spinoff

The vacuity of modern popular culture dawned on this Spinoffite this morning. There was no special reason for this damascene moment (which occurred on, of all things, Blackfriars Bridge). It dropped out of a clear blue sky, unprompted. At the centre of this problem – if indeed cultural vacuums like this can be said to have centres – is a pervading sense that everything presented as entertainment in today’s society is a debased version of something that previously had value. Sitting there on the train from Herne Hill the feeling suddenly dawned of being surrounded by a wall of 'accelerated talentlessness'. Music is a good example.

If we are looking for the start point of 20th century popular music, then we could do a lot worse than look to a man called WC Handy. His name is, all things considered, not all that well known, but nevertheless he is significant for being the first person to write a blues, and then publish the notes in sheet music form. So whereas previously the blues had been couched in an oral tradition, this was the first time such music had been codified, in turn allowing Handy to make money out of his song above and beyond collecting door receipts at performances. Thus, the publication in 1912 of “Memphis Blues,” can be taken as the beginning of the music industry as we know it.

Blues underlies all popular musical forms that have cropped up since. Blues led to r’n'b, (poor imitations of 1950s and 1960s r’n’b bands by Caribbean musicians led to a distinctly flavoured style of music named ska, which in turn gave way to rock steady, reggae and dancehall). Back in the US, r’n’b then led to rock and roll (eg.Chuck Berry), which led to rock (eg.Led Zeppelin) which then led on to punk, then new wave, metal, sports metal, thrash, hardcore and all the rest of it.

On the other side of the family tree, blues, combined with a healthy dose of gospel, led to soul, which led to funk, which led to disco, which gave us on the one hand hip hop and on the other house music which in turn led to techno, which led to breakbeat techno, which led to drum and bass, which led to grime. Hip hop has since been refined into rnb (that name reprised from the earlier form of music) which now stands as the most commercially viable of all the popular forms, and is currently being flogged by everyone from X Factor contestants to Snoop Dogg.

The origins of jazz, however, are less certain and for this reason it has been left out of the above family tree. One explanation for the birth of jazz is that the goings-on in wild west saloons saw a huge amount of shot-up pianos being sold second hand to musicians in the east looking for cheap instruments. Those pianists were forced to syncopate their playing to account of the dud notes and hence the jazz swing was born. Other people attribute the birth of jazz to pure drunkenness. There are myriad theories, all of them as dubious as these – but whatever the origin of jazz, it is certain that it shares profound links with blues and was deeply influenced by it, from the old-time Louis Armstrong days of "Basin Street Blues," right up to the sharp-suited art school chic of Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” and beyond.

Blues has dictated the melodic, structural and tonal make up of all western popular music. The most significant of its structural gifts has been that of the minor pentatonic scale, still referred to widely as “the blues scale.” This structure is the frame around which the blues is swung, (though the major pentatonic is also used, appearing most often in country or country blues). As its name suggests the pentatonic scale it is a simple five note progression repeated continuously up the stave. In the key of A, say, the minor pentatonic is A, C, D, E, G. This note shape and the chord structures that will compliment music in this mode have formed an unconscious orthodoxy so familiar to the modern ear, that to stray from it is almost unthinkable. Even Louis Armstrong, on hearing Charlie Parker for the first time, denounced be-bop as “Chinese music,” for the liberties it took with the melodic conventions that the blues laid down.

As well as the structural elements of blues, stylistic elements have also survived. When we look at a contemporary band, say Franz Ferdinand, we are essentially seeing an electric blues band line-up - drums, bass, guitar and voice - that has remained unchanged since blues went electric in Chicago in the ‘40s. The vocal themes of dancing, sex, good times, drinking, hard times and the bad, dark side haven’t changed that much either. As well as lyrically and melodically, the musical structure has also remained relatively unchanged. The repeated “verse chorus verse” formula is a structure which was to a great extent cemented in place by Robert Johnson, the man who took the 12-bar approach and who performed it with such panache, such style and such heart that from that moment on any music that wasn't in a time frame with a four in it somewhere, sounded simply wrong.

