Why I respect Peter Hitchens.

Adversarial politics

Believe it or not, there are honourable conservative voices out there. By 'honourable', I really mean those few figures with integrity. You don't have to agree with someone to respect their point of view. This is easy to forget in a political discourse lacking worthy opponents of the Left.

The fulminating columnist Peter Hitchens is one such case of the honourable rightist. The particular strain of conservatism, to which he adheres, may be summarised as traditional, cultural or socio-moral conservatism. His targets include the Westminster consensus, not only the Labour Party, but the Conservative Party as well. He sees the country threatened from a left-wing cultural putsch against the vestiges of an organic social order. Yet it's clear that he is no friend of the current flavour of right-wing politics.

On an ABC panel with Dan Savage and Germaine Greer, Hitchens was asked what he thinks of Tony Abbott. He immediately laid into the Australian Prime Minister deeming him a 'fake conservative' for his neoliberal economic agenda, pseudo-moralism, and connections with Rupert Murdoch. He has dismissed UKIP as a 'dad's army party', unlike many of his associates in the right-wing press, seeing the party only as a means of annihilating the Conservative Party.

"I also yearn for a truly radical party," he once confessed to the BBC. In the same segment, Hitchens made clear what he really opposes: namely, the centre-ground of the Third Way and 'compassionate' Conservatism. He sees both forces as two sides of the same coin (and he's not wrong) routinely flipped every four or five years. In short, he wants to abolish the fakery of personality politics and return to adversarial politics.

When it comes to the economy Peter Hitchens has said that he is for a robustly social democratic model, which would include a safety-net and universal health-care. It would include what he describes as strong employment rights and social housing. He opposes the right to buy scheme which has wiped out so many council houses and inflated the housing market. On top of this, Hitchens has routinely criticised privatisation and the legacy of Thatcherism.

Years ago on Question Time, Peter Hitchens savaged Iain Duncan Smith and called for the renationalisation of the railways. It's not the only case either. "I think there was a case for nationalising coal, made in the 1920s and accepted by many people for non-dogmatic reasons," he wrote in his column in October 2012. "I have always believed that the electric power grid should be nationalised. I think it should be renationalised  as a prelude to an enormous programme of nuclear power station building, without which we face an appalling energy crisis within 20 years."

In a Chat Politics interview Peter Hitchens was asked whether or not he thought it would be possible to build a right-wing alternative to the Conservative Party. He responded "Who says it'll be right-wing?" Of course, this kind of response is symptomatic of the very view he takes of the prime oscillation of UK politics between Labour and Conservative. He often eschews the label of 'right-wing' for himself, preferring the title of Burkean conservative. It's evident that he sees the left-to-right spectrum as a defunct measure of politics and yet he never strays away from bashing what he calls 'the Left'.

"The left's real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social," he insists in one of his columns. "They lead to a powerful state. This not because they actively set out to achieve one." Not surprisingly, the way he frames left-wing politics really comes from the position he takes on cultural and socio-moral issues. "It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers."

As a former Trotskyite, Peter Hitchens remains within the bootprint of twentieth century leftism, bemoaning the cultural revolution of the 1960s, yearning for a revival of the traditions and social norms it killed. He's wrong on almost all cultural and social issues, but he's right that the problem, for people like him, isn't just the Left - it's Thatcherism too. Fortunately, it is too late to turn back the clock on the progress achieved in our attitudes to sexuality, gender and race. The malaise of the reactionary press is really down to this harsh reality.

The Resurgent Right?

 

Since the Crash of 2008 we have witnessed the resurgence of free-market libertarianism on the American Right. The bailouts of the banks may have kept the cogs turning in the capitalist system, but it was a violation of everything held most often by free-market libertarians. It didn’t take long and the Tea Party movement emerged as the basis for a renewed Republican opposition to the Obama administration. Backed by Fox News and associated nut-hatch Republicans the Tea Parties flourished at city halls where they fought for health-care to remain privately run for profit and not on the basis of need. It seemed peculiar for liberals and radicals that the conservatives had managed to mobilise protests across the crisis-riddled body of America. Even for conservative Republicans it was an odd sight, right-wingers taking to the streets like anti-war protestors. The parallels reached an apogee of high farce with Glenn Beck leading demonstrators to Washington in an obscene satire on the March for Jobs and Freedom. In a way these farcical scenes are nothing new.

