'Howkit fae a dreel in Fife, currently using tumshie powers in Frontal Lobe Epilepsy and neurodiversity awareness campaigning. Quite creative and, due to my academic background, write some stuff on cultural anthropological and sociological matters, social justice and democratic deficits generally, mostly through a Scottish lens.'
Chances are Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein is not an overly familiar name in most Scots households; as we brace ourselves for the triggering of Article 50, if Ian Duncan Smith has his way, sometime before Christmas, but more likely as indicated in the blandest interview ever given by a PM (and yes, I'm including all the Spitting Image 'grey' John Major ones!), early in 2017, with some version of the Snooper's Charter en route and a Great British Bill of Rights sold to a UK public desperately trying to overcome buyer's remorse with those 'tough times ahead', it might just be one to become au fait with. Zeid assumed his post as High Commissioner for Human Rights on 1st September 2014 and became the first Asian, Muslim and Arab to do so.
Zeid's formidable CV demonstrates a long familiarity with international criminal justice, international law, UN peacekeeping, post conflict peace building, international development and counter nuclear terrorism. He played a central role in the establishment of the International Criminal Court and is a champion of Human Rights Courts around the world. He is not just a diplomat or a desk jockey, seeing active service in the Jordanian desert police from the late eighties to the mid nineties and served in the UN peacekeeping forces in the Balkans shortly thereafter.
Yesterday Mr Zeid wrote an open letter to the demagogues and populists on the rise across Europe, in the UK and in the US, addressing many of them by name, including Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders and Donald Trump. In his letter, prompted by the release of Wilders' '11 Point Manifesto' and supporting speech in Cleveland, he sets himself up as a 'nightmare' for the political fantasists of the right, a Muslim angry at their half truths and lies. As the global voice of human rights, elected by all governments to be the critic of all governments, he sees his role ultimately as the defender of the human rights of each individual, everywhere, of:
'...the rights of migrants, asylum seekers and immigrants; the rights of the LGBTi community; the rights of women and children in all countries; minorities; indigenous persons; people with disabilities and any and all who are discriminated against, disadvantaged, persecuted or tortured, whether by governments, political movements or by terrorists.'
To my mind, Zeid nails it when he pulls no punches and says that what Wilders has in common with Trump, Le Pen and Farage, he also has in common with Da'esh. They flow from the same source of deceit and bigotry, seek in 'varying degrees to recover a past, halcyon and so pure in form...united by ethnicity or religion...A past that most certainly, in reality, did not exist anywhere, ever.'. He elucidates and explains that he:
'does not equate the actions of the nationalist demagogues with those of Da'esh, which are monstrous and sickening;...But in its mode of communication, it's use of half truths and over simplifications, the propaganda of Da'esh uses tactics similar to those of the populists. And both sides of this equation benefit from each other - indeed would not expand in influence without each other's actions'
Most importantly Mr Zeid gives a call to action. Having mentioned Farage, he is including the UK in his assessments. Wilders admits to being emboldened, heartened by the Brexit vote and the inflammatory language used by Farage and some of the Brexiteers, not a few of who now serve in PM May's cabinet as the gatekeepers patrolling the outward looking aspects of fortress UK, which pushed it over the line. He asks good people to remember the safeguards of human rights laws in the face of bigotry's insidious march.
Inevitably the few headlines which appeared around the letter in the UK media were of the 'UN Commissioner Compares Farage to ISIS' variety and sent populist cheerleaders a-frothing all over the Twittersphere. If your reasoning is not theirs but you supported their cause, you are enabling their bigotry and it comes from the same place as that of Da'esh, repeating the same reasoning is an exercise in denial. Time for all good people who found that cause supported their views to consider acting on that buyer's remorse and for us all to find a way of doing as Zeid has urged:
'We must pull back from this trajectory. My friends, are we doing enough to counter this cross border bonding of demagogues? A decade ago, Geert Wilders' speech would have created a world wide furore. Now? Now they are met with little more than a shrug, and, outside the Netherlands, his words and pernicious plans were barely noticed. Are we going to continue to stand by and watch this banalisation of bigotry, until it reaches its logical conclusion?
Ultimately, it is the law that will safeguard our societies - human rights law, binding law which is the distillation of human experience, of generations of human suffering, the screams of the victims of past crimes of hate. We must guard this law passionately and be guided by it.
Do not, my friends, be led by the deceiver. It is only by pursuing the entire truth, and acting wisely that humanity can ever survive. So draw the line and speak. Speak out and up, speak the truth and do so compassionately, speak for your children, for those you care about, for the rights of all, and be sure to say clearly, stop!'
Human rights are not only at a remove, to be defended for victims of extradition or torture in distant lands, they are being violated every day, yes here on our streets too, by systemic failure and by individual and concerted bigotry. Sometimes I can barely face the disgusting, almost daily hate crimes perpetrated against vulnerable people with disabilities, and the ignorance which cannot see them for what they are, defined in international human rights law, or the suffering they cause. I see 'casual' hate crimes almost accepted as the norm in the lives of people with dsabilites I work with and I fear for what comes next, without the safeguards of EU law and the European Court of Human Rights, so I speak out as often as I am able.
I speak out, not just where it occurs, where it has been allowed to fester and bloom in bland, hideous ignorance, but also where it is enabled by pernicious whatabootery too; I speak out even if the necessary belligerence and antagonism it stirs in me, for even if I begin with reasoned argument the stance is of its nature oppositional, impacts my seizure threshold, somewhere along the way making me pay physically, neurologically, in getting rights right, I realise, maybe I need to take that hit for those who can't, for those who can't even raise their voice loud enough to just say 'Stop!'; some days I can't either, but when I can, your damn right I will and make no apology for it!
