Call the police? I know what I call them.
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Category Archives: In the world
Writers demand bailout
Downing Street, today.
David Foster Wallace
David Davis
I’ve been waiting years for an MP to do this. I always thought it would be a Labour MP, maybe even my own MP, Jeremy Corbyn. And I thought it would happen after the Blair led Labour government won the House of Commons vote that took this country into war in Iraq. It didn’t happen then. As the UK has slid further and further towards a police state in the years since, and the Labour “rebels” in the House of Commons voted no but stayed where they were, the idea that one of them might force a by election on a matter of principle over New Labour’s erosion of fundamental rights, or the idea that a group of them might organise to do it together, became more and more of a distant, idealistic, ridiculous dream.
And now, today, a Conservative shadow Home Secretary no less, David Davis, has done it. He’s resigned his seat to force a by-election on the issue of 42 days detention, and on the broader issue of the slide towards a police state. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more admiration for a Tory MP. It’s brave, principled and actually, when you think about it, very smart. We’ve been told recently that the public (as represented in opinion polls) is in favour of 42 days without charge. This is going to take the debate away from the distraction of Brown’s competence or survival, and move it to the principled point. That’s a debate we need. And this represents the best way available at the moment of having it.
Don’t work for the clampdown.
{Update} The Lib Dems have now said that they will not contest the by-election, and it’s being reported that Labour are “very unlikey” to put up a candidate either. Which leaves David Davis looking rather foolish. It’s deeply fucking annoying that the story is therefore being reported so far (even including Channel 4 News which I’m watching now) as “Tory eccentric throws a wobbly” or as “Tory strategy undermined by ego-maniacal weirdo”, or as a combination of both. What no one is so far covering is the actual issue – the slow motion constitutional crisis which is morphing this country into a police state.
Jean Daniel Cadinot
Gay porn film maker Jean Daniel Cadinot died last Wednesday, aged 64. I’ll miss him. I liked his films very much, especially the ones I saw in the 19080s, in a world before the internet, when it was difficult if not impossible for a young gay man in Dublin to see any visual depiction of gay sex whatsoever. I think I saw his stuff first in Paris, when I was about 18. It was the first time I’d seen any gay porn at all and I was astounded. It was in a coin operated booth in some grimy place on Rue Saint-Denis. You put in your couple of francs and you chose a scene. The set up in mine involved some kind of medical examination, perhaps at a barracks, which became a gloriously erotic sexual tableau involving several recruits and recruiters, and I’d never seen anything like it. 
Instead of sex being a stolen moment, it was a fully lived, fully enjoyed, immersive bout of great fun. It was only later, back in Dublin, in the warm close flickering darkness of the “cinema” room of The Gym gay sauna, that I saw my first full gay porn film (Chaleurs) and felt able to put a name on the brief excerpt I’d seen in Paris. Young lithe men, usually white and black, in realistic set ups, smiling, in hot places, with beautiful cocks and assholes that the camera lingered over like the sun shone out of them. Cadinot.
Instead of sex being a stolen moment, it was a fully lived, fully enjoyed, immersive bout of great fun. It was only later, back in Dublin, in the warm close flickering darkness of the “cinema” room of The Gym gay sauna, that I saw my first full gay porn film (Chaleurs) and felt able to put a name on the brief excerpt I’d seen in Paris. Young lithe men, usually white and black, in realistic set ups, smiling, in hot places, with beautiful cocks and assholes that the camera lingered over like the sun shone out of them. Cadinot.He made films that were a lot more than the standard procession of sex scenes that most porn directors settle for. His films had plots. Acting. Emotions. Humour. I don’t want to lay it on too thick – Cadinot’s main interest was in young (and smooth and thin, but not necessarily conventionally good looking) men who like to fuck aggressively, but he was a smart artist. He recognised that our need for story is as ancient as our need for sex, and he did his best to satisfy both. And he played a part in changing the way I thought about both my own sexuality and about sex itself. He made it sexy. And for that I will always remember him with a great deal of affection and gratitude.
What would you like to be arrested for today?
There’s a great letter in the current issue of the London Review of Books. It’s from Slavoj Žižek, and it’s about Tibet. You can read it here – just scroll down the page a little to where it says No Shangri-La. I’m not very familiar with Žižek – in fact I think I’ve only read him in the pages of the LRB. But I think I’m going to change that, because this isn’t the first time that he’s crystallised a vague unease of my own into something intelligent and tangible, and his relaxed but provocative style makes for good stimulation. See what you think about what he says about the West’s fanciful preoccupation with Tibet – it strikes me as being pretty much spot on. But I wanted to quote the last thing he says in his letter, on a broader point, about China generally.
