In defence of rainy weekend days in January

On a clear summer’s day, from the escalator on the outside of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, you can see the Eiffel Tower standing proudly over what is a good candidate to be the most beautiful city in the world. It’s the perfect place for an epiphany or to be struck by inspiration. 

I always thought of myself as strange that I was more likely to be inspired by the sheer beauty of the world in a Wetherspoons or walking along the side of a ring road. Maybe that’s just me. These places are as full of life as a Moroccan Bazaar or the Amazon rainforest, but are less likely to be the subject of rapturous descriptions rendered in sparkling prose. Beauty can be found in the magnificent squares or Rome with its steady diet of Renaissance masterpieces or in the sublimity of Niagara Falls, but there is beauty to be found in the mundanity of suburban life, in queues for the post office, or in a round of drinks after work on Friday.

In Britain, there is no truer expression of beauty than a good pub. I have known many good pubs in my time on this Earth, and I can say that there is no formula for creating an excellent pub. George Orwell laid out his ideal pub in his essay The Moon Underwater, which has given its name to many pubs (most of them Wetherspoons). I disagree with Orwell, there is no perfect pub. A great pub is a response to its environment and shouldn’t be measured against a universal standard.

I am a man of my time and a product of my environment, so I can usually be found in a trendy East London craft beer bar that probably used to be a warehouse, with exposed brick and pipes as well as keg beer from a local microbrewery. It’s easy to sniff at these places for being the embodiment of the modern aesthetic, but a pub should be a response to a time as well as a place. 

Another mode of pub that I very much enjoy is the traditional high street boozer, usually with recognizable pub design and names such as the Kings Head, Rose and Crown, or celebrating a local historical figure or event. In recent years I have seen the range and quality of beer and food offered in these places increase greatly. They have always moved with the times to be the cornerstone of British life.

The best of these pubs are friendly, but not so relaxing that you think you’re in your own living room; so please don’t take off your shoes or put your feet on the chairs. They have subtle, inoffensive interior design, great beer and good food. They capture the community, town or suburb they are located in and reflect it back, whilst still being welcoming to outsiders.

These places offer a refuge from the assault of to our mental wellbeing that is the month of January. Why many people decide to quit drinking in the most depressing of months is beyond me. They sit on the high streets of small towns and street corners of suburban sprawl. Many of them are in tasteful Victorian buildings, but they come in varieties from delicate Mock Tudor to modernist cubes with flat roofs. The town centre pub is one of the few things that link us together in an increasingly atomized society.

There is a quiet beauty to the High Street pub that suits its usual understatedness. It’s the same quiet beauty that can be found on rainy weekend days in days in suburban streets. It can be found in a family or group of friends tucking into a Sunday roast. It can be found in weekly shops and car MOTs and the way that fans watching football in a pub can cast aside British awkwardness to share in elation at victory and commiseration at defeat.

This is where the profound can be found on a rainy January weekend afternoon in suburbia. It is on one of these weekends that I write this, in the midst of a local high street pub that serves good beer. People are sharing stories. There are family meals and friends’ reunions. A young couple is having a drink on the leather sofa near the fire. Kids are running around but are closely supervised. American Pie just came on the stereo. The pub is starting to empty out as the sun sets. Work tomorrow.

This is as fine a subject for a painting as the Battle of Trafalgar, and it says more about the Britain that we are than a mythologised naval encounter with the French. Pubs on rainy Sunday afternoons are what brings our country together and we need some togetherness as recent events have done their best to tear us apart.

Recently, I have sensed a rejection of the idea that mundane British life is beautiful. This comes from a mistrust of normal people and their experience by people of my ilk, whatever ilk that is. We used to champion the person in the street against their wealthy oppressors, but since the person in the street voted for Brexit we paused and thought maybe they have opinions that we don’t find so wholesome.

This has led to a mistrust of the person in the street or the pub, usually a Wetherspoons. In many recent political discussion drinking in Wetherspoons has become code for being ill-informed, angry at nebulous elites and probably a bit racist. This is mainly because of the pro-Brexit views of Tim Martin, the chain’s owner. There is more to Wetherspoons than being a vehicle for pro-Brexit propaganda, and not everyone who drinks in one supports Brexit. When we reduce people’s everyday experience to a knee jerk reaction we lose some part of our collective identity.

Some of that identity has informed the collection of anxieties that make up Brexit. The closure of pubs in a local area reinforces these anxieties and contributes to the support for Brexit. Brexit is a nostalgic movement, based on a nostalgia for an idealised Britain and for pubs that are vanishing from large parts of the country. In other parts of the country having new, cool, craft beer oriented bars is a badge of identity as a successful, open and anti-Brexit community. The pub, and how we view it, is key to understanding how we feel about Brexit. 

I’m not denying that the referendum and Brexit are processes designed to divide people and turn us against each other. Brexit is not something that has to be merely accepted. What it is becoming is a culture war, a widening gap between people who share the same streets and pubs. Now we resent anything that smells of that other culture we feel so separated from.

I don’t want to trivialise the important disagreements at the heart of Brexit. I have written about the grave threats to our nation. However, we cannot continue to live as two nations in one land. Increasingly we have come to see each other as different. Not just politically or even culturally different, but different in the fundamental nature of the lives we lead.

If we view our Britain as the one of the exceptional, the cultured, the open-minded, then we cannot help but think of the other Britain as mundane, grey and filled with people ground down by the harshness of the world. If this is how we think, then we will grow to see every day experiences as signifiers of our cultural enemies.

At worst, a dislike of the person in the street could lead to a rejection of the everyday as invalid, a dismissing of the everyday things that bind us together. Rainy Sundays in suburbia are a part of everyone lives, regardless of who they are or what they believe. You can be awestruck in the Pomedu Centre Paris, or in a Wetherspoons in Grantham, but we all experience the same feelings.

I write this on a rainy Sunday afternoon in January in suburbia where our future is uncertain, but we must make sure that we don't turn against each other, dismiss the person in the street as an angry crank and render the everyday experiences of millions as invalid.

I don’t think that the answer to fear and suspicion is more fear and suspicion. We cannot harbor hostility to people who think differently to us or come from different places. I don’t want to live in a divided Britain.

 "The Shepherd and Dog Pub" by lloydi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

What are the limits to free speech online?

What are the limits to freedom of speech? Almost everyone believes in some limits to freedom of speech, unless you think that currency forging or child porn should be accepted as self-expression. You would have to be a psychopath to think that it’s acceptable to scream racial or sexual abuse into someone's face. What about the nuance beyond these extremes examples? Where is the line where free speech stops? 

The case of online social network Gab is instructive in this debate. The website was shut down after the Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooting in which 11 people were killed. The perpetrator had posted on the social network before committing his crimes, which was a notorious gathering space for neo-Nazis, the alt-right and conspiracy theorists. It was filled with racial hatred and anti-Semitism; the sort of speech that most people think is completely unacceptable, but many argue should be allowed under free speech protections. 

Gab's homepage (before it was shut down by its hosts) described it as: "A social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online. All are welcome." The community certainly believed that there should be very few (if any) restrictions on speech. However, this led to it becoming a safe space for the worst speech and that ultimately contributed to a mass shooting. This implies that no limits to speech is the wrong approach.

The makers of Gab certainly leant to the right politically, but we'll assume that in creating a free speech community they didn't set out to create a safe heaven for hate speech, Nazis or the people who want to do a mass shooting. The problem is, that is what their web site became. The question is: why didn't Gab's community of free speech prevent this? They had unlimited free speech too, but they didn’t use it to prevent Nazis taking over the website.

If I was at a gathering of my friends, and someone said something hateful, then we would make it clear that wasn't acceptable and the person who said the awful thing would have to apologise or leave. Most people and most social gatherings are like this. Why wasn't it like this on Gab? Why isn't it like this so frequently online?

You could argue that Gab was an extreme case where free speech got out of hand and led to a mass shooting. Drawing up a framework for the limits of free speech is complicated. There is a difference between what speech I think should be legally tolerated by the government, and what speech I tolerate in my presence. There is a lot of stuff I don't want to hear that I think should still be legal.

Online it gets more complicated. Are social networks private or public spaces? They are the largest gatherings of people in the world, but they take place on platforms that are the private property of the companies that own them. Are they public squares, or private members clubs? The rules that gather what you can say or do in each is quite different.

I think that social networks (especially the large ones like Facebook and Twitter) should be treated more like public utilities than private spaces. This means users should have the same rights as they would have in public and the same recourse to appeal against decisions, however, it also means that there should be greater public scrutiny of what goes on on these platforms.

You may have a different view to me as to whether these are public spaces where and users should have the same rights as someone in the street or if they are private members clubs where the club gets to set and enforce the rules. If you think that these online spaces should have no restriction on them whatsoever, then remember the case of Gab.

So why did Gab become overrun with Nazis and people spreading racial hatred? Partly, it's because Nazis gravitate towards free speech zones the same way that weeds grow in unattended gardens. Nazis are everywhere online, but they get be weeded out by effective moderation. If your policy is no moderation, then Nazis will grow. Partly, it's because Nazis are leveraging the issue of free speech. Most people agree that free speech is a good thing (which it is) and that it shouldn't be restricted. If you believe this absolutely then it follows that Nazis should be allowed the same freedom of speech as everyone.

Nazis don't care about the free speech of people they hate - Jews, people of colour, usually women and LGBTQ people as well - but they are clear about their right to freedom of speech and use it to drive a division between leftists, who they paint was opposed to freedom of speech, and everyone else whose view of free speech are less nuanced. Nazis are leveraging this to their advantage and using it paint those who question the limits to free speech as worse than themselves and thus making their hateful views more palatable than questioning free speech.

This is feeding a popular conservative narrative that snowflake leftists (usually young people on campuses) who don't want to listen to ideas they disagree with are the real threat to free speech. The truth behind this narrative is several things coming together: an important debate about the limits of free speech, the legacy of no-platforming the far right, and a long overdue recognition of the different effects that hateful speech can have on different people. Conservatives aren’t interested in the nuance of these debates and are also attempting to leverage free speech for support.

What conservatives are frankly overreacting too (and in their overreaction they are giving an opportunity to the far-right to seize the issue) is a discussion amongst the left about what are the limits of freedom speech. This debate is important to prevent every public square and social network becoming the Nazi ridden hellscape that Gab became.

If we aren't going to have rules about what speech is and isn’t allowed then it's up to everyone to stop Nazis openly recruiting, which the example of Gab shows we are really bad at. This is my main concern. Clearly free speech communities have a problem with preventing Nazis, people who want to do commit mass shootings and other disgusting Internet bottom feeders from taking over. If there aren’t rules about speech then how do we stop the whole world becoming Gab?

If free speech communities cannot police themselves then we need stronger rules about what the limits of free speech is. Remember it isn't left-wing students who don't want Germaine Greer or Jacob Rees-Mogg on their campus who are shooting up synagogues. It's Nazis organising in free speech communities.

I am not saying we need to get rid of free speech. I am saying we need to know what the limits of free speech are. I think that the limits are threatening violence against people and spreading racial, sexual, gender, religious or other hatred. Are these limits accepted by everyone? Clearly not by the users of Gab who were happy to tolerate people saying they were going to commit mass murder.

We cannot afford to be blasé and say that anyone is allowed to say whatever they want, whenever they want, and nothing bad will ever happen. Discussing the limits of free speech is not the same as threatening it. It’s trying to find out the best way we can all live together, safely.

Much needed sober reflections on Brexit

After a particularly crazy year of Brexit chaos I wanted to take some time to reflect on the state of Brexit. Sober reflection is the one thing this debate is lacking. Everyone knows what is pissing them off, but not what should be done about it. The need for some clarity of thinking has never been greater. 

I’m pro-European on an emotional level, but I have serious criticisms of the EU as a project. I feel a connection to my European neighbours and a sense of community with them. We have a shared history and a shared culture. The EU as an institution is one that is difficult to love as - like local government - it’s overly complex, staffed by technocratic functionaries who have their own impenetrable jargon and deeply is involved in citizens lives but seems unresponsive to their wishes.

I think the best course of action (given a magic wand) would be to stay in the EU and reform it from the inside. I dislike the anti-immigration, anti-politics rhetoric of Vote Leave. I’m also worried by their implication of Britain's Imperial past and a vision of a hyper neo-liberal future outside the restraint of EU protections of workers’ rights and the environment.

