David
Cameron, Barack Obama and the Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt,
may have been caught out being less than graceful at Nelson Mandela's memorial
service by taking selfies, but at least they got one bit of etiquette right.
They didn't arrive at the service after the deceased. At the funeral of a
friend of mine, I turned round to watch the coffin being brought into the church
only to spot my therapist scuttling in behind it. My psychological wellbeing
has been greatly improved ever since.
Top
xeno-psychologist Roy Hobbs explained today that “To argue that when certain
people do in fact act like total wankers they are at the same time being
totally cool by not parking a 40-vehicle motorcade, a fold-up eco-bike and the
Danish Embassy’s State Skoda in a football stadium when the crowd is already
singing the first verse of ‘Let’s kill some Zulus’ - though that might admittedly
actually upset some people - and then to also
assert that such crassness could also refreshingly take the sting out of global
grief was an act of intellectual flexibility, meme-plaiting, non sequiturs and
treble-standards with which only a Guardian writer would start his analysis.”
You could argue that world leaders have
a duty to be statesmanlike at memorials and that hatchet-faced solemnity is the
order of the day. You might even wonder how much any of them really cared that
Mandela had died. Most of them would probably only have met him a couple of
times at most and in the ordinary run of events you don't go to memorials of
people you've only met twice.
Political gossip
columnist Emma Bradford praised the G-13 celebs as “Extraordinarily sensitive,
given the circumstances. President Obama in particular has risen to the
occasion splendidly. Having never found time to meet the world’s most popular
black man in the scant five years of his globe-trotting Presidency, Big O’s appearance today
at a globally televised funeral says it all, really”.
But world leaders have to do what world
leaders have to do. And if it means jetting halfway across the world, both to
represent your country and to show you are important enough to be invited, then
needs must.
Henry Brubaker at
the Institute of Studies seconded that emotion by
explaining that “It was an act of diplomatic time-management genius for Queen
Gertrude, The Big Number Two and the Big Number One to visit the funeral in
person.
They could simply
have paid tribute by dispatching proxies such as a drone Lego X-Wing Fighter, by
sending an over-flight by the Royal Air Craft, or simply by allowing American Consular staff to be murdered by Soweto businessmen and going back to
bed; blaming their televised murders, rape and dismemberment on critical
reaction to a You Tube trailer for the racist film ‘Pearl Necklace.’
Getting censorious about Obama, Cameron
and Thorning-Schmidt having a laugh is to miss the point. If they had laughed
the whole way through the service, then it would have been a misjudgment. But
they didn't. They were serious when required, which is the way it should be. A
memorial is a sad time, but it's also a time to remember the fun bits of the
dead person's life. Irreverence is not the same as disrespect. I'm not sure
that Mandela would have taken a selfie at Obama's memorial if the positions had
been reversed, but I'm fairly sure he would have seen the funny side of Obama
posing at his.
“Actually,” chuckled
Tom Logan “in life Nelson Mandela was well known for his terrific sense of
humour. You only have to remember his promises upon his historic release from
Batman Prison during Antiques Roadshow of a better life for every South African
when the ANC came to power to realize what a natural genius he had for comic
timing and the delayed punch-line. I’m sure he’d get a giggle out of three
leaders of the Free World acting like students in Wetherspoons at a Freshers’
Weekend Hos ‘n Bros pub crawl sending
their shiny, happy smiles to Facebook.
Like"
A memorial should celebrate and reflect
the life of the deceased. Remember Margaret Thatcher's funeral earlier this
year? Everyone at St Paul's
Cathedral behaved with the utmost solemnity. But was there ever a more joyless,
soulless service? Thatcher left this world into a public emotional void.
Compared with that, Obama's selfie could almost be construed as an act of love.
Nikki Hollis
observed today: “If only the mourners at the Thatcher planting had loosened up
a bit and sung a couple of verses of ‘Don’t
Cry For Me, Argentina,’ let off a few party poppers like the SAS at the Iranian Embassy and passed out trays
of post-Soviet Russian vodka shots it wouldn’t have been such a snooze.
And how
right that Guardian writer is. After all, what does
the very word Obama mean to most everyone if not the world’s latest and widest-used synonym for an
act of love?”
I have replies to my post of yesterday, about the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 summit/protest/partial riots, take your pick.
And very grateful for them I am too.
As I’d hoped to take part in this debate, I’ll post my responses as a main page since my correspondents have put up such a lot of good sense it’s a shame to hide it down in the little Blogger boxes.
Anonymous:
Welcome (again?), and thank you for your comments and arguments. I'll take them one by one, respectfully and respectively.