This internal repetition is a product of the environment that nurtured the blues. Blues derives from work songs. Slave songs – music to hammer rocks to, with the repetitive rise and fall of the mallet becoming the repeated lines of song. It’s not hard to imagine one man in the chain-gang leading the singing – the bandleader – and the others joining in at the end of each line with the refrain. And once we are imagining this, we are looking back to the birth of the verse and the chorus. As such, popular music was shaped under the whip.

Work songs echo through the early blues recordings, recordings that retain the ability to shock, enthral and captivate. The voices, inevitably badly recorded, come down to us now as haunted, desperate howls, bathed in the oppressive heat of the south and the hiss of the wax cylinders which caught these sounds. Listen to Leadbelly sing, “In the pines / In the pines / Where the sun / Never shines / I’ll shiver the whole / Night through,” and the hairs will stand up in the back of your neck. The immediacy and longevity of this music is no better demonstrated in the fact that Kurt Cobain, in his last recorded work, sang a heart-stopping version of this very song (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”)

This extremity of emotion still forms an integral part of popular music. Blues dictated that lyrical subject matter, reflected in the yearning tone of the music itself, must deal with the heartfelt and the emotive. Just as contemporary music has inherited the structure of blues, it has also inherited its tone. However, the result is that now we have music that apes this style of emotive delivery as a matter of course, but that has no real reason to do so. None at all.

And so multi millionaires stand on stage with faces contorted in wincing pain, fists clenched, guitar slung about them, and they wail into the microphone about the hardships of life. Meanwhile other men, some of whom are the CEOs of their own recording, distribution, promotions and clothing companies, stand on stage dripping in jewellery and talk about how hard it is to live life on the streets as a down-and-out with no prospects, all the while knowing that they have a Bentley to take them home at the end of the night. On other stages, there are children, driven by an almost pathological desire to become famous, who pump their fists and wail and emote and display all the symptoms of a hard, exacting life we know they have not led.

This is popular music today – a practice removed from, and stripped of, those elements that made it effective – and even worth while – in the first place. The effect and appeal of blues was, and still is so far-reaching because it deals with eternal human themes, deals with them realistically and does so without cloyingly sincerity. Blues is honest without being earnest, if you like. Contemporary mainstream popular music, however, is not realistic. It has nothing to do with the people that create or perform it or the environment in which it is generated. It does not deal with eternal themes, either human or otherwise (Robbie Williams, for example, seems content to write albums dealing exclusively with celebrity and his difficulty in coping with it) and it is, without doubt, consistently cloying earnest.

What this shows is that there is a distinct difference between, on the one hand “entertainers” and on the other “artists”. It has been the cultural vogue to treat these terms as interchangeable. They are not. This is in part the fault of a super-charged entertainment media, a stunningly developed machine that catapults individuals to the summits of success in the click of a shutter, and, having sent them rocketing up into the troposphere immediately starts looking for the next catapultee, leaving the previous victim to land where he or she may. So take Hear’Say for example, a group of affable young things who had some hit music squeezed out of them; who were taught how to sing, how to dance, how to dress, how to deal with the media, and who were then unleashed upon the public. They were flung to the dizziest of heights; they were to be the pop stars to end all pop stars. But now they are gone, and all of the implied future greatness that awaited is gone with them. Now the smoke clears, we see them for what they really were. They were entertainers – entertainers in exactly the same mould as Jimmy Tarbuck, Bruce Forsythe or any other all-singing, all-dancing acts.

This is not artistry. This is not art of any sort at all. It is craft, but craft designed specifically to be mistaken for art. It is dressed up in all of the recognised regalia of musical art – the emotional substance, the strict adherence to blues-based precepts of musical form – but it is not art. But of course, Hear’Say and their ilk (Boyzone, Take That, Robbie Williams, the Pussycat Dolls, Girls Aloud, etc etc) are extreme examples. The same can also be said, however, of more subtly crafted acts. Coldplay's songs deal with an existence filled with turmoil, uncertainy and angst, and yet the band members are rich, upper-middle class, successful, and the lead singer is married to a Hollywood megastar. In this, they are joined by other middle class, super-rich mourners such as Keane, Snow Patrol et al who have taken musical conventions inherited ultimately from the blues, and used this as a start point to create a body of work that in no way relates to the world around them, or life as they live it. 50 Cent, the multi-millionaire businessman who raps about street life is another example of this stellar craftsmanship masquerading as artistry, as are the hoards of other CEOs who present themselves as the gritty talent of the hip hop scene (Puff Daddy (or whatever he’s called today) Jay Z et al.)