 

It may be a surprise for some, but there is a long history of this on the American Right. It was Christian rightist Paul Weyrich who infiltrated the activist circles of the New Left in the 1970s. He would set out to use these same methods to mobilise the conservative evangelical community as an electoral bloc for the Republican Party. The right-wing televangelists were easily organised once it looked like the churches might lose their tax-exempt status. The spiritual leader of a hippie commune Francis Shaeffer snapped at the landmark decision of Roe v Wade on abortion. He had been a figure of the 1960s cultural revolution and yet Shaeffer flipped and became a major fundamentalist leader on the issue of abortion. He would lobby the Ford administration and even advocate terrorism as a necessary method in the battle to defend the sacred foetus and its right to life. By the time Shaeffer died the Moral Majority had taken over with much more reactionary agenda of rolling back advances in women’s rights and gay rights (causes that he had actually supported).

 

Developments on the Right are not to be separated from the circumstances of the time. The revival of a Protestant Right came in the 1980s in reaction to the dramatic cultural changes of the 1960s when a greater sphere of freedom was attained for African-Americans, as well as homosexuals and women. Feminism had emerged from the failure of the Commune movement in its descent into patriarchal forms of domination. The increased accessibility to contraceptives and abortion had liberated individuals from the old sexual morays of the past. There was a burgeoning opening for civil liberties and rights, as well as some economic opportunities, for African-Americans. The Right did not need so much an economic reaction as a cultural reaction to try and slow these developments. And so the Christian Right swooped in to elect Ronald Reagan in a coalition with the anti-Communists, the neoconservatives and the libertarians.

 

We find the same when we look into the history of the anti-Communist Right. The cause of anti-Communism had belonged to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the 1940s originally before it was absorbed by the Republican Party with the demagoguery of Joe McCarthy and the ‘Red Scare’ of the 50s. The best way to support a rightward shift in the Democrats was to co-opt the means by which the Truman administration had sought to justify the military-industrial complex.  The Republicans had found a way to outmuscle the Democrats. This was later made further evident by the Democratic administrations which launched the war in Vietnam. The Republican administration of Nixon intensified the war to win not just one term but two terms in office. So anti-Communism became a solid pillar of American conservatism until 1989 when the Berlin Wall, unexpectedly, collapsed when faced with the might of the German people.

 

After that the anti-Communist Right largely lost its purpose as its mission seemed to have been fulfilled, and not by American hegemony but by forces endogenous to the Soviet system. Significantly, old Cold War conservatives such as Pat Buchanan have moved to a non-interventionist position on foreign policy since the Berlin Wall fell. The CIA agent Chalmers Johnson and army man Lawrence Wilkerson have made similar ideological shifts. It is consistent because if one believes that the American hegemon was necessary to safeguard the free world from the tentacles of the Soviet conspiracy for world domination then once the threat is gone the US should retreat and become a normal country. This has opened up a space for other rival tendencies on the American Right: such as the neoconservatives who updated the rational for American military aggression. Yet it also created greater space for scepticism of the military establishment from such sectors as the free-market libertarian Right.

 

By the end of the first decade of the 21^st Century the prevailing forces of reaction would have largely discredited themselves and opened up a space for the Tea Party movement. The Bush administration was a lot like the Reagan administration in that it was an alliance of the Christian Right with the neoconservatives. Bush had posed as a ‘compassionate conservative’ pledging a prudent foreign policy of staying out of other peoples’ business. Before the election of 2000 was successfully stolen Bush had found an ally in Dick Cheney, a hawk of unbelievable proportions. Once in office the Bushites jumped at the opportunity to crackdown on civil liberties and engage in multiple wars. The Protestant and Catholic Right were mobilised to support the Bush administration in its support for abstinence promotion in Africa, its opposition to abortion, gay marriage, as well as euthanasia and stem-cell research. The neoconservatives moved in to provide the rationalisation for the bloodbath in Iraq. By the election of 2008 both the Christian Right and the neoconservatives were left largely discredited just by association with the crimes of Bush.