(I've quoted extensively from Mr Zeid's letter but it can be read in full here:
(Originally published on Kiltr 28 days ago, coinciding with start of Taiji 'season')
Its that time of year again…
…hang on, lets rewind a little. Back in May this year a fascinating study emerged from the University of Bern, Switzerland. It found that in orcas, as in humans, culture is not only clearly evident as an important social factor in their lives but also helps drive genetic evolution. It noted that, essentially, a few individuals can colonise new habitats and ecological niches thanks to their behavioural flexibility. Group culture then transmits the know how of surviving on new resources, which, like humans, becomes encoded in their genomes and sets the group on a separate evolutionary track.
The study, hailed by both marine and genome researchers as an extremely important piece of research, found the species, uniquely in common with humans as far as science has so far been able to establish, share a number of unusual features with us, including their intelligence, longevity and social natures. These work together to create an ideal environment for social learning which can strengthen group identity and reinforce genetic distinction. For the orca, called the killer whale but belonging to the oceanic dolphin family of which it is its largest member, like humans, culture is in the driving seat.
This commonality, the shared bond of lived experience and acculturation between these cetaceans and humans is a unique, beautiful and natural thing. Misunderstandings of shared similarities in a should be bygone age of sea life aquariums which use orcas and dolphins for human entertainment, where they are exploited for profit, evolving goodness knows what cultures of slavery, entrapment, resentment etc are grudgingly being acknowledged in some places. Alas, not in Japan, where the pacifist constitution does not extend to all sentient creatures capable of evolving culture.
And so back to where we came in. Its that time of year again, for the places which still keep cetaceans captive for entertainment to place their orders for those who jump the highest, look the prettiest and are spared the annual butchery and slaughter of their apparently less attractive species mates in Japan’s inlet of Taiji, made infamous by the documentary ‘The Cove’.
Between September and April as many as 2,000 dolphins will be driven inland, leaping for their lives, then killed for their meat, turning the sea waters blood red. They will be killed for their meat despite warnings that high amounts of heavy metals in it cause lowered immune systems, fertility issues and premature dementia. They will be killed because a lucrative industry exists where oceanariums will pay up to $150,000 for prize specimens.
A prominent opponent of the cull, activist star of ‘The Cove’, Ric O'Barry, was detained by the Japanese authorities before this year’s ‘season’ and deported, with alleged violation of his work visa cited as the reason. The timing of his detention and deportation is difficult to interpret as anything but an attempt to deter his involvement in attempting to sabotage this year’s cull. For the first time in fourteen years he will not be ‘on the ground’ in direct opposition to it.
O’Barry admits, ‘I’ve been operating out of guilt. I helped create this industry’, alluding to the fact that before the cull began in 1959, there was no market for captive cetaceans. He was the original trainer for the Flipper TV series, capturing and training five dolphins.
In 1970 O’Barry performed a volte face and formed the Dolphin Project, fighting to free captive cetaceans worldwide and in particular to stop the Taiji cull. This year, prevented from returning to Japan, he was one of the chief organisers of Japan Dolphin Day on September 1st. Protests were organised, as they have been in recent years with gathering support, worldwide outside Japanese embassies.
An added impetus was given to this year’s protest with hopes of shaming the Japanese government into action before the world’s attention is turned upon their country as hosts for the 2020 Olympics. O’Barry attended and spoke at the event outside the embassy in London. He is appealing against his deportation and if successful will return to attempt further sabotage and highlighting of the ongoing cull with his fellow protestors from the Dolphin Project. He also admits to feeling his own mortality creeping up on him and says, ‘At 77, I’m running out of time!’.
Whilst a new generation takes up the cause, I cannot help but wonder, as killing seems so endemic to human culture, if the few recent instances of orcas filmed hunting other cetaceans is the result of learned, acculturated behaviour. It would be no less than humans deserve if this developed into a concerted effort and pursuit of their would be captors and killers too.
Following on from last year's study, led by the government's former drugs advisor, Prof. David Nutt and colleagues at Imperial College, London, there has been a resurgence of medical interest (but crucially not in funding or research investment) in LSD and psilocybin, the active ingredient in 'magic' mushrooms, as treatments for mental health conditions ranging from depression to PTSD. According to Nutt, government and funders in the UK remain unwilling to engage with the potential clinical benefits of psychoactive drugs.
In the study, which was, of necessity, partly completed through crowdfunding sources, twenty healthy volunteers who had experience of LSD were injected with 'moderate', 75 microgram, dosages before having their brains monitored using fMRI techniques. Robin Carhart-Harris, also from Imperial College, said the dose produced 'quite profound effects' in brain activity, mood and mental state of the participants, with the overwhelming response being positive. None reported having a 'bad trip', with only three reporting some anxiety or paranoia. Carhart-Harris noted that even those few who had a slightly more challenging experience joined the others in seeming 'somehow psychologically refreshed' afterwards.
A previous related psilocybin study by the group showed that it alongside other psychoactive substances decreased bloodflow to 'hub structures' in the brain, thus having innate potential to help patients overcome mental health conditions where pathological patterns of thought are otherwise entrenched and difficult to reverse. The team began a new study on the effects of psilocybin on patients with depression in May.