Craft disguised as art is bad. Craft disguised as art that in turn has no basis in experience is even worse. Music is, of course, made up, invented – it is from the interior, and as such is pertinent to, and is the product of, an individual. In this respect, music cannot hope to cover all experience.

But the thing is, some of it has come very very close. Listen to John Lee Hooker singing “I Cover the Waterfront,” and it will change you. Listen to Louis Armstrong singing “Basin Street Blues,” and it will warm you to the core. Listen to the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout,” and it will make you want to scream. Sometimes our post-blues music can transcend its medium and take on an almost uncanny greatness.

Today though, there seems very little of this musical greatness. It seems, in fact, that the majority of music on offer lacks those elements that have in the past made music so exciting, vital and personally important to its listeners. In the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of singles had to be sold for a track to reach number one. Conversely, the record for the fewest units sold by a number one single was set in October 2004, when a Swedish DJ sold just 23,519 copies of - of all things - a Steve Windwood remix. The reason for this? We are surrounded by entertainers performing songs that are, in terms of tone, structure and melody, pastiches of an earlier musical form. These acts are forced through the music industry meat grinder at such a great speed that there simply isn’t the time for an audience to decide that they like them or not. The resulting music is empty, deracinated, overly-earnest, dishonest and, worst of all, disguised as and presented as artistry. It is the product of financial greed.

And so we are saddled with 'accelerated talentlessness'. Having realised this, this Spinoffite stepped out of Blackfriars Station, and went to work.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

One of the many, many comments directed against the newish MP for Bethnal Green and Bow (shortly, it seems, to be caught with his expensive pants down over oil for food unless he manages to prove that the entire world really is plotting against him, which seems unlikely but possible) is his taste for expensive flash suits and an all-year tan. How, the reasoning goes, can you be a man of the people and yet go about wearing Armani suits?

This question broadens into an argument about acceptable pursuits for a leftie; something like 'I understand why the left likes conceptual art, but not why they like opera and ballet'.

There's a peculiar type of political/cultural schism here. Political allegiance somehow gets linked with cultural enjoyment: poshos (and, by extension, the centre right) like high brow pursuits like rugby [Ed. – rugby? High brow? Perhaps ‘stock broking’ more apposite. Or poss. ‘shooting poor people’], dressing in good clothes, the opera and classical music; lefties like football, shell suits, The X Factor and conceptual art.

It's a division maintained as much within the groups as outside them: some kind of obscure class solidarity implies that if one is, for instance, an Eton/Cambridge/Guards person one should not like - for instance - graffiti art; and conversely if one is a banner-waving ecowarrior, one should spit on Donizetti and Verdi.

It is time to get rid of this cultural stereotyping. It is perfectly possible to wield a banner in the morning and go to the ballet in a suit in the evening (this writer will be doing exactly that) much the same as it is to work in an investment bank during the day and attend outsider arts events at night (one of this writer's friends). The idea that the underprivileged (or the northern) should leave 'high art' to the wealthy south is undermined every time Opera North performs, or another museum opens in Gateshead.

What's brought this on? Since you ask, it was a raised eyebrow during a comradely discussion during which the subject of ‘going to the ballet’ was mentioned. The left, the discussion continued, should support art 'of the people' and leave 'high art' to the privileged few and their statist government funders. And it is that statement which contains the false premise.

For all art, visual, performed, literary or whatever, almost by definition, is 'of the people'. It challenges, inquires into, investigates, exposes and explains the essence of the lives we are all living, whether in gentleman's clubs in St James's or on an estate in Salford. One can gain an insight into one's own condition as easily in the stalls of the Royal Opera House, a gallery in Hoxton or a grime club in Dalston.