 

With the incoming Obama administration the Republicans had to open up a new front as Obama was following a more hawkish position in foreign affairs than Bush. The prospect of economic reform had to be fought because the country was in a deep recession and the Left might win greater ground in such desperate times. What is called ‘Obama-care’ really comes out of the conservative searches for an alternative to serious health-care reform in the 1990s. It was supported by Newt Gingrich. The individual mandate was a means to safeguarding the state of affairs which denies the American citizen a fundamental right to adequate health-care. Reform is somewhat inevitable given the role that the health system has played in bankrupting American industry. But at the other end the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry will be pushing hard to make sure their interests are covered. As if this situation weren’t bad enough the Koch brothers moved in to finance a surge in libertarian protest. Faced with this the Obama administration had no reason to establish a national health service. Once again, serious and much needed reform was offset and America would remain the only advanced capitalist society – other than South Africa – without universal health-care.

So the space had been opened up for a resurgence of interest in Ron Paul, the Austrian economists and even the fiction of Ayn Rand. The paranoid rambling clown Glenn Beck rose to stardom. Significantly Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, a member of the Ayn Rand cult, as his running mate. It was a necessary front opened up by the bailouts of banks under Bush and Obama. The agenda of shrinking the state had newfound support given the new mission was austerity to destroy what little of the New Deal had survived the decades of erosion by Republican and Democratic administrations. It should also be noted that the space has been opened up to paleoconservatives who have positioned themselves against the military adventurism of the neoconservatives. Yet it has been the libertarians who have been able to muster a position in mainstream American politics. The Tea Party movement succeeded in providing the basis for a Republican victory in the midterm elections of 2010 and Ron Paul made it into the debate at the 2012 election. Even still this is more so a symptom of chaos on the American Right – to be compared with Barry Goldwater’s winning the Republican ticket in 1964 – than an emergent platform to see take office in 2016 or even 2020.

 

This article was originally written and posted at the Third Estate on September 12th 2013.

Strange Bedfellows on Syria.

The opposition to another war has its usual crowd of seasoned anti-war activists, from Lindsey German and John Rees to George Galloway and Tariq Ali. Yet the push for intervention has attracted a considerably broad range of opposition voices. Somewhat surprisingly Glenn Beck, Nick Griffin and Nigel Farage have all come out in opposition to any intervention in Syria albeit for reasons we can only describe as nutty. Nick Griffin claims we must take the side of the Assadian abattoir because a war with Syria is only a stone’s throw away from a war with Russia – a country he designates as the “last great bastion of the white race” - though I’m sure Putin will be glad to hear Mr Griffin is on his side. As for Farage it is, no doubt, more about the huge sacrifices of ‘our boys’ out in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as an extension of his calls for serious austerity. Of course, if it weren’t so damn costly (to us) it would be fine to rush in and drench ourselves in the blood of the Syrian people. It looks like another way for the UKIP to soak up the puddles of Tory disenchantment. And naturally Glenn Beck frames the events in terms of a coming apocalypse because there are to be ”no winners in the West” from sending guns to Syria’s Islamists.

