Over at CiF, Frank Fisher, the Big Blogger winner knows as Pike Bishop, make a pretty decent fist of a critique of the government’s plans for roadpricing…

Sir Rod Eddington’s transport report suggests road pricing is the only way to solve Britain’s gridlock crisis - an “economic no-brainer” he reckons; coincidentally it’s the route that also guarantees massive receipts for the Exchequer, and a fabulous new surveillance system for the Home Office - little wonder politicians seem keen to embrace the big vision.

Eddington claims that road pricing will deliver £28bn a year to the UK’s economy - in fact, his assumption is that if congestion were to vanish totally business would save that sum. Of course, additional cash will also be generated: tariffs levied on motorists. Is anyone convinced the government will reduce other taxation to make this a tax-neutral measure? I thought not. But regardless of the financial impact on motorists, where poorer motorists will be hit hardest, and also the privacy argument (I’ll come back to that), is road pricing in fact the only way to cut congestion?

There is, however, another, rather fundamental problem with this whole scheme that no one seems yet to have noticed, and as you might expect from debates such as those surrounding ID cards, its technology that’s the problem.

It’s a matter of accuracy. If the government is going to charge you a toll for using certain roads, then you want to be damn certain that you’re only paying for your actual usage. The bill has to be correct.

And therein lies the problem.

You see, the technological ‘hub’ of this system, it has been suggested, will be a GPS tracking system fitted to your car, which will report your mileage, speed (think of all the tickets) and which roads you’ve used back to the government, so that your bill can be compiled an issued.

But, there’s a but in all this, and its a big one.

You GPS system are not 100% accurate - the location they provide is subject to a margin of error arising from a variety of different things, including atmospheric interference, multi-path errors (signals bouncing of nearby buildings and structures) and clock/timing errors.

A standard GPS system is accurate, as a result, of a margin of error of between 4 and 20 metres - best case is usually cited at 15 metres.
Now this may present few difficulties in tracking cars whizzing along the motorway, but in urban areas this error may cause considerable problems.

Consider the following scenario - two roads running roughly parallel to each other, one a main road into town and subject to road pricing, the other a minor road running through an estate for which there is a minimal or zero charge.

These roads are separated by a distance of around 10 metres, run parallel to each other for half a mile and eventually ‘meet’ at set of traffic lights (i.e. one can turn off the minor road at a junction which take you up to the main road at another junction.

A car travels up one of these two roads at thirty mile and hour - how can a system with a best case accuracy of 15 metres, be certain as to which road the car is on, and therefore what, if anything, they should charged for that portion of their journey.

This scenario is not only possible, but very likely be played out every day in Britains crowded towns and cities, if roadpricing is introduced.

Yes, the accuracy of GPS tracking can be improved, down to an accuracy of between 1 and three metres, but such improvements are not cheap by any means, requiring fixed base stations as well as satellites - and most of the technology is currently either still experimental or in use only by the military and/or aviation industry. And data from other systems (ANPR) could be used to improve accuracy as well, but there are still limits - 100% accuracy would be attainable only if every single chargable road were covered by an ANPR system - and how much would that cost?
As with biometrics on ID cards, the government are, again, pinning their future policy on the belief that ‘technology’ will provide - but what if it doesn’t.

What if the costs of a system with the necessary degree of accuracy prove to be prohibitive? Or if it simply proves impossible to attain the necessary level of accuracy in typically British urban conditions? What then?

A road-pricing scheme based on a tracking system that can’t tell exactly what road you’re on and, therefore, what you should be charged, is completely useless.

One of more curious aspects of the Farepak fiasco has been the incredulity that has characterised some of the reaction to it, as much as to suggest a general air of disbelief that such things as savings clubs, and the people who use them, even exist in this day and age and that the whole debacle is some curious intrusion into modern life from a bygone age.