The true barriers to entry are economic, and schismatically cultural. While stalls seats for 'Siegfried' at the (part publicly funded) Royal Opera House are going for £160 a pop (three weeks of full income support), the rich have access to them by default. Because people on low incomes cannot attend high cost events, such events are seen as high brow (though, of course, an annual season for - say - Chelsea home matches costs and arm and a leg).

But this is bogus. The question is not art, but access to art. While cultural solidarity is seen as patronising the same arts events as ones cultural peer group, the disconnect between popular and high art will remain. Art - all art - is liberating. Its cost is not: and this is where the battle should be fought, not over whether a particular type of art is 'our class'.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

A couple of days ago, Spinoff's resident Redaktionsführer set a little task. Write something about 'why I'd never vote for David Cameron'. Always up for a challenge, especially one as easy as this, this writer provided fourteen reasons in the space of five minutes. All of which were knocked back, because they were 'emotional rather than reasoned'.

OK, back to the drawing board (never challenge the editorial director, it's not worth it: he plays a mean game of cricket and anyway I'm in debt to him for a few rounds of beer).

One frustrating weekend later, one conclusion is obvious. This writer, normally quite clear headed on most things, though subject naturally to the normal biases in an op-ed author, cannot write about the Conservatives without becoming emotionally involved. And this emotional involvement normally takes the form of visceral, unbridled loathing. No matter how sensible they seem, no matter what policies they advance, there's a mental block with the Conservative party.

What on earth have they done to provoke such a reaction? Well, in part, it's because of a northern background. Seeing one's town - and, indeed, county - devastated by the collapse of heavy industry, seeing grown men crying because they cannot get jobs, seeing the rows of bailiff's vans literally queuing up our street, leaves an impression. Yes, it was uneconomic; yes, coal from Poland is cheaper; yes, sweatshop labour is more economic than unionised labour in British factories. But hundreds of thousands of people were forced onto the breadline by the economic policies of the last Tory administration, and that's left a scar.

Sexual sleaze, which the last administration was good at, is less worrying than the overweening arrogance of the truly dishonest. Mandelson apart, this administration has not (yet) repeated the errors of the last, where ridiculous arrogance led to Archer, Aitken (the sword of truth and the shield of British fair play? That's what got you in clink, mate) and Hamilton.

The brutality of Margaret Thatcher's attitude to the people who elected her changed politics from an engagement between the people and the government to some kind of elective dictatorship. And that spilled over into a state where there 'is no such thing as society, there is only the inidividual', which is the most disgraceful statement made by any leader of a democratic country. What is democracy about if it is not about society? What are our fundamental principles based on if not the mutual support of each other for the common good?

No-one is arguing that Labour is perfect. The website backingblair.co.uk is the best of many that makes the point that the current administration is in fact a Tory one, under a different name, and that rescuing the Labour Party from the clutches of the Tories who are now running it is one of the key objectives of any socialist in the UK.

All well and good, but - despite the attractions offered by infighting, schisms and endless theoretic discussions, as well as the opportunity to call perfectly normal people 'comrade' - the people don't want socialism. What they want, judging by the results of recent elections, is to be left as far alone as possible and let someone else deal with this politics thing.

And this, I think, is where the Conservative administration of 1979 - 1997 is really to blame. By being overbearing, by encouraging individuality above all, by refusing to listen, they made people think that politics, selflessness and involvement in society is of no value. A whole generation of people are out for themselves, and believe they are right to be so.

That is enough on its own to justify hatred. And it's not likely to be forgotten, either - not just by this writer, but (hopefully) by the electorate when it next comes to an election.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

665 metric tons of cocaine come out of South America per annum. Most of this is exported. Large amounts travel into the US and Europe via the Caribbean.

In Colombia, there are around 32,000 murders a year. This number is approximate because nobody’s really counting. This situation is in large part due to the civil war. This war is funded by cocaine sales.

In the same time period Kingston, Jamaica sees 1,042 murders. US army doctors are still sent to train in Kingston’s hospitals – it’s the best place on earth to get experience of treating gun shot wounds. It’s a coke war.

So then, how many deaths are required to export a ton? We take the number of murders in both places and add them together to arrive at 33,042. We then divide by the number of tons exported.