To pretend that the EU isn’t in need of reform is self-delusion on the same scale as those who deny the damage a No Deal Brexit would do. The way that the Greek economy was treated like spoilt child that needed harsh discipline, and not a sick patient who needed treatment, is worrying to say the least. As does the fact that the EU has done little to intervene against the Tory's savage austerity, and done nothing to alleviate the plight of the homeless or children suffering from malnutrition.

The EU has made deals with authoritarian Turkey to keep out millions of poor people seeking a better life. It has also been good at ensuring the easy movement of financial resources across Europe away from tax authorities or into the London property market, thus perpetuating the housing crisis. I’m not sure whose needs the EU is prioritising, but I am beginning to think it’s not the poor and the needy.

That said, letting a Tory government take us out of the EU won’t help any of the above. Putting the Tories in charge of Brexit will lead to either a No Deal Mad Max hellscape where we murder each other for the last bottle of Prosecco or a Blade Runner neoliberal nightmare as Britain becomes Singapore with a more historically entrenched class system.

What if the Tories weren’t in charge of Brexit? I hear you say. What if it was all down to Jeremy Corbyn and Labour? Well, I doubt that they could do any worse. However, under different leadership the central problem of Brexit won’t go away. This is that no one is agreed on what Brexit should be. Labour’s insistence that they should be in charge of it (via angling for a general election) overlooks the fact that we need to know what Brexit would look like if we were in charge. On that, there is no agreement.

Due to all this, I’m still against Brexit. The way to address the problems with the EU is not to storm off in a huff. Nor is Brexit the way to address the problems of this country and it will likely make poverty worse if there is a huge (or even slight) economic contraction. Brexit is a bad idea and all the versions of Brexit on the table are bad ideas, which is why politicians are unable to agree on the particular shit sandwich they want to eat.

What I don't believe, is that the tide of popular opinion is turning against Brexit. Brexit voters on the whole don’t regret their decision and none of the factors that led Leave winning the referendum have changed in any meaningful way. Poverty, inequality, immigration, concerns about British identity, distrust of politicians, none of this has changed since the last vote. Voters certainly regret putting Theresa May in charge of Brexit, but I don't think there’s a ground swell against it.

I still think Brexit should be stopped but I have two concerns about the People's Vote, the most prominent method of stopping Brexit. The first is that a second vote could trigger huge support for the far-right, who will seize a narrative of the people being betrayed by the elites. My second concern is that even if Nigel Farage doesn't end up storming parliament ahead of an army of gammon, I don't think that Remain can win a second vote so we might end up with an even more fractured political landscape and even more support for Brexit.

Whenever I raise these with supporters of the People's Vote, my concerns are usually dismissed out of hand and then I am usually asked if I voted Leave. When I try to explain my concerns, what follows is usually a lot of condescension about the people who voted for Brexit. Twice someone has told me that street violence is an acceptable price to stop Brexit, which is chilling in itself. None of this reassures me that Remain can win a second referendum.

Coupled with this unwillingness to consider that not everyone is a horrified by Brexit, there is tangible desire (occasionally directly expressed in these terms) to turn the clock back to 2015. They want to go back the days when the debate was between David Cameron's austerity, Ed Miliband’s small shuffle towards redistribution and whatever Nick Clegg stood for. This desire is as fantastical as the wildest, mercantile dreams of Brexiteers. Not only does time move forwards not backwards (I can't believe I have to explain that), but the EU today is not the EU from before the referendum.

The EU has been changed by the spread of right-wing populism taking governments in Eastern Europe and opposition parties in Western Europe. I still think Britain needs to remain with the EU to fight this, but not engaging with developments in the EU over the last two years is naive. This comes from many Remainers not really understanding or following European Politics or even caring. They are more motivated by a dislike the pro-Brexit narrative in Britain. Nothing wrong with this, I hate the immigrant bashing too, but let's stop pretending that politics goes back to reasonable after a People’s Vote.

The question all this poses is what should Labour do? No Deal must be avoided at all costs. It is a disaster of untold proportions. If we think politics or the economy is bad no, wait until planes can't fly, shops run out of food and hospitals run out of medicine.

Labour has been on the right track in trying to get the Tories out of office, as is the job of any opposition, but it looks like government will not fall before the Article 50 deadline. If a general election cannot be brought about, then Labour should accept the deal on the table. It's not good, but it's better than No Deal and it's unlikely anything better can be negotiated in the time left. If the party really cannot stomach May's deal and parliament is deadlocked, then the decision needs to be handed back to the people to resolve the impasse. This could either in the form of a Citizens Assembly or a People's Vote.

Another thing that must be avoided is a People's Vote that is Remain against No Deal as we cannot run the risk of No Deal being decided upon in a referendum. Farage and his pals will be on TV telling everyone that No Deal will be fine - and then it will visit destruction upon the country. The reason why No Deal must not be on the ballot is the same reason that general election ballot papers don't have "fuck all politicians, burn down parliament" as a voting option. It might win. Then we would have to do it.

So, Brexit is a mess and there are no way forward. The only thing I can say with a degree of certainty is that a No Deal catastrophe must be avoided. Beyond that, all I can say is that both doing Brexit and stopping Brexit are very risky courses of action.

 EU flag image created by Yanni Koutsomitis and used under creative commons.

2018: The year of stagnation

By the end of the 2016 I was quivering with fear about what would come next. More populist, far-right revolutions? A heating up of the cold civil war that has been steadily building in Western democracies? At the end of 2018 I am surprised by how little has changed since the epoch defining 2016.

My summary of politics in 2017 focused on how normality had returned last year after the upheavals of 2016. 2018 certainly lacked the explosiveness of 2016, but we have a new, quieter peril. There appears to be no way to break several key deadlocks in politics. Deadlocks that have emerged as attempted to grapple with the implications of the events of 2016. In 2018 some things got better and some things got worse, but there were no significant steps forward. Overall it was a year of stagnation.

One grand spectacle of marginal gains and marginal losses this year was the US midterm elections. Here, Democrats won the popular vote and retook the House of Representatives. However, Republicans tightened their hold on the Senate and were able to ram through the confirmation of Brett Kavanagh against widespread disapproval.

The fact that these positive results for the left were offset by defeats is because of how heavily jerry-rigged the House of Representatives is, and how this was the worst electoral map for Senate Democrats in decades. The fact that they won the popular vote and now have the House’s power of investigation is a good sign for the Democrats.

The reason why these gains were only marginal for what passes for the left in America, is that they offer no clear path toward the 2020 Presidential election. A clear challenger to Donald Trump didn't emerge nor did a template to follow to success in the next general election. Should the Democrats be populists or technocrats? Should they move left, or try to take the centre ground from the increasingly swivel-eyed Republicans? Do they knuckle under on healthcare and jobs, or try to out Trump Trump?

None of the above offers a clear root to victory. None are without serious risk. I often feel that I don’t have a dog in American politics, as by European standards the Democrats are a centre-right party and the Republicans are the sort of mouth frothing far-right party that in the UK would be lucky to win a few council seats. That said, the world would be a safer place with Trump and Republicans (who under their current leader have become the party of the madder corners of Reddit) out of office. New talent elected in November this year, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, offers me some hope, but on a macro level the Democrats appear to be treading water until they decide who they want to be.

On the international stage the West’s defeat of ISIS looks even more likely and Trump signed an agreement with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, very much the authoritarian dictator’s authoritarian dictator. Neither of these are a substantial steps forwards to a world without military conflict. Neither are they likely to address the long-term instabilities in either the Levant or the North Pacific. They are, at most, marginal gains.

At the same time Trump is busy tearing up the nuclear agreement with Iran and the West still has no response to the rise in authoritarian strongmen from Hungary to the Philippines. The chances of a large-scale military conflict breaking out still seem high to me. At the beginning of 2018 the threat of nuclear war seemed higher than at any point in my lifetime. At the end of 2018, I only feel a little safer.

The global economy continues to stagnate. The long-term structural problems exposed ten years ago by the financial crash have not been addressed. This has left us with a lost decade of low growth, rising inequality and falling living standards. In the UK, in the second quarter of 2018 (which is the most recent quarter I could find figures for) economic growth was 1.2%. This sluggish growth is mainly captured by the wealthy and is not being felt by people in work, whose wages aren’t growing but costs of living are going up. This is especially acute for lower paid workers. In work poverty is at an all time high and there are record numbers of people sleeping rough in London.

For ten years the global economy has been stagnating, but there is little consensus about what should be done about it. Our entire economic system, based on multinational financial instructions and heavily polluting manufacturing and technology industries, looks increasingly moribund. Something radical needs to be done to escape from the pattern of stagnation, falling living standards, rising homelessness, rising child poverty and rising hopelessness as work doesn’t pay.

This year we received the starkest warning yet that we are on the verge of enormous environmental disaster. The right are determined to deny this, ignore it or propose inadequate solutions. The left needs to seize this issue to save billions of lives. However, we are seeing insufficient leadership from the leaders of left-wing parties and governments around the world. Our response to climate change is marginal and in the very near future that will spell disaster. This is another area where the left needs to break the deadlock of inaction that has gripped politics in 2018.

2017 was a good year for Labour as they managed to outperform all expectations in the general election. Sadly, I feel that Labour and Jeremy Corbyn have made few gains in 2018. The party had a good conference this year; with policy offers made towards working class Leave voters, the main group Labour need to win over to form a government in the next election. However, I feel that Labour have failed to capitalise on the success of last year. The polls consistently show both major partys’ support in the high 30s. This means another election will produce the same result of no clear winner. This is stagnation, and I had hoped that the polls would have moved further in Labour’s favour with the disastrous performance of the Tory government.

Issues such as child poverty, homelessness, the decline in the public realm, the housing crisis and the NHS mean that Labour may well be able to gain electoral support in another election, but this is by no means certain, which is why Labour’s gains this are only marginal. The party has been unable to force a general election, which was a difficult task, but that has led to there being no clear way forwards for the Corbyn project.

The greatest area of political deadlock remains Brexit. This year saw Tory unity collapsing and the “natural party of government” reduced to a joke. The public is completely divided on Brexit, as are our politicians. There is no clear way forwards, as Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement cannot pass through parliament, and there is no clear alternative to current plan. In just over three months Britain will leave the EU and we still have no clear idea of what Brexit will look like. We have had a lot of magical thinking (from all sides) but no clear answers to the questions raised by the 2016 referendum. If nothing can break the deadlock, then No Deal wins by default.

I am very worried about what will happen with Brexit in 2019. A year ago I said “a deal that makes no one happy, but avoids a disaster, will most likely be struck,” now that looks like too much optimism. At this point No Deal looks most likely as it requires no agreement to happen. Politicians must prevent the disaster of a No Deal exit (economic collapse, food and medicine shortages) at any cost. However, as there is complete stagnation of our political process, this looks unlikely.

A year ago I said “there is no serious energy behind overturning or ignoring the result of the referendum,” this has been a significant change over the last year. There is now a substantial movement for stopping Brexit entirely, led by the People’s Vote campaign. The appeal of this option increases as the No Deal cliff edge gets closer, but there are serious risks of holding another referendum. Not the least, that Brexit might win again and that this could embolden the far right much more than they are right now (this alone should terrify anyone who has been paying attention).

There are risks from holding another referendum, risks from going ahead with Brexit, risks of May’s deal and risks from No Deal. There is no consensus, no way forwards and no solutions. A year of stagnation on the issue of Brexit has brought the country close to a No Deal disaster that will be a catastrophe for the country and all politicians.

Stagnation occurred across politics in 2018 and it means we are running out of time to deal with the big problems, from the environment to Brexit, from the rise of far-right hate mongers like Tommy Robinson in the UK or electoral success of authoritarian nationalists like Viktor Orban in the Hungarian elections this year, from Trump to economic stagnation. The world is getting worse and the gains won by the left are only marginal. 

We need radical change to politics or else we will sleep walk into disaster. Something has to give to break the deadlocks and the left is running out of options as the clock runs down. This may have been the year of stagnation, but next year could be a year of explosive change.

Polling station image taken by Rachel H and used under creative commons.

Nathan Barley is standing in our light

The Internet is totally Mexcio, but in a bum way. This is how Nathan Barley, the "self-facilitating media node" and eponymous protagonist of Channel 4's 2005 sitcom would describe the net today. The show was famously ahead of its time, in how it portrayed Shoreditch hipster culture, but one thing it didn't predict was how the internet went from a place of amusement to the location of information warfare between nations and the most powerful tool for empowering the far right. All of this would be much too serious of Barley.

