Relaying the Commonwealth baton - Queen and media on-message

 

Message in a baton:
Commonwealth is royal wealth

With much media fanfare, the Commonwealth Games baton has now been sent on its royal-approved way from Buckingham Palace to Glasgow and onwards around the globe. As the BBC dutifully reported: 

"The baton contains the Queen's hand-written message to the Commonwealth and will visit all 70 competing nations and territories over the next 288 days. It will travel to Scotland on Thursday before heading to India for its first international stopover on 11 October. The baton's journey will end at the opening ceremony on 23 July 2014, when the Queen will read the message inside."

The royal 'message', we might assume, will entail some standard reiteration of the Commonwealth's 'mutual benefits', sealed with a dedication of continued service to this 'enduring community'.

With the baton being carried to and from the Palace by royal-honoured sports figures, it's a message and imagery that will be grovellingly amplified in the coming months.

Reporters are already investing the baton with some mystical quality, anticipating the many who will now 'touch the baton' and 'live its experience'.     

Kudos, at least, to 'spoilsport' journalist Stuart Cosgrove who, while sincerely wishing a great Games event for Glasgow, spoke on Radio Scotland about the Commonwealth baton as an "exhausted" neo-imperialist promotion. Watching it leave:

"...Buckingham Palace, the heart and soul of Scotland, as you can imagine[...]I cannot lie and sit here and say I have the same level of enthusiasm for the post-colonial institution called the Commonwealth, I really can't."

The Queen's Baton Relay will be covered as a travelling blog by the BBC's Mark Beaumont. Again, the kind of sketches likely to be relayed from Commonwealth lands and other post-colonial outposts will be about the 'happy bonds' rather than brutal bondage of empire. What chance here of honest reflection on Britain's violent conduct in countries like Kenya, Malaya (now Malaysia), Nigeria and Jamaica?

As the baton travels around that notional 'family' of two billion people, starting in Delhi, it would be great to have a country-by-country account of Britain's conquests, wars and plundering, past and present.

We could even have the historian Mark Curtis, author of Unpeople and Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam, on-hand to help chart the ten million deaths that Britain is complicit in since 1945 alone.

But that, again, wouldn't be very 'sporting', 'on-message' or 'illuminating' for Games-watchers, would it? We just can't have the baton being defiled like that, can we?

The Games will, I'm sure, bring a nice buzz of excitement to Glasgow, and a chance to show our welcoming side as hospitable Glaswegians.

In that same spirit, it could even be a timely occasion on which to acknowledge and apologise for Glasgow's own considerable part in the slave trade and all the other imperialist enterprises which helped found its Merchant City.

And, as a wider educational exercise, it might encourage the question: precisely whose wealth is currently held 'in common' across the Commonwealth?

Hopefully, in some optimistic post-2014 state, we might be fanfaring a more radical baton for the emergings of a real wealth-sharing community, motivated by a people-centred Common Weal, rather than the neo-colonial fabrications of a royal-coveted Commonwealth and the neoliberal forces that drive it all.

The Mail, Ed Miliband and other 'moral' parties - not much to value

As the tussle between Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail intensifies, what a 'task' it's been trying to  'choose sides' and pinpoint one's 'British values'.

Ralph Miliband "hated Britain", the Mail alleges, a headline intended to register a typical Mail hatred and revel in its controversy, even while riding the considerable public backlash.   

While the claims against him are, of course, spurious in their very terms of reference, it's fitting that the Mail chose the verb "hated", thus revealing not just its desperate distortions but its core mindset.

And yet, while trying to avoid that same net of hateful invective, it's hard to decide which parties here are the more reprehensible.

Including the seemingly obvious, here's some further 'valued' choices to reflect on:

~ The poisonous Mail, maligning a learned Marxist and principled man in naked pursuit of his son.

~ 'Red Ed's' own declared rejection of his father's socialist ideals in preference to continuous neoliberal ones, all in standard Labourite service to leading class interests, capitalist order and safe political office.

~ The hypocrite, opportunist and war criminal Alastair Campbell, coming to his leader's defence in savaging the odious Mail's Deputy Editor John Steafal on Newsnight.

~ Newsnight, the rest of the BBC and other liberal media lauding Campbell's intervention, thus giving him even more hiding space for his war crimes.

~ Cameron and Clegg empathisisng with Miliband in the name of media and public 'decency', after their own rightist pandering to Daily Mail prejudice and efforts to take the country into another murderous, indecent war.

~ Liberal oulets like the Guardian gloating over the Mail's public discomfort and withdrawal of large corporate advertisers, while it protects villains like Blair and Campbell, rationalises Western wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and continues to take multiple advertising cheques from planet-destroying corporations.

~ The oligarch-owned Independent preaching to the Lord-owned Daily Mail.   

Hard to decide, eh? There's just so many noble media institutions, moral political figures and great 'British values' to choose from here.

It's just a pity Ralph Miliband himself isn't here to help shed more light on them all.

More Tory stripping of the welfare tree

Autumn can be so lovely. The turn to crisp, sunny mornings, goldening leaves and wrap-up nights. One gets used to the familiarity of seasonal sights and sounds, pleasing and not so, like the autumnfest of party conferences with their turgid speeches and ritual pledges. And no October would be complete without another Tory rallying call to purge the poor.

This year's 'low-hanging fruit' is the under-25s, with Cameron, Duncan Smith and their policy boffins unveiling plans to axe the benefits of young adults who don't 'earn or learn'.

Young people now face the prospect of losing their job seeker's allowance and housing support if they don't meet rigid criteria in seeking a job, training or educational placement.

On top of the bedroom tax and multiple other new benefits sanctions, it's likely to see growing numbers in emergency situations and living on the streets.

The Daily Mail is, predictably, effusive in its detailed indulgence of Cameron's new notice to "feckless" youth. But it's an assault that, in fact, most of the political and media mainstream pass off as 'reasoned' policy for 'valid national debate' rather than wicked economics to be utterly condemned.  

It's not just the shrill 'land of opportunity', the Eton toffs castigating 'workshy wasters', the crude appeals to 'welfare-burdened taxpayers'.

It's the sheer calculating vindictiveness of the new social insecurity - a callous system where someone can typically lose a month's payment for missing an appointment or making an elementary mistake over their claim, with even more severe sanctions for 'second and third strike' offences.

As a recently-leaked DWP letter shows, beleaguered Job Centre staff are also coming under intense pressure to deliver more sanction referrals.

All these additional Con Dem cuts, purges and punitive measures are deepening the trauma for already impoverished families.   

In the poorest parts of Scotland, charities are now talking of a "humanitarian crisis" of child poverty. One in three Glasgow children now live in conditions of multiple deprivation. In the city's Springburn area, the child poverty figure is fifty-one per-cent.

This may not be the poverty and destitution that afflicts vast swathes of Africa, or the nightmarish experience of refugees fleeing war-torn places like Iraq and Syria.

But the domestic policies being deployed to hurt and punish society's poorest, while a corporate and privileged elite flourish, are akin to economic war crimes.

Ever-dutifully, the BBC and other service media pore over Cameron's welfare-swiping speech, crunching the numbers, noting the social fallout, but never seriously thinking to question its core inhumanity.

Where, amid this wicked onslaught, is the remotest discussion of economic compassion? Real compassion, that is, not the rhetorical ConDem version of 'helping' the poorest and most vulnerable with 'tough love' cuts, or the shameless Labourite acceptance of such, but true, radical attention to human well fare, rather than paltry and heavy-conditional 'welfare'. 

It may be sublime autumn. But, for a despairing many, it's the last sweet glint of warm light before more Tory winter.

Military-sectarianism - singing in tune

Awkward questions are now being asked of the MoD, Rangers FC, the police and a virtually silent Scottish media after an armed forces parade at Ibrox degenerated into a military-sectarian singalong.    

Much of the public will be both embarrassed and sickened by the spectacle. Many, of course, will be unsurprised at seeing some of 'HM's finest' revelling in their true colours.

How they 'bounced' together 'for club and country' - with even a senior uniformed figure zealously waving a red-hand of Ulster flag from the touchline - as troops and fans belted-out 'No Surrender' and other 'party tunes':    

"Three cheers for the red, white and blue. For the army and the navy and the UDA. Three cheers for the red, white and blue."

Victims' families in the North of Ireland will have little difficulty recalling the dark politics of military-paramilitary collusion behind that little ditty.

Little will such events do to help diminish long-standing hatreds. But at least it gets an ugly reality into the open.

It also undermines the oft-made claim that such parades aren't political in essence. And in this case, as understood even by an ex-serviceman, there's a darker political-ideological agenda afoot.    

The real culprits here are not the sadly-conditioned fans and soldiers, but the military brass who, grandstanding with Rangers' smart-suited directors, surely understand not only the jingoistic potency of parading troops, but their provocative presence at this still deepest of sectarian clubs.

'Win-win', they must have thought in mixing this 'our brave boys' march-on with keeping the 'faithful' nicely diverted from the club's deepening in-house crisis. A motley amalgam, indeed.

If only those 'Rule Britannia, no surrendering' fans really knew how much they were being manipulated by such tawdry stagecraft.   

Nor, in this exploitative context, should we dismiss the significance of such naked displays of Unionism in approaching the independence referendum.

How seamlessly the legitimising of imperialist wars and militarist propaganda is being used as a prop for Unionist continuity.

Yet, even here, mainstream Better Together campaigners must be troubled by such Unionist 'associations'. Is this a healthy 'promotion' of their 'best-of-both-worlds' urgings, or any inviting message for a still mass of undecided voters?   

On which note, a seemingly uneasy silence from much of the Scottish media. I suspect the standardised, cursory reportage of 'an incident now under investigation by the police and army' reflects both an editorial reticence to engage a subject that not only still scars our society, but carries sensitive ramifications for the 2014 poll.

As Bella Caledonia conclude:

"We’ll wait and see the response from the media, politicians and sporting authorities in the coming days. The response will answer the question ‘what kind of a country are we living in?’ and a subsequent question, what sort of Scotland do we aspire to?"

One can only trust that such events help stir the electorate towards a more enlightened vision of political-cultural modernity, something more inclusive and humanitarian, hastening the true detachment now from an anachronistic British state, with all its imperialist gloating and militarist pandering to sectarian division.  

Miliband and mesmerised media - no energy for real change

So, Labour leader Ed Miliband has pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months if elected in 2015. 
 
Sometimes one needs an energy boost just to read what passes for 'radical' policy and the media's energised coverage of it. 
 
It's not just that Miliband is promising electoral sweeties. It's the stark poverty of political reform and shallow critique that follows such announcements.

Here, for example, is Jonathan Freedland's excited take on Labour's 'new left populist' sell:

The new approach will bring relief to both the shadow cabinet and Labour MPs. They have struggled to explain what one nation means, to convert an academic insight into a doorstep-ready pitch. Now they have a set of specifics, tailormade for retail – with the 20-month freeze on energy bills bound to be the first sample pulled from the salesman's suitcase. 

Like one of the shark-competing energy companies it affects to indict, Labour unveils its 'switch-over-to-us-for-a-fixed-rate (but only for 20 months)' offer, and it's treated like some great electrical bolt from above. This is the outer limits of political-media 'challenge' to neoliberal 'reality'. 
 
Of course, there's no promise to slash household energy bills. No notion of bringing such companies to serious, even criminal, account. And certainly no intention (how apparently laughable) of taking them into public ownership, stripping-out grossly-overpaid executives and a parasitical shareholder class.    
 
Nor is the issue of energy usage/costs ever linked to the emergency situation of global warming, mass consumer waste and the case for radical environmental sustainability.   
 
For Labour and a liberal commentariat, the core 'problem' here is one of 'market inefficiency':
 
As the Guardian's political correspondent, Patrick Wintour, amplifies:

Ed Miliband has written to the big six energy firms urging them to co-operate with his plan to impose a 20-month price freeze and reset the energy market, or instead be seen as part of the problem in the energy market. The companies have reacted with fury to his plans, saying he is risking power blackouts and sending a message that Britain is not open for business. They said he was threatening much-needed investment in green energy as rightwing newspapers accused him of swerving to the left.

Thus, for Miliband, the market itself is not the problem, just the now-so-embarrassingly-obvious grab within such markets. All that's needed, then, is a little tweaking of those market arrangements, a little squeeze on those considerable profits, which can be used, in this case, as a cheap electoral bribe.
 
Cue predictable reactions from furious energy chiefs, defiant rebukes from 'people-championing' Labourites and a gazing media swooned by these oh-so-daring pledges.  
 
And isn't it always useful to note, as in Wintour's lame panderings, that lofty liberal distance between Guardianista 'reformers' and all those right wing scaremongers. 

The' leftist' alternative? The most sensible solution for Miliband - and seemingly for the Guardian? Even greater competition.

Wintour goes on:

Miliband insisted he wanted greater competition in the market and in his letter argued: "We can work together on the basis of this price freeze to make the market work in the future. Or you can reinforce in the public mind that you are part of the problem, not the solution." He said there was a crisis of confidence and loss of trust in the energy market. [...] "I'm determined to make this change and I've written to them today to say: 'Look come on, make yourself part of the solution, not part of the problem. There's a crisis of confidence in this market. There's a crisis of confidence in you.'"

As Wintour and his Guardian peers should be noting, the crisis is not just in "this market", but in the people-dismissing, capitalist market at large. 

Corporations are profit-grabbing entities. That's what they do. Definitively.  So, how easy, safe and hypocritical for corporate-facilitating politicians and a corporate-centred media to round on corporate excess.

The actual crisis of 'confidence' here lies not with the energy companies or any other money-driven corporation. Their primary motivation and function -greed and profit - is already established.

The real crisis of confidence, massively hidden by such diversionary speeches and reportage, lies in the complicit actions of a political class who allow, promote and excuse such market greed, and with a functionary media which says almost nothing to expose or challenge such manipulation and deceit.

Gunpoint diplomacy - Israel's message to 'meddling' visitors

Here's an image to ponder on UN International Peace Day.
 
French diplomat Marion Castaing, visiting the West Bank this week with other EU and UN officials, lies on the ground with a gun in her face after her delegation had tried to deliver aid to a village being pulled apart by the Israeli army.
 
As The National's Hugh Naylor reports:

"The convoy was carrying tents and water to residents of the Palestinian-Bedouin community of Makhul that Israel demolished on Monday. Makhul is located in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley area. Taking part were diplomats from several European Union countries, Brazil and Australia, along with officials from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Israeli soldiers forcibly removed Marion Castaing, a French diplomat, from a truck and pushed her to the ground. After the military seized the aid, police officers arrived on scene and dispersed the crowd with stun grenades, witnesses said."

Of course, Palestinians are treated much worse every day, their experiences often resulting in death, serious injury, homelessness and detention, with barely a media mention.
 
International coverage of this disgraceful incident doesn't amount to much in itself - just imagine the blanket, headline reports if it had been such treatment of diplomats by, say, Syrian or Iranian forces. 
 
Still, as the posturing 'peace talks' go on, this powerful image helps illustrate the ways in which even peaceful international visitors are routinely dealt with by Israel, ever determined to enforce its brutal occupation and arrogantly oblivious, it would seem, to world reaction.

War exponents exploit non-findings of UN report

UN findings on the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta confirms what most already understood: that an atrocity, one of many in this tragic civil war, had actually taken place.

Yet, for all the UN's carefully-gathered evidence, two key things remain unidentified: those responsible for the attack and the actual number of people killed in it.

The issue of culpability was not, of course, part of the UN remit. Nor does the report tell us for sure how many died in this incident.

Yet these two key issues continue to be assumed and misrepresented by war politicians and most Western media.

On the fatality count, John Kerry claims that 1429 were killed in the August 21 attack. Yet, substantial doubts remain over the precise figure, including children.

This is not to say that such numbers of people did not die. It's simply to record that we've seen no actual proof of these claims from the UN or, as yet, from the US and its allies.

Nor, one must reasonably assume, are we likely to, particularly from the latter. For, surely, if the actual evidence was there, it would have been placed in the public domain by now.

And yet, war-supporting politicians and most major media continue to use such numbers without qualification.

The figure of over 100,000 deaths in the course of the conflict is, likewise, usually cited without either a source, or, crucially, clarification that it includes deaths caused by all sides in the civil war.

The total death figure is commonly attributed to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Yet, SOHR's own recent figures include 27,654 army soldiers and 17,824 pro-regime militia. That in itself is a substantial part of their declared count - intended to convey the impression of a strong military opposition.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, their calculation of civilians killed by opposition forces is not so forthcoming.

But whatever the breakdown of SOHR figures, why would the BBC and other political/media observers trust an organisation so obviously propagandising the opposition case?

As previously cited by Media Lens, Aisling Byrne has cast key questions over SOHR's bona fides, and the easily-accepted ways in which the BBC and other leading media repeat its claims.

There's also, as ML show, a notable precedent here for the BBC in its selective use of Iraq Body Count.

The absence of hard evidence on actual fatalities corresponds with a lack of hard proof on who was definitively responsible for the attack.

Again, the UN seems to have 'prudently' avoided making proclamations over what it doesn't substantively know.

But, speaking at Real News, environmental scientist and human rights activist Rania Masri also asks us to consider why the UN inspectors were not also tasked with obtaining evidence on who committed the crime.

The resulting vacuum of definitive information has allowed the American French and British governments even more space to infer Assad's guilt, while, as Masri also notes, marginalising the very real means and motives of an international-backed opposition to handle, move and deploy chemical weapons.

Emerging Russian-Syrian claims of opposition guilt over the use of chemical weapons are also being treated with token disregard by the BBC.

But even these claims do not confirm or deny Assad's innocence. We still have no primary proof either way.      

Thus, critical analysts will search in vain for any actual evidence of Assad's guilt in Samantha Power's interpretation of the UN report.

Yet, this hasn't stopped Human Rights Watch director Peter Bouckaert, writing at the Guardian, from intimating guilt based on little more than hypothetical supposition:

Their [the UN's] mandate does not allow them to say who was responsible for the deadly barrage. But if you read between the lines, it isn't difficult to figure it out.

The various theories claiming to have "evidence" that opposition forces were responsible for the attack lack credibility. This was not an accidental explosion caused by opposition fighters who mishandled chemical weapons, as claimed by some commentators online. The attacks took place at two sites 16km (10 miles) apart, and involved incoming rockets, not on-the-ground explosions. This was not a chemical attack cooked up by opposition forces in some underground kitchen. It was a sophisticated attack involving military-grade sarin.

Perhaps. But, again, where is the defining evidence disproving all this, or proving otherwise? And, as with its interventionist promotions over Libya, doesn't HRW's supportive assumptions over Syria again indicate its useful service to Power?

Meanwhile, beyond the chemical weapons attack, and key others still to be verified, a greater overall calamity goes on, involving both sides in the civil war.

As the UN statement specifically states:

We should not lose sight of the broader perspective of the Syrian crisis. The terrible loss of life on 21 August was the result of one of many attacks that have collectively killed more than 100,000 people in Syria during the past two and a half years.

The UN Commission of Inquiry has reported that Government and pro-government forces have committed murder, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, rape and torture against civilians. It has also reported that anti-government armed groups have committed murder, executions, torture and hostage-taking. There has been indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighbourhoods by all sides. Yet arms continue to flow to the country and the region.

Beyond the CW issue, the ongoing militarisation of the conflict, as overseen by the West and its Gulf allies, is the much bigger problem requiring political and media attention.

Yet beneath the diplomacy-speak on removing chemical weapons and wider 'peace-seeking' overtures, a much more pernicious policy prevails for the US, Israeli and Saudi nexus: to keep Syria in a state of war, instability and mutual depletion. As noted by Rania Masri:

You know, I don't believe that the U.S. government ever really cared about chemical weapons attacks in Syria. It was simply used as a means for a larger goal, and that larger goal has been to shift the imbalance on the ground in Syria, to prolong the civil war as long as possible, until it reaches a stage where the country has completely been destroyed, and then to be able to replace the regime with a more clientelist regime than we currently have.

Unsurprisingly, liberal interventionist groups like HRW and Avaaz seem much less interested in helping to uncover the truth behind that toxic agenda.