Northern Ireland doesn’t need prosecutions – it needs the state to open its books

June 2010

The iconography of Northern Ireland is changing – and with it the official narrative of what that armed conflict stretching across three decades was all about.

The priest Edward Daly waving his bloodstained handkerchief as he escorted Jackie Duddy’s body out of the firing line in the Bogside on 30 January 1972 is the iconic moment.

It now accompanied by another defining image: The look on the face of his sister Kay Duddy, and that handkerchief -  now a  rather sacred relic – that was brought out to the Guildhall to greet the publication of the Saville report.

The relatives of the dead and wounded on Bloody Sunday wore “a look of liberation,” says Professor Christine Bell, one of Northern Ireland’s premier experts on peace processes and transitional justice.

The acceptance of the Saville report by the leaders of the unionist and loyalist parties, and the visit of Protestant church leaders to the relatives, mark a radical change of tone and dialogue.

We have known for three decades what happened, we have always known that there were no guns, nail bombs petrol bombs or grenades in the hands of the casualties. Citizens were shot for being there.

Bereaved families now have it on record. It needed to be said officially. And Saville has now said it. David Cameron’s repetition of those words, ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’, was eloquent and unprecedented.

So, what now? Prosecutions are hardly the relatives’ priority. But the limits of the Saville report – what happened on that day -  produced a political trap.

Blame now attaches not to the victims but the people who pulled the triggers and who ‘knowingly put forward  false accounts.’

Yet everyone knows that culpability lies with their commanders and the context created by the political and military systems.

Prosecutions of 1 Para squaddies won’t take us any closer to those systems. They won’t answer the question: why were paratroopers known for excessive violence positioned to police a banned civil rights march? Which generals and politicians were talking about shooting civil rights leaders? Why was such talk tolerated? Why was there no redress for socio-economic and political injustice in that place?

We don’t need prosecutions and we probably don’t need another public inquiry to answer these unanswered questions, but we do need another part of the process.

If an obvious forum has not emerged it is not for want of trying to imagine what it might be. It is very difficult. But it is only difficult. It is not impossible.

Professor Bell suggests that the British state could just open the books. The paramilitary organisations, too, could open their books. The government could appoint a custodian of those archives and improvise a process of disclosure.

We can’t close the book if we haven’t opened it. Meanwhile, we cannot exaggerate the iconography of joy and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry’s importance in narrating a new national story.

Big society – small state

Marlboro man meets Russell

Within a couple of weeks of the general election Nick Clegg  staked his political reputation on the coalition not scything Britain with the savagery for which Margaret Thatcher was simultaneously loathed and loved.

He will use his authority ruthlessly, he said, to stop the coalition leaving Britain broken.

He had already swerved into a U turn – beckoned by the Bank of England, he signed up to cuts of £6 billion immediately.

His alibi was a contradiction in terms: ‘progressive cuts’,  and the model promoted by Canada and Sweden.

His  best friends should tell him: this stinks. The scythe is savage; it’s meant to be. Public sector cuts will hurt those with the least – the public sector sector workers, a majority of whom are women, who service us, the public.

Innovation will be starved, research will be pruned,  progressive development will be disabled, green shoots will be trodden down.

Clegg will be undone: his reputation will be ruined, because Britain will be broken.

If anyone profits it will be Cameron’s new Conservatism, if only because the cuts will create the context for Cameron’s ‘Mad Men’ moment: the Big Society.

Cameron conjours a dream in which the Marlboro myth of the big country: solitary cowboy on horse between big sky and craggy landscape segues into Up and its heroic little, loveable Russell. Russell’s allure is that he only wants to be kind -  he needs to get another helpfulness badge and who but a curmudgeon could resist him! He is blessed by indefatiguable curiosity and a talent for empathy.

Russell is, of course, a solitary child. Like Marlboro man – who he’ll never become – Russell belongs nowhere. We are reassured that he is a loved child, whose resilience comes from a good mother – but only after we have witnessed his heroism. His valour flourishes up in the air, up, up and away. Away.

Russell, like Marlboro man, is de-contextualised.

They live in places where there is no society.

Cameron, of course, repudiates the crazy Thatcherite mantra ‘there’s no such thing as society…’ But he is mobilising ‘Big Society’ in the service of anti-statism, against the ‘Big State’ as if the state were the enemy of ‘society’.

Cameron’s Big Society is also de-contextualised. It enlists the rhetoric of community activism whilst erasing its history in Britain.

Like many Big Ideas borrowed from the US to animate New Labour and New Conservatism, they are bereft of time, space and history.

Britain has a long history of community activism, but now its civil society is shrivelling. It is neither apathetic nor under-developed. On the contrary, it is exhausted. It has been angry, its anger has flared to little effect and it has become depressed.