At the leading newspapers of reaction we can find major columnists who have all come out in stern opposition and criticism of David Cameron and his hawkish posturing. Only weeks ago Con Coughlin was scathing about the naïveté of Peter Oborne in his latest book on Iran’s right to enrich uranium (a case refreshing in its incongruity to the hysteria around its subject) and yet Coughlin and Oborne were unified against the prospect of another war in the Middle East. At The Daily Mail, the reactionary Peter Hitchens was quick to express gratitude to Parliament for the outcome and had nothing but ferocious contempt for Cameron’s adventurism and went as far as to call for the PM’s resignation. Even the interminable Lord Tebbit came out to damn Cameron for this and suggested it would Cameron’s fault if he was ousted over this. This isn’t the first time the Right has turned out to oppose a war, Iraq had right-wing opponents such as Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan. It shouldn’t be a surprise in a sense, solidarity is not a value of the Right given that the system they represent already exists and has far from any serious competitors or enemies on the horizon poised to supersede it.

Meanwhile it is the self-appointed guardians of social democracy who have taken a more vocal line of support. Paddy Ashdown and Shirley Williams turned out to pen a war-hungry article with Simon Hughes and Nick Clegg in The Evening Standard. Though I am never disappointed in Simon Hughes and the lows to which he will stoop. It was sad to see Shirley Williams on board for war as she had taken a noble stand over Iraq, then one may recall that she voted for the Health & Social Care act (so it’s hardly the first betrayal). The opposing article was written by Tory MP Douglas Carswell, it was a modestly sceptical piece of writing which stood in stark contrast to the delusions of the Liberal chickenhawks. Paddy Ashdown seems to honestly believe that the only way to strengthen international law is to take the side of the Obama administration, which has been blunt that the intervention will be made outside of the UN and thereby violating international law. As if this wasn’t cretinous enough Lord Ashdown had a hissy fit as soon as the government couldn’t get its way. The list of reasons to torment these people to the end of the earth gets longer by the day it would seem.

This article was written for The Third Estate on September 2nd 2013.

The Politics of a Litterateur.

With the campaign slogan "You'll get more with Gore", Gore Vidal ran for Congress in 1960 in a traditionally Republican district of New York. The planks in the platform including recognition of Mao's China, federal aid for education and progressive taxes. He received more votes than any Democrat in five decades, but still lost. Though Gore Vidal has strong links to the Democratic Party through his family as well as his own affiliation in the early 1970s he chaired the People's Party alongside prominent socialists like Benjamin Spock. The Party campaigned for withdrawal from Vietnam, legalisation of cannabis, a higher minimum wage and the introduction of a maximum wage. Ultimately Vidal opted to support McGovern against Nixon, to avoid splitting the anti-war vote and hopefully end the Vietnam war. It would be the last chance for New Deal liberalism to save itself. He ran for the Senate in 1982 and campaigned to tax Church income, nationalisation of natural resources and the replacement of the current system with a Parliamentary democracy.

In 1988 Gore Vidal presented five proposals to improve the American Republic. The first of which was to limit elections to 8 weeks and secondly to ban any candidate or party from buying time on television, radio and newspapers. In Vidal's America the media ought to provide free time and space for the candidates to be interviewed and debate with one another. No more, no less. The growing decay of political language and the system at large was a great worry of Gore's in his later years. The costs of advertising must be eliminated as a necessary step to the removal of money from the political arena. Thirdly, social security should be factored out of fiscal policy in order to expose the bloated military expenditure to the American people. This is all a part of Vidal's isolationist convictions. He goes further to recommend American withdrawal from NATO and all foreign adventures, as well as an end to military aid to foreign countries (e.g. Israel). The line is populist as the cash can be put to better use at home, for infrastructure and public education Vidal stresses.

The fourth proposal was to legalise the use and sale of all drugs because Prohibition only made the Mafia rich while alcoholism sky-rocketed in the 1920s. Addiction cannot be eliminated through criminalisation. This fits into his own commitment to civil liberties and rights pitched since the 1960s when Vidal first moved to the Democratic Left. He later corresponded with Timothy McVeigh and found that he understood the libertarian reasoning for a rebellion against the government. After all the Clinton regime had the FBI incinerate 80 people at Waco with the broad approval of the liberal Left. Vidal remained a scourge of civil authoritarianism when the Bushites stole the election and launched the country into war. The last proposal was to end the Cold War and initiate the beginning of economic integration between America and Russia, justified by self-preservation in a world increasingly centred around China and Japan. It would seem Vidal was internationalist on economics and isolationist on foreign policy.