A Home Office standard response to the first study's findings was exactly the same as that which I was sent after signing a petition to the government asking for a widening of the medical uses of marijuana in the UK. I signed because I have refractory Frontal Lobe Epilepsy, meaning I am resistant to medication and still have between 40 and 120 seizures every day depending on my seizure threshold and where I am in my cycle. I also have early onset osteoarthritis, due in part to a botched NHS operation. When the arthritis is bad, and it can be debilitatingly so, the pain exacerbates my seizures, clustering them tighter. I have come to from secondary generalised seizures on a few occasions with the bones down the left side of my body all locked and immovable without snapping arthritic spurs In some European countries and in a growing number of US states, as well as in many enlightened countries the world over where medical opinion is reaching something of a unanimous position, both of my medical conditions are top of the list for prescription of medical marijuana and it has been scientifically proven in numerous peer reviewed studies to be by far the most effective drug at treating both conditions with far fewer side effects than any of the prescription drugs available in the UK. UK funding and licensing remains obstinate in the face of scientific evidence and despite the growing prevalence of heartening stories like this:
I cannot take any of the most effective painkillers which act against my arthritis because of how they are proven to interact with AEDs (anti epileptic drugs) my neurologist insists I still need to take as a precautionary measure, despite having never reduced my seizure count in the five years I have been taking them and having a plethora of almost unbearable side effects to boot! Despite what active police practice may be, it is illegal in the UK for me to buy or grow medical grade marijuana as treatment for either of my conditions. That Home Office standard response reads:
'Drugs are illegal where scientific and medical analysis has shown they are harmful to human health. We have a clear licensing regime, supported by legislation which allows legitimate research to take place in a secure environment while ensuring that harmful drugs are not misused and do not get into the hands of criminals.'
Come on, really? Who does that protect when studies across the globe show the drugs in question, issues over which the response is being given, are of some provable scientific benefit to human health and harmful, illegal versions of them remain in the hands of those who that statement means when it refers to 'criminals', whilst legal versions, as well as contingent new research studies into them and their funding, are controlled by 'criminals' with only profit in mind and not the health and well being of the patients the drugs are intended for. Jeez, it's not conspiracy theory, it's neoliberal big pharma theory 101!
Before the anger gets the best of me and lowers the seizure threshold even further, at this juncture I'd also just like to point out I'm no Timothy Leary or Albert Hoffmann, nor even any kind of 'blazer', just an occasional, necessary medicinal user of nothing more than marijuana. Stimulants of any kind as well as alcohol are not advised as part of my prescribed medicinal regime or even just for how they interact with the condition in general, even caffeine. Amidst the trajectory, narrative and language of the 'War on Drugs', it's always destined to failure echoes still playing across our society despite changing global social mores, there have been far too many casualties of 'friendly fire', left to suffer in criminalised ignominy through the complacency and glacial (in)action of drug research funding and licensing in the UK.
With that in mind, I'd like to take a wee moment to remember a time before that war was engaged in earnest, or at least when there was a culture of detente, when one of those Great British Cultural Institutions, The Beatles, was fuelled by recreational, never mind medicinal, drug use. What was, to my mind, the greatest of their albums, 'Revolver', turned fifty back on Aug 5th this year, with barely a peep in the Great British Meeja, noting how it was largely inspired and motivated by John Lennon and George Harrison's first (surprise) LSD trip!
The story goes that in 1965 (as told to Rolling Stone in 1971 by John Lennon and the original interview recordings recently animated by them and shown below), Lennon and then wife Cynthia, with Harrison and his wife Pattie, were having dinner at the London home of their friend and dentist John Riley. Riley insisted they have and finish a sweetened coffee after dinner, then admitting to the sugar cubes being laced with LSD, which both Beatles had previously claimed they would try if they didn't know they were ingesting it! The story of their experience is in the animation here, enjoy:
Now, I'm clearly not advocating the manner, amount and/or settings used here for any use of psychotropics for mental health issues, that's being done by medical professionals, but for Lennon and Harrison, it led to them seeing the world in a whole new way and then advocating LSD use to Ringo and a reluctant Paul. Of course, writing, performing and recording 'Revolver' took a lot more than that but to begin the process it took, just like the subjects in the Imperial College study, a kick start which made the band feel 'somehow psychologically refreshed' enough to make perhaps the most significant work of their career.
If just a drop of the right psychoactive substance can help shift the pathological burden of mental health issues in the right medically determined patients isn't it preferable to a lifelong reliance on big pharma produced anti depressants with dependency designed in? Shouldn't we all be tuning in and turning on to the deficit in funding language and resources, asking who they serve? Or should we just accept that the folks in the white coats with the big pharmaceutical logo on the pocket have our best interests at heart?
(A wee addendum/footnote, I wonder what Owen 'Pfizer' Smith's stance is on the issue, anyone heading to any hustings anytime soon able to pop him a question or two?)
Although much of this is catharsis, like lifting a huge stone slab from my chest, its not just personal. If it makes you feel a little uncomfortable, I guess its supposed to.
A week spent waiting, watching, having, trusting a latent hope in the individual empathy for others lurking in the human condition. A week spent waiting for the hashtags, for the memes, for the mass showing of solidarity on social media profile pics. A week spent waiting in vain hope; it had me thinking about Lilias Adie.
As a Scottish Ethnology undergraduate, many moons ago, I used the witch trials of West Fife (which persisted relatively late in the area due to the fervour of a local minister and self appointed witch finder general, who took up a post in Torryburn and sought to become the scourge of ‘witches’ all around) as a basis for research into local custom and belief which persisted into the modern era. Some of it has gained new relevance in my current research. A source of much material was the case of Lilias Adie.
In 1704, under duress of trial and tortures, Lilias confessed to being a witch and having sex with the devil at a local gathering place for witches. Initial accusations of Lilias’ crimes came from neighbours who witnessed her acting strangely and leaving her dwelling at unusual hours. The accusations came after a familiar, to any contemporary sociologist or cultural anthropologist, 'moral panic' had built up locally following a few other high profile trials which stamped the new minister’s authority on the parish and which engendered a culture of suspicion, fear and distrust among locals.