This, perhaps, is what is so unsettling about China today: the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past … but a sign of our future. What if the combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle to it?
That’s a pretty grim thought. Which may seem far fetched at first. Surely we value democracy too highly to allow any government to dismantle it? Surely no government could begin even to tamper at the edges of our democratic rights and freedoms without being swept from office on a wave of public anger?
Welcome to the UK : (the following list is from Henry Porter)
• Protests are banned within 1km of Parliament Square without police permission. (penalties 51 weeks in jail and/or £2500 fine).
• Groups may be dispersed under antisocial behaviour laws.
• Groups may be dispersed within a designated areas under the terror laws.
• New offence under SOCPA of trespass within a designated site. No justification for designation is required.
• Under the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act, government agencies may intercept email, internet connections and standard mail without seeking a court’s permission (latest figure: 500,000 secret interceptions a year).
• Since summer 2007, the government and some 700 agencies have had access to all landline and mobile phone records. No primary legislation. No debate in parliament.
• Without primary legislation, police introduced a national network of all automatic number recognition cameras. The travel data is stored for two years.
• The ID card national identity register will store details of every verification made by an ID card holder and give access to government agencies without knowledge or consent of the private citizen.
• ID card enrolment requires every citizen to offer up 49 pieces of personal information to the national database. Heavy and repeated fines for non-compliance.
• Children’s database – all children’s details stored on a central database. Access granted to a wide range of public bodies.
• Children’s Common Assessment Framework database stores all details of children with problems indefinitely.
• The home secretary has announced laws that demand 53 pieces of information for people wishing to travel abroad. No primary legislation was required.
• Public order laws have been used to curtail free expression. A man wearing “Bollocks to Blair” on his T-shirt was told to remove it by police.
• Race and Religious Hatred Act 2006 bans incitement of hatred on religious grounds.
• The justice minister Jack Straw proposes new laws which would ban incitement of hatred for the disabled and on the grounds of a person’s sexual orientation.
• Terror laws are used to ban freedom of expression in designated areas. Walter Wolfgang was removed from the Labour party conference for heckling Jack Straw.
• People searched for wearing slogans on their T shirts or carrying banners.
• Protection from Harassment Act 1997 bans the repetition of an act. People prosecuted for repeated email protest.
• Terror laws ban the glorification of terrorism which has resulted in the prosecution of a young woman for writing poetry.
• Asbo legislation introduces hearsay evidence which may result in a person being sent to jail.
• The Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows prosecution to make an application to be heard without a jury where there is a danger of jury tampering. Fraud trials will be included in this.
• Admissibility of a person’s bad character, previous convictions and acquittals.
• The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 gives the state powers to confiscate assets in circumstances where it does not have enough evidence for prosecution.
• Special immigration appeals court hearings are held in secret. Those terror suspects whose cases come before the court are not allowed to know the evidence against them or to be represented by a lawyer of their own choice.
• End to the right to silence without inference being drawn by the court.
• The Courts and Tribunals Enforcement Act abandons the tradition of an “Englishman’s home is his castle” which since 1604 has made breaking into a home by bailiffs illegal.
• Terror laws have been used to stop and search ordinary citizens. The current rate is 50,000 per annum.
• A maximum of 28 days without charge is allowed under terror legislation. The government has announced plans to extend this to 42 days.
• Control orders – effectively indefinite house arrest – were introduced after the Belmarsh decision.
The Olympics
From Herschell Hershey’s Flickr stream. Lovely how the Olympics is rapidly becoming a poison chalice for bad government. People, broadly, seem to have cottoned on the the fact that the games have long been a scam – politicised by propaganda hungry politicians well before the demonstrators arrive, and obscenely exploited by big business as a cash cow. It’s stirring to see people try to grab the flame back.
Scared of school
A friend of mine has written a great little piece for the Guardian Education website about his time in a pupil referral unit (PRU) – places usually associated with difficult kids. His PRU though was a little different, or at least it catered for a different kind of pupil, and it suggests something of a model for how education should or could be conducted.
We have such a strange attitude to children and teenagers – a peculiar and unhealthy mixture of fear and sentimentality which tends to mask what is, in broad social terms, a pretty unthinking way of raising them. Jasper’s article touches sensibly on that, and I think the points he makes about the society of children, as it exists for most kids, are insightful and important. We keep on hearing about how unhappy children are here in the UK. If we’re serious about improving the quality of their lives, this is the kind of thinking we need.
You can read the article by clicking here.