For those who haven’t seen the show, it focuses on the hyper-cool, hyper-annoying Nathan Barley who runs the "urban culture dispatch" TrashBack.co.ck (registered in the Cook Islands). He spends every second of his existence promoting his website which, as far as we can tell, hosts monkey animations, endorsements from celebrities and pranks on Barley’s long-suffering techy Pingo. So far all very YouTube, but it captured the innocence and pointlessness of the net in the early to mid-2000s.

If you were to remake Nathan Barley today, it would be a horror show, more like Black Mirror than a surreal comedy. The Internet had gone from a place of idle fun to something that could be quite dangerous. Concerns about its effects go beyond worries about how easy it is to find porn or far-right content. Many criticisms of the net are focused on the design of the platforms that make up the modern Internet.

In the time since Barley has been on our TV, the Internet has come to be dominated by what former Google employee and author James Williams calls the "attention economy". We often refer to the current structure of the Internet as the information economy, but as Williams points out, when data is as abundant as it is online, it is attention that scarce. Thus platforms from iPhones to Facebook and Twitter are designed to capture as much attention as possible. This is the nature of the attention economy, something that is new since Barley's day.

The negative effects of the attention economy are becoming very clear. News has spread that even the people who work for net’s big tech companies, who described them in utopian ways in the past, are limiting their own exposure to the platforms of the attention economy and are preventing their children from using them.  Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee, said to the Guardian last year that “our minds can be hijacked.”

One of the key problems from these platforms is how they distract us from what is important by monopolising our attention. Williams described how this happens on a political level in his book Stand Out Of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. In his book, Williams argues how the platforms that make up the attention economy are obscuring the light of our attention. The distraction caused by the attention economy is more than just push notifications and the allure of the red dot above the Facebook icon meaning we can’t concentrate for long enough to write a blog post. It’s much deeper than that.

In this book, Williams describes two, more insidious, ways that that platforms distract us from what is important. The first is that we focus our attention on the metrics of the platforms themselves, instead of our higher goals and values. For example, we all want to connect with our friends and family, which these platforms are supposed to help us achieve, but instead of spending our time on these platforms doing this, a focus on likes on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has taken the place of meaningful interactions. Likes are our goal when using these platforms, not the intangible, empirical connection with other human beings. This is because likes can be measured by the platforms and genuine moments of human connection cannot. So the platform's design pushes us towards what it can measure. Our goal has changed from what is important to us to what is important to the platform.

The other way these platforms distract us, identified by Williams, is that by continuing hold our attention they don’t give us time to reflect on what our goals really should be. Is it our intention to connect with the people who follow us on Facebook and Twitter? Or would we be more fulfilled if we spent more like with people off these platforms? Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn’t, but it’s impossible to grapple with these questions while we are being constantly distracted by more likes and updates.

This is a very brief summary of one aspect of Williams's analysis of what is wrong with the attention economy and the whole book is really worth reading. For our purposes here, what is important is that these platforms distract us from our personal goals (and from knowing what our goals should be) and give power to those who are best at grabbing our attention. The design of the platforms give power these people through the design choices the platforms’ engineers made as their goal is to hold our attention (and then, usually, show us advertising). This is where Nathan Barley comes in.

Some of the people on these platforms are able to grab our attention by being really shocking. Donald Trump is the king of this, but vile creatures like Milo Yiannopoulos and others of his ilk use the same approach. Some people are good at grabbing attention through comedy, such as the rise of Twitter comedians like Cluedont or whoever is behind Mum’s Net Madness. Some captured our attention through a combination of hyperactivity and easy answers to complicated questions. An example of this is the travel vlogger Nas Daily who grabs people’s attention with footage his amazing travels and inability to keep his arms still while talking to camera.

Nas Daily reminds me of Barley, as he’s basically harmless but really annoying. Nathan Barley (the show, not the character who once thought it was cool put paint caps in his hair because he saw someone else do it) predicted a lot about culture (as well as casting actors like Ben Whishaw, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Ayoade and the members of the Mighty Boosh before they were famous). However, where the show was most ahead of its time was in its predictions about how powerful the ability to get attention will be in the future.

Everyone in Nathan Barley is constantly competing to get attention. From shock merchants like 15Peter20 with his art depicting celebrities urinating, to the staff of Vice-esq magazine Sugar Ape who are constantly loud, brash and irreverent, to the man at one of Barley’s Shoreditch club nights constantly pointing to a photo of himself and shouting “this is me!” That man seems especially prescient.

There are other characters who predict modern online dynamics, such as Sugar Ape’s editor Jonathon Yeah? (he had the question mark was added by deed poll). Yeah? seems to know how stupid all this is but is making a killing out of it all taking place on his platform. Would he rather be editing the Guardian, but this pays better? Does he just want to burn the world to the ground to see what happens next? Hard to tell, but it reminds me of a lot of the people behind the net’s platforms.

There is cynical Dan Ashcroft, who sees that the world has gone mad but is too self-absorbed to do anything about it. There’s also his sister Claire Ashcroft, whose serious documentary about drug addiction and homelessness in London is ignored amongst everyone else’s aggressive, but ultimately empty, self-promotion.

Barley himself is a constant disruptive presence. His goal is to maximise his own exposure and that of his website by getting as much attention as possible; he doesn’t want to achieve any higher goals for himself or anyone else. In the show, no one reflects about this or whether this is the world they want to live in. They’re all distracted by Barley’s latest antics.

In one way, Barley and his world is better than the world we have built for ourselves. Barley doesn’t have any negative intentions. He is very annoying, stupid and disruptive, but he does what he does out pure love for it. Barley is not motivated by a desire to enrich himself or cause harm. Online today, many people are using the platforms of the attention economy to enrich themselves and cause harm to others. Trump and Yiannopoulos are notable examples.

This shows how the net has changed since Barley’s time. From people messing around for pure anarchic fun, to very serious business. Now the usage of the Internet in certain ways is considered an act of war. Barley and people like him (Nas Daily seems like a good modern analogue for Barley, with his attention-grabbing videos and lightweight politics) aren’t seeking to do harm. Even if they are eroding our attention faculties.

The problem is not the Nathan Barley’s of the world, but the companies that own the platforms Barley and his ilk use to grab our attention. They are the ones whose design and business decisions brought us to this point. It is they who are making money out of attacks on our attention and the spread of far-right politics. They are like Jonathon Yeah? who might not agree with all this madness but are willing to make money out of it. Maybe the real villain of Nathan Barley is the long-suffering Pingu, who gives Barley the platform to do what he does.

The fact that money can be made from attacking our attention, to giving a platform to extreme right agent-provocateurs, is why we need better regulation of these platforms. There are certain design aspects of these products that should be restricted, just as we decide that there should be restrictions on products with tobacco in them.

We need to have a conversation about whether we want all our politics to flow through platforms that reward attention monopolising behaviour. We need genuine space free from distraction, to reflect on what our goals from these platforms should be and how we can achieve them, rather than allowing their metrics to dominate and dictate our lives. As James Williams says, we need to think rethink advertising, which is how Barley gets the money to do what he does.

Nathan Barley may be the one standing in the light of our attention (shouting about two people jumping from the Twin Towers on 9/11 and fucking on the way down) and distracting us from what is important, but the real problem are the platforms that give him his power. The future doesn’t have to belong to Nathan Barley, if we are willing and able to reflect on what we want it to be.

What would William Morris think of the modern work place?

A man wakes up after a sleep of 122 years into a world that has changed entirely. A world of thinking machines and a glass skyscrapers taller than the world’s tallest cathedrals. In this world, the middle classes no longer want mass production of standardised items, but handcrafted goods. This is a world where we drink locally sourced craft beer and lovingly stitch our own quilts.

The man who awoke would be forgiven for thinking that while he was asleep a revolution occurred that change the country. The people of Britain don't perform backbreaking Labour in filthy factories or mines anymore. We now have clean, bright officers which are ergonomically designed and have free tea and coffee for employees. The dehumanising working conditions of Victorian Britain have been conquered by technology.

If this man was William Morris, would he believe he had awoken in his book, News From Nowhere? Would he think that that the working class had cast off the oppressive factory conditions that horrified him in his life? Would he think people aren't exploited anymore?

Well that would depend on how much of the world he saw. Morris would probably be horrified in how we have moved production so far away from consumers that we don't think about it anymore. The industrial working class of today still eek out a wretched existence in dangerous factories, but these are in huge Chinese cities that we don't know the names of. Our world is not Morris's ideal of people working with their hands to make beautiful, high-quality objects, as they did in the imagined medieval Britain he idealised.

I can see Morris being fascinated by craft breweries and artisan bakeries, which are in many ways his spiritual successor. He would also be interested in the tech industry, where lavish perks are bestowed on highly paid workers. Is this the closest we have come to the ideals that William Morris wanted from production?

In the tech industry, people work in beautiful offices with lots of flexibility to explore projects that interest them. They have high-quality food and entertainment provided by their employer. Workers are not regimented into performing repetitive tasks over and over by harsh bosses who watch them hawkishly.

These offices are a million miles away from soul-crushingly oppressive factories of Victorian Britain. Many tech companies have a flat (or flatter) management structure like the Medieval Guilds that Morris thought were greatly superior to Victorian factories. The products that tech companies produce are high quality and lovingly worked on (or at least have many hours poured into them) by the startup employees. Is this what Morris thought work would be like in the future?

Morris said: “That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in Labour.” I know from when I worked in a tech company that people take real pleasure in writing code and creating high-quality products that their customers (or fans) really appreciate. Their work environments and products are beautiful, as was Morris's ideal. Of course, many of the products of the tech industry can only be afforded by the wealthy, but the same can be said for Morris's furniture. The iPhone today serves much the same purpose as owning a William Morris chair. They don’t buy them for the functionality or the beautiful design, but to make a statement that they are the type of person who buys such as thing.

The big question for Morris would be: whether these tech company workers were connected to what they worked on. Morris believed that the best way to work was with your hands, creating something. This is why he was interested in the violence of Medieval Knights, as it was hands on. This is why he placed a high value on handcrafted products.

There is a degree to which tech workers are removed from what they make by virtue of working with machines rather than a saw and plane. However, if Morris's ideas about what work should be like are to be anything other than reactionary and anti-modernity (as the Soviet constructivist critic Boris Arvatov thought Morris was) then they need to take into account that almost all work today is done with machines. Morris himself was not against machines, he believed they should be used to free workers from menial or boring tasks, which is one way they are used today.

The aspect of the tech industry that Morris would find most distasteful would be the difference between the working conditions of the employees of the tech companies and the army of self-employed "platform users" that they rely on. The difference between the pay and working conditions of the average Uber driver and the average Uber engineer is huge. The same is true for platforms from Deliveroo to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which rely on low paid, insecure, arm's length, non-employees to do a lot of the important work. If Morris was horrified by the conditions in Victorian factories then he would probably be horrified by Uber drivers having to pee in bottles to maintain their driving schedules.

What would Morris think of our world? Would he think it glorious compared to his own or morally bankrupt? This question relates to how people in the future might see us. Will they look at us with the same disgust that we look at the Victorians with for their use of child labour?

Morris might think that not a lot had changed. Britain is still a place where the labour of many enriches a privileged few. A place where a few get to work in beautiful workshops and many more toil in terrible conditions. The only difference is that we have got better at hiding the truth. 

One thing is for sure and that is that Morris would need to sleep for many more years to wake up a world like News From Nowhere. A world free from exploitation and misery.

"William Morris wrap 3" by Mmm...Fiber! is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Labour is not being radical enough on welfare

The British government needs to provide more generous welfare payments to the poor, unemployed and disabled. Tory cuts to benefits have driven millions into poverty and brought back conditions that were thought extinct, such as scurvy. A narrative of scroungers, pushed by right wing politics and newspapers, has led to the demonisation of the poor and the needy. This must be stopped and the way to do it is for benefits to be more generous.

What the Tories have done is incredibly cruel. People who are in work are unable to feed themselves. Food bank usage has exploded and even nurses are using their services. Homelessness has gone up. In every city and town across the country it can be clearly seen how many people are sleeping rough. Universal Credit is a disaster. Not even the Tories think it's a good idea any more, but they stick with it because they don't know what else to do.

A new UN report has damned the government and its welfare policy. The left has been using this as a stick to beat the Tories with, and it's heartening to see so many people standing up for the poor and needy against a government that is actively impoverishing them. It must be made clear to the Tories how sickening their treatment of the vulnerable has been.