Following her confession, whilst awaiting sentencing in her cell, Lilias took her own life. According to the heightened custom and belief of the locale and time, Lilias was now in compounded danger of returning to do harm as a ‘revenant’, a corpse of someone who has died an un-Christian death and could come back from the grave to torment the living. Folk belief was such that these walking corpses were seen as a very real threat, animated by the devil, with certain corpses being more vulnerable to this devilish reanimation. The most vulnerable among them were thought to be suicides and witches. If a fear of Lilias as something ‘other’ had grown whilst she was alive, it had multiplied with the manner of her death and confession.
Compounded, extraordinary steps were taken to ensure Lilias’ body could not become a dreaded revenant (It is also worth pointing out that belief would have been such that Lilias’ coupling with the devil would have been thought to have been with another revenant, animated by the devil’s dark forces; the apparent strengthening of dark power and threat to the parish would have been facilitated further should the thus propagated Lilias return. There is even mention in the trial of misgivings over the possibilities of her carrying the devil’s child.) So Lilias was buried, as was customary for suicides unentitled to Christian burial, beyond the foreshore, between the high and low tide mark. Where there was a belief that a corpse could return as a revenant it was also a relatively common practice to ‘weigh down’ the corpse in its grave with a large, heavy stone slab. Given her confession and suicide, according to folk belief, leaving Lilias as a double revenant threat, this was done too.
Archeologists believe they rediscovered Lilias’ grave back in 2014 and that the dimpled slab is the only known witch’s grave of its type in Scotland. Its also thought that, despite being raided by nineteenth century antiquary hunters, which led to Lilias’ skull being sent to St Andrews University, where it was photographed more than one hundred years ago, parts of Lilias were still under there. The grave robbers would have seen the skull as the main prize, highly sought after by practitioners of the nascent (pseudo)science of phrenology, and would have been paid handsomely for their efforts by the university. Sometime in the twentieth century, the skull itself went missing and all attempts to trace it have failed. Some of the photographs taken are still on display at the National Library of Scotland.
Earlier examinations of the skull and later of the photographs have determined that Lilias was likely in her seventies when she died. She was also likely to be of strikingly unusual appearance with highly prominent front teeth and areas of her face and head misshapen. Rear areas of the skull are malformed and there are, here and in other areas, clear signs of pressure being exerted on Lilias’ brain. Some of these seem to be due to earlier life trauma. There are clear indents around the fronto-temporal areas, indicating it was highly likely Lilias was not only a person with complex needs and learning difficulties but was also a person with at least one form of epilepsy (many people with Frontal Lobe Epilepsies have seizure patterns consistent with Lilias’ reported behaviours, particularly somnambulism, uncoordinated ‘wanderings’ or difficult to understand bodily movements, which even now can confuse some neurologists.). Clearly, lately, given that my initial studies were some years before my own diagnosis, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of Lilias personal as well as her cultural predicament.
I’ve written before about how some beliefs around disabilities, and epilepsy in particular, have their roots in medieval custom and belief; despite how much more science understands, some aspects of culture, of behaviours, move at a slower pace and it becomes difficult for us to acknowledge it as a society. So they remain, festering, buried beneath a great, stone slab.
But those beliefs are the revenant. Even just as far back as the mid-1980s, during the Miners’ Strike, my Uncle, who brought me up from the age of nine (in a wheelchair due to a virulent bout of polio when he was a toddler, who I’d watched deal with the ignorance and indignities surrounding disabilities all throughout the 1970s and early ‘80s) found himself banned from the local Miners Welfare Club, of which he’d been a member for fifteen years, because he’d torn a woman’s tights whilst dancing in his wheelchair. He was told his chair was a danger to others and a fire risk. He’d been a huge supporter, being still in work and able to donate, of the local Strike Fund, and as a family we’d all taken an active role in community efforts to support the miners, of which we had several family members involved. We stopped. Nice understanding and solidarity, nice work comrades!
Despite the many advances, despite the safeguards of legislation, people with disabilities have still been the most disproportionately hit by current ideological austerity budget cuts. Amidst a nascent culture of fear and anxiety, which for some exacerbates debilitating conditions, amidst the uncertainty of the post Brexit vote milieu and the threat of removal of guarantees for protections of disabled people’s rights which EU membership gave, now, just as in 1704, people with disabilities are the easy other its difficult for people to talk about, to find appropriate means of showing solidarity with.
The outpourings of solidarity in the wake of the Orlando tragedy for the LGBTI community, the continuing outrage and support for the #BlackLivesMatter movement are rightful and righteous. The memes, the social media profile pic additions after terrorist incidents and abuses of power show how we can find simple ways to reassert our humanity over hatred. Whilst I may not use social media much personally, often because, my company is saturated in it due to us conducting social media marketing campaigns on behalf of our clients, I’ve made damned sure they were all actively aware of the need to express and spread that humanity.
So, I’ve waited, working with, supporting those companies; and I’ve done my usual work with people with disabilities, people with epilepsy, head hung heavy. I’ve waited for the mass show of solidarity with a growing sense of rage and frustration as I’ve felt the fear and anxiety palpably increase. But you cant force people to feel empathy, compassion, solidarity. That’s not to say there has been none, just no movement, no mass showing of it when it was most needed, for those who maybe needed it more than others, needed to be able to see it.
