 'industrial themed dubstep trip-hop' band included:

• Military Industrial Complex (Ed's suggestion, not bad, but not punchy enough)
• Spawn Point (amusing, if you're a geek, but somewhat weird otherwise)
• Neon Flare (sounds like an Electro Indie band who think they're better than they are)
• Event Horizon (unfortunately there's already a film called that)
• Custom Data Cables (meh)
• Lascannon/Ion Cannon/Lion Cannon (again, too niche)
• Charlie Sheen's Fire Breathing Fists (my personal favourite, but hard to take seriously)
• Magma Smelter (Industrial; yes, good; no)

There are, in fact, a large number of possible Charlie Sheen related bandnames that actually sound ok, for example: Tiger Blood, Winning, F-18, etc... There are people already cashing in on this gold mine of memes, as evidenced by the Tiger Blood energy drink which has already been launched in the US - US firm launches new Tiger Blood energy drink inspired by Charlie Sheen.

With band names, it's not so much the destination as the search. A good band finds its own name, I guess. Others have to settle for names like Nickleback, U2, or even James Blunt or Kanye West. The most important thing is to use your creative genius to invent combinations of words that sound new and refreshing, even if they don't literally mean anything. It's gratifying to be able to be able to make your friends laugh, and that's why if you ask me what to call your band, I will tell you to call it something that will likely get you laughed off stage. Gay Hitler and Charlie Sheen's Fire-Breathing Fists are hereby copywrited by me forever.

A History Of My Life In Bicycles

I couldn’t ride an unstabilised bike until I was 11. People tried to teach me on a number of occasions, but I can imagine that I was a terrible student, easily discouraged by my initial failure. The first bike I successfully rode was recovered by my mum from the police when it  was left behind after a robbery on our road and nobody came to collect it from the police. My mum spray-painted it dark blue, just in case the robber saw it and wanted it back. It was a small mountain bike, low enough for me to put my feet on the floor and feel secure. We went to Ruskin park, which is on the side of a hill in south London, and I stood at the top of a slope, let the bike roll gently down, and without having to concentrate on pedalling, suddenly realised that balancing wasn’t that hard. Einstein himself believed this to be a good metaphor for life, (‘to keep your balance you have to keep moving’), though I’m not sure he would have been as successful a poet as a mathematician.

The next bike I can dredge up from my blurry memories of childhood was a red mountain bike I had in my middle teens. I remember this bike because I was once cycling through my local park at 1 o’ clock on a Saturday afternoon on my way to play tennis, when I heard running feet behind me and a voice calling ‘Oi, mate, stop, stop!’ Unsure of what he wanted and not feeling particularly threatened, as there were many people nearby, I stopped and turned around. A mixed-race boy, younger than my 15 years approached me, and with a mean, yet ultimately fragile expression, told me that I should give him my bike, or he would proceed to slit my belly open. He brandished some sort of indistinctly offensive weapon in a sheepish manner. Trying to ignore the adrenaline suddenly pumping through my blood, I considered my options. I chose to neither fight, nor run away, but instead started shouting loudly and wildly, ‘help, help, I’m being robbed’. A man walking his dog 20 metres away came sprinting over and the young boy beat a retreat across the fields.

In my late teens, I cycled infrequently, never once thinking of using it to get to my school, because of the hill I would have to climb on the way there and back. This seems somewhat timid to me now, as I regularly cycle ten miles a day or more. When I left school, I started to use public transport much more than before to get around London, which was then not unreasonably expensive (bus fare: 70p for any journey). At university in Nottingham, I cycled around campus, which was on a big hill and a real pain to climb up. I have no memory of what this bike looked like, and it subsequently fell off the back of my parents’ car on the M4, never to be seen again.

[While I write this in Starbucks near Spitalfields Market and Liverpool Street, a succession of customers enter the disabled toilet next to me, realise that the toilet is blocked and a massive, smelly shit floats near the top of the bowl, and emerge disgusted to remark on the foul sight that they have just witnessed  to their friends. It really is a quite hilarious and predictable human spectacle.]

Coming back to London, I finally took to cycling in a big way, realising that it was not nearly as dangerous as I had supposed previously. I hate doing exercise and I love trying to multitask as many things at the same time as possible, so what better way to get exercise than while going somewhere you had to be anyway, saving money, saving the environment, and getting to feel smug and self-righteous about all of the above? Yes, I love to cycle because cycling makes me feel better than you, you wasteful, environment destroying capitalist pig. When I get to the pearly gates and I have to make my case to St. Peter, this shit is gonna get me on the guestlist. What? Do I believe in god? Of course not, do I look stupid to you?

In October and November 2008, I went to Denver for a month and a half to volunteer for the state Democratic Party campaign. I was offered a car by my hosts, showing not only misplaced faith in my driving abilities, but a completely US-centric view of the necessity of cars. I cycled to work every day instead, taking about 25 minutes, and somehow I managed to find one of the few cycle paths in the city, though some of the journey was through back streets to avoid the massive, car infested freeway. It frustrated me seeing all those SUVs with just one person inside, as well as the posh houses with their sprinklers constantly on to make their front lawns verdant, even though the whole of the South-West of the US suffers water shortages.