The propositions are reformist, even conservative, in tone as the recommendations of are about the preservation of the body politic. The ruling-class and prevailing politics had become a drag on the Republic in his mind. The national security state would inevitably threaten the foundations of the United States. Its rapacious growth would eventually devour every chunk of the mountain of revenues from the American tax-payer. It was in this same presentation that Vidal delved into the details of the 1986 US Budget. He breaks it down for us: out of $794 billion in revenue a total of $294 billion goes to social security while $286 billion goes to defence, $12 billion on foreign arms to client states and $8 billion on energy (e.g. nuclear weapons); $27 billion on benefits for war vets and $142 billion on interest payments for loans used to prop up the national security state. Other federal spending came to $177 billion, partly the size of the deficit. Out of the $500 billion left over after social security around $475 billion is spent on the national security state.

 

 

Out of all the Founding Fathers it is Aaron Burr who is most admired by Gore Vidal, not Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson or even Tom Paine. For Vidal it is the man who was never President but served as Vice President under Jefferson who is most important. He notes that Burr introduced a degree of professionalism to American politics. Later, Aaron Burr challenged Alexander Hamilton to a duel before shooting him - a standard maintained by Vice Presidents until Dick Cheney mistook a lawyer for a quail. It's clear that Vidal saw himself as a man of the Jeffersonian revolutionary tradition. He remained concerned that the US was desecrating its republican ideals. The way Vidal portrayed Jefferson in Burr was particularly controversial back in 1973 as it included an account of Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings. The historians of the time argued that a gentleman would have never had sex with a slave and since Thomas Jefferson was the consummate gentleman he would've never had an affair with Sally Hemings.

A few words about Dr No.

The Principles of Harm.

Once again we find Ron Paul is running for the Presidency as a Republican. The planks in his platform are libertarian in content and populist in form, with a strong isolationist stance on foreign policy which is attractive to less hawk-ish Americans. In the debates between Republican candidates, Ron Paul stood out as a maverick politician as usual and came second to Michele Bachmann in the Iowa poll. Even as the majority of the Republican candidates agreed that there should be a constitutional ban on gay marriage, Paul maintained that the government has no role to play in marriage at all. On foreign policy Paul maintained that the US had no role to play in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, whilst he called for significant cuts to the US military. As Ron Paul is appropriately dubbed "Dr No" because of his voting record to oppose any legislation which is opposed to the principles of the US Constitution. At a deeper level this is significant of the brand of libertarianism to which Ron Paul subscribes for it rejects some of the most basic aspects of government and society which we take for granted.

The libertarians who say "No!" to paternalism will reject any legislation which is meant to protect the individual from harming themselves. So the laws which obligate individuals to wear seat-belts in cars and helmets when driving motorcycles can be burned. The people hurt must also pay for their own medical bills, the government has no right to dictate what risks a person can take with their bodies and lives. We might think that it is reckless to ride a motorcycle without a helmet and we know that a helmet law would prevent devastating injuries, we should oppose such laws anyway. We should do so on the grounds that it is a violation of the right of the individual to decide what risks to assume. It might be that a law on this issue is a slippery slope to totalitarianism. Of course, a libertarian may concede such laws from the position that these laws will prevent the harm of others from reckless decisions made by others. But that would presuppose a certain utilitarian leaning which is not always the case for free-market libertarians.

The opposition to paternalism leaves room for Ron Paul to stand in opposition to gay marriage and abortion in that the removal of legislation against such behaviour would in itself function as a form of paternalism - just as the imposition of legislation to ban gay marriage would be a form of paternalism. This is the same reasoning behind much of the libertarian opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Conveniently Paul can rely on this platform to bring in a portion of the homophobic vote. Effectively the same social constraints which are necessary for an unbridled marketplace emerge in the Ron Paul 'revolution' just as it does in mainstream American conservatism. Opposition to abortion might be justified along libertarian lines by taking the side of the baby over the woman, as in the Harm Principle limits the freedom of the individual to decisions which do not harm other people. This is a contentious issue as it is disputable whether or not a fetus constitutes a person in the same sense as an adult woman does. One of the implications of such an opposition to abortion is that the stance of isolationism may be broken.