Just in case you missed it, a week ago was when this happened:
…every newpaper, every channel, every online news source carried the story. Every one emphasised that 19 people died and more than that were injured in the brutal attack. Every one also quoted the attacker as saying ‘It is better that disabled people disappear’. Then the story quietly went away, leaving every person with a disability, able to process the information fully or not, feeling a little less safe, even more vulnerable, even more the other. More than ever they needed that sign, needed to hear, the world, the good people at least, stand with you. Jeez, the deaths of political satirists, cartoonists, at the hands of extremists started a worldwide outpouring of solidarity and rightfully so, but where the fuck was Je Suis Invalide? Or more appropriately, its Japanese equivalent?
Japan is not some obscure, disconnected place (not that it should matter at all!), in our cultural consciousness. It has the third largest economy in the world, it is globally interlinked with us all financially and culturally. The distance from Edinburgh to Tokyo and that from Edinburgh to Los Angeles isn’t all that different, what's a few hundred miles when you've already bridged thousands, yet somehow we are so much more ready to sympathise with causes originating in the US than any originating in Japan.
In this case, the lack of empathy, the lack of mass showing of solidarity, has sunk me, for myself and everyone I work with, advocate on behalf of, into a darker despair than ever I felt when moved to write ‘Kafkaesque’ or the three parts of ‘Landscape of Fear’. I have three other half written pieces, deliberately all on lighter themes, which I haven’t been able to complete, to fully engage with, despite them being on subjects I’m generally quite passionate about. With them, I wanted to try and move away from the anxious, the fearful and, yes I’m aware of it, the preachy; but when I wrote at the end of ‘Kafkaesque’ about us all being the next easy other, I hoped it was implicit from my other writings who I thought would be next firmly in the crosshairs.
And right now, a week out from brutal tragedy, both directly and indirectly affecting a worldwide community among the most vulnerable humankind has, solidarity, mass empathy feels too late. When we’re gone, don’t forget, between the high and low tide mark with a great, heavy stone slab on top and everyone else can rest easy.
Monday evening, a fortnight and a half out from the Brexit vote and as if in mute testimony to the now seemingly constantly redefining maxim, a week, no a day, no an hour is a long time in politics among the settling sands of the UK’s new political landscape, my already way too numerous notes for a promised shorter than its predecessors third and final part to ‘A Landscape of Fear’, had throughout the course of the day become far more copious and were spread out before me. How much of it had caught me in the sleight of hand, the political prestidigitation of it all and how much was strictly relevant to my overall theme, to the intended trajectory of the piece? It couldn't just be indices, democracy and 2025, not now.
I had intended to focus mainly on how the opposite of fear is so often given as hope, but fear can be so visceral, so immediate, whilst hope is at a remove, deferred. Certainly hope can help to assuage fear, to keep it at bay, but if hopes become more faint still, or less likely in their realisation, they are no antidote at all, becoming simply a seeming delay, a deferral of what has become inevitable in fear’s dark harvest. No, a more immediate counter to fear is surely happiness, contentment. With that in mind, I had intended the focus of this concluding piece to be on the indices for measuring overall happiness in a nation state, focusing on the World Happiness Report and particularly the Happy Planet Index.
Perhaps that seems a little idealistic, simplistic, now, here, against the backdrop of a landscape of fear, one which not only sees much of Europe seemingly taking some solace from the ravages of increasingly unfairly distributed advantages and disadvantages of globalisation in a retreat into a populism and intolerance redolent of the 1930s, but, as I will try to summarise a little more, areas of the world which had legislated against history repeating itself are in fact also retreating even further. Its not simplistic or idealistic, that’s part of the narrative which wants you to subsume resistance to hegemony in its prevailing trajectory, there are alternatives and some, at least when compared to the deliberately obscured, hegemonic narrative of neoliberalism, may seem deceptively simple. For now, back to those notes, some of them were still relevant, just in a slightly different context. Don't think much of it will be pulling the UK up any kind of happiness indices anytime soon though.
Yes some of them, those bloomin notes, cover the rearranging of the chairs on the deck of what is still a deeply troubled ship, despite all attempts to appear contrary to that on the surface. Everything turned a little literal, for a while at least, with the most prominent Leave campaigners having left and the least visible during the campaign of the high profile Cabinet Remainers is, well of course, remaining to be crowned, appointed, ushered in amid much fanfare to the recently vacated high heid yin’s chair for her (lack of) effort. In fact, as Home Secretary of a Government apparently being brought to task for failing to address concerns over immigration sufficiently, according to the Brexiteer’s narrative, she should have been least likely to gain the promotion she has.
Across the floor of the house, Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, appear to have missed their window of opportunity to draw the general public’s attention to the hypocrisy of this or to skewer the lack of a plan B, or even really a plan A, for a Brexit vote in either the official Leave or Government camps. Almost inevitably, they have instead been descending further into their latest bout of (as public as they can make it) internecine warfare, where the candidate who finished fourth in last year’s depute leader elections feels it apt to challenge a leader who just ten months ago was elected by the highest majority ever secured in a members' ballot. Whilst one Remainer is rewarded with the top prize, unelected, for her leadership qualities in barely campaigning at all, another is castigated for poor leadership by a fourth rate depute leader for lack of leadership in campaigning not quite enough. They appear to be very British degrees of separation.
But whilst the window closes and the opportunity to land as many blows as possible on the exposed flank of the Conservative party for a Labour party hobbled by its commitment to ghosts of recent past, whilst the smoke and mirrors give the illusion of competency, of a plan forming, of continuity, of moderate, one nation conservativism, the apparently ‘landmark’ speech given by Theresa May, which at once saw off her final challenger and assured her coronation as unelected Prime Minister, given the ‘form’ of a government where she has played an integral part, the doublespeak spoke loud and the final reversal of Blair’s triangulation appears complete. When working class voters have given their approval in such huge numbers for an enabling of further right wing policies its clearly wise, for the perpetrators of the ruse, not to scare the horses. Soothing noises are obligingly being made.