At the same time, those of us on the left need to acknowledge that Labour and Corbyn have been too timid on this issue. So far they have confirmed that they will review Universal Credit and have not committed to increasing the amount that goes to needy people. There has been some talk of exploring Universal Basic Income (UBI) but this is a long term plan. Those suffering from homelessness and hunger need help faster than the timeframe that UBI can be brought in. They need more money through existing benefits.

Labour need to be bolder on this issue. They need to make a public statement that a vote for Corbyn is a vote for more benefits for the poor and disabled. Simple as. Labour also need to commit to doing what it takes to fix Universal Credit or to scrap it. A Labour government should mean that people won't have to sleep in shop doorways or rely on foodbanks. Currently, I can’t see the policy proposal from Labour that will achieve this.

I know that this will not be popular with middle England Daily Mail readers. I know that Labour doesn't want to be labelled as on the side of people who don't want to work. Labour can’t allow this to prevent them from helping the people who desperately need help and it need it quickly. The majority of people receiving benefits are in work, but still can't afford to pay rent and provide food for their family. This isn't giving a free handout to the workshy, this is making sure that if you work you can afford home and food.

If the Tories and the right wing press want to spin a narrative that helping the starving or the homeless is wrong then we need to tell them that in twenty century Britain we don't want to see people sleeping under bridges, or suffering from Victorian conditions, or children living in poverty. We need to tell the Tories and the right wing press that the people of Britain want the poor and the disabled to be helped. This message needs to be loud and clear.

Corbyn has been a radical leader of the Labour Party in many ways, but he has not been radical enough on welfare. Corbyn has also been a break from the centrist orthodoxy of the past and we need him to be a break from centrist orthodoxy on this crucial issue. This UN report is the perfect opportunity for Labour to get behind people's anger with the Tory government's cruelty, cease the narrative and take it in the direction of a radical program of help for those who need it the most.

The Labour Party needs to be pledge that when it power it will raise benefits so that people can afford a home and to eat. Once the suffering caused by the Tories has ended, then we can look at long term radical change such as UBI. I support UBI and think it would be a good policy, but it’s a long term solution and people need short term help. When you're homeless or starving you’re focused on the short term and long term solutions won't make a difference.

I want the next Labour government to be radical in all ways, not just those that test well with focus groups or swing voters. I want socialism to be more than more money for public sector workers and nationalising the railways (although those are good things). I want it to be a helping hand to those who need it to the most. We need a radical Labour government to make everyone's lives better. Especially the poorest.

Labour Party image created by David Holt and used under creative commons.

Remembering the end of the First World War

The First World War is a difficult issue for those of us on the radical left. There is a prominent view that the war was a waste of human life. That it was a mass slaughter for the glory of country at the expenses of millions of lives. The war deflected rising class tension into international conflict and used patriotism to prevent working people from turning on the class that oppressed them. This view holds that remembering the war encourages nationalism and discourages thinking about class issues.

To some degree, I believe in this. The war should certainly not be celebrated, and patriotism has gotten more people killed than it has helped. The war was not glorious. It sent millions of men to a violent death and subjected them to huge suffering beforehand. The war was a tragedy, not heroic.

I do wear a poppy, and I did observe the two minutes silence on Remembrance Sunday. I do this to remember those who had no choice about being sent to war, and maybe didn't even want to go, but where sent anyway and lost their lives.

I certainly don't agree with making a performance out of criticising people whose remembrance is different or attacking charities associated with remembrance, as Aaron Bastani did when he attacked the British Legion on Twitter. This doesn't change opinions, or address the real problem with the lack of support from the government for people leaving the army.  It just gets attention for people being controversial, which is the currency of social media.

It is important to remember the sacrifices made by ordinary people during the war. The people like me and you who died in their millions. Not generals, kings or Prime Ministers. It is the people who died, some of them in agony and fear, we must remember. As someone who would last about ten seconds in a war, I want to remember those whose lives were thrown away without feeling so that a line on a map could move a few inches.

There are lots of myths spread about the First World War. That it was a war for freedom and democracy against German Imperialism. This is not true. It was a war of nation against nation. It was fought by ordinary people of one nation against ordinary people of another. People fighting who had more in common with each other than the generals that sent them to their slaughter against walls of machine guns in fields of barbed wire.

The important political point to make about the First World War is that the scale of the death shows how terrible war is and how it must be avoided if at all possible.

The most fitting First World War memorial would be for the government to give every citizen free tickets to tour the sites of the battles. If everyone saw what happened at the Somme, at Verdun and Ypres and in other places, then they would know the terrible cost of war and seek to prevent it. If people saw what happens when the government cares more about the strength of the nation than the lives of its people, they wouldn’t want to fight people like them to make their country stronger. If people understood the terrible waste of life that is war, they would see that killing people that happened to be born under a different flag for the flag you happened to be born under is tragic and not heroic.

We need to keep the memory of the First World War alive so that we never do anything so stupid ever again. We need to remember it to prevent our leaders from thinking that they can feed people to the slaughter machine and claim it's fine when it's done for country and flag. The best way to honour the memories of those who died in the war is to make sure others don't have to suffer as they did. That way their sacrifices won't be in vain. 

Everyone should go and see Mike Leigh’s Peterloo

Mike Leigh, veteran left-wing filmmaker, director of Happy-Go-Lucky and Secrets & Lies, has made a film of a seminal event in British history: the Peterloo massacre. In 1819, the unprovoked massacre of ordinary people protesting injustice shocked the nation. Peterloo is the foundational event of British democracy and it paved the way for the process of reforms that (eventually) gave everyone the vote.

This was certainly a film that I was going to like, as it combines my interest in cinema, history and radical politics. It is probably no surprise to you, if you know me, that I did like this film. I can’t have unbiased opinions about something as important to me as this film. 

So, my entirely subjective opinion is that this is a powerful film. I defy anyone to not be moved when they see unarmed men, women and children mowed down by cavalry in a confined square.

Mike Leigh and the army of actors, camera people, set designers, clothes makers and prop designers have created a very detailed portrait of a critical time in British history. There are lots of historic details that bring the film to life, from beautiful period costumes to the recreation of political rhetoric from the time.

The film’s sympathies are with the ordinary victims of the massacre, however, it does not paint the massacre as either a freak occurrence, an accident or being unavoidable. There were clear decisions that led up to it happening, made by a range of people with their own prejudices and assumptions. The film characterises the complex political situation and nodes of state power around Peterloo and the events that ultimately led to the deaths of 15 people and between 400 and 700 injuries.

As well as exploring the complexities of the state apparatus that carried out the massacre the film does not present the victims as one monolithic block. The film explores how they had a wide range of opinions. Some people were people were poor and simply wanted to improve their circumstances. Some people were protesting against the greed and callousness of landowners. Some had specific goals such as the repeal of the Corn Laws or reforms to how parliament was elected. Some had a radical vision of changing all of British society. Then, like today, a mass movement of people was made up of many different people with different visions, united in a common expression of discontent.

Peterloo is a strangely hopefully film, considering it is about a peaceful protest that was cut down. There are many characters in the film who are hopeful about the prospect of one form of change or another. Many of the characters in the film who are poor and have been ground down by early 19th century Manchester. There had been a lot of change, industrialisation and the rise of dark satanic mills, and many people’s lives has been made worse by the Corn Laws and a draconian establishment that uses everything from courts to the military to batter people down. Despite all this, many characters are hopeful, they believe their situation can improve and that their lives can get better and that they are the instrument of the change they need.

Our world is changing rapidly as well. Information technology could have as dramatic an effect on the world of the 21st century as industrialisation did on the 19th. A lot of this change seems to be for the worse. Social media has given a new platform to nationalists and hate mongers. In many ways it seems our world is spinning out of control. In this last week we have had bombs sent to liberal politicians, mass shootings in a Synagogue and the far-right candidate winning an election in Brazil. Just as it did for the Manchester poor of the early 19th century, the future looks bleak.

I think we can take some courage from the people who stood up for a better world in St Peter’s Field in Manchester. Their sacrifice brought us a fairer and more equal society. Peterloo shows that there is a cost to doing politics, especially when the state is heavily armed and its power is wielded by people who are the awful combination of stupid, prejudiced and frightened. Terrible things can happen when standing up to power and demanding that you be treated like a human being with rights. There is a cost to asking for a better world. Terrible things may happen in our future, but we still need to stand up for our rights against those who would oppress us and grind us down.

If ordinary people can come together and stand up for fairer, more equal and less oppressive society then a positive change can be made. The legacy of Peterloo is that ordinary people can make a positive difference, when united, even against an oppressive and powerful enemy. This is why a film that is very sad, ultimately left me feeling positive about our future.

Remainers are angry with the establishment that ignores them

700,000 people marched through London last week to demand a People’s Vote. From those I know who attended the march, and what I read on social media, the point of a People’s Vote is to give the government a democratic reason to stop Brexit. The fact that 70,000 marched for this goes to show that a lot of people are still very hostile to Brexit.

Although the tone of the march was good-natured and overall it was positive, many Remainers are angry at the political establishment. Not only are they angry, they feel there is no democratic outlet for their anger. Remainers feel they have been ignored, as over the last year and a half a narrow referendum win for Brexit has steered us increasingly towards a No Deal cliff edge.

As with every Brexit article, I feel I need to make my position clear at this point: I voted for Remain and I think Brexit is a bad idea. I am very angry with this government that is being reckless with the livelihoods of millions of people. It’s farcical that the government is risking crashing out of the EU without a deal, which would do enormous damage to our economy. Damage that will be felt the hardest by the poorest. I understand the anger of Remainers, because it is my anger too.

I understand that many Remainers feel that Brexit is an existential threat to them. There is a very real danger of a No Deal Brexit and something biblically awful following, like hospitals closing because they can’t get medicines or recession so severe that it will make the last one look like a minor economic adjustment. Remainers are right to be angry about how careless the government is being.

This anger goes beyond the fact that the government is handling Brexit terribly. It comes from a feeling of that Brexit project itself is illegitimate. The fact that Leave won the referendum doesn’t settle the issue for many Remainers, as it wouldn't be for many Brexiters if they had lost by only 2%.

The government’s poor handling of Brexit has made this worse. No one voted for the debacle we ended with and many Brexit voters didn't vote for a No Deal cliff edge. Remainers are angry that the Brexit leaders lied to win and possibly had support from Russia. The fact that these charges have gone largely unacknowledged by many politicians means that many Remainers feel let down by both Labour and the Tories.

Not only do many Remainers feel that Brexit is fundamentally illegitimate, the very idea of Brexit strikes at the heart of how Remainers see the world. Brexit is the political expression of suspicion of foreigners, hostility to people with different cultures and nostalgia for an imagined past of British global supremacy. Remainers feel that their values are under threat from a culture of intolerance and backwardness. Remainers feel that their culture of tolerance and openness is under attack not only from the government but in the streets by emboldened nationalists. They also think they are being sneered at for being soft and out-of-touch by a political class that prefers to pander to knee-jerk bigotry.

The way that many Remainers see Leavers is deeper than the specific issues that came to a head around the time of the referendum, such as migration from Eastern Europe or the refugee crisis. The cultural difference between Remainers and Brexiteers comes down to basic things like a dislike of patriotism and preference for internationalism. Many Remainers simply don't understand why people would love their country to the point that they want to do huge damage to it so that they can save it from foreigners. The idea of patriotism (especially the way patriotism has been expressed through Brexit) is an anathema.

Remainers are also angry about being told to listen to Leavers. A lot of the Remainers I talk to don't want to listen to people with different views from them. They don’t want to listen to peoples’ concerns about immigration or the loss of British identity. Remainers are constantly implored to understand Leavers, but why is the opposite never said? Why are Brexiters never told to listen to Remainers? No one is suggesting that there be a pro-EU column written in the Daily Express to broaden their worldview.

At this point, it's worth remembering that not every Brexit voter was an unemployed former steelworker. Many were middle-class, property owners who feel insulated from an economic shock that Brexit cold produce. Most Brexit voters are older and not university educated, but that doesn't mean their howls of anger directed about the EU is the product of a life of being crapped on by the system. It could equally be the product of a close-minded, curtain twitching, dislike of others. Most young, University educated, Remainers, trapped in the private rented sector, have a better claim to being the people abandoned by the political class then Daily Mail readers who have been pandered to at every possible opportunity.

Remainers feel betrayed by the establishment. They feel betrayed by Corbyn and Labour for failing to mount an effective opposition to Brexit. They feel betrayed by the Tories for failing to put the practical needs of the economy ahead of the whims of the anti-EU loonies in their party. Above all, they feel betrayed by supposedly sensible politicians for pandering to people’s dislike of immigration to the point where the political manifestation of this dislike has driven the country to the brink of disaster.

There is the very real possibility of crashing out the EU without a deal and doing huge damage not just to our economy but also to the basic infrastructure of the country. If Brexit is a gargantuan disaster (which we may discover it is, very soon) then we will have ruined our country because a few people are sent into waves of existential anger because they hear Polish being spoken on the bus, and politicians were too frightened to tell them this is small minded and bigoted.

Remainers are angry that despite the fact that 48% of the country voted not to gamble our future on the promises of Boris Johnson, no serious political party is representing this group of people. Ignoring this number of angry people or dismissing these concerns as just those of "metropolitan liberals" will make Remainers feel less alienated. So far this anger has not found itself a radical outlet, but it will. Given time. Doing Brexit and getting it over with will not make this anger disappear. It needs to find adequate political expression.

EU flag image created by Yanni Koutsomitis and used under creative commons.

The Bercow scandal shows that Remain fake news is a problem

If you have been following the news this week it has been impossible to miss the scandal enveloping House of Commons Speaker John Bercow. For those not aware, an independent House of Commons inquiry has found that accusations of bullying and harassment of Parliamentary staff are not being dealt with due to a culture of "acquiescence and silence".

Just to remove any doubt that it is The Speaker’s office is responsible for this culture. The following paragraph from the report is quite damming:

“Almost all the allegations of bullying by members of House staff in this inquiry were made against someone in a more senior position, consistent with the typical pattern of bullying cases. Management style is closely linked to organisational culture, and there were many examples of behaviour described that would fall within the category of workplace bullying. A single incident of some of these may be unlikely to be characterised as such, but a few incidents taken together or occurring repeatedly over time can indicate a pattern suggestive of unacceptable bullying.”

What I have found most shocking about this has been the response from Labour MPs, who I had naively assumed would want to stand for the rights of workers. As journalist Stephen Bush said the Party’s "literal name is about workplace rights.” 

The reason for Labour MP's failure to stand up for these peoples’ right to safe working environment is Brexit, or as I prefer to call it, the root of all evil. As speaker, Bercow has defended MPs’ desire for a meaningful vote on Brexit when Theresa May's deal comes before the commons, and what's a little workplace bullying next to the future of the nation? Dame Margaret Beckett went as far as saying that Brexit “trump bad behaviour”.

This is all disgusting. Bercow has to go, no one should be allowed to preside over a climate of bullying and harassment and be expected to keep their job. Labour MPs should stand up for workers’ rights, be the workers in a coal mine, a call centre or the Palace of Westminster.

The response from soft left, Remain MPs has been shocking and I have lost a lot of respect for some MPs. The response from Remain Labour supporting groups on social media has been similarly awful. The way people have closed ranks around Bercow reminds me of, and it pains me to say this, Donald Trump’s supporters and how they brook no criticism of their President. The rhetoric reminds of how the US right rallied to Bret Kavanagh when he was accused of sexual assault. It was pure tribalism and based on a complete refusal to believe that any higher moral standard has been transgressed. I thought that the point in opposing Brexit is that the EU protects workers’ rights. Well there is no point having rights if they aren’t respected.

Remainers have even engaged in spreading elaborate conspiracy theories as to why this has happened. Naturally, the hand of the Brexit ultras appears in all of these. Like the conspiracy theories that infest the American right, these are spread on social media via rage shares and filter bubbles. I saw this happen in real time as the Bercow accusations came out. I haven't repeated what I saw here as I haven't asked permission of anyone involved to share their words, but if you're doubting my veracity then this stuff is easy to find on Facebook.

I want to say at this point that I am pro-Remain and really wish this whole Brexit shitstorm would go away. I want Britain to stay in the EU so that we can reform it. However, the cause of stopping Brexit is not served by sharing conspiracy theories that see shadowy Brexiters behind everything. Unless your goal is just to project rage at the current state of politics, instead of, you know, change things.

This type of behaviour is what allows fake news or conspiracy theories like Pizzagate to spread. The latter nearly resulted in deaths. Fake news is lies that serve someone's political goals and imaging that Brexiteers are responsible for the Bercow scandal to stop parliament having a meaningful vote on Brexit is fake news.

So-called sensible liberals are no different than Trump supporting sharing Pizzagate stories, or the far left sharing fake news about Portland Communications. I support Jeremy Corbyn, but that story is made up. I have seen a lot of pro-Remain Fake News shared over last two and half years. Most of it revolves around Sinn Fein taking up their seats in Westminster to stop Brexit. The stars in the sky will grow cold and dead before Sinn Fein MPs swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen so that they can sit in the House of Commons.

There is a sad side to all this, which is that this debacle is stopping justice for the people who have been bullied and harassed. It means that this kind of behaviour can continue. It means that Westminster is not a safe place for people to work, especially for women, and our politics is poorer for this. It shows the rank hypocrisy of Remain supporters who claim to stand up for the vulnerable, except when it is politically inconvenient. Having principles isn't principled when it doesn't cost anything. 

This whole shitshow also illustrates that fake news and conspiracy theories are not just for the far right or the far left. They're for anyone who believes anything hard enough to stop thinking. This includes passionate Remainers.

John Bercow image created by National Assembly of Wales and used under creative commons.

The growing support for fascism should scare us all

Bookmarks on Bloomsbury Street in London is a left wing institution. For those not familiar with London's Premier socialist bookshops, I highly recommend a visit. The shop stocks a wide selection of books on left politics from histories of the Russian Revolution to books on women's liberation and trans rights. It sells magazines, journals, pamphlets and second-hand books, in a small space that has reading chairs and soft jazz music on the stereo. It is an oasis of calm reflection next to Tottenham Court Road station.

It was also the subject of an attack by mask-wearing fascists, who tore up books and intimated staff. This was a clear attempt to intimidate and silence the left. It’s strongly linked to the growing confidence and support for the far right in Britain. From Free Tommy Robinson to Boris Johnson insulting women who wear the Niqab, hatred is rising and fascists are benefiting from it. This is something that should worry us all.

Fascist is not a word I use lightly, but it does apply here. The word is overused and members of the far right don't have to be fascists to be scary. Fascism is like pornography, a terrible system to base a government on. Also like pornography, it's very difficult to define but we all know it when we see it.

Understanding exactly what fascism is can be difficult. There are many competing definitions. Benito Mussolini said he was fascism’s only theorist and when asked to define fascism he always gave different answers. Writing a clinical definition of fascism is very difficult, but it’s plain to see that people who attacked a bookshop, that sells books they disagree with, are fascists. Bullying and intimidating people who have different political views to silence their free speech is fascism.

I can tell at least some of you are rolling their eyes at this point and thinking something along the lines of “what about all those left wing students on campuses that I keep reading about? They want to bully and intimidate people. They’re against free speech”. Well, a campaign to disinvite Germaine Greer from a lecture is not the same as people invading a shop and threatening staff. One is tinged with the very real possibility of actual violence. The other is using non-violent political actions to stop the spreading of transphobia.

What the left is having right now is a discussion about what the limits of speech should be. Everyone believes in some limits to freedom of speech, unless you think child pornography or printing your own pound sterling is completely okay. Should I be allowed to give a speech to my local conservative club on how Margaret Thatcher ruined Britain? Is denying me the chance to scream at local Tories infringing on my freedom of speech? Well, it is, but I still shouldn’t be allowed to yell obscenities at Tory members in their own club if they don’t want me to. There are limits to freedom of speech.

It’s important that we have the discussion about what the limit is. It’s happening in a messy disorganized way, which frightens some people, but important political discussions are rarely neat. I can’t talk politics with someone in the pub without it getting heated, so it’s going to get messy when all of society tries to talk about something difficult. This tough debate on the limits of free speech is clearly different to menacing people quietly buying books.

Fascism is a political movement that aims to replace the current political system with a different, parallel one. One that is authoritarian and violent. Fascism is moving political debate off the TV and Twitter and into a street brawl where the strong assert their political dominance through physical strength. Fascism isn’t a set of beliefs, but a way of doing politics that is different and more violent. This might not be what the people who attacked Bookmarks wanted, but it’s what they’re participating in.

As much as I enjoy an academic discussion of politics and trying to wrestle with the definitions of what is and isn't fascism, this discussion is removed from many people’s experience of it. Fascism isn’t a thing that only lives in political science textbooks. It’s in the streets kicking people in the stomach.

For the people being kicked in the stomach, the fact fascism is hard to define from a political science point of view is a pointless observation. Fascism is a real force in Britain and it targets the people who have the least power. Immigrants, non-White people, queer people. Muslims and Muslim women especially. These people have much less power than white, straight, male, atheists like myself. Fascism is terrorizing their communities. This attack on Bookmarks may have drawn our attention to it, but it’s been going on for a while and it's getting worse.

The forces of fascism in the UK are getting stronger, fuelled by hatred of immigrants and fear of Muslims. Fascism needs an enemy to fight in the streets, one with less power, and by exploiting hatred of minorities fascism spreads. Fascists are using the freedom of open platforms like Facebook and Twitter to connect and organise. Fascism has always had an undercurrent in the UK, but now it is a serious threat.

Sometimes when I read reports of what’s happening in America or Hungry and Poland, I have visions of John Snow coming down from the Wall to warn the rest of us in sunny King’s Landing. Meanwhile, the various factions of the left are fighting over who gets to sit on the Iron Throne. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important who sits on the Iron Throne. The Iron Throne is very significant, that’s why people are fighting over it. However, John Snow has come down from the Wall to tell us that the old enemy has returned, the enemy we thought was long dead. Not only are they back, but they’re strong and getting stronger. The old enemy doesn’t care about our fights and our differences. The old enemy is coming to kill us all. Unless we can stop them. 

I’m very worried about how fascism is growing in the UK, fuelled by those in the media and on social media who spout hatred aimed at those with less social power. I am worried about how many people don’t see the danger that is on the march. Are we going to go back to the 70s when the National Front openly marched through the street and racist attacks were a frequent occurrence? Or, are we entering some new hell, unlike anything we've seen before?

The Bookmarks attack show how bold fascists have become. If we don’t stop them, this will become much worse. I am very frightened.

Crowd image created by James Cridland and used under creative commons.

The past is all around us: A tale of architecture in Bucharest

I was surprised by how hot Bucharest was in July. I had assumed that a city in a former Communist, Eastern European Country would have permanent grey skies and light drizzle. This, of course, more accurately describes the London climate and not the climate of a city that is roughly as far south Milian or Lyon. This was an assumption I made based on how Bucharest looks, ie very Soviet. 

Romania is the place that first comes to mind when people think about Eastern European Communist countries. It had a self obsessed, power mad, authoritarian dictator in the form of Nicolae Ceausescu. During Ceausescu’s 24 years in power he committed many crimes against humanity, as well as ordering the construction of buildings that would make the judges of the Carbuncle Cup weep. His style of building was greatly influenced by a visit to North Korea, as was his ordering of huge military parades for his own self-aggrandisement.

I spent an afternoon in the baking Bucharest July sun looking at huge, grey buildings and trying to understand the lives of the people who lived there. Many of these lives overlap with my own (there are still former Communist politicians in the Romanian parliament) but their lives seem as alien to me as those of people of Victorian Britain. The fact that their TV only showed two hours of broadcast a day that was entirely propaganda speeches from Communist leaders and that it was illegal to consume media from outside the country, was one striking fact that stayed with me. In truth I struggle to imagine that it would be like to live in such a society.

My initial conclusion, after spending an afternoon walking around the decaying ruins of what seemed to me like another world, is that Bucharest lives up to its reputation of having a lot of very large, very grey, very Soviet buildings. The most famous of these is the Palace of the Parliament, the world's largest parliament building and second largest government building (behind the Pentagon). This eleven story high structure dominates the skyline of Bucharest just as Castle Rock dominates Edinburgh. Surprisingly it is even larger underground than it is above. Just to remove any doubt, that is the building pictured at the top of this page.

Most of Bucharest's large and grey buildings were began in the 1980s when Ceausescu went on a building rampage that involved demolishing a 6th of the city. He was overthrown in a violent revolution that fitted his blood soaked rule in 1989 and most of the construction was put on hold. The revolution resulted in Ceausescu and his wife, Elena Petrescu, being executed on live TV. You can watch this clip on YouTube if you really want. I am not linking to that here, because it is the actual footage of actual human beings being shot to death.

Since the revolution, legal disputes between the current and former occupiers of land that was confiscated by the Communist government has meant that construction on my buildings has not continued and maintenance has not been done. Many buildings remain half finished or have been abandoned. This gives the city is ruinous, dystopian feel.

Bucharest has been doubly damaged, first by having a lot of its 19th century neoclassical buildings pulled down, then by what was put up in their place left unfinished and now much of it falling into legal limbo and ultimately ruins. Many buildings had unfinished facades like the example below:

The double presence of the architectural excesses of an authoritarian regime and then the decay of something that capitalism sees no value in, does give Bucharest a decaying, run down feel. This is not a city that inspires much affection. Although, the beer is gloriously cheap.

It is not that Bucharest's buildings are without merit. Many are fine examples of the socialist realistic or socialist functionalist style of architecture. Especially those designed as residents for Communist Party officials that can be found along the Victory of Socialism boulevard. These are fine examples of a socialist interpretation of the neoclassical view of architecture.

What these buildings have in common with modernist architecture - a style that doesn't seem to have had much impact on Bucharest as dictators generally disliked the artistically challenging and personally expressive nature of modernism - is that these are buildings that the people of Romania are trying to put behind them just as Britain has spent the last 40 years trying to put the modernism, of 1950 and 60s councils behind us. Our guide on the tour declared that there was only one Communist building of merit in Bucharest, a concert hall that I was unable to photograph. Many people will see similarities (both architecturally and philosophically) between the Palace of the Parliaments and Birmingham Central Library, ie they were imposed on people and stand radically against the public’s perception of beauty.

The similarities between Bucharest's socialist functionalist buildings and the modernist buildings in Western Europe, is that these buildings doesn't apologise for themselves or seek to flatter bourgeoisie aesthetic tastes. These buildings have ambition and work on a scale that are much bigger than individual humans. The monumental scale of Bucharest's buildings is their architectural merit. They possess, what Jonathan Meades has called the architecture of the sublime, a rare character posed by the buildings of great architects from John Vanbrugh to Le Corbusier.

That said, Bucharest's buildings have all the hallmarks of totalitarianism. I can see why people find these buildings ugly. They go against conventional taste, and I am not enough of a snob to say that conventional taste is entirely invalid. Furthermore, I can see why the people of Bucharest want to put their past and these buildings (which are an ever present reminder of the past) behind them. I didn’t seem confident enough in my convictions of the merits of Bucharest's architecture (or enough of a dickhead) to argue with a local guide’s summary of the city.

The problem is that Bucharest is struggling to put the past behind it because of the scale of the past. Bucharest is currently building the world's largest Orthodox Church (pictured below) that will be taller than the Palace of the Parliaments. I am not sure the solution to having a city based around a large building that has aged poorly is to construct a large building that will probably age poorly. Certainly the leaders of Romanian haven't lost their appetite for monumental building.

It is impossible to defend the regime that made Bucharest the way it is, even for diehard socialists. It killed people and crushed liberty on a scale only imagined in Orwell's 1984. Bucharest has the feeling that monumental mistakes were made here and now people are paying for those mistakes. Such is Bucharest disdain for its own past that the memorial to those who died in the 1989 Revolution is broken and covered in graffiti.

Are the people any better off now? Certainly they can’t be arrested for listening to foreign media anymore, which has to be an improvement. The transition to capitalism and western democracy has brought liberty to the people of Romania, but it has also brought its own problems. Corruption and legal disputes are a blight on their economy and the aesthetics of Bucharest.

Bucharest serves as a reminder that bringing down an authoritarian regime doesn’t solve all the problems. The people are better off with Ceausescu gone, but a lot of reform is needed to make Romania a prosperous country. Western capitalism promises more than liberty with poverty and it needs to make good on these promises. In Bucharest the jury is still out on whether it has made good on these promises.

The past leaves long marks on the present and takes a long time to get over it. People and places don’t change overnight or even over decades. The built environment that the past leaves behind is a reflection of this. 

Haringey: A borough of two halves

The names of the places that make up the London Borough of Haringey are more famous than the borough itself. The same cannot be said for Islington, Hackney, Camden or a host of other boroughs. Tottenham, Crouch End and Highgate are well known, but the name of Haringey is sadly usually evoked with negative connotations. Harry Kane plays for Tottenham and the position of this national hero inside the borough of Haringey has not changed the perception of it.

Outside of North London, Haringey reminds people of either the Baby-P scandal or the battle between local people and different factions of the Labour Party that erupted over the Haringey Development Vehicle. I have especially enjoyed people who couldn't find Haringey on a map of London, opine on Twitter about what events in Haringey have to say about the state of the nation. Have they asked anyone who lives locally? No, that would require actual engagement with the complexities of an area.

After spending the better part of seven years variably living, working, volunteering and most importantly drinking in the London Borough of Haringey, I can say that I find most views expressed by people outside the borough as reductive and lazy. Responding to Haringey, if such a thing was possible, is the same as responding to the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in one tweet. It's simply too varied to do it justice.

If you want to understand Haringey then I suggest you start by putting some boots on the ground. Take a walk and as we've having a rare spell of unbroken good weather, why not visit a few pubs as you go.

I began at the Green Rooms on Station Road, not far from Wood Green tube station, which is a classic Charles Holden design: geometrically shaped and bricked built. A modern, clean and functional design. The borough has several tube stations designed by Holden on the Piccadilly Line, who certainly the architect to have the biggest impact on London after Sir Christopher Wren.

The Green Rooms is one of the most individual pubs in London. The space reminds me more of East Berlin than East, North, Central London. The large windows let ample light spill in and the exposed brick work and wiring is an excellent execution of the modern ascetic. Art from local artists adorn the walls and there is a rotation of pop up restaurants that occupy the kitten. It goes without saying that the beer selection is very good, local favourite Beavertown Gamma Ray and German classic Paulaner Helles are frequently available. When I dropped by in the middle of the day, there were many people sitting alone at tables working on Mac Books.

So far this may seem so very London, but the Green Rooms is located in area that is subject to an ongoing postcode war that included a young man being disembowelled. I have several anecdotes about the space around Wood Green tube station, but I don't think the area is served by a white middle class man's poverty safari stories. What I will say is a fact: that Wood Green is in East Haringey and the average life expectancy in East Haringey is nine years less than West Haringey.

There is another point here: the mixing of craft beer and gang violence shows the changing face of London. East Haringey may have social and economic problems, but it’s also rapidly gentrifying. You can live a life at the Green Room, Crouch End Picturehouse and Jack's Off Licence (the best offie in the world, and I don't use those words lightly) without interacting with the poverty that surrounds you. I know, because that was my life before I started volunteering. Being a middle class white person or a poor person of colour in East Haringey is very much like living in Ul Qoma or Besźel in China Mieville's The City and the City.

I am trying to convey the complexities of Haringey, and you'll notice that I only mentioned East Haringey so far. After leaving the Green Rooms I hopped on a bus that took me on a tour of Haringey's suburban sprawl. Don't assume this was a bad experience. To summarise Jonathan Meades, sprawl is just sprawl, it can be good or bad.

Haringey has lots of lovely sprawl. There a Victorian terraces that are now blocks of flats. There are rows of small shops that border parks. There is interesting infill, something that I always find fascinating as they ask the question: what was there that needed to be filled in?

The bus took me past 1930s housing blocks that have ornate curved brick balconies and shopping parades where branded stores are being slowly driven out by local cafes/art galleries and interesting restaurants, whose menu can only be described as nationality X, but modern.

The bus ultimately arrived in Highgate Village. Filled with beautiful Georgian houses, which are mind bendingly expensive to own anywhere and in London I cannot imagine the level of wealth needed to purchase such a property. There is a level of wealth above the hipster craft beer drinker and above even the obnoxious City Boys.

Highgate Village does a better approximation of a country village than most other parts of London that have tried this. This is the village that many urban villages are modelled on. I dropped by The Flask, which is very much a country pub transposed to what is still TfL zone three. It has beautiful wooden interiors with nooks and carries that provide privacy. The most interesting part was wallpaper showing facades various buildings made in the neo gothic style. It goes without saying that the beer selection is very good, a full range of Fullers cask ales and craft beer is frequently stocked. There is also a leafy outside area complete with picnic tables that remind me of the canal side pub where I first sampled craft beer as a student.

Highgate Village, with its expensive cars and boutique shops, also has a pedigree for producing the country's poshest leftists. It has been home to both Miliband brothers and to Peter Mandelson (who is technically on the left, at least by this eye-wateringly posh part of the country’s standards). From its position on the side of a hill, Highgate Village commands views across London. On a clear day you can see Anish Kapoor’s Orbital in the Queen Elizabeth Park. From here it is possible to look down on the rest of London in every sense.

Highgate Village may seem more like Richmond, just as Wood Green feels more like Hackney, but the two places are united by being in same borough. A borough many people have tried to summarise glibly. Highgate is as disconnected from Wood Green (socially and politically) as the drinkers of the Green Rooms are from the drug dealers. In London we live shoulder to shoulder with people whose lives are completely unrecognizable to our own. This is something China Mieville understood. We share a space with people who are different to us, but we don't understand them and often we don’t see them. We're more likely to see their lives represented in our media than to engage with them.

The solution: take a walk more often. If you do this in Haringey then don't think of Haringey as a poor place or a place of hipster craft beer or a place full of wealthy people. Think of it as it is: varied.

Should we have a People’s Vote on Brexit?

Okay … deep breath … we’re going to talk about Brexit.

Before we start, I want to get this out of the way, just so there’s no doubt: I voted Remain. Remain with a capital R. I hated the leave campaign and how they lied about money, exploited love of the NHS and whipped up fear of immigrants. I think Brexit is a terrible idea, likely to reduce workers' rights, cause an economic shock that will hit the poorest the hardest and restart a sectarian war in Northern Ireland. Even if Brexit wasn’t an awful idea, it’s been handled atrociously by the Tories who can’t even agree amongst themselves as to which horrendous, dystopian visions of the future they want to force on everyone not lucky enough to be financially insulated from this bullshit.

Yes, I have criticisms of the EU and the official Remain campaign couldn’t find a decent argument with both hands. But on the whole if I could wave a magic wand and make the whole Brexit thing go away I would. Slight problem with that: I can’t.

Now, there’s lots of talk of having another referendum or a People’s Vote. The point of this is to stop this Brexit nightmare by democratic means. I’m not going to dignify the colossally stupid idea of stopping Brexit via a non-democratic means with any discussion. Ideas for what exactly the People Vote would be differ, but generally it’s another referendum between some form of Brexit and Britain remaining a full EU member.

Brexit and the left

A lot of the people who don’t like Jeremy Corbyn and don’t like his stance on Brexit are pushing this. The Venn diagram of being Labour, anti-Corbyn and anti-Brexit has a lot of overlap. Also, Corbyn is a Eurosceptic of long standing.

On the other hand, a lot of young people and middle class metropolitan lefties (I’m at least one of those things) are really into Corbyn and really anti-Brexit. Calls for a People’s Vote is not just a means to get rid of Corbyn without the awkwardness of winning a Labour leadership contest. A lot of people on the left think Brexit is a bad idea, handled badly and would like it to go away. Not least the Corbyn leadership who want to turn the many against the few (such as by supporting more money for the NHS), not the many against the many (by rubbing salt into Brexit wounds).

The case against holding another referendum is that most normal people really hate politics, politicians, the time the media devote to politicians, elections and most of all referendums. Everyone remember this?

Another referendum would empower the far right by handing them an easy narrative of the people betrayed by the elite. It would also massively empower the regular pro-Brexit right. “Brexit Betrayed!” Splashed across every right wing paper is a) something all right learning papers really want to do, and b) would mean right wing or far right government until the point the sea rises high enough to drown London.

The case for a second referendum

Another reason not do it is (and I haven’t read this elsewhere is so this maybe, shock horror, an original thought) that it wouldn’t stop Brexit anyway. Even if we stop the current Brexit process without making Arron Banks Fuhrer of Britain, what’s to stop Boris Johnson leading the Conservative Party to a huge election victory at the next general election on the platform of Brexit? After he hoovers up all Tories and Leave Labour voters he’ll take us out of the EU without another referendum or a parliamentary vote or anything. Does the People’s Vote do anything other than kick the can down the road?

The case for a second referendum is built on the idea that significant numbers of people have buyer’s remorse over Brexit. If we do this again, only the diehard immigration haters will vote Brexit; so the logic goes. I don’t think many people do regret their vote, to be honest.