I went to visit my former flatmate from when I lived in Washington DC, who was living in Boca Raton, Florida. He drove me everywhere by car, but in the gated community 45 minutes from Miami where he lived with his parents (while he studied at law school), he would walk his dogs in a big circuit, and we took his mountain bikes for a ride around the quiet road between the gated houses. I took the opportunity of the carless road to ride the good quality bike as fast as possible. One of the dogs decided to chase me until he ran right in front of my bike, causing me to break sharply and fall over the handlebars, cutting my hand and knee. A plaster/bandaid solution was called upon, and it was generally a less painful accident than when I fell off a scooter on two successive days in on Ko Pha-Ngan Island in Thailand.

The next time I fell off a bike was one year later, in winter 2009/10. Living by the football stadium in Grenoble, France, I was about to be late for a French class, and it was raining quite hard. As I cycled down the side of the football stadium, the concrete path veered off round the side of the stadium, and as I continued straight ahead, the short flight of stairs leading down the stadium side appeared. The breaks were wet and ineffective, and the bike flew over the edge quite fast. I must have gone over the top of the handlebars and landed on my shoulder then back, which was good because it avoided getting me mangled with the bike on landing. I was looking into the air, wondering where I was hurting most and how badly when a number of people appeared above me,

« Ca va? »

« Ouai, je pense. I’ai tombé... uh… » [How do you say, from the steps ? De l’éscalier? Des marches?]

« Baa, ouai, je t’ai vu. Vous etes blessé?»

« Je crois pas. »

Covered in dirty, muddy water, I returned home to change my trousers and accept my inevitable class lateness.

The summer before going to France, I was back in London, finishing my MA, not a care in the world, a blooming new relationship to occupy my absent, wandering mind, and I wanted to get a badass looking bike on which to prosecute my love of cycling through the empty streets of early morning London after carousing out in town or at friends houses. My friend Karim worked at Cotswolds, a hiking and outdoorsy shop which was a partner of the next-door Cyclesurgery. He got 20% off there, so he said he would let me buy a bike through him. I picked it up at the shop near Liverpool Street, rode it to the South Bank via Fopp in Shaftsbury Avenue and saw a film with Alastair at the BFI (he works there and gets free tickets).  I chained the bike up with a new £30 lock (not a D-Lock unfortunately), and when I came out, the lock had been cut clean through and in place of my new Specialized Sirrus 2008, the thief had left as compensation his Dawes Mean Streets; another, much older roadbike. Did he feel guilty for stealing it? The bike he left was worth maybe £50-70. I told the police and they said they’d call me. One morning months later I was asleep when the phone rang.

“Hello, can I speak to Mr. Lubbock?”

“Huh… Is that the accident claims or the double glazing people again?”

“No, this is the police.”

“Uh… yeah, that’s me. What… I mean, how can I help you?” [Shit, they’ve found me, run, now]

“You had a Specialized bike stolen. We’ve found one matching the description. Can you describe any distinguishing features of your bike.”

“Well… it had the light attaching clips still on…”

“No, this isn’t it then. Sorry, bye.”

I went back to sleep. Maybe I had never been awake in the first place. I guess not, only real life is that infuriatingly disappointing.

Just a few months later, after the summer was over and the long winter in the valleys of the French Alps started, I found a beautiful example of French communal life operating under the guise of an atelier, a workshop. I paid a 15 Euro membership, bought a fantastic old but repaired silver Motobecane bike with non-standard old wheel sizes (this matters when trying to obtain tyres for it in the UK). It had leather paniers, baskets with buckles to tie the tops down. I massively overused these baskets to cram in extra shopping on trips back from the supermarket, somewhat breaking them over the course of 10 months. The bicycle broke and had to be repaired numerous times over the year, not least after falling down the flight of steps, but I got to know what went wrong with bikes most commonly, and I got to practice my French in explaining to the helpers at the atelier how to fix what had broken. There is a massive vocabulary relating to the parts of the bike and the tools and pieces you use to repair it which you would never learn if you did not spend your time living within a language. Here is an article I wrote about living in Grenoble when I was there -

Grenoble Life: How to be poor in Grenoble

I brought the bike back with me on Easyjet, since I had become somewhat attached to it and wanted to use it in London. I had to loosen the handlebars and detach the pedals to pack it flat in a box, and was then informed that it was massively over the weight limit for a bicycle, being double the 12.5kg limit. I protested that this limit was not made clear on the website, and that as a poor student, I could not possibly pay the 11 Euro per extra kg penalty. After much arguing in French, he made me agree to pay for 4 extra kg, and I took a ticket to the payment window. I produced my maestro card, and was informed that they did not accept maestro. After some more arguing, I was released to departures without paying any extra cost. It's your lucky day, they told me. Hah, I thought, JW - 1, The Man - 0.