It was almost, but not quite, easy to forget during the twenty minutes or so of that speech in Birmingham, that Prime Minister May (and just how many times did she say when rather than if she was PM, of course it was a done deal!), as the continuity candidate, will be set on continuing the rightward veer of post Brexit vote UK, and on taking those ‘ordinary, hard-working people’ deeper still into almost every carefully opined social and economic ill visited upon them, with those least able to bear it likely to take even more disproportionate a share of the burden, by her own government’s ideological choices. I watched it three times on Monday evening just to be sure, then decided to wait a beat before finishing writing this.
Then on Wednesday watched Hansard savaged, again three times over in incredulity (the only saving grace being Angus Robertson’s wily oppositional entry into Hansard as regards why his compatriots would not be applauding the outgoing PM’s leadership), and the truths for so many, the actualities of Prime Minister Cameron’s reign, smoothed over by well placed questions, designed of course to stroke an ego in no need of it. But Hansard is not all of the record and it is wholly fitting that as the final nails are sharpened for the arch triangulator Blair’s political coffin, his diametric apprentice hums off over the horizon, with no inquiries as yet into the rampant social and economic, domestic and international consequences of his ineptitude. He will of course lose much less sleep, if any at all, over any of it, than his erstwhile tutor shows in the preternatural aging of his countenance.
By far the largest part of Davie and the PR men’s ‘reverse triangulation’ of Blair’s success has been/is aimed at those areas which have suffered the most economic adversity, by and large the same areas which were led to vote so strongly for Brexit. Two consecutive governments have repeatedly blamed an ongoing economic crisis in Europe post 2008 and subsequent pressures on the economy from immigration as the necessitating factors for a brutal and persistent austerity regime. During the referendum debates it was an all too simplistic finger to point, given more than a decade’s long narrative trajectory, towards stagnation in wage levels being attributable to cheap imported labour from Europe. However, it is the manner in which those factors may be more accurately, directly attributable to ideological austerity and the manner in which policies led by it have been pursued in the UK, rather than the easy scapegoat we were supposed to look at and millions did, which was the subject of last week’s unusually critical report from the UN. It was the news from experts you didn’t get to hear where you are.
Whilst the, its becoming almost tedious to write but write it we should every single time, overwhelmingly right wing British media have circled the wagons and set up an almost constant barrage of smoke and mirrors to allow a modicum of retrospective forward planning and organisation to be mustered, it shouldn’t be surprising, but nor should it be any less galling for it, that the prestidigitation not only distracted from the continuing dance around the 31 year low of the pound and the lack of genuine resilience in any of the wider markets, with a deep recession predicted for next year as a direct result of the Brexit vote compounding failed austerity economics, but also from last week’s UN judgement of the UK Government’s austerity programme. It is no surprise, because as the UK, under Ms May’s new stewardship, will be set to continue its pursuit of a Great British Bill of Rights. Among many other ills too numerous for me to face amidst what was to be my summing up of where we stand now in the landscape of fear, before getting back to the happy, I’d like to spend a little time on just two overlooked developments (overlooked in the sense that the compliant UK media reckoned, what with the hell and handbasket situation generally, it may just be best to say ‘oh look, a squirrel’ and subsequently keep saying it for as long as need be), that human rights report and the elevation of ‘the social partners’ in a European context, which relates back to that other Great British Bill, the latest Trade Union legislation.
The aforementioned report was issued by the UN’s committee of independent experts which monitors states’ protection of economic, social and cultural rights, with a particular eye on disadvantaged groups. There are a set of internationally recognised legal norms ‘designed to ensure everyone’s rights are progressively realised using the maximum available resources’. The group takes into account that in the post 2008 landscape difficult choices had to be made and ‘respects the considerable scope for legitimate political disagreement about how deficits should be reduced in the pursuit of prosperity’. Above all the group is a legal institution valuing the rule of law and evidence over all and any propaganda, spin or rhetoric. Jamie Burton, writing for Social Europe, sums up the report’s findings perfectly:
‘After considering extensive evidence submitted by the Government, national human rights institutions and civil society groups and conducting two public dialogues with the UK Government’s delegation…its findings are stark: social security reforms and cuts to public services have had a disproportionately adverse impact on low income households and should be reversed. Regressive reforms to corporation and inheritance tax, and VAT have diminished the UK’s ability to “address persistent social inequality” whilst not enough is being done to tackle tax evasion by corporations and high net worth individuals. The housing deficit is now “critical” and contributing to “exceptionally high levels of homelessness”. Insufficient action has been taken to address the growing dependency on food banks. Benefit levels leave many in states of destitution. Benefits sanctioning is being misused.’
None of this is anything new to anyone genuinely concerned. Those concerns may have been dismissed as politically motivated, the report can’t be. In it the committee goes on to admonish the UK Government in stating the new ‘National Living Wage’ is ‘not sufficient to ensure a decent standard of living’. It also fully acknowledges that employment levels may appear to be increasing but much of that increase is fuelling the crisis which sees too many people in low paid, low skill jobs or precarious zero hour contracts. In submitting evidence to the committee, even before the Brexit vote, the Institute for Fiscal Studies projected child poverty to increase by 50%, with almost one in five living in absolute poverty by 2020.