The Politics of "No!"

A libertarian of this kind can also say "No!" to morality legislation in that the coercive force of law should not be used to promote any values at all. Just because the moral convictions expressed are majoritarian in nature does not mean it is automatically right to impose such convictions on everyone. We might object to prostitution morally, but that does not justify legislation which prohibit consenting adults from engaging in it. The same can be said of homosexuality and abortion. Of course, we find that these libertarians had no problem with opposing legislation which might strengthen or defend the rights of minorities. Both Reagan and Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights act on the grounds it violated the rights of the individual and gave too much power to the government. Here we find the liberal framework of rights and freedoms which is parasitic on the beliefs of individuals provides a space for racism to be expressed. The same goes for homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitism. So we should not be surprised by Ron Paul's meandering racial populism.

The libertarian subscribes to a theory of rights which rules out any law that requires some people to help others, especially taxation for redistribution of income or wealth. The benefits that can be derived from welfare state measures to provide health-care, education and housing come at a cost to the individual. It should not be the role of government to mandate that cost. Charity is the name of the game for libertarians. Progressive taxation is a form of coercion and even theft to some. The state has no right to force affluent tax-payers to support social programmes for the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. The slogan "Tax is theft!" is often bandied about by this crowd. Of course, the suggestion that the sudden removal of welfare provisions in health-care is a form of theft escapes them. A free-market libertarian has no time for needs, wants and merits matter much more. So even though a patient on dialysis could do with one of my healthy kidneys it doesn't mean that they are entitled to my kidney. It's my kidney! The needs of another person cannot be allowed to trump my right to do what I want with my body and what I own.

You may notice a pattern here, these self-proclaimed libertarians are not on the side of a lot of people in society and certainly never on the side of the under-dog. The closest a free-marketeer like Ron Paul can get to the common man is to appeal to the prejudices of the American working-classes. There is no serious attempt to represent the interests of working-people at all. That's probably because it is up to working-class people to pursue their own interests as obedient atoms of consumption and the cogs kept turning for the extraction of surplus value. This is not the time for market liberalism, when BP has ruined an entire ocean and Wall Street has tore the US apart at the joints like a chicken.  Ron Paul's America would be one in which federal power is decentralised for the benefit of business while blacks sit at segregated tables in canteens, women die in back-alley abortions and poor people drop like flies from curable diseases on street corners. Meanwhile the state would be there to function only as a security apparatus in the defence of the borders and the incarceration of the population superfluous to the economy.

David Starkey, Black Culture & the Riots.

Wiggers with Attitude?

In the aftermath of the riots David Starkey decided it was wise to bring up Enoch Powell and argue that a specific point made in the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was "absolutely right". He was keen to reassure the audience that Powell was wrong in that it was not "inter-communal violence" and that it is cultural rather than racial. It would be generous to David Starkey to designate him as a cultural chauvinist, which is perfectly consistent with the monarchism and nationalism to which he subscribes. David Starkey is a provocateur in the tradition of an insolent dinner guest crowing just to offend and shock. In this instance the bespectacled historian was at dinner with an Oxbridge liberal, a leftist and a crime novelist. The outrage was over comments such as "The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham." As if that were not bad enough Starkey went on to claim the problem is that "the whites have become black" and that the black politician David Lammy sounds "white" when you close your eyes.