The answer? For every metric ton of coke exported, 49.6 Jamaicans and Colombians will die. Right. We in the UK snort 32 tons of gak per year, a figure that, when multiplied by 49.6, gives us a grand total of 1,587.2 murders.

Of course, this figure is extremely rough, and probably way off the mark. For once we have added in the coke dealers shooting one another in every major city in the world, and the gangsters killing one another over control of the cocaine industry in the other cocaine-producing countries such as Bolivia and Peru, then the real number of murders per ton would be much greater.

So we can say therefore that a minimum of 1,587.2 people have to die in order for Britain to get a nose-full. During the Kate Moss debacle, the media lambasted Moss for the harm she was doing herself and the poor example she was setting to young women in the UK.

The fact that she was funding an industry which is essentially a third world killing machine seemed neither here nor there.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Those of us lucky enough to work for ourselves very rarely come up against the usual disadvantages inherent in the modern workplace – but when we do so, we do so double.

Take Microsoft’s last little gift to its Windows users, for instance. A recent ‘Critical Update’ (discussed in MS Security Bulletin MS05-051, for the techies amongst you) buggers up Windows 2000 and XP, as well as MS Windows Server 2003. Here we are, religiously downloading our critical updates as recommended (after having had to prove we’re running ‘genuine Windows software’, as if that was something to be proud of) and what happens? A patch, designed to cover up a security breach in the original software, makes things worse (much worse, in some cases to the level that the computer seizes up entirely).

For those of you with IT departments, this is presumably an inconvenience, but not a serious one: at best, it’s a call to IT and some scruffy youth potters down and fixes it; at worst, it’s a few hours off work whilst they find you a new PC.

For those of us who are our own IT departments, though, this is the sort of thing that can actively lose you time, and money – to say nothing of hair and patience.

Microsoft has always been an anomaly: a worldwide monopoly based on producing persistently defective products which become obsolete in a couple of years. Macintosh (leastways before OS X), Unix and Linux at least pretend to be stable: Windows is so full of holes that one of Microsoft’s main jobs is finding them after the software’s been released. It’s as if we were all driving Trabants past showrooms of cheaper Range Rovers.

And here’s the power thing. Microsoft have got themselves into this dominant position by somehow convincing us that their products are the best – which they manifestly aren’t; the most cost effective – how did they do that? Linux is free, for crying out loud; and the most secure – nine critical updates this week alone. It’s one of most amazing marketing successes ever, and one that now they’re dominant, is one they can keep doing again and again.

Us home workers have to have computers that work with our clients’ systems – so we’re almost forced into using Windows. As for real business, though, and its beleaguered IT departments, what’s their excuse?

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Spinoff is pleased to introduce its latest service for hacks – words to describe the Conservative Party and its leadership competition after the ousting of Ken Clarke.

Ken Clarke:

· ‘the greatest Prime Minister we never had’

· ‘Big beast’

· ‘lardy smoker popular with the electorate’

· ‘The only hope of winning an election’

The decision of the Conservative MPs:

· ‘yet another suicide note’

· ‘Great successes of the Tory selection process: Major, Hague, Duncan Smith, Dracula, [fill in blank] – election losers all’

· ‘grey non-entities’

· ‘another six years out of government’

· ‘knee jerk anti-Europeanism’

· ‘cloud-cuckoo land’

· ‘complete failure to understand the mood of the country’

· ‘introspective’, ‘navel gazing’, ‘smug’

The new leader of the Party (these terms are applicable to whoever is now elected):

· ‘Chocolate teapot’

· ‘tits on a nun’

· ‘a tin fart in a thunderstorm’

· ‘wax fireguard’

· ‘hopelessly inexperienced’

· ‘devoured messily by Gordon Brown’

Acceptable ruminations include:

· ‘Are there really Labour agitators in the Tory Party?’

· ‘What will it take them to understand the 21 Century?’