They regret putting Theresa May in charge of Brexit for sure, but the idea itself remains resolutely popular. If anything we’re more Brexit-y now than we were in 2016, as it has been given the sheen of democratic approval - the government wouldn’t throw its weight behind not-Brexit next time. If you’re rolling your eyes right now: remember people do listen to the government, even when David Cameron is in charge of it.

That said … Brexit is currently a massive mess. A mess because it is filled with contradictions and I don’t see how we can resolve these contradictions without another referendum.

With Brexit, essentially, we have to choose between two models: Norway or Canada. High access and taking rules, or low access and striking our own trade deals. Peace in Northern Ireland or more control on immigration. This government is incapable of choosing between the two because it is unwilling to accept the negative consequences of either. I don’t see how other governments, say a Labour one, could resolve this either, as Labour voters are split between wanting controls on immigration and single market access.

Fantasy policy making

Brexit has only got as far as it has through fantasy promises made during the campaign and then fantasy policy making by those who were supposed to be the grown ups and sort this out. Too much bullshit has been said about Britain being able to negotiate something different from these two models. We can’t. Certainly not now, after we have wasted all our good will and nearly all our time. The fantasy crap has obscured the single choice facing Britain.

No one wants what May is offering. Her Chequers agreement won’t work and neither the EU, her party or MPs will accept it. There’s really only one way to resolve the fundamental Brexit split: put both options - with full details, no more fantasies about artificial intelligence, the blockchain or Churchill coming back from the dead to save us - on the table and let the people decide.

That way we can have a proper debate about Brexit, not the farce we had in 2016. People will have to decide whether they want (and newspaper/politicians will have to be honest about the trade offs between) a reduction on immigration and an end to EU red tape or peace in a Northern Ireland and economic stability.

Would there be an option for Remain in such a referendum? As in a complete no Brexit, time machine back to 2015, option? I don’t see this happening in the event of another referendum. Although, if we are going to give people a choice, it’s hard to argue that they shouldn’t be given the option to make it all go away. Whatever referendum we have will embolden the far right.

Two Brexits and one Remain

The real problem with this plan is: what happens if most people vote for the two Brexits but Remain still wins with about 45% of the vote? We would be in real trouble. Like, armed Gammons storming parliament trouble.

All options are risky. Also, there’s no time to arrange any of this and make sure that the Russians don’t rig it so that Nigel Farage becomes Prime Minister.

So, should we have a People’s Vote or another referendum? I don’t see how we can resolve the two-Brexits issue without one. Parliament would rather tear itself apart than resolve this problem themselves. I would like Remain on the ballot, under the proviso that Brexit is only cancelled if more people voted Remain than both Brexit options combined.

What I really want is for the government/parliament to resolve this. However, I don’t see that happening. Party politics and government are struggling to absorb the result of a referendum. The two seem incompatible. Certainly, having no plan for what happened after the referendum if Brexit won didn’t help. Also, not having a proper debate about what Brexit would actually mean during the referendum made things worse. For this, I blame both the Brexit and Remain press, but we can’t change what happened.

The entire process of Brexit has broken down. As we are going, I don’t see a way forward that doesn’t run the serious risk of a no deal, cliff edge, hospitals run out of medicine, Brexit. Maybe the unthinkable second referendum is the only way to settle this once and for all.

EU flag image created by Yanni Koutsomitis and used under creative commons.

What is the struggle for?

One of the most successful political movements on the 20th Century was the Civil Rights movement. It brought together millions of Americans, with different views and backgrounds to address a specific injustice. The movement had tangible outcomes in the form of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

We can learn from this when building a left wing movement in the UK. For example, having a clear goal that can unite people. This is one reason why the campaign to make Jeremy Corbyn leader of the Labour Party worked so well; having a specific goal brought together people with a range of distinct and indistinct political opinions.

The Corbyn campaign was supported by people who felt left wing and wanted a broader change in society. Corbyn was able to unite this desire (a desire for people disagreed on many details of politics) around a specific outcome: becoming Labour leader.

Completing this goal is not the end of the struggle. We have a long way to go before any meaningful social change in enacted. This leads me to ask: "what is Corbyn Labour and the wider left wing movement behind it trying to achieve?" What is the struggle for? It's not enough to say "make Corbyn Prime Minister," what do we want him to do after that? What are the tangible outcomes?

The end of neoliberalism

One answer is to end neoliberalism, the political ideology that believes free markets bring about the optimum allocation of resources and that it is government's role to make markets freer. Getting rid of neoliberalism is a good idea, but what ideology do we want to replace neoliberalism with?

Socialism has become a byword for opposition to neoliberalism. Do you want to nationalise the railways, spend more on the NHS, increase benefits, beef-up trade unions and invest more in economic development of poorer areas? Then you're probably a socialist. However, being someone who is more economically left wing than Tony Blair is not what socialism used to be.

What I described above is Keynesian economics and fairly timid Keynesianism at that. From what I can see, the economic program of a future Corbyn government would be to return to the policies of Harold Wilson's Labour government. This would make a Corbyn's government the third most radically left wing Labour government out of five. That is not what I thought was being offered when Corbyn stood to be party leader.

Corbyn clearly wants to change Britain's foreign policy, or more accurately the entire way that Britain acts in the world. During his years on the backbenches, foreign policy is where Corbyn concentrated his efforts, mainly through solidarity with various oppressed groups around the world.

Foreign policy

Certainly a Corbyn government would have a radically different foreign policy to any previous British government. Britain is not the international heavyweight it once was and now we  have lost our ability to influence EU foreign policy our influence is diminished further. I am not sure what global impact the Corbyn government will have, beyond a greater capacity to make gestures of solidarity. If Corbyn was PM would he be able to stop the Syrian Civil War?

A focus on foreign policy would overlook the crucial role of domestic politics. What will a Corbyn government do to fix the problems in Britain? I am worried that the objectives of socialism has become changing the people at the top of the machinery of state to be nice people and then let them fix social problems with said machinery. This ignores the fact that the machinery itself is part of the problem, no matter who is in charge of it. We need to change society, not just put Corbyn at the top of it.

The stated aim of a socialist government should be creating the conditions to transition our economy to a post-capitalist one, providing a minimum standard of living to all its citizens, reducing inequality in all its forms, addressing climate change and diminish in the power of the state wherever possible. This is what socialism should be about.

This will require radical new policies that go beyond nationalising the railways, spending more on the NHS or even introducing Universal Basic Income. There are many areas we need to think about, such as how taxation, housing, unions, health, transport and work. We need to ask questions, such as who has social power, and how do we measure values?

Change society, not the Prime Minister

A lot of this can't be done at the Westminster level and will need a broader movement aimed at changing society instead of just changing who is PM. I am sure that Corbyn is a nice guy, but what we need to achieve is bigger than him, bigger than any person or political party. Party and government are tools to help us change society, but we need to also build new tools that are more suited to the task of improving people’s lives.

We can look at the Civil Rights Movement and how we are a much more racially tolerant society now than we were in the 1960s as proof that broad social movements can change society.

The photo of Corbyn at a CND event was taken by Garry Knight and is used under creative commons.

Between the Mega Spoons and the Brown Jug: A tale of the Kent coast

The writer who best captures the sense of a place is Jonathan Meades, mainly because he brings his own experience of a place into how he captures it. Meades’s writing and documentaries shows that you cannot know a place outside of your subjective understanding of it.

I always thought that if you wanted to know a place in Britain, the best way to start is by visiting its pubs. Pubs reflect the complex web of class, community, politics, history and people that make a town or suburb distinctive.

With this in mind, I headed down to Ramsgate on the Kent coast to visit Britain’s largest pub, the so called “Mega Spoons”, and to see what it can teach me about British’s small coastal town.

The Ramsgate pub scene is dominated by The Royal Pavilion, which was built in 1904 and is now a Wetherspoons. Its presence looms from the front of town, despite it being a low squat building, and all drinkers in the town feel its pull wherever they are.

On the waterfront

The waterfront is lined with beautiful Georgian buildings, which are nice as anything found in Bath or Islington. I was staying in the Royal Temple Yacht club, which is a charming hotel that appears as if time stopped in the early 1960s. It stocks a good range of local ales and was decorated with oil paintings and small models of ships, which should be mandatory for coastal pubs.

The Yacht club very much represented the old world of Ramsgate. It’s thick carpet and polished brass handrails belong to a different age from the shabby chic of London’s Antic pubs. It is a place that is much alive, set next to a row of seafront restaurants and bars that hummed with activity in the late afternoon. As did the Queen Charlotte, a bohemian pub a few streets away that boasted a wide selection of beers from popular breweries.

Then to the Mega Spoons, a welcoming an airy pub, which is impressive given its size and dominance over the town. The sea front terrace is an excellent in the warm summer early evening. It’s a shame to think of this beautiful building standing empty and I’m glad that it has found a use worthy of its former royal status.

The Mega Spoons is the epitome of Spoons, and Spoons is the epitome of the modern pub experience. It is a social leveller, bringing together people from all aspects of Ramsgate life, boasts a wide selection of cask ale and craft beer and wholesome food. I ordered food and drink via their app and enjoyed libations late into the night. The only issue was that in an inebriated state I struggled to open the door to my room at the Yacht club.

The bus to Broadstairs

The next morning I took the bus to Broadstairs, further along the Kent coast. As the bus wound its way through the back streets of Thanet I noticed it was a different story to sunny seafront I had visited the night before. Only a few streets away from the Mega spoons and the poverty became apparent. The back streets of Thanet were reminiscent of Skerton or other poor places in the North of England. Not somewhere that was supposedly gentrifying due to people being displaced to Kent by London’s housing crisis. The wealth of London is not spreading through the South East.

This is mirrored in the pub situation across the country. Pubs in London are going from strength to strength. So many are opening that old shops, cinemas, working men’s clubs and even a former Job Centre are turning into pubs. Micro breweries are springing up everywhere.

Across the rest of the country pubs are closing at two a week and many rural communities are left without a pub. Wetherspoons continues to expand and the centre of Britain’s large cities still have many pubs, but the future for the estate pub outside of the wealthier suburbs looks bleak. The causes of this are myriad and reflect the current unequal economic state of the country.

In the back streets of Thanet my bus passed a pub called the Brown Jug (complete with a giant brown ceramic jug on the front porch), which was closed and boarded up. It looks like it was once a much loved local that had fallen on hard times. Tourists may be patronising the Mega Spoons or seafront pubs, but a few streets away pubs can’t stay open.

Fundamental division

This shows the fundamental divisions in British society. Thanet is an area split between wealthy former Londoners (or wealthy Londoners visiting the Mega Spoons) and suburbs of the “left behind”. Thanet is represented in the European Parliament by Nigel Farage and voted heavily for Brexit. I can’t help but feel that this division between the patrons of bohemian craft beer pubs and people whose locals are closing is part of the divide that was opened up in British society since the referendum.

The state of our pubs shows the emotional underpinning of the divisions in Britain. Some people see their lives getting worse, their communities declining and their pubs closing and want it to stop. Some people never leave their microbreweries and craft beer pubs and can’t see why anyone else thinks differently to them. Some people don’t understand shabby chic, exposed pipes, e-sports bars or board game cafes, and feel that the patrons of such places have contempt for the old fashioned boozer.

Even if the government paid for the Brown Jug to reopen I don’t think this would help the situation. We need solution that brings everyone into a prosperous future, whether they drink in sports bars, Spoons or Antic pubs. How we achieve this is a question too big to find the solution to in one weekend by the sea.

Taking stock of Corbyn so far

I used to think that it was impossible for an overtly socialist politician to be leader of the Labour Party. The idea is completely antithetical to how the Labour was run for all of my adult life. Everything I knew about politics told me that it would be impossible for Jeremy Corbyn to have gotten as far as he has. Not only becoming Labour Party leader and being popular with the members, but also having a decent chance of becoming Prime Minister at the next election.

I used to think that radicalism was separate from mainstream politics. Maybe a small, local campaign somewhere could come up with an interesting policy idea that might possibly be more widely adopted after it had been watered down a bit and stripped of its radical context. There was no way that the Labour Party as a whole would be heading in a radical direction. Yet here we find ourselves.

The result in last year's general election was incredible. To go from being so far behind in the polls to improving Labour's position was an enormous achievement. One that came from the hard work of activists across the country. This shows that left wing policies can be popular when offered to the electorate and disproves the New Labour idea that Labour must tack towards the centre to win power.