At first he pinned the riots as an "extension of commercialism" and the exuberant consumerism of British society, though he is intelligent enough to understand that the consumer boom was born out of the implosion of social democracy and the emergence of Thatcherism in it's wake. Therefore to manage the contradiction between rapacious individualism and the moral opposition to senseless violence Starkey wheels in racially charged rhetoric which will scandalise the liberal intelligentsia and split the commentariat down the middle. At which point the working-classes can make a cameo appearance in the guise of the angry crowd yelling "Enoch was right!" It is now highly unlikely that there will be any debate over the issues behind the riots as the media discusses whether or not David Starkey is a racist. Notice David Starkey asks of Owen Jones "You glorify Rap?" and then backs off as Dreda Say Mitchell points out that the rappers only reflect the materialism of the world. Brian Cox was right to call Starkey "utterly corrupt" last year.

It could have been a conscious effort to further derail the political discourse away from any meaningful discussion of inequality and police brutality. It could just be a simple case of racism masquerading as cultural conservatism. Time will tell if David Starkey distances himself in the future from such remarks. The insinuation of a respectable historian that this is somehow related to an imported "black culture" of crime is just false. In the halcyon days of vanilla Britain, at the finest hour of our country, back in 1940 juvenile crime accounted for 48% of all arrests and there were over 4,500 cases of looting from then until 1941. There were even cases of firemen looting burned-out shops, teenagers stripped the clothes off of corpses to sell and some even cut-off the fingers of the dead to get at their rings. These could not have just been the "wiggers" who had watched too much MTV and absorbed an awful lot of 50 Cent's anger before going out to spit it out into society. As a result of this level of bullshiting we're unlikely to see any real solutions in Britain, just a right-ward shift that will lead us down the road to more riots in the future.

Cultural Blackness?

Originally the issue of race was raised on Newsnight before Starkey crawled out from his hole, it was Gavin Esler who wondered if the riots had anything to do with "black culture" or even MTV. We should bare in mind the relations of base and superstructure when we're talking about culture in this way, that the superstructure is generated by the base in order to justify and defend itself. Simultaneously the superstructure has the potential to undermine the base in spite of the interdependent relations between them. Take Rap music, usually it defends the status quo in it's portrayal of a anti-political and anti-intellectual form of underground capitalism in which collective organisations (e.g. gangs) can still function meaningfully. It at once embodies society's institutional corruption and it's opposite with an emphasis on a warped set of codes and rituals. The misogyny and homophobia found rampant in the music videos and lyrics is born out of a thoroughly impotent masculinity.

It is not coincidental that Rap music becomes incredibly popular and influential in the late 1980s onwards at the peak of Reaganism. Look at the socio-economic situation for young black men in particular, especially in the US where there was a brief opening for black people in the 70s as civil rights were gained through harsh struggle. But with the financialisation of the economy millions of African-Americans became part of a superfluous population. The black economy of drugs provides an alternative to the business system which has excluded black people for decades. Not only is it an alternative to financial capitalism, where the wasps of Harvard still thrive, it provides a welfare system that has been completely destroyed in the US. It is also an expression of rage against the police for the murder and persecution of black people, NWA captured the anger bubbling beneath the surface just before the battering of Rodney King sparked the LA riots in 1992. Ultimately, mainstream rappers are only looking to establish a black aristocracy which stands as a reflection of the white elites.

Rap music is not the source of riots and crime, rather it is linked to it through economic circumstances. The riots were not a coherent and organised expression of political dissent. It was mass-rage against the police along with elements of the same consumerism we have all indulged in. Where does this anger come from? In 1997 and 1998 there were around 8,000 stop-and-searches, by 2008 to 2009 that had risen to 150,000. The use of Section 60 between 2005 and 2010 has increased by 300%, originally Section 60 was introduced to combat football hooliganism; over the same time period the stop-and-searches of black people increased by 650%. From 1998 to 2010 over 330 people have died mysteriously in police custody, surprisingly 75% of the people who died were white and not so surprisingly 90% were male aged between 25 and 44. Let alone the level of unemployment and economic stagnation in this country which has plagued the poor for years. The decisions undertaken by the rioters were not justified, but the grievances are legitimate and real.