· ‘I say, that Mr Kennedy looks like a better hope every day that goes by’

· ‘More leaders in a short space of time than the Italians – and about as much use’

Try to avoid:

· ‘bloody stupid’ and similar, no matter how great the temptation.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

According to the ‘Human Security Report’, issued 17 October by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, wars are getting less frequent and less deadly – the number of armed conflicts falling by 40% in the last 13 years, and the number of ‘very deadly wars’ by 80%. Most beliefs about conflict – civilian deaths, the victimization of civilians – are ‘myths’. All of this, the report says, is thanks to the United Nations, the end of colonisation and the end of the Cold War.

The report also contains a league table of most warlike nations. All the usual suspects are there – the Great Satan, Israel, Iraq, numerous little dictatorships whose bloody adventures have disfigured the face of the developing world for decades. But the leaders? The most violent, belligerent, blood-soaked nations in the world? The United Kingdom. And France.

Us, teeny weeny peaceful little us. Members of damn nearly every peace and reconciliation body going, proud members of the Security Council, led by a centrist government with an ‘ethical’ foreign policy, with armed forces that are 3,500 under strength. Shome mishtake, surely?

Well, no. For all the UK’s rhetoric about being a beacon of peace and stability, it only seems to be so provided it’s within our own borders. As long as it’s overseas, it seems we’re quite prepared to administer a little war and chaos to help impose that peace and stability.

We haven’t, it’s true, actually declared war on too many people recently – the Falklands was a ‘conflict’, not a war (and, unusually, we were the injured party), and Iraq one and two were in pursuit of UN Security Council resolutions.

But that doesn’t detract from the fact that wherever there’s a spat, somewhere there’s a squaddie with a Union flag on his shoulder lugging a rifle and dodging bullets. No wonder our generals are warning of ‘overstretch’.

What is it that makes the government put its hand up (and its other hand in its pocket) as soon as someone starts waving a stick about? Part of it is keeping on the good side of the USA, obviously – we’ve provided international legitimacy to Bush’s imperial ambitions since he wangled his way into office. The good interpretation of this is that if we fight alongside the Americans, we are able to moderate their more extreme military and political excesses. And in its small way, this seems to be true. British troops are clearly better trained (though worse equipped) for both peacekeeping and warfighting than their American colleagues – two small examples being the generally more stable situation in southern Iraq and the fact that no American has died at British hands in either Gulf Wars one or two, whereas the Americans have developed a nasty habit of bombing and shelling their own allies in ‘blue on blue’ engagements.

The less charitable interpretation is that we’re playing a grim game of keeping up with the Wolfowitz’s, using our troops as tools in a ploy by the government to increase our stature in world politics at the expense of teenagers in body bags. Motivated by a desire to be a global policeman (or rather, if the US is a global policeman, we’re more of a global community support officer), and to seem more important than our diminishing status implies, we wander the world doing what we’ve always done – looking for recalcitrant foreigners to subdue. As long as they don’t have nuclear weapons, of course.

The Human Security Centre study makes clear that we’re fighting more wars than anyone else. What we need now is a study that answers two key questions: ‘why?’; and ‘when are we going to start behaving less like a nation of soccer thugs on a beer bottle rampage and more like the internationalist state whose values we – nominally – espouse?’

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Iain M Banks, multi-talented author of, among other things, the Culture series of science fiction novels (and, as Iain Banks, such wonders as The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass), makes the point that ‘there is nothing so vicious as a democracy in its own defence’.

Whilst Mr Bank’s comment is made in the context of some far future crypto-democratic anarchy defending itself against scaly green things from beyond the void (or something similar), the comment holds true – increasingly so, it seems at the moment. We have a Prime Minister who is on the verge of instructing the judiciary how to think. Our home secretary wants to introduce detention without trial on suspicion for a period of three months. And the government is about to introduce a bill banning, amongst other things, the ‘glorification’ of terrorism.
We haven’t yet got internment, but doesn’t it feel like it’s heading that way?

The state’s main job is to defend us, whether it’s through providing health care, or incapacity benefit (on which note see David Blunkett’s recent comments, but that’s another matter entirely), or, ultimately, defending us from people who want to hurt us. No argument there. And the battle between the civil liberties extremists, who seem reluctant to have any protection against terrorism, and the right wing, who want border police and invasive searches before we’re allowed down the shops (I exaggerate for effect, but not much) is neither useful nor edifying.