The First Post, an online refugee camp for disaffected Thatcherite emigres from the Daily Telegraph, takes an all too predictable line on the whole issue:

Christmas is coming and the media’s trove of tear-jerking Farepak stories gets fatter by the day. This is Bob Cratchit meets The Little Match Girl, a three-hankie weepie that everyone except the 150,000 sorry losers of their Yuletide savings can enjoy…

…All this over a Christmas club? I very much doubt that any of the glossy London media types piling into the story even knew such things still existed. Christmas clubs were what your grandparents subscribed to before the war, in an era of debt and shortages. The idea was to put a little money aside each month to pay for the festive goodies.

If there is really a story here, it is surely the fact that in the age of telephone banking and online accounts there are still people prepared to put their cash into unregulated savings schemes that pay no interest.

As one might expect from an online magazine whose ’star’ columnist is that doyen of all reactionary old reprobates, Peregrine Worsthorne, the milk of human kindness soured long ago leaving behind only a faint whiff of goulash and lifetime’s supply of piss and vinegar for sustainance.

Stevie’s site, in the absence of a pair of brain cells to rub together, takes a much more personal look at whole fiasco:

Whatever the story, this picture appeared in the paper and I couldn’t help but laugh at the coke-bottle-bottom glasses Grandmama was wearing. It made her look like she was trying to hypnotise the readers into donating to the fund. See for yourself.

A paragon of compassion is our Stevie. Words might fail me, but for the inclusion in the English language of the wonderfully utilitarian word ‘twat’.

Even the normally reliable Longrider seems a little bemused by the whole business:

While I have some sympathy for the victims – we have all made bad calls in our time – it is rather limited. In the first instance, a bank or building society savings account will not only keep money safe, it will pay interest…

…Also, since when did a hamper, i.e. luxury goods, become a charity case?

Christmas is something of an obsession in this country. But, then, I’m biased; I hate Christmas in all its garish, tacky superficiality with a vengeance and eschew it in its entirety. Yes, I have some sympathy, but not enough to put my hand in my pocket. I will however, dispense some pretty obvious wisdom; put your money in a proper bank or building society account in future. Consider this a life lesson – there, that’s a useful Christmas present for you. Harsh, I know, but true.

While, in the comments over at Longrider’s blog, Chuck Unworth, has decided to give his neaderthal side a good old airing:

So, some bastard’s done a runner with the Christmas Club cash. A story repeated over decades, if not centuries. Admittedly this is on a bigger scale, but so bleeding what?

Why do these ‘victims’ think we’ll all want to cough up our hard-earned because they’ve been stupid enough to trust the ‘Directors’? All they’ve got to do is track down and offer some physical ‘advice’ to these con artists. That may prove rather more effective than crying to the world about how hard done by they are.

Anyhow I can’t stand the sight of these snivelling prats being ‘interviewed’ by the hordes of ‘journalists’ - who are obviously having a pretty slack time of it.

Chuck. If ever you find yourself up to your eyeballs in debt having been royally fucked over by a millionaire businessman then, please, don’t hesitate to give me a call…

I’ll take great pleasure in telling you to fuck off and pointing you to the nearest soup kitchen.

There is rather more to the Farepak story than simply the age-old and oft-repeated tale of consumers taking the fall for the failures of a businessman, a tale that Chris Dillow (whose blog, Stumbling and Mumbling, could still desperately do a search facility) would, I suspect, understands very well.

Corrie demonstrates the greatest political wisdom of all - that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.

In Corrie, people are not simple ciphers, to be boxed, stamped, labelled and managed as managerialists think. They are real, multi-dimensional people. Take Roy Cropper, the mocked and bullied geeky, autistic loner, with his Christ-like humility. Or his wife Hayley, who has done more than almost anyone to show that trans-sexuals are not freaks. Or Eileen, showing that single parents aren’t feckless scroungers, but battlers against adversity. Or the sadly-departed Sunita, showing that the mousy Asian shopgirl has an intelligence and sensuality beyond the cultural stereotype. Or Steve MacDonald, showing that ex-cons can come good.

What’s more, Corrie, more than any TV programme, embodies a tradition. It’s hinted at by that prominent but never discussed poster in the Rovers advertising Wilfred Pickles, the homage to Donald McGill within Jack and Vera and Les and Cilla, and the distinctively Northern character types represented in different ways by Emily, Ken, Norris and Blanche. In all this we see an embodiment of a part of English - Northern - history, a history we are in danger of losing.

What the sorry tale of the collapse of Farepak proves, above all thing, is that the working class is still alive and well and living in Britain today and that is remains what it always was, not a sociological experiment for the benefit and edification of the middle classes, to be consumed vicariously and from a safe distance in the received wisdom of newspaper columnists (Polly Toynbee take note) nor a ravening hoarde of asbo-ridden chavs, but real people living real lives, people who struggle from day to day and week to week, just to make ends meet.

The good, old-fashioned, honest poor did not, in Britain, ‘go gentle into that good night’ alongside ‘Love thy Neighbour’ and Watney’s Red Barrel, its still here. Today. Now. As much a part of Britain and British life as it was when George Orwell wrote of England in ‘The Lion and The Unicorn‘:

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning - all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

Tommy Atkins didn’t fade away to distant memory, become just a name on a plaque on an empty ceremonial tomb, in harsh and unforgiving glare of Thatcherism and the me-first 1980s.

He’s me. My family. My friends. The people I grew up with. The people I work with. The people I see around me every day.

The Farepak fiasco hurts these people, these communities, in ways that the most of the effete, consumerist, middle classes seem unable to comprehend.

These people are poor, but they’re what used to be called the honest poor. The thrifty poor. People for whom the Christmas period is not about religion and the Church, nor about shopping and consumerism, but about a simple yearly act of dignity. If you’ve struggled, scrimped, saved and gone without all year, just to make ends meet, then it will all be worth it, and for an all-too brief period the world will be made right, if only you can have a good Christmas.

When you grow up poor, in a working class community, then to have presents under the Christmas tree and a decent spread to put before the family matters, and it matters in ways that the middle classes cannot even imagine, let alone comprehend.

The gobshite (William Langley) who wrote the article that appeared in the First Post may well sneer at the image of Bob Cratchit but in doing so he demonstrates only his own ignorance. Bob Cratchit is not a figure of pity but the very emblem of a traditional working class Christmas, as Dickens must well has known when he conceived of the character as a counterpoint to the miserly Scrooge. Cratchit is no mere plot device, nor is he a cipher whose sole purpose is to provide a literary crutch for the introduction of Tiny Tim into the tale of Scrooge’s moral apotheosis. He is the everyman of the working class, and the simple festivities he shares with his family (before the appearance of a reformed Scrooge) the very archetype of a working class Christmas that continues to this very day.

And if one might wish upon Langley just one thing this Christmas, then a visitation from Jacob Marley would do very nicely indeed.

There is something altogether despicable about the character of those who, on seeing good honest people cheated of their savings and asking only for a little justice, would rather deride them as undeserving charity cases in search of a handout or as fools for placing their trust in an unregulated savings scheme.

These are people who, in the main, will have little or no choice in the matter. If they have a bank account at all, it be only a basic one, no interest (either paid or from their bank) and certainly no credit facility. The only plastic you find in many of these household this Christmas is likely to be of moulded variety encasing a toy bought from their local 99p Store.

The ramification of the collapse of Farepak will stretch far beyond this coming Christmas. Having been robbed of their savings, pride alone will dictate that many of these people will go heavily into debt to rescue some shred of dignity from this debacle, and oh what debt. While the middle classes agonise over the prospect of a quarter percent hike in the base rate and ponder merits of the various deals on offer by different credit card provides:

- should I take the 6 month free on balance transfers at 15.9