Two examples:

1.    if society is a living, breathing form of intelligent life, than what does it do to its spirit to mobilise the biggest ever public demonstration on its streets only to be ignored? More than a millon people marched against the Iraq war and yet had no impact on the parliamentary outcome of Tony Blair’s war misson. That experience can only yield a kind of depression. It isn’t apathy, its angry and its hopeless.

2.    Sure Start, inspired by feminist stalwarts in the Labour government elected in 1997, promised to repair the anomalous lack of good publicly funded child care in Britain. Its emergence depended on these politicians’ convergence with other interests and agendas within the Labour Cabinet. Sure Start was, therefore, always the subject of multiple and sometimes contradictory pressures.

It innovated a novel structure – high quality provision for children plus engagement with parents needs, not just as parents, but as people, in alliance with sturdy professionals. At their best, Sure Start projects were a model of ‘community development’ that sought to empower localities with ‘action ‘research’. That was a template that flourished in the 1970s, and the best of Sure Start brought together ‘action research’ – finding out what people needed and what worked -  while improvising new alliances between professions, parents, children and their localities.

Sure Start was hobbled, however, by Tony Blair’s political interventions that skewed its mission, and by  a reluctance to roll out the programme as a model for universal child care. That left it vulnerable to Tory scepticism.

So, these  are two  examples disrespect for civil society. In the first, the art of active dissent was disabled by the crushing reaction of Parliament to the movement against war in Iraq. It remains a peculiarity of the British Parliament that its indifference has been matched only by so much blether about the need to ‘listen to people.’

In the second, the dialogue between the state as provider, professionals and parents will be destroyed by the Conservatives: the community development model will not be honoured, provision will not be expanded, indeed it will be scaled down to meet the needs of children in crisis not children in general. Children’s services will not, therefore, be allowed to become the hub of community spaces.

So, the community activism template promoted by the New Conservatives will be a way of NOT doing community development. The notion of a community army may skill up neighbourhood champions, but it will not empower neighbourhoods, nor will public and private capital be invested in economic development.

Millions has already been spent on refurbishment in ailing  neighbourhoods since the Tory Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine introduced City Challenge – a bidding competition for urban regeneration – in the 1980s.

Poor communities have been consulted to the point of exhaustion.  Often their homes have been transferred to the non-state social sector. They may or may not be better managed. Regeneration programmes seem to have had minimal impact on unemployment and economic sustainability.

‘Social renewal’ was predicated on the perception of these neighbourhoods as a ‘social problem.’ They stayed poor because social renewal was not matched by sustainable economic regeneration.

Unless Cameron’s notion of a community army is not to be a kind of Dad’s army – a home guard for the poor , bob a-jobbing – the coalition government will have to deliver a matrix of educational and economic investment. The Tories believe, of course, that the market will do it. But why would the market do for Marlboro cowboy and little Russell (not to mention their sisters) what it hasn’t done in Belfast, Glasgow, Tyneside or Hastings or Rhyll for the past 30 years?

Why was the encounter between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy in Rochdale so achingly uncomfortable?

Not because he groaned ‘bigoted woman’ – he wasn’t wrong; not because the top man hadn’t answered a customer’s complaints – he had; not because he couldn’t spin an explanation of party policy – he had; not because he had failed to manage a conversation with Labour Party kin – he had; That was his problem – he ‘managed’ his dialogue. He answered her, but he didn’t engage with her. He made no concessions. What he, and everyone around him – and many commentators, too, didn’t appreciate was that the white woman in Rochdale also managed: she wasn’t an ingénue, she wasn’t ignorant, had a clear, coherent and unyielding critique of her party that should have engineered equality but decided not to. Her final poignant protest about student fees should have alerted Brown and his comrades to what was exercising Gillian Duffy: this women knew exactly what was different for the working class between now, and then – when her own generation could enjoy ‘great expectations’ but her grandchildren’s generation seems doomed to hard times. Immigration reared up, as it always does, as both bigotry and as a proxy for pitiless disappointment.

The tragedy of the encounter was that he expected her to be grateful, and she was angry about everything.

Babybooming

There’s a spookie tone about Neil Boorman’s latest spiffy idea. Neil Boorman has ideas, he’s a writer and music promoter, and one of his most celebrated spectacles of anti-consumerism was to torch his designer wardrobe (he could have given the stuff away!) and live without retail therapy for a year.

His new bad idea is promoted on WWW.itsalltheirfault.com. You might be expecting the banks to appear somewhere in this blame blog. But they don’t. Instead he targets the babyboomers – people born after World War 2, the generation that was blessed by the National Heath Service, free universal education and mass public housing. It seems they were blessed by everything, and now they are blame for everything. Boorman has launched a campaign to kick out the baby boomers – not because of their age, oh no, but because of their generation.

He recommends the hypothesis offered in David Willett’s book, the Pinch, (see my Guardian Comment is Free blog, 21 Feb 2010).