I was sure that if I could find in London the spare parts that made the atelier such a useful place to repair bikes, that I could make decent repair bikes and then sell them. I saw skeletons of bikes chained up in London all the time, and with a little harder looking, at almost every decrepit looking bike I saw on the street, I found abandoned, unchained ones too. Within two days I found one almost working bike with flat tyres in Peckham, and one with an uncentred wheel on Brick Lane. But I was soon off to Barcelona to live abroad again and the idea of making bikes languished. About 7 of them still occupy the little house at the back of my parents’ garden.

Barcelona was not a particularly happy time for me, but I remember the straight sloping grid system with some fondness. The way the sun shone so brightly up the streets of Gracia between 9 and 10 in the morning, blinding you as you headed towards the city centre, is an image and feeling I don’t think I will forget in a hurry.

Back home to London then, back to the house I have lived in since I was 1 year old. Back to my bikes, the French Motobecane, the Dahon Jack folding bike, which is the most used, as you can take it on the tube, lock it up, or take it into shops or houses with you partially folded. I am trying to get rid of the bikes in the back, secretly craving to replace them with a beautiful new road bike that costs loads. I know I don’t deserve this fantasy bike, and I’m perfectly happy with my crappy old ones that litter the house and back garden. At least no one wants to steal them. Getting a really good bike almost seems oxymoronic, like getting a jewel encrusted fork or something. They’re simple things that perform a simple task very well.

There really is no overall idea or theme connecting these stories and memories; just like life itself, in fact. But the time you spend in your life shooting along on a machine which magnifies your potential velocity is like the time you spend in your life asleep; a discreet, self-contained amount of time intended to produce a necessary result. It always seemed strange to me that the bicycle was really only invented just before the car, and has always lived in its shadow. It’s nice to dream of a world where noisy, polluting cars are in the minority and get their own lane to the side of the road, while the majority of people cycle in the middle of the road. If people only knew how easy, safe and enjoyable cycling was, maybe the daily commute would be something they looked forward to, not a source of misery, penury and annoyance. I’ve been threatened by a taxi driver who told me that he would like to strangle me to death in the middle of the road, but I’ve never seen two cyclists get angry at each other.

Fight The Power

On February 15, 2003, when I was 17, I went to the biggest mass demonstration ever held in Britain. As I sat atop a lion in Trafalgar Square, I gazed in awe at the column of human beings inching slowly up Whitehall, the crowd disappearing off into the distance and filling the road. It would have taken hours to watch everyone pass by. These days formed the person I became, at once hopeful and cynical, desperate for a different politics and resigned to the inevitability of the status quo.

Nothing came from that demand to abstain from violence, leading many young people into an apathetic, despondent malaise, making us feel disenfranchised. Politicians don't listen to us; they don't have to, so why should we listen to them, right? They're all the same anyway. So we turn off, distract ourselves with frivolous ephemera until someone finally notices that these powerful people have been corrupt and greedy while our backs were turned, and we say 'oh, see, they're all the same, what's the point in politics, it doesn't make a difference what I think.' What difference does it make to politics if people feel empowered, important, making a difference, making history even, like we did on the first anti-war march?

We were hopeful, we had made our voices heard, but we gave into our failure and believed not that we were strong and important, but that we weren't. We're not very good at revolutions in Britain. The Peasants' Revolt in 1381 was betrayed and brutally crushed by the King and nobles. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was neither glorious nor a revolution, but a clever piece of spin put on a religious coup d'etat. The Industrial Revolution, meanwhile, led to the Highland Clearances, infant chimney sweeps and WW1 (also direct representation, modern medicine and electricity). This doesn't mean we're no good at people power, we managed to subjugate a quarter of the world for hundreds of years, after all. That's got to count for something - it's impressive even if it outrages our liberal consciences.

But we are complacent. We've had it quite easy over the last few hundreds of years compared to other nations. There's not been a battle in the UK since Culloden, 1746. We've forgotten how to fight for what we want, just look at the England football team. A Marxist Leninist would probably say that the international bourgeoisie had paid off the proletariat with the surplus labour stolen from poor countries. It's certainly true that we have exported our working classes to other parts of the world.

Where does that leave us? Fundamentally, if we were demanding the same basic reforms and changes which they are demanding in the Middle-East, it would be easier to rally people to the cause. But how many people get passionate and emotional about the AV vote? Most people have little idea what RP is, let alone any idea of the difference between STV and AV+. We have to get better at using the same technology which has assisted the recent revolutions to widen the debate to more difficult or marginal political causes.

But the 2011 revolutions cannot be credited to anyone. Not to the dictators who inspired resistance; to the young man whose self-immolation  in Tunisia sparked the first demonstrations; not to wikileaks who revealed the extent of corruption by President Ben-Ali's family, and not to new media like facebook or twitter.

The world has been changing in a thousand unnoticed ways, and we should all be emboldened by what we have seen to try harder than ever to embody the political virtues and goals we dream of. Together we can be more powerful than a nuclear explosion, we can become life, the creator of worlds.