Desert Island Discs

Another year, and still no call from Sue Lawley.
As it's Christmas, time for a little self-indulgence. Here's the twelve records I would take with me to the desert island (I know you're only allowed eight, but it's Christmas!).
I must admit the temptation to take a recording of Stephen Pollard on Any Questions was very strong...(not)

Below is my selection ( in no particular order).
What about yours? The Exile, Holocaust Child, Bob, and all our other regular readers-I'd like to hear from you!

1. Hey Neighbour- Flanagan and Allan
2. Dragon’s Legend- Koto
3. Run Rabbit Run- Flanagan and Allan
4. Hary Janos suite- Zoltan Kodaly
5. Paper Sun- Traffic
6. Dedicated to the One I Love- Mamas and the Papas
7. Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear- Harpers Bizarre
8. Anything Goes-Harpers Bizarre
9. Das Model- Kraftwerk
10. L'Important C’Est La Rose- Gilbert Becaud
11. Where have all the flowers gone? Marlene Dietrich
12. God Only Knows- Beach Boys

An Open Challenge to Britain's Chick Hawks

The Territorial Army announced today it needs another 7000 volunteer recruits to stem the flow of people leaving the organisation (currently running at 600 a month). The T.A. denies that the Iraq war is having an effect, but it's hard to believe otherwise.
To bolster the numbers of Britain's reservists, I would like to make an open challenge.
To Mr Stephen Pollard, Mr Oliver Kamm, the bloggers at Harry's Place, Mr William Shawcross, Mr David Aaronovitch, Mr Nick Cohen and indeed to all those 'chickhawks' who cried 'war', from the safety of a London office, to go out and enlist. The Henry Jackson Society calls for the spread of 'democracy' by non-peaceful methods if necessary- so what are you laptop bombadiers waiting for? If you really feel so passionately about the merits of the military operation- why don't you take the next plane out to Baghdad? Dodging the bullets in the Sunni triangle is surely more exciting than hedge fund management or trying to flog a biography of David Blunkett.....
ps the challenge is open to Melanie Phillips and Andrew Roberts too.

An Unholy Alliance: The Oligarchs, Likud and the Neo-Conservatives

I wonder how many British readers watched the first episode of BBC2's new series 'The Oligarchs', last night? The sight of robber baron Boris Berezovsky strolling around Riga with Neil Bush, brother of the U.S. President will have shocked many. But the links between Russia's oligarchs and Washington's neo-conservatives go back a long way. Here's a piece I wrote for the NS in 2003 on the unholy alliance between the oligarchs, the neo-cons and Israel's Likud party.