Willetts, a rare thinker among Tories, argues that the babyboomers are the selfish generation: among their many social felonies, they are spendthrifts who have priced their children out of the housing market. Willetts is wrong – it wasn’t the babyboomers who created the crazy housing market, it was Thatcherism in the 1980s, and every government since. It wasn’t the babyboomers who introduced student fees; who sold off 1.7 million council houses; who created the pensions crisis and left the infrastructure to rack and ruin while the people making loadsmoney went on making loadsamoney.

By a sleight of hand, a political project has been re-interpreted as a generational mission.

Thatcherism, albeit audacious and surgically successful in our dysfunctional electoral system, never actually secured a majority of votes cast. But it tilted the centre of  gravity of English Parliamentary culture to the right. And there – alone in these islands -  it has stayed.

Boorman rehearses the Willetts’ rhetoric. But with more bile. ‘In 650 days time the babyboomers will start to retire, they’ll stop feeding money into the system with taxes and start sucking out of it with benefits…we don’t have the money to pay for them.’

He complains that ‘we are going to be slaves to our parents, working longer hours, paying more taxes, getting further into debt, just to pay for their retirement…’

What should we do with them, then? He doesn’t suggest mass euthanasia, just mass contempt and electoral eviction: ‘Kick them out,’ he says.

So, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher lives, inflaming angry young men with nothing to lose but loadsamoney and their labels.

But do not despair, babies of babyboomers: check out the Green New Deal, read the  Green Party manifesto, www.onlygreen.org.uk – there is another way, it will put the smile back on your face, and hope in your heart: vote Green.

I  will be speaking at the Beyond Politics – Alternate Ways of Governing Society meeting at the Friends Meeting House tomorrow (Thursday, April 8).

Starts at 6.30, all welcome, entry by donation.

The Green Party is fielding more Parliamentary candidates than ever before – now electors in over 300 constituencies will have the opportunity to vote for the only party whose priorities unites social justice, sustainable society and sustainable environment.

We are the green shoots of British politics. Even in our hostile electoral system our presence is being felt and it is helping to renew our bedraggled political culture.

In the last European Parliamentary elections,  the Greens came ahead of Labour in the South East and the South West. Greens beat the Tories in Brighton and Hove, Oxford, Norwich, Liverpool and Manchester.

The devolved jurisdictions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have introduced forms of proportional representation and their governments are manifestly more representative of their voters. Not so in England where the unreformed Parliamentary electoral system has for the last 40 years distorted our political sentiments.

It is in local government that Greens have been able to get past our crazy electoral system. Already the Party’s impact is palpable.

Hampstead and Kilburn is a progressive constituency – the combined vote at the last general election shows that the anti-Tory vote is overwhelming. The addition of Kilburn wards makes the constituency even more like the Londoners who make London what it really is.

People say: but won’t voting Green risk letting in the Tory who currently trails behind Labour’s Glenda Jackson and the Liberal Democrats’ Ed Fordham? I say it is time for people to be allowed to vote for the candidate they really want to elect. If your priority is to keep the Tory out, don’t vote Tory.

Pressure for electoral reform is becoming irresistible – all the more reason to show by our votes that we want an electoral system that expresses Londoners’ green values, our social justice sentiments and diversity.

Let the green shoots grow!

You can contact me through this website

Beatrix

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Feminism in London 09 took place recently at Conway Hall. Read the speeches, view photos and much more on the Feminism in London website.

There’s a full evaluation of the event over here.

Here’s a piece first published in The Guardian in August 2004:

It would have been his idea of hell. When Greater Manchester’s former chief constable, James Anderton, accused the city’s gay population in 1987 of “swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making”, little did he know he would come to be regarded as one of the instigators of Britain’s gayest city, and perhaps the most successful gay village in Europe. The roll call would also have to include Margaret Thatcher, whose notorious Section 28 – a clause in the Local Government Act passed in 1988 – galvanised a spectacular coalition, ranging from theatre impresarios to librarians, to defend the right to a gay life. Neither could have anticipated how their crusades would conjure up a queer constituency. Back then, Canal Street in Manchester city centre was still a red-light district. Anderton, an evangelical Christian, encouraged his officers to stalk its dank alleys and expose anyone caught in a clinch, while police motorboats with spotlights cruised for gay men around the canal’s locks and bridges.

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Here’s a piece first published in the Independent almost 15 years ago to the week.

DISNEY will earn more from The Lion King than from any other cartoon in history. That’s not just because Disney is the best marketing machine in popular entertainment, but because this movie offers a fantastical solution to that most vexing political problem of our time: the role of fatherhood.

This fantasy is far more important than the accuracy of the film’s detail. As it happens, The Lion King is an insult to lions, hyenas, Africa and children. My cinema was packed with children who were forgiving and enthusiastic; they quarried the cartoon for laughs and filled the place with the sound of their own pleasure. They forgave this cartoon its formulaic score and crass zoology. They rewarded Disney and their adult relatives with the goodwill of having a good time.

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