“Well I take heart that we aren't in a police state yet but that's no reason not exercise vigilance.”
Agreed and agreed.
“A lot of foolish people on the right imagine that the machinery of the state is fundamentally good but the wrong people are in charge.”
Maybe I’m being foolish…:-)
I think that the machinery of the State (some of it; that is the traditional functions of law and law creation and enforcement, defence, upholding and circumscribing contracts, and providing public goods – in the economic sense of ‘public goods’) is the State – and without which life would be Hobbesian or at best Hogarthian. So, these institutions are good in a roughly equivalent way to the sense in which air and gravity are good for human life.
“If only we can put our people in charge”
Our people ARE in charge – legitimately and democratically elected British MPs and Metropolitan Police Authority councillors. (You can’t even blame the EU for this one.) Party shouldn’t enter into this. Legislators should uphold the law and oversee its enforcement. Opposition, media and citizenry should hold them to account through the proper channels – and not on the streets in rioting. (Not saying that you support rioting here, but there are those for whom it’s the means and the ends, I think.)
Being ‘Right-wing’; meaning here conservative, does or should contain a strong aspect of respect for legitimate force even when it is distasteful – and when is force not distasteful outside of sport and fiction?
I agree with the general constitutional point that institutions should function irrespective of the party in power, and your point that making some parts of the state lawless or over-mighty is a bad thing even when some of what they might do would be good for ‘our party’, no problem. That’s Limitation Of Powers 101, and Peter Osborn in “The Triumph of the Political Class” points out, as you do, that the erosion of the limited and largely self-limiting Establishment began with the impatience of the Thatcher government.
“… they will make it all good.”
Nah. I’m a conservative, and therefore I don’t think anything in this world will ever make anything all good.
But seriously, no; the State is a rough-and-ready but well-established collective arrangement consisting of weak and fallible people with imperfect knowledge, but what I do believe is that it should be allowed to do its job for the most part. We pay the MPs enough and more than enough to check that it does just that.
Okay, they’re doing a lousy job of it at the moment, but that doesn’t mean we should or could micromanage them or second-guess everything.
“I think that's the root of the difference between say Dumb Jon and libertarians.”
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Dumb Jon is a conservative and therefore takes a view, if I’m reading him right, that some State functions are legitimate to preserve a number of desirable values - and that freedom is only one of them.
Freedom (in the classical liberal, Scottish Enlightenment, American and New Enlightenment sense) to libertarians is both the path and the prize. It may preserve and generate other values, but it’s still top of the list. At least, that’s what I used to think, back when I was a libertarian.
Maybe I’ve just agreed with you, and merely coloured in my version of yours?
“Nice but a bit idealistic. Think Baker bringing in the national curriculum to restore old fashioned teaching. That worked well.”
See the paragraph above for my agreement.
“The point of all this is that the loyalty of the Right to the police must have limits. After all the Stasi were policemen too and this government has done more than any to politicise the force.”
Absolutely! Or, rather, relatively! And in context.
Some ‘police’ forces are or were tyrannical and lawless: Gestapo, KBG, Stasi, etc, and I’m not suggesting tyrannical powers or lawlessness for ours. But they are limited by laws, and there are internal constraints and external complaints procedures, and the officer concerned may be brought to trial – as fair a trial as being posted all over the Internet will allow to him?her?, of course.
“The balance between the privacy of the individual and interests such as national security, crime prevention, and freedom of expression, is far from settled.
The extent of a right to privacy in the UK and its weight in relation to competing values is unclear. Current laws protect some aspects of privacy but disregard others.
Liberty are concerned with how the state, the press and others strike the balance between privacy and other interests.”
And here’s lovely Liberty again on this aspect of how “the state, the press and others strike the balance between privacy and other interests” –
“Shami Chakrabarti, of the human rights organisation Liberty, said: "Clear images of an armoured policeman assaulting an innocent bystander from behind impugn the whole attitude to policing protests by the Metropolitan police. The IPCC failed its first major test in the [Jean Charles de] Menezes case. If the commission is to regain a shred of public confidence it must do far better in terms of speed, sanction and transparency."
Tried and convicted in a single sentence. And the custards ipses likewise. Good old Liberty; always on the side of the individual and the little guy – and never the mob or the powerful.
Back to Anonymous
“It'll take more than electing Mr Cameron to undo the harm done by two or three generations of PC educated elites to this countries institutions.”
Agreed. The upper reaches of the public sector will need to be disciplined, perhaps purged, and certainly there will have to be retraining , ie de-programming from Tony’s Crony’s victim-generating world-view.