Burton concludes, ‘as we enter this period of unprecedented political and economic uncertainty, it is critical that we claim the right to honest, informed debate and evidence based policy to carry us through it…A robust public discourse backed by enforceable human rights and the rule of law is integral to ensuring that it does. An honest and responsible government would welcome, not fear it.’. But we clearly do not have an honest or responsible Government, the track record detailed in the report gives the lie to that, redefining human rights would render it redundant though, phew, said the champion of the Snooper’s Charter in kitten heels. Strangely enough, almost every subject in which the government’s actions were decried in the report was mentioned in that carefully calculated speech, its almost as if she was party to a trick or two in earnest doublespeak from all that time in power alongside those shiny PR boys. How much easier in times of national crisis and strife to have the minister’s daughter delivering the lines, how much more believable that sincerity will be, almost a PR masterstroke, funny that.
Whilst platitudes echoing expectations of control over their own lives litter every speech the new PM gives aimed at those ‘ordinary hard working people’, it seeps away with every right wing, hawkish appointment to cabinet. Eyebrows may be raised beyond foreheads for some of those new appointments and roles but in every key position where the UK must negotiate or be represented internationally, a Brexiteer now stands proudly at the helm; where the UK should look outward those tasked with doing so have shown themselves as rooted in xenophobic isolationism, the (often not so) closet racists now control the UK’s borders and international diplomacy.
In a wider context, beyond the narrowing confines of Great Britishness, beyond the borders of a continent petulantly blamed for all ills and turned away from, beyond the failed foreign policies and illegal wars, beyond the complicity in creating an age of terror which they represent, baited breath won't save us from the diplomatic land mines they all now represent scattered across the globe. If the UK’s isolationism is turning the clock back to a mythical 1950s and the rise of populism, intolerance and fascism here and across Europe, around the globe, are aiming a populist time machine roughly at the 1930s, in the South China Sea a contest for primacy is brewing which seems to be taking things a step further back yet, appearing more redolent of the 1910s and, according to Dr John C Hulsman, ‘will probably do more to tell the tale of what our multipolar world will evolve into than anything presently happening in Europe’. He explains:
‘Asia today, like Europe then, is bristling with nationalistic states with armies and navies, determined to throw their weight around. In Prime Ministers Abe of Japan and Modi of India, and in China's President Xi Jinping, the leaders of the three major regional powers are all strong nationalists, unchallenged masters of their domestic political realms, who would be unable to easily back down if a crisis occurs.
…the still-dominant Americans are forced to shuttle bilaterally between their various Asian allies, scuttling about like a headless chicken trying to keep the geostrategic show on the road. For there is an utterly unresolveable strategic tension lying at the heart of the increasing controversies in the waters surrounding China: the US is the dominant power in East Asia, and China wishes to be the dominant power in East Asia. Nothing can wish this basic strategic reality away.’
The rivalry playing out in the South and East China seas (now being further complicated by an emboldened post election Abe, overseeing the world’s third largest economy, intent on amending Japan’s pacifist constitution, imposed by the US after WWII and which prohibits it from waging war, whilst Emperor Akihito, a committed pacifist, has expressed his intention to abdicate, a step unprecedented in modern Japan), to use Hulsman’s analogy, resembles nothing so much as 1913 Europe, sitting precariously on the edge of a powder keg. The US resembles 1913 Britain, China approximates the Kaiser’s Germany, Japan looks like Third Republic France and India even makes a decent rough stand in for Tsarist Russia. None of it appears to bode well for the UK’s new international diplomats. Lets remember too that nascent US presidential candidate Donald Trump, has gone on record as ‘having no problem’, with any of those aforementioned nations ‘protecting their own interests’ by accelerating their nuclear defence interests.
As things move on apace, as everything changes and everything stays the same, only more so, with added pre WWI and WWII tensions, shadows lengthen across the landscape of fear. Whilst day after day the UK’s newly acclaimed moderate, continuity (but in actuality, in lobby voting practice and on which policies have most drawn her support, is at the very least hard right) Prime Minister cites the result of a plebiscite with no integral legal, actionable threshold as mandate or democratic basis for the tautology ‘Brexit means Brexit!’; in retort, rightfully and of course, the First Minister of Scotland has pointed out that for Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly against Brexit, ‘Remain means Remain!’.
Those opposing standpoints and what is likely to be the first significant debate and vote of PM May’s tenure, that on Trident renewal, may even now be front and centre of her immediate thinking, should tradition hold. As one of his last acts as chief of Defence Staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton, will at some point in the early days of her premiership walk Ms May through a briefing on the country’s nuclear plans and the damage which could result from a nuclear attack on the UK. Based on the information given, May will then be tasked, as has every PM of the nuclear age before her, with handwriting what is known as the ‘Letter of Last Resort’, in fact writing four copies, one for each submarine commander in the UK’s fleet, to be sealed until after the event of her death and the country being destroyed in a nuclear strike.
The letters are expected to detail instructions for the commanders, telling them what to do with the UK’s nuclear arsenal, housed in their subs, if the country has been under nuclear attack. The subs’ commanders and their deputes, who are the only ones with access to the safes within safes on the subs where the letters are stored, must decide together when the country has been entirely destroyed, and only then access the instructions.
Sometime, maybe it has already happened or will be happening very soon, those letters are being, have been, composed and will be winging their way to the UK’s nuclear submarine base at Faslane; this is also wholly contrary to the expressed anti nuclear views of a resounding majority of Scottish MSPs, all but one of Scotland’s MPs in Westminster and against the wishes of a majority of the Scots electorate. Do we, in Scotland really feel included, warmed and welcome in Ms May’s ‘democracy that works for everyone, so we can restore trust in our most important institutions and the political process itself’? Or is it just she forgot to count us in when she said she was ‘not going to ignore the public when they say they are sick of politics as usual’?
In the meantime, back at that wholly unreformable shibboleth of an unworkable, we need to get out of it if we want control of our borders, our laws, our lives, the universe and everything back, European Union, at least some reforms which would give genuine control over many areas of ‘ordinary working people’s’ lives where it has diminished, were already recently put in place, and we didn’t hear a jot of it during the stramash of a Tory leadership contest which wasn’t.