A funny sort of democracy
Neil Clark
New Statesman
11/17/2003
It is well documented that a cabal of Likud-supporting American neoconservatives played an important role in bringing about this year's illegal war against Iraq. What is less well known is the link the group has with the billionaire oligarchs in Russia and how theyare trying to use the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky to harden USpolicy towards Moscow. Richard Perle's gang of regime-changers andadvocates of total war are taking advantage of their disproportionate influence in the western media to portray the arrest of the billionaire businessman as a major international scandal and evidence thatVladimir Putin, a man whose elevation to power they largely welcomedthree years ago, is now the new Stalin. Perle's interest in Russiagoes back a long way. As for most Likudniks of his generation, the Soviet Union was the "evil empire" - not so much for its clampdowns on western-style freedoms, but for the support it gave to secular Arab regimes and its sponsorship of Palestinian liberation movements. Perle helped draft the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment which, to the chagrinof supporters of detente, made US-Soviet trade deals dependent onthe Soviets facilitating Jewish emigration. In the 20 years that followed, more than a million Russian Jews left for Israel, boostingthe electoral prospects of Likud and the far right. This also produced new settlements in the occupied territories, which did much to provoketoday's troubles.
The eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union and the shock therapyof Russia's road to a "market" economy were widely welcomed by Perle and his supporters, even though this led to the impoverishment ofswathes of the population. With the rapid transition to capitalism came the emergence of the oligarchs - seven businessmen who usedtheir connections with the corrupt Yeltsin administration to seize valuable state assets at knockdown prices. In the oligarchs, Perleand his fellow hawks saw a way in which the US and Israel could, by proxy, gain political and economic power in Russia and, by doing so,eventually gain control of enormous energy resources.
But seven years on from the heady days of 1996, when the intervention of the oligarchs and their backers in the west guaranteed re-electionfor the "reformer" Boris Yeltsin, things have gone very wrong. BorisBerezovsky, the "Godfather of the Kremlin", and his fellow oligarchVladimir Gusinsky are both in exile. Earlier this year, Russia'sstubborn holding of its line on Iraq infuriated the neoconservativesand increased their determination to work towards regime change atthe next presidential elections in 2004 - and to accelerate theirplans to secure Russia's energy resources.
Before his arrest, Khodorkovsky had been in talks with US oil companies over a merger with Yukos. Now, with their man in Moscow behind bars,it is time for the neoconservative propaganda war against Putin to go into overdrive. Perle was first out of the blocks, calling for Russia's expulsion from the G8 and its exclusion from any postwarIraq oil contracts, and accusing it of collusion with Iran's nuclearpower programme.
Bruce P Jackson - like Perle a member of the Project for the NewAmerican Century and president of the hawkish Project on Transitional Democracies - used his column in the Washington Post to arguethat Putin had established a "de facto cold war administration inMoscow" and that the Russian president's actions were motivated by anti-Semitism (a claim echoed by Ariel Sharon). "In dollar terms weare witnessing the largest illegal appropriation of Jewish property since the Nazi seizures during the 1930s."
For Jackson, Putin is not just a new tsar and a new Stalin, but a newHitler, too. In Britain, the Daily Telegraph, a paper not known forhanding its comment pages to refugees wanted for criminal activities in their own country, did just that. Boris Berezovsky condemned the"increasing totalitarianism" of the Putin regime.
In the unrelenting pro-Khodorkovsky, anti-Putin propaganda we have beensubjected to, much has been made of the oligarchs' role in buildingRussian "democracy" - as opposed to the crude attempts of the Russianpresident to shunt his country back to the days of Peter the Great. Butthe "democracy" that Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky stand for is the"democracy" of an elite of billionaire businessmen to buy themselves not just political power, but immunity from the laws of the land.
"We hired First Deputy Chubais," Berezovsky boasted in 1997. "Weinvested huge sums of money. We guaranteed Yeltsin's re-election. Now we have the right to occupy government posts and use the fruits ofour victory."
True democracy in Russia would mean not only the return of propertyheld by the oligarchs to their rightful owners - the Russian people -but the formation of a government that puts the needs and interestsof Russia first, rather than those of the US or Israel.
For all their lip-service to the democratic ideal, that is the last thing Richard Perle, the oligarchs and their supporters in the west really want.

Islamofascism for Beginners

Islamofascists:
murder people for insulting Islam;
murder people born of muslim parents who adopt another faith;
murder women for having sex before marriage, or even for marrying without their father's consent;
destroy the religious symbols and places of worship of other faiths;
murder people for being citizens of a country which they consider to be hostile to Islam;
believe that 'Islam will dominate the world' and are trying to make it so.
-write that there can be 'no connection between Islamic and non-Islamic institutions'
-and, if they get the chance, recruit for divisions of the SS in the Balkans in the 1940s.

Who armed and supported these people, in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo.....
(a) The Yugoslav government of the 1990s
(b) The Iraqi goverment of Saddam Hussein
(c) The government of the United States of America

Answers on a postcard to:
The Henry Jackson Society;
Planet Neo-Con
ps the answer is not a or b.

We want more of Mr Punch

Here's my piece from today's Times on why the last thing we want is more consensus politics. We already have far too much!