Brexit and small towns

One year on from the election seems like a good moment to pause and to take stock of the Corbyn project so far. We shouldn't be complacent; there is still a long way to go before Labour can form a government. So a frank assessment of where we are now will give us some insights in what we should do next.

Brexit is a real threat to Corbyn's chances of becoming Prime Minister. The country remains divided between Leave and Remain camps and has settled down to a grudging acceptance that Brexit must go ahead. As a Remain voter, it’s painful to admit that it's tactically suicidal for Labour to oppose Brexit at this point. Becoming the party of Remain voters will not gain Labour the votes it needs to form a government. Neither will halfway measures such as offering a referendum on the final deal. There are a lot of pitfalls for Labour to avoid, on this issue.

There is also the problem that Labour is not making enough gains in small towns. It is clear that there was not enough liberal metropolitan voters in the county for Labour to form a government. Labour needs to win over more voters in small towns to gain power. An economically redistributive policy offer will help here, but more needs to be done to bridge the vast cultural gap opening up between the Labour Party and those who live in small towns.

If Labour can address these two crucial issues then the possibilities are staggering. Not only a return to power for Labour, but the chance to pass reforms that will address the big problems facing the country. What I want to see from the party is more radicalism in the face of these challenges, an openness to the far reaching reforms that are needed.

Radical reforms

These radical reforms will need to think about more than how much we spend on schools and hospitals, although these are important. We need to ask questions about how we relate to the state, how we participate in democracy, how we think about value and how we save the natural environment.

We need to ask ourselves: what is that we want to achieve? It’s not enough to get Corbyn into power, we need to know what we will do when he gets there. All the tactical thinking over Brexit will be for nothing it if we don't know what we’re fighting for.

Is the plan undoing neoliberalism and the damage that cold ideology has done to this country? An end to austerity and giving a lifeline to those who have suffered through years of cuts? Is it the rebirth of Keynesianism and idea that there is a role for the state to play in curbing the worst excesses of markets. Is it Universal Basic Income and giving a minimum standard of living to everyone? Is it something else more radical and more powerful?

We need something concrete to build the movement that can win the next election. Something that we are offering everyone in this country. Something that will transform their lives for the better. I believe that we can do this. We can change the country.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

What can the British left learn from Russian propaganda in Germany?

Yeah, it’s wordy title, but Russian propaganda is complicated issue that affects the left globally. I have been thinking about this a lot recently and what follows are some conclusions I came to with the help of some clever people who study this sort of thing.

Being, in many ways, between the USA and Russia, the British left has had a complicated relationship to Russian foreign policy. Many view it as a necessary check on American Imperialism. In some instances, hostility to American foreign policy has muted into support for Vladimir Putin and his own brutal Imperialism.

I have criticism of any left wing politics that involves support for a brutal authoritarian who surrounds himself with, and represents the interests of, billionaire oligarchs. Until recently, I thought that this flirtation with Putin (usually expressed as sharing Russia Today news posts that support the Kremlin's line in left wing Facebook groups) was a peculiarly British thing.

I had assumed that things were different in Germany and that the German left would be united in their opposition to Putin. This is because Germany is the major player in the two institutions that are the most effective check on Putin, the EU and NATO. Britain is trying desperately to walk away from one and austerity is testing its commitment to the other. During this period of national navel gazing, we are leaving the crucial work of standing up to Putin to Germany.

This neat assumption that I had made was shattered recently when I read a paper called Make Germany Great Again by Anne Applebaum, Peter Pomerantsev, Melanie Smith and Chloe Colliver and published by Arena, based at the Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) within the LSE.

The paper looks into the Kremlin's attempts to interfere with last year's German Federal Election. The paper’s authors (who shall henceforth be referred to as Applebaum et al to save space more than anything else) look at the Kremlin's attempt to use online propaganda to influence the far right in Germany and the Russian-German community. However, the sections of the paper I read with the most interest were about the Kremlin's attempts to influence the far left in Germany.

The German left is a not the single monolithic institution I had naively assumed it was. Applebaum et al say that several groups on the Germany left are critical of Putinism, usually those who support feminism, environmentalism and human rights. There are also left wing groups that flirt with Putinism - as some elements of the British left do. These tend to be anti-Imperialist, anti-Zionist and against US hegemony.

I was surprised to learn that there are significant Putin-sympathetic groups on the Germany left. Applebaum et al say that the main German radical left party, Die Linke (literally The Left) has: "grown closer to the Russian government in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine." This is characterised by following the Kremlin's line on NATO, the US and Syria.

Some groups have a more complicated relations with Russia, such Alliance 90/The Green Party who criticise Russia as being undemocratic, but in the words of Applebaum et al: "occasionally portrays the Kremlin as the victim of the West." There are also groups on the German left that are strongly opposed to Putin, such as the anti-fascist movement.

After reading the work of Applebaum et al, I felt that this divide between pro and anti-Putin left wing groups in Germany is not a difference in ideology per se. It's not about different outlooks on the world or different thinking about the Putin regime. I believe it shows the differing media diets of different left wing groups.

Applebaum et al talk about how in Germany: "the far left users in our network map showed far less reliance on fringe outlets as top sources of information than those in the far right." Applebaum et al also state that the German left as a whole is less likely to share disinformation and more likely to debunk fake news.

I believe that this will be reflected in the German left wing groups that are anti-Putin. Certainly, what I have seen in Britain is that the left wing groups that are the most scornful of mainstream media are the ones that are most likely to be sharing Kremlin propaganda. British left wing groups with a varied media diet, are generally more hostile to Putin.

Applebaum et al talk about the: "rapid expansion of transnational networks of information and toxic speech." It would be wrong to see Putin as the spider in the middle of this web or as some kind of sinister puppet master of online hatred. Nationalists the world over, from Donald Trump’s supporters to Britain First, have been effectively organising online either with or without any aid from Putin. It would also be wrong to think that the infiltration of Kremlin propaganda into political debate is exclusively a right wing problem.

Applebaum et al have recommendations for the media in Germany to tackle the problems of pro-Kremlin propaganda. I think we need to take on these recommendations as a project for the left and not to leave it up to Western governments that have their own agenda to push - or might just do a terrible job of implementing the recommendations.

For example, Applebaum et al recommend that Germany: "invest in sustainable digital literacy programmes" and that "critical thinking skills need to not only be taught in schools, but also delivered via media and public awareness campaigns for adults." I can imagine this being done terribly. Imagine government infomercials telling worried parents about the signs that their child is reading Russian propaganda. Then imagine this ad campaign designed by a committee in the most centrist dad way possible. Noble as at intentions of this campaign would be, the state does not have the ear of the people the campaign needs to reach.

The left needs to tackle on this important work of teaching critical thinking and digital literacy so that well informed citizens can spot media propaganda, whether it's pro-corporate, pro-Russia bombing whoever they feel like this week or pro-America bombing whoever they feel like this week.

Applebaum et al also talk about the need to: "reduce the financial incentives for disinformation." As social media sites monopolise and sell our attention, and are more than happy to spread Russian propaganda or extremist content in the process, then a left wing critiques of these media companies and why they care more about making money than protecting their values of our society is necessary. We can’t talk about financial incentives for disinformation, without critiquing capitalism itself.

At the end of reading Make Germany Great Again, I was aware that the issues I thought were local to the British left are global. There are many similarities between Britain and Germany. How "wedge issues", such as immigration, are exploited by the far right or how a loss of trust in the mainstream media is creating gaps in the media diet that pro-Kremlin news sources are happy to fill.

The changes to media and technology of the last ten years present a global challenge to the left and to the Western governments. The left needs to globally rise to this challenge and offer a means for people to understand this brave new world that we live in. If we don't then the vacuum of media authority will be filled by authoritarians of one stripe or another. We need to be critical of Putin, and of our Western governments, and of the media companies that are "disrupting" how politics is done with new technology.

There is a lot of passion on the left right now and a lot of good new ideas. There has never been a better time to be on the left and there is a huge need for a prominent left wing narrative in our politics. I believe that we can make the difference the world needs.

Are other governments lying to us worse than our own government lying to us?

Whilst bouncing around left wing Facebook groups I came across this article by Caitlin Johnstone. It makes the argument that we cannot discuss Russian disinformation on social media (the stuff that may have helped get Donald Trump get elected) without talking about how Western governments lied when making the case for the invasion of Iraq. Johnstone says:

“Any argument about the truth of what’s happening with regard to Syria or Russia which does not begin with an explicit and thorough explanation as to why this is completely different from Iraq should be instantly rejected as illegitimate.”

This made me think that we often talk about the propaganda spread on social media by Russia as inherently bad, whilst failing to explain why it is worse than the lies told by our own government or our "free" Western media.

I am not naive enough to believe that our government doesn't lie to us. I believe that blind and uncritical faith in your government is a bad thing. I am also not naive enough to believe that Russia doesn't have a geo-political agenda in spreading its own media narratives via social media. Russia Today is not criticising the monarch on the weekend of the Royal Wedding because it stands for making Britain a more egalitarian society.

I thought about the issue Johnstone raised and realised that the whole thing boils down to one question: "Why are other governments lying to us worse than our own government lying to us?" Answering this question took a considerable amount of thought. Below are the conclusions I came to:

Firstly, let's take the instances of Russian disinformation spread via social media. By disinformation I mean stories that challenge or contradict the accepted narrative of our domestic media.

I believe these are a bad thing. Not because I believe our Western governments are paragons of truth and virtue, but because I believe that this disinformation is not spread with the aim of building a fairer and more just society in the west. Disinformation that helps advance the cause of Vladimir Putin is not good. It needs to be said to everyone on the left, loud and clear, that Putin is not our friend. He may oppose Western foreign policy that we also oppose, but that doesn't make him one of the good guys.

Putin is an ultra-capitalist, supported by billionaire oligarchs. He suppresses free speech and opposition in Russia. He throws around his military weight as much as America does, and he has allied himself with very conservative factions in his society that attack the rights of LGBTQ people. He has people he doesn’t like killed.

The disinformation spread by Russia is not designed to educate people, but is designed to turn us against each other. It exploits the divisions in Western society (young v old, town v country, rich v poor, conservative v liberal, etc.) to make it difficult for our society to function because we are constantly fighting each other. Look at how well Russia was able to use social media to exacerbate the divisions in American society before the 2016 election. America is more divided now than ever.

This hostility and suspicion of each other cases us to lose faith in the institutions of government and democracy. Not just faith in one government, party or leader, but faith in the entire political mechanism. This will make it harder to change society for the better - something I very much want to do - via democratic means.

It must be said that the above also happens when Western governments abuse their power and/or lie to their citizens. Again, the Iraq War is a good example of this, as is the expenses scandal that has shaken faith in democracy.

Stepping aside from the all the bad effects of Russia lying to us, is it harder to address the question of whether a generic foreign power's lies are worse than our own government's lies? All lies undermine faith in the idea of an objective truth. I am critical of the idea of objective truth; what is one person's objective truth is another's subjective opinion. Again the war in Iraq is a good example. We were told an objective truth, that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and this turned out to be just the subjective opinion of the establishment with no basis in fact.

After a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that the answer to the above question is no. Devoid of context, all lies are equally bad. However, what I also decided is that the question of whether generic country X lying to us is worse than our own government, misses the most important thing about disinformation.

We are lied to all the time: by Russia, by our own government, by newspapers in our own country. Pro-Brexit newspapers and politicians lied when they said that Brexit would be easy. Pro-Remain politicians lied when the said voting to leave the EU would trigger an instant economic meltdown. There are lots of lies out there, but the key question is why do we believe them? Also, why do we believe specific lies and not others?

The answer to these questions involves digging into the key issues in politics today. The answer is that because we are divided society, suspicious of groups who think differently to us. It’s because of rising inequality, which means that people in the same country, even the same city, live in vastly different economic worlds. It's because of the fragmentation of news media caused by technology and the rise of filter bubbles on social media sites. It's because we are becoming increasingly partisan in who we associate with and talk to.

If none of this were happening, then it wouldn't be so easy for either the Daily Mail or Russia Today to lie to us. Fully explaining these issues is too big a job to get into here, but I hope to dive into them in following blog posts. I will say that you need a leftist political framework to get to grips with them. You need a left wing political view to understanding rising inequality, social strife and the problems of big tech companies.

After all this thinking, and I like nothing better than having a good deep think about politics, I have determined that all of us on the left should be against Russian disinformation aimed at undermining democracy, but also have a healthy scepticism of our own government. To get to the truth of the big political issues, that disinformation exposes, you need to tackle them from a left wing perspective.