Also, I don’t know if you’ve looked elsewhere on this blog, but I don’t hold out much hope that MisterCameronandhisintimates will be able to solve as much as the Telegraph cryptic crossword (even on Thursdays); let alone any one of our country’s problems.
“My view of the death is that it is too soon to judge. On face value the force of the push did seem excessive given the video evidence but I'm inclined to give the policeman some leeway on the basis of "heat of the moment". It's unreasonable to expect the adrenaline to flow one minute and not the next. But that has to be demonstrated.”
Agreed again.
It’s not that what you’ve said is wrong – far from it in most cases – but that said and given the time we have and the lives we lead, comments can only contain so much information, can’t they?
So where do we go now?
Well, I want to add what I subsequently added [rather hastily draughted yet again, perhaps] to the ATW post, is that permanent and institutionalised opposition to the police – and you can be sure that there were plenty of such people amongst the legitimate protesters – can be as hurtful to life and liberty, if not more so, than meek public compliance with our non-existent Gestapo.
It went …after decades of crying wolf over 'police brutality,' when they finally get what seems at first sight to be a genuine example of it - or at least of roughness which preceded death by a heart attack - then the left and the libbies are up in arms.
Now OK, every man's death diminishes me and all that, but the civil rights lot are so up their own... I mean, are so specialized and one-sided in their concerns that they persecute and deride the police and the other security forces when they seek to protect all our lives from the jihadists.
Their arguments are usually one or more of:
A] There is no jihad - there's just a few unrelated Muslim reactions to local conditions - thus 9/11 was truly and only a reaction to US troops being stationed on Saudi territory (Al Q's main bug bear), and not a continuation of Koranic instructions to al the faithful in perpetuity,
B] there is no jihad, and anyway look at how the West stole all the oil, so that's alright then.
C] even if there is a little tiny jihad - or even quite a big one - it can never merit police raiding homes of probably innocent Muslims and thus marking them out as suspects and shaming them in the communidee,
D] the Nu Labour neoconzionists are using a few isolated incidents to set up domestic dictatorships and reinforce neocolonial power overseas.
In each and every case, it is the institutions of legitimate government that are under attack from the civil rights crowd and not the actual bombers and other terrorists and their internet cheerleaders that are threatened with the full force of liberal and libertarian opinion.
Field officers and detectives may in future feel intimidated as a result of the flak handed down from on high as a result of this tunnel-visioned civil libertarianism, and this poor man's heart attack and the political furore that it might result in could cause some armed response copper to hesitate.
And so the next police fugitive on the Tube might turn out not to be an innocent illegally-resident off the books foreign electrician after all, but a home-grown 'suicide bomber' from Leicester or Drewsbury who presses the detonator and liquefies a carriage full of London commuters whilst Plod tries to remember the Portuguese for ' Which was the greater goal scorer - Pele or Shakira?'
The poor chap's dead but not as a result of deliberate 'hit anyone on G20 day' policy by HMG or ultra-Right-wing police training or culture.
But the atmosphere: the stink and the cultural idiom that the civil libertarians will add to in this next bout of 'all coppers are bastards' may threaten innocent lives.
It's an atmosphere in which worse crimes are more likely to be committed against the innocent, and that's wrong.
Cherry Pie, yes, context does matter, we are told. I’d be interested to know how you felt the policing was on that day, however close or distant you were from these events? Not necessarily on my blog to boost my word-count, but maybe on yours?
You were there, trying to make the world better and, I guess from this, largely in sympathy with the main burden of the protests which I have typified as Left-wing. Were you the cherished heir to all those who lost life or loved ones from freedom and democracy, protected by your government’s police, or did it feel like you were there on sufferance? Was there the oft-described dichotomy of peaceful majority and violent minority? And you’re a photographer, and the picture-taker’s opinion of the film and the stills of mister Tomlinson’s push and fall ( or his assault and battery?) might be a good thing to know?
“who exactly is this 'our people'? Call-Me-Dave's bunch? Unlikely...”
It sometimes amazes me how everyone but we ourselves the less-than-anarcho-capitalist Right seems to think we’re so all up the Tory Party’s historic brain pan. They need to read you more.
I'm plagiarizing my own comments in other posts on this one, and I may soon regret posting in haste about the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 riots - sorry demonstrations - but there's good eating on Left-wing hypocrisy and libertarian me-tooism.
Julia does her usual thorough autopsy of the news and blogging coverage of death of Mister Tomlinson here.
Note that her comments are about the attitudes of bloggers and others to the news; it is in no sense an attempted justification of a 'police murder.'Mine might be, but hey, that's just me, right?