Thunderer
The Times
December 08, 2005
We want more of Mr Punch
By Neil Clark
DAVID CAMERON says he wants an end to “Punch and Judy politics”. But the problem is not that we have too much Punch and Judy politics, but that we don’t have anywhere near enough.
On the biggest issues of the day — from Iraq to globalisation, from law and order to our economic system — both HM Government and HM Opposition have, for the past few years, been singing from the same hymn sheet. And it is this mind-numbing, anti-democratic consensus that is alienating voters; not that there are too many verbal brickbats at PMQs.
It wasn’t always like this. As recently as 1983, voters could still enjoy thrilling Punch and Judy politics and the cut-and-thrust of a real ideological debate. The choice was between the undiluted socialism of Michael Foot’s Labour, with its pledges to remove nuclear missiles from British soil and pull out of the EEC, and the full-blooded neo-liberalism of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. During the campaign Denis Healey (a wonderful Mr Punch if ever there was one) accused Mrs Thatcher of “glorying in slaughter”; Mr Foot accused Lord Hailsham of “licking Hitler’s jackboots” and Kenny Everett called for Mr Foot’s stick to be kicked away.
The result of the rudest and most knockabout election since 1945 was a turnout of 72 per cent. Contrast that with the last two general elections, in which only 60 per cent voted in sleep-inducing contests between a pro-war, pro-privatisation government and a pro-war, pro- privatisation opposition.
With the election of Mr Cameron, things look like getting a whole lot worse. He not only dislikes Punch and Judy politics, he also thinks the Tories ought to stop “grumbling” about modern Britain. This narrows the debate still further — millions of people feel they have perfectly good reasons to grumble about modern Britain. With a “modernised” Tory party embracing Cool Britannia, who will there be left to speak for the Victor Meldrews?
Rather than extending consensus politics, here’s a better idea. Let’s have Mr Cameron call the Prime Minister a liar who led the country into an illegal and disastrous war. And let’s have Mr Blair retaliate by calling Mr Cameron an out-of-touch Hooray Henry. If it’s democracy we want, that’s the way to do it.
www.neilclark66.blogspot.com

The case for Punch and Judy

David Cameron, new Tory leader, says he wants an end to 'Punch and Judy' politics. But the problem is not too much 'Punch and Judy' politics in Britain, but not enough. On the biggest issues of the day, both H.M. Government and H.M. Opposition are singing from the same hymn sheet. Both are enthusiastic supporters of the global capitalist system, which puts a price tag on every human value. And both are enthusiastic supporters of the policy of perpetual war-and the use of B52s to make the world safe for western multinationals. This is the reality of 'democracy' in the New World Order- you can have any government or opposition you like, so long as it's neo-liberal and likes cluster bombs.

A Brilliant Piece

Here's a brilliant piece from today's Guardian by the consistently excellent Madeline Bunting. A couple of years ago my wife Zsuzsanna wrote a piece for the Guardian entitled 'Goulash and Solidarity' on how much better things were for the majority of people under 'goulash communism' than they are under capitalism.
We're not talking here only about real wages and living standards- but about the feeling of solidarity and warmth between fellow human beings. In the absence of religion or other value systems, capitalism destroys solidarity as sure as night follows day. The aim of the game is to turn us into selfish, acquisitive consumers- spending our whole lives trying to keep up with the Jones. But there is another way. It's called being human.


Consumer capitalism is making us ill - we need a therapy state Britain is becoming unhappier as depression, crime and alcoholism grow.
Government can and should intervene
Madeleine Bunting Monday December 5, 2005 The Guardian
Having done so much damage to the self-image of Slough in The Office, the BBC had to make amends. So they made a series about trying to make Slough happy. Tomorrow, in the final episode, we get to hear if they succeeded. It has been a cheerful but loopy series that left happiness to be defined by a collection of endearing "experts" indulging their own idiosyncrasies, from dancing in woodland to launching a choir. They didn't achieve their aim (although it didn't stop them from claiming they had) but along the way, they made a fair bid at introducing a mainstream audience to a fascinating emerging territory of public debate.
The funny thing was that, while the series may not have been gripping TV, it ended up making you feel, well, rather happy. It's heart-warming to see a woman who has always hated her voice singing lustily on stage, and to see the 50 volunteers for the project making new friendships and enjoying themselves. It generated the kind of feelgood factor you get from the school summer fete: not a thrill, but a gentle glow.
The hunt for happiness is an ancient human preoccupation, so there is nothing new in all this, but it is being reframed in order to challenge our prevailing political assumptions. The argument starts from the fact that Britain may have got very much richer in the past 40 years but it has not got happier. In fact, by measures such as depression, crime, obesity and alcoholism, we have got very much unhappier. So isn't the preoccupation with rising GDP misplaced? Shouldn't politics be focused around more than just economic growth? Shouldn't politics be as concerned with measures of human happiness?
Second, research has established more clearly than ever what the most likely predictors of happiness are, and there are now proven methods to treat unhappiness - particularly cognitive behavioural therapy which aims to break cycles of negative thinking. Happiness is no longer an elusive fuzzy feeling; a body of data gives us the tools to analyse what it is and what causes it. Happiness has gone respectable, and it's been tagged to intellectual disciplines - the science of happiness, happiness economics - so it will be taken more seriously.
But neuroscientists and psychologists apart, there is an even more pressing reason to take happiness seriously and this is what is grabbing the attention of Whitehall - unhappiness is an expensive business. Most striking is the huge chunk of claimants who are on incapacity benefit because of mental health problems: a whopping 900,000 or 38% of the 2 million total. Mental ill-health is the biggest single cause of incapacity and costs the country an estimated £9bn in lost productivity and benefits. The weight on the NHS is enormous: GPs spend a third of their time on mental health and the prescription cost of drugs is rising.
Plus, there is a whole range of political issues which have roots in mental ill-health, from obesity and alcoholism, to parenting, the respect agenda and antisocial behaviour among children and young people. The combination of incapacity-benefit reform and this "behaviour" politics is giving unprecedented impetus to mental health, the long-time Cinderella of the NHS.
The most dramatic development of the "therapy state" will come with the announcement, expected later this week, of a big increase in the availability of cognitive behavioural therapy on the NHS. But there has been a rash of smaller initiatives as government departments grapple with how to integrate this new dimension into policy. The Department for Education and Skills launched new guidelines earlier this year on the social and emotional aspects of learning (Seal). The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is now proposing to introduce indices of welfare and life satisfaction and how they relate to sustainability.
Most of it is piecemeal and still relatively small-scale, but the old liberal concept that the emotional life of citizens is no business of the state is crumbling. It raises the prospect of a future politics where emotional wellbeing could be as important a remit of state public health policy as our physical wellbeing. In 10 years' time, alongside "five fruit and veg a day", our kids could be chanting comparable mantras for daily emotional wellbeing: do some exercise, do someone a good turn, count your blessings, laugh, savour beauty.
We might also be discussing how to regulate emotional pollution in much the way we now discuss environmental pollution. Top of the list would be advertising, which is bad for our emotional health. It induces dissatisfaction with its invidious comparisons with an affluent elite. Television is not much better for us with its disproportionate volume of violence and fraught relationships. It makes people unhappy, less creative and cuts them off from emotionally healthy activities such as sport or seeing friends. Meanwhile, there would be a strong rationale to increase subsidies for festivals, parks, theatres, community groups, amateur dramatics, choirs, sports clubs and lots of other lovely things.
To some, these kinds of interventions represent a nightmare scenario of a nanny state, an unacceptable interference in personal freedom. If people want to pursue their own unhappiness, then the state has no right to stop them. Critics conjure up the nightmare prospect of Brave New World and its soma-imbibing placid citizens.
But the problem is, as Richard Layard argues in his book Happiness: Lessons From a New Science, that the decline of both religious belief (which is a strong predictor of happiness) and the social solidarity movements of the 20th century has left a vacuum of understanding about what constitutes a good life and how to be happy.
The church has lost sway, and the state has retreated behind the single rationale of promoting economic competitiveness with its overtones of Darwinian selection (a major source of unhappiness in itself with its vision of life as a competitive struggle). That leaves the market a free rein to describe happiness - the new car, new sofa, new holiday - and to manipulate our insecurities around status.
Leave things as they are and the state will increasingly have to pick up the bill for how consumer capitalism effectively produces emotional ill-health - depression, stress, anxiety. Leave things as they are and the state is part of the problem, promoting a set of market values that produce emotional pollution. Take education for example, where the needs of the labour market have been the driving influence for more than a generation. Has the regime of testing, league tables and competitiveness had a cost in emotional health? Layard cites an international study of schoolchildren in which the 11-15 age group were asked whether they agreed that "most students in my class are kind and helpful". England came last of eight developed countries, below Russia.
The huge ambition of the small but growing happiness lobby is that the state resumes a role in promoting the good life, not just to chivvy us along in the global rat race, anxious and insecure.