But three months detention? So the police can gather the evidence they need to prosecute? What about sorting the police out so they get the evidence first, a good first step towards which would be allowing wire tap evidence in court. Incidentally, I think the security service only oppose this last because it would show quite how much they do collect – assume everything you say on the phone, fax to people, or send by SMS or the Internet, is watched, and you won’t go far wrong.

Telling the judiciary how to interpret laws also seems a little strong. If the laws were properly drafted in the first place – and we have lots of them, pretty much all we need to deal with the present problems – then we wouldn’t need to tell our judges how to think. And do we want judges who toe the party line? There are few other states without a free judiciary, and we’ve just fought a war with one of them partly and precisely because it didn’t have a free judiciary.  Oh, and by the way, when your major ally has just promoted the ruling clique’s legal advisor to be a judge on the Supreme Court, for god’s sake, we’re on our guard about this one now.

And there’s this last, gloriously unenforceable proposal to ban the ‘glorification’ of terrorism. The home secretary can do this already, actually, if he wanted to, under all sorts of other provisions, provided you mean providing moral support to terrorist groups. But think what this actually means. That statue of Nelson Mandela’s on the South Bank’s going to have to go for a start. Bin the pro-Sandanista t-shirts we used to wear, the Che Guevara posters, and throw out any novels where the bad guys are remotely attractive. We couldn’t have supported the Northern Alliance in their war against the Russians in Afghanistan. The CIA would go out of business almost overnight, at least in central America.

And this little ‘freedom of speech’ thingie? Better say it whilst I can, I think terrorism is sometimes a good thing. I think revolutions are a good thing. I think if the burden of an oppressive government becomes more than one can bear, one has the right to rebel. After all, it’s terrorists that created the United States of America. And France. And South Africa.

Stop fannying round the edges, Mr Clarke. It makes us no safer. And if you feel you have to be seen to do something, use your existing powers, in concert with your allies, to disrupt those groups who want to do us harm, and put their members on trial. But don’t tell us what we can say – because the next step down that road is telling us what to think, and that’s not (yet) in any party’s manifesto. Not even yours.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Spinoff Towers has echoed this weekend to the sound of a violent and unexpected handbrake turn echoing from one of the rooms in the east wing. Metaphorically, of course - there isn’t enough room in the east wing to drive a Robin Reliant, even if you could get it up the stairs. But it’s a handbrake turn, none the less, complete with the smell of burning rubber and swearing. Spinoff’s resident Iraq hawk has changed direction. He (your humble interlocutor) has come to believe we have been sold a pup.

This is not to say that the goal of removing Saddam was wrong. Far from it. The inhabitant of the east wing – almost uniquely amongst the motormouths who have commented on the Iraq invasion – used to live in Iraq, working cheek by jowl with Iraqis in the villages of the south, and with the Kurds in the north. First hand experience of the vileness of the Iraqi regime’s casual brutality, of gassed or forcibly displaced civilians, of the viciousness of the secret police, of the multiple attempts to gain and develop and use weapons of mass destruction leave any sane observer in no doubt that of all the blots on the human landscape, Saddam was the blottiest. And a war to remove him because he was a mass murderer of his own people would have been justified.

So where’s the handbrake turn come from? From the increasing evidence that the war on Iraq was part of the Bush administration plan before it came to office. From reading Richard Clarke’s brave book, ‘Against All Enemies’, which clearly lays out how Wolfowitz et al used the atrocities of September 11 to largely ignore al-Qaeda and instead generate an excuse to attack Iraq. From the documented torture in Iraq and Afghanistan which sprang from a policy of allowing mercenaries (because that’s what they were) to run prison camps and give orders to soldiers. From the fact that whilst the American’s are paying attention to Iraq, Afghanistan is churning out more opium than ever. And from the sheer stupid arrogance of the Americans believing that the Iraqis, a proud, clever people who made Baghdad one of the greatest cities in the world centuries before, as well as during all but the last twenty years of, the existence of the United States, would simply roll over and take whatever the Americans chose to give them.

From the single key fact that, despite all the rhetoric, al-Qaeda is stronger than ever, and still killing people.

You can smell the rubber burning, can’t you? But there’s more. What about the America that Bush has produced: the supine nature of the American electorate’s failure to realise that it has elected a fool – and that maybe, just maybe, it didn’t. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which proved the American administration’s lack of care over its own (black, poor) people – and its care of awarding the Vice President’s old company the reconstruction contracts, just like it did in Iraq. The appointment of family friends to the Supreme Court. The… oh, fill it in yourself. God knows, it’s easy enough.

My friends, we have been sold a pup. The Iraq war is an illegitimate war started by an illegitimate government for illegitimate reasons. Mr Blair, who agonised over British involvement so obviously, should recognise the fact as one of his last decisions before he hands over to the dour Scot, and draw the fig leaf of legitimacy from the Americans. Let’s pursue the people who want to kill us, with renewed energy and with very little mercy; but let’s not continue this misdirected adventure any more. The Americans have betrayed the Iraqis before (this writer cannot forgive the failure of George HW Bush to back up his promises with action at the end of Gulf War one, which led to the outright massacre of Kurds and Marsh Arabs), they are doing so now by their failure to deal effectively with the terrorism they themselves have largely created and they will doubtless do so by pulling out before peace is truly established. We – the Americans, the British, the Poles and others – need to get out, and let the Iraqis, with the help of genuinely well-meaning countries, sort out the mess we have created for them.

And sooner or later, we need to make the Bush administration pay for taking our goodwill, and turning it into this bitterness.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

This particular Spinoffite, being a bit of a god-botherer himself, has always thought that it is no bad thing for the leader of a state to have a religious faith. Recent events, though, have led one to a substantial revision of those views. One now realises that the faith one means is the sort of wishy-washy Anglican belief system that says, in short, ‘help me through this’ or ‘wouldn’t it be nice if everything was nice?’.

The sort of faith one most emphatically does not mean is the sort of faith that produces lines like ‘God told me to do it’. For those of us in the liberal West, this is often the first sign that one ought to spend some time under heavy medication in a locked ward. Even the Catholic Church, home of miracles, saints, mummified body parts in boxes and direct intervention, gets a little sniffy when some grandma turns up saying god’s talking to her, since she’s likely to follow it with a piece of half eaten toast in the shape of Christ’s head.

So what do we do when the leader of the free world (memorably described as the ‘retard Bush’ in a recent blog piece on another site) says that God told him to sort out the Middle East?

Bush has been the subject of many unkind remarks during most of his life. Many of them, in this writer’s opinion, are justified but, whilst considering him distinctly intellectually challenged and below par in the presidency department, one has never thought of him as a person who is minutes away from being taken down the local hospital with the woo-woos going.

But this is serious. One wants one’s leaders to be guided by principles, yes. By their advisors, probably. But by a voice in their head that may or may not be the Almighty but would by most medical professionals be judged to be a sign of impending schizophrenia?

The coverage of this one has been fascinating. The BBC had it first, but – if one believes the Guardian – made a deliberate attempt to underplay it, click here for article. Mr Bush’s spokesman Scott McLellan Friday denied the comments had ever been made (and that they are ‘absurd’). And Nabil Shaath, whose report of the conversation is what made the headlines, now says he did not think that Bush was speaking literally.

But we don’t believe that. We know, because he has made such a song and dance about it, that Bush is a born again Christian (the useful side effect being he was saved from a descent into alcoholism), electorally deeply in hock to the Christian right, surrounded by neo-cons who have links to the sort of Christians who want the state of Israel to exist because it is in Revelations as one of the signs of the imminent rapture. Which means that when someone of the stature of Mr Shaath says a thing like this, we listen. And when Mr Bush’s spokesman denies it, we hear the sound in the distance of a stable door being swiftly, if belatedly, bolted.

The West is founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Most of us are one stripe or other of Christian. But we have had the Reformation, and Darwin, and are largely pragmatic about our faith. That our most important leader starts sounding like Viz Comic’s Mr Headvoices reminds us of the depth of religious feeling in America: and makes us more than a little uneasy about what the Lord will tell him to do next.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.