For over thirty years the EU has been enabling employers’ and workers’ representatives to negotiate on improving working conditions and workers’ rights across Europe. What has been called the European Social Dialogue has achieved much in the areas of part-time work, parental leave, workplace stress and harassment and violence at work, lifelong learning and plenty more besides. More than forty different sectors have launched their own Social Dialogue committees, negotiating concrete, real world benefits for ‘ordinary hard-working people’.
On Monday 27 June, the social partners, the European Trade Union Confederation and employers organisations, alongside the European Commission and Council, signed a joint statement pledging ‘A New Start for Social Dialogue’, jointly expressing that this should lead to more substantial involvement of social partners in the European Semester, a stronger emphasis on capacity building for national social partners and a strengthened involvement of social partners in EU policy and law making.
This built on decisive action taken earlier in June when, for the first time, the Council of the European Union also adopted conclusions on strengthening European Social Dialogue, recognising that ‘social dialogue is a crucial factor and a beneficial tool for a well functioning market economy’, whilst calling on all member states to involve social partners closely in the design and implementation of policies, a hugely significant step in formalising the role of unions in EU policy making.
That’s an EU which the UK was due to take over the rotating presidency of next June; one in which the rights and influence of ‘ordinary hard-working people’, their control, has just grown immeasurably and one over which the UK was set to have a greater degree of influence and control over too. In the UK, in stark contrast, the role of social partners is being curbed and the ability of unions to represent and protect workers’ rights diminished by the Trade Union Act 2016.
So whilst talk of any snap General Election fades into the background noise, mandated democracy, genuine representation of any kind other than a platitudinous doublespeak, well you gave your permission, your consent for this, Brexit means Brexit, recedes further, the dust settles on a widening democratic deficit; the wolves remain confident in a landscape of fear where they have emboldened the scavengers of extremity. The success of the right, in the UK as it is elsewhere in Europe, is the failure of the left; or, to take greater account of what should be acknowledged as a shift in focus, the narrative of social democracy, like the demagogues and populists, needs to find ways to move beyond traditional definitions of left and right. That is, at least if any hope is to be found for the restoration of redistributive social justice and the provisions of social protection for the casualties of globalisation. Reflecting on what the Brexit vote means for the left, Dick Pels has this to say:
‘…clearly the cultural and identity dimension of politics must be taken much more seriously as independent forces of division and conflict, particularly in a ‘knowledge society’ which is increasingly stratified according to levels of education. Both immigration and Europe are such virulent issues because they are located at the crosspath of the economic and cultural axes, simultaneously addressing anxieties about economic insecurity and the perceived loss of national community. Any politics of hope rather than fear therefore needs to target both dimensions, without reducing one to the other, and speak to people’s economic and cultural concerns with equal seriousness. This anti-reductionism of course also implies rejecting the populist conviction that economic problems ultimately derive from cultural ones…We can and must do better than the populists on both counts: offering robust social protection for those in precarity (the modernisation losers), while simultaneously providing a cultural narrative which is strong enough to lay their anxieties about a ‘loss of country’ or ‘loss of home’ to rest.’
Pels is a positivist advocate for a New Deal for Europe. Balanced against a continuing improvement of public services and welfare protection by nation state, within the supra national protections of a truly social Europe, he calls for ‘a cultural civilisation drive against the prison guards of the closed society and their captives’ as an absolutely necessary defence of ‘pluralism and diversity, free thinking and tolerance’. For Pels, this is a cry for a return to what the early decades of the 20th century knew as Cultural Socialism, which at the heart of a 21st century European ideal of civilisation ‘may lift up our small nations to a bigger, more generous and adventurous sense of who we are’. For Scots, with many of the anxieties he mentions at least partly laid to rest, and explicitly so in terms of how we voted as a nation in the EU referendum, this is a notion which may yet prove telling for our small nation’s fate.
So for now, fittingly amidst all the other minute by minute twists and turns, this has become an entirely different ending to the one I had intended. I maintain happiness is a greater antidote to fear than hope. Somewhere, sometime, relatively (and I emphasise the relatively, two years is a long time othered, marginalised and increasingly destitute for far too many) soon, I hope Scotland can take its rightful place among the independent small nations of Europe, perhaps emulate nations like Costa Rica on the Happy Planet Index, or 'just' the usual suspects of Denmark, Iceland, Norway or Finland on the World Happiness Report, I’m just not so happy, nor should you be, we can glean only hope as solace in an almost all pervasive landscape of fear.
A Home Office standard response to the first study's findings was exactly the same as that which I was sent after signing a petition to the government asking for a widening of the medical uses of marijuana in the UK. I signed because I have refractory Frontal Lobe Epilepsy, meaning I am resistant to medication and still have between 40 and 120 seizures every day depending on my seizure threshold and where I am in my cycle. I also have early onset osteoarthritis, due in part to a botched NHS operation. When the arthritis is bad, and it can be debilitatingly so, the pain exacerbates my seizures, clustering them tighter. I have come to from secondary generalised seizures on a few occasions with the bones down the left side of my body all locked and immovable without snapping arthritic spurs In some European countries and in a growing number of US states, as well as in many enlightened countries the world over where medical opinion is reaching something of a unanimous position, both of my medical conditions are top of the list for prescription of medical marijuana and it has been scientifically proven in numerous peer reviewed studies to be by far the most effective drug at treating both conditions with far fewer side effects than any of the prescription drugs available in the UK. UK funding and licensing remains obstinate in the face of scientific evidence and despite the growing prevalence of heartening stories like this:
