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More thinking about Wikileaks

One interesting thing I’ve noticed since Wikileaks exploded out of its relative obscurity: I keep finding myself of things which I wish someone would leak to them.

So, after FIFA awarded the World Cup to Russia and Qatar in what is widely asumed to be a more-or-less bent bidding process, I thought ‘there must be someone who has some dirt on Sepp Blatter and the FIFA organising committee, someone who knows where the bodies are buried… be nice if they leaked that to Wikileaks’. And today, when we learn that no charges will be brought following a probe into phone hacking at the News of the World, I thought ‘those nasty fucks have got away with it again… there must be someone who has the evidence that Andy Coulson knew what his reporters were doing and could send it to Wikileaks’.

Because the powerful have so many ways of suppressing information, the simple idea of an avenue for people to anonymously release information is rather intoxicating. And the higher-profile Wikileaks becomes, the more likely it will be that individuals within organisations like FIFA, or the News of the World, or the Metropolitan Police, will feel able to get that information out.

Interesting times.

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Thinking out loud about Wikileaks

I’ve been feeling a bit ambivalent about the latest Wikileaks kerfuffle — not an unusual reaction, I suspect.

Because I don’t think there’s anything inherently sinister or unreasonable about the fact that diplomats want to be able to say things in private that they wouldn’t say in public. And quite apart from the Swedish sexual assault allegations, Julian Assange comes across as a bit of a dick: arrogant and egomaniacal.

And I’m a bit creeped out by the self-righteous certainty of internet evangelists for the idea that information wants to be free: whether it’s the anti-copyright campaigners, or Mark Zuckerberg with his high-handed attitude to other people’s privacy, or Julian Assange. Although of the two, a wish to abolish government secrecy is easier to defend than a wish to abolish personal privacy.

So for those reasons I’m a bit sceptical. And yet…

Someone once jokingly defended fox hunting to me on the basis that ‘it keeps the foxes on their toes’. And I feel that way about governments. Sure, there are good reasons why they want secrecy… but I don’t want them to get too complacent about it. I don’t want them to assume they can do things that no-one will ever know about.

Some of my feelings about it were crystallised by this excellent blog post — essay, really —  by Aaron Bady, which concentrates on the role of diplomacy in East Timor, and how the State Department’s eventual backing for UN peacekeepers in East Timor only came after spending decades providing military support to the murderous and oppressive Indonesian regime.

Because despite politicians’ high-minded rhetoric, when it comes to foreign policy human rights is always the bottom priority. Our governments will prop up almost any regime, however brutally oppressive and violent, for almost any reason. They — we — do it to ensure access to resources, whether it’s oil or something else; or because the enemy of our enemy is our friend; or because they may be a bastard, but at least they’re OUR bastard; or because we want to stay on the right side of the Americans; or for reasons of ‘stability’; or because they are valuable trade partners; or because we want somewhere to put our air bases.

And the thing is, none of those are stupid reasons. Take oil. If we — the West, the wider global economy — lost access to Middle Eastern oil, we would be completely fucked. Our countries would grind to a halt extremely quickly. We have a direct strategic interest in the politics of the region. Is that sufficient to justify the propping up of the corrupt, hypocritical Saudi royal family, even as they bankroll Islamist terrorism and torture their own people? I think that’s a genuinely difficult question to answer.

But politicians don’t even want to have the discussion. They would rather treat us like idiot children, not worldly enough to deal with these kind of grown-up problems. They can’t keep the really big stuff secret, but they certainly do their best to avoid drawing attention to it, and to avoid talking about it. And you can bet your life that they do keep things secret when they can get away with it.

So let’s keep our politicians and civil servants on their toes. Let’s make them stand up and actually justify their actions.

The other aspect which has been surprising and thought-provoking is the government reaction to the leaks. It’s worth pointing out at this point that, despite a lot of bluster, no-one at Wikileaks has been charged with any crimes; no-one has come up with any convincing argument that a crime has been committed. Certainly not under US law, since they have that admirable constitutional protection of free speech. And yet one by one, Amazon, Paypal, Visa and Mastercard have rolled over under government pressure and denied service to a legal journalistic enterprise exercising free speech. Are the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel next?

I don’t think I am, generally, someone who wants to shake up the global political establishment just for the sake of it. I don’t have that anarchist temperament. But when I see politicians reacting with such panic and hysteria to the threat of a little daylight, and when I look around the world and consider how they’ve been doing when left to their own devices, I tend to think, yeah, let’s have it. Who knows, let’s look on the bright side; maybe this is the birth of a new golden age of journalism and of newfound accountability in government and commerce. And maybe it’s just a storm in a teacup. But I doubt it’s the end of the world. So let’s try it. See what happens.

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Happy sparkly royal bollocks.

Aarrrgh. Having the royal family in the news always makes me feel all irritable and republican. I’m still sticking to my previously stated position that getting rid of the monarchy would be more trouble than it’s worth… but still. Arrgh.

I guess I have to be fair, and admit that the young couple themselves have done nothing to annoy me. But the media coverage… oh god, I can’t bear it.* And we’re going to get months and months of this crap.

Still, despite everything, my overwhelming reaction is to feel sorry for Kate Middleton. Imagine marrying into that family and that situation. After a few years as his girlfriend, she probably thinks she has some idea of what the media attention is going to be like, but I’m not sure you can ever really prepare for stepping into a cage of tigers.

*with the honourable exception of the Caledonian Mercury

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The chill wind of austerity

Gosh, it’s been a depressing week in British politics. Austerity is such a grey, foggy, Victorian sort of word. They’ll be talking about retrenchment next.

And you don’t have to be an expert in the fine details of the budget to realise that there’s no way the government can cut total spending by 20% without making the country a harder, nastier place in a whole lot of ways, some obvious and some subtle.

I was at a party the other day where parents were swapping tips about places to take young children, and they were commenting that London’s parks all seem rather nice these days. They’re well-maintained, and clean, they have nice facilities, and they’re making an effort to be better for wildlife. Well, with a 30% cut in local government funding, I think it’s a safe bet that those parks are going to become grottier, grimmer, a little bit less of an escape from the city around them. Which seems like a good symbol for what’s going to happen to the whole country.

And since 85% of the debt was run up bailing out the banks, most of this pain is being inflicted in the name of saving the bankers from the consequences of their own incompetence.

But that’s not the really depressing part. It might be possible to take a deep breath and face the cuts as stoically as possible, if I was actually sure that they were going to have the desired effect. If I believed that they were the only thing keeping Britain from becoming the next Greece, if I was sure that the cuts were going to lay the foundation for a more stable and more prosperous economy in the longer term… but meanwhile there are Nobel prize winning economists like Krugman and Stigliz saying that, on the contrary, this is the worst thing the government could possibly be doing. The killer quote from the most recent Stigliz article:

Austerity converts downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions.

Now I don’t know whether they’re right. I suppose I have to hope not. But it really would be the vomit garnish on a shit sandwich if the effect of all these cuts was to take a weak economy and give it a good kicking.

Meanwhile Cameron, Clegg and Osborne seem to be rather enjoying themselves. Partially perhaps because of a pre-existing ideological commitment to the idea of small government, but I think mainly because they’re rather enjoying the vision of themselves as dynamic men of action, men with the leadership qualities to make the hard decisions.  Of course the British economy is where it is because a group of decisive, dynamic go-getters in very expensive suits decisively and dynamically cocked up on a catastrophic scale. The politicians have obviously been watching and learning.

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A rising tide of whatever

I’ve noticed a tendency recently for religious commentators to refer to ‘secularism’ as a force in British society. There was even someone on the radio who, discussing the Pope’s upcoming visit to Britain, referred to ‘a rising tide of secularism’. But I think that’s completely wrongheaded. We don’t have a rising tide of secularism: we have an ebbing tide of religion.

Certainly there’s not much political momentum behind secularism in the specific sense of the separation of church and state. Thanks to the tangled history of the British constitution, there’s a lot of scope for reform in this area. Off the top of my head, I’d want to get rid of: the monarch’s position as head of the Church of England, the bishops’ seats in the House of Lords, the Prime Minister’s role in appointing bishops, the legal requirement that schools have regular acts of ‘collective worship’ which are ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’, and the government funding of faith schools. Not to mention the ridiculous fact that members of the royal family are specifically barred from marrying catholics. But none of those are exactly hot political topics. The only one likely to get much political traction is faith schools; but it’s schools which are the fiercely contested issue, not religion.

But it’s broader than that: I don’t think secularism in Britain deserves to be called an ‘ism’. It’s not a system of thought or an organised political movement; it’s just a whole lot of people not going to church.*

Mind you, I don’t think it needs to be an organised anti-religious movement; a widespread lack of interest is probably enough. Everything else follows from there. When you have enough people who have simply never had religion as an important part of their lives — people who might, if pressed, claim to believe in some sort of higher power, but have never attended a church service by choice unless it’s a wedding or a funeral — well, the authority is gone. Social authority is like paper money, or fairies: it only works when everyone believes in it. If people have no emotional attachment to the idea of religion, they start judging religious beliefs by the same standard as other beliefs, and religious organisations by the same standards as other organisations.

At its root I don’t think that the hostile reaction to the Pope’s visit is based on anti-religious sentiment, although that is clearly present for some people.† I think it’s more that the absence of religious feeling means people approach him in a different way. I think a few decades ago, many people who were offended by catholic teachings on contraception and homosexuality, and even the child abuse cover-ups, would still have been less direct in their criticisms, because of who he is and what he represents. But now, it’s more like he’s a visiting politician with a bad human rights record… which, among other things, he is.

* Or at least, organised secularism does exist in Britain — you can follow the British Humanist Association on Twitter, ffs — but the BHA has existed under one name or another since 1896, and I’m sure they’d be honest enough to admit that their activities come a long way down the list of reasons for falling church attendance.

† And read this article by Padraig Reidy (formerly an editor at New Humanist magazine), who sees it as part of the long British history of anti-Catholicism.

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Belated World Cup food blogging: Algeria

I wasn’t going to do World Cup food blogging for the Algeria gam, because I was out that night at a friend’s house, but as it happens I did a somewhat appropriate dish yesterday because I happened to have the right ingredients. It’s lamb meatballs in an aubergine sauce, and it’s based on a couple of dishes from Claudia Roden’s Tamarind and Saffron. I don’t actually know which part of North Africa or the Middle East they were from, but it’s close enough.

I know it looks a bit underwhelming in that snap from my phone, but actually it was nice; the aubergine made a sort of creamy sauce and it was quite a delicate sort of dish.

The meatballs are just lamb mince with egg and a bit of cumin and allspice; the sauce is roasted, mashed aubergine with a bit of yoghurt. And, you know, some of the brown lamby bits deglazed from the pan and some salt and pepper.