It's quite simply the best I've seen so far.
But the left wing media and blogs totally lost their collective shit.
Anyone from the ‘right’ of the blogosphere (either self identified, or those considered to be on the right by the left) who didn’t immediately post was castigated for ‘ducking the issue. By a Lib Dem blogger, no less!
Those who argued, once they’d seen the video in question, that other interpretations and conclusions were available, were howled down as the ravening pack descended on their comments section.
And this the crux to me:
"Wiser heads who elected to say nothing at all until more of the facts were in were mocked by commenters and pretty much told they should write about what the mob wanted them to write."
And that’s the difference between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ (if those terms have meaning anymore). Emotion. With the left, emotion and immediate gratification rules. They react with passionate intensity to what they see, what they feel, and what things immediately look to be. If I’ve read once that Ian Tomlinson was ‘murdered’, ‘beaten to death’, viciously attacked’, I’ve read it a hundred times on blog comments. I’ve read that the police ‘caused his heart attack’ as if this was a) possible, and b) deliberate.
Left-wing history gets written when some adolescent-minded numpty reacts instantaneously and a Cause is born. It becomes Left-wing history proportionately to the number of people who express outrage and to the frequency with which their outrage is treated as measured and well-considered by the main opinion-formers and news-vendors of the day.
Ye gods - that means the mainstream media!
Over at A Tangled Web, Mike Cunningham had posted a quotation from Gordon Brown:
"And let me, therefore, promise you our continued support to ensure that there is no hiding place for terrorists, no safe haven for terrorism."
...and then immediatley after photo of a line of riot police guarding (I think) Westminster Bridge a next copy of the Guardian video showing Mister Tomlinson being shoved to the ground, and then arguing with police.
Hmm...
For those of us who want this to be a one-off incidence of what appears to be genuine police brutality, it's not an easy call, but still and all the police are by and large institutionally the good guys, and so in I dived with my ha'pennyworth:
This looks bad. The Guardian's decades-old assault on the forces of law and order can always do with a boost, and what appears to be a genuine example of police brutality is just the ticket.
It's being investigated already, according to our highly selective news.
And all the while, in back rooms and basements across Britain, and in camps in Pakistan, young men, enraged by internet hate sites, dream of doing Allah's work.
And the civil rights Left and the holier-than-thou-libertarians will draw together New Labour's increasingly authoritarian attitude to...well, to everything, and they themselves will choose to dream that there is no jihad - or at least not one caused anywhere but in 'Palestine,' and some land transfers and more 'aid' will solve that.
And the government's slippery resolve to protect us all will slip a little lower down the spin cycle.
And more of us will die. The grave is where you have no civil rights - none at all.
Not too bad for a Wednesday night before the pub with Mrs. Northwester wanting us out the door ASAP as scumble awaited, but still it seems I was right about the civil rights crowd.
We got:
Apparently certain sections of the police force get 'masked-up' because they specialise in brute, physical violence, and need the anonymity.
Good news of course for those in power who also seek anonymity while they pillage the State's coffers to enrich themselves. It kinda fits into the general ethos.
At least the thug has handed himself in I hear.
bernard
And then
I suppose I should really arrest myself, too. I'm a terrorist, as I often amble along the street, lost in thought. (Thought is doubleplusungood, as Smythe surely found out in '1984').
Tom Tyler.
So to quote the master:
For those who are keeping score there's the Tangled Web quickie posting [and I've done it myself, it's a legitimate dramatic effect for bloggers to use] which connects: a national security statement about terrorism from the Prime minister with a (probably illegal, yes, I got the irony, thank you so very much) photograph of street order arrangements for G20 with an egregious example of what appears at first sight to be unprovoked police brutality,
...followed by my (admittedly hasty) comment to the effect of 'Hang on, let's see if it's true, and what about the real destroyers of life and liberty; will they be discouraged by anti-police propaganda from the Guardian et at?'
and followed by a rack of we-are-all-victims stuff from posters. And it's not the worst on the web, by any means. Look here at the comments in Old Holborn and of course The Independent.
Admittedly, ATW attracts a lot of trolls of the 'you're wrong so nah!' type, but coming from the Bar Sinister end of the blogosphere - the one utterly silent on the rain of rockets onto Israel during the ceasefire and the suicide attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan - I suspect that the inalienable Rights Of Man not to be randomly killed for political convenience is not its chief motivation.
But even if we are all selective in the victims we publicly mourn, and we are, these are people happily feeding the febrile atmosphere of a cause celebre with little or no concern about what it's going to be like to be a police officer on public order duties over the Bank Holiday Weekend.
Their words of pain and outrage can't possibly be inflammatory and inspire heroes of the revolution to bottle them in revenge, but in any case, even if their moral panic did cause some police officers to be hurt, and even if the Left did force itself to admit that hurting police is bad [to some value of bad], we must all remember that using free speech to grunt inarticulately about our deep hurts that we suffer from and to express grievance at a system that ignores and diminishes them is their Absolute Inalienable Right, and should be enjoyed and exercised no matter what the consequences.
Unless someone says 'nigger,' obviously, as that can have TERRIBLE consequences for the named group.
Absolute Inalienable Rights have their limits, and you really have to check with the Guardian to see what they are, what with some grievances being merely vindictive grudges and all.
This poor dead bloke may very soon be painted as a latter-day Francis of Assisi, devoted family man, inventor of the cure for cancer...unless Ian Tomlinson eventually turns out to be a BNP supporter, in which case all bets are off.
Wow, even the BBC has this only as English news. So maybe it is just a little local difficulty to the Government's analinctusest cheerleaders.
But with fresh 'news' and 'evidence' coming out all the time, will the light of truth finally be shone on this tragedy, or will more darkness merely be added?
As for the Left, we know just what they'll say,
But for the Right, let Dumb Jon end the day.
I got going as well: some quips, a truly dreadful pun and…and then it struck me that I was wasting my time today.
This person is so far out of the world that we know and care about that even the pleasure of larting him remotely would be a guilty pleasure.
The British war dead don’t exist to him, or matter. The bed-wetting, emotionally retarded children of Israel unfortunate enough to live near the death-cult bearded crazy rocket monsters don’t matter to him. The Japanese and Nazi empires and what it took to stop them didn’t exist or matter to him; let alone the Soviet and Maoist and Cambodian charnel houses – they especially didn’t exist or matter to him – not to someone whose email address is
Miners poring by candlelight over Workers’ Educational Association books, or parsons meeting with local magnates to show off and explain about slavers’ chains and collars, or printers waiting to get into work at Wapping standing under a barrage of abuse and missiles; all nothing. Social Democracy and Christian Socialism, nothing; civic Conservatism and liberal individualism, nothing. Women’s’ suffrage and the Jarrow March, the Anti-Corn law League and the gentle, courageous work of pacifist nurses in the trenches, all nothing.
Modest, gradual, non-violent and piecemeal reform; worse than nothing – a foe to subvert or destroy.
His Manichean dualism with all good on his side and all evil everywhere else seems unlikely ever to let any other viewpoint in.
So I’d better do a bit, today, getting the message out elsewhere.
Sue’s idea is the first suggested incoming campaign to go on. Thanks, Sue.
Raw Dead Plant Diet Week.
Day Two.
Getting to me. Feinian colleague who can’t wait for Maggie to die to dance on her grave in ecstasies of delight over incoming snacks. Mange-tout and cucumber salsa not different enough from onion and cucumber salsa yesterday and not enough calories. More chocolate talk…gossip turns to pizza and slow cookers. I shall be strong. Got to stick it to the bad guys on blog tonight. Three more days of carrots and celery and not a crust or spud in sight.
I can recommend it for anyone who thinks perhaps that we enraged Daily Mail-reader types are:
A) too harsh on all concerned, and B) members of a tiny minority of professional right-wing whingers.
On it is a link to another Guardian page discussing how its readers failed to notice an insignificant number of tiny and easy-to-misinterpret clues which might, in a parallel universe, have led to a different outcome for Baby P.
The Guardian Key Questions are a priceless treasure trove of the bleeding obvious, and here they are.
Key questions
• Why did all the children's services in Haringey fail to stick to approved procedures for managing child protection cases?
• Why did Shoesmith chair the serious case review into the handling of Baby P, rather than an independent expert?
• Is it a coincidence that a death happened in Haringey again, eight years after the death of Victoria Climbié, or is there a specific problem in the north London borough?
• Did police urge social workers not to return Baby P to the family home? If so, why was this ignored?
• Why did Haringey fail to pass on all relevant documents to police and prosecutors until the case reached trial?
• Why did NHS staff fail to follow the correct procedures when there was evidence that Baby P suffered non-accidental injuries?
• Was the management and supervision of staff involved in the case up to scratch?
• Why did the local authority not abide by the fostering regulations when it used family friends as temporary carers for Baby P?
The bodily hygiene behaviour of family Ursidae in sylvan environments springs to mind, and also speculation about how well the Reformation has been received lately in the topmost stratum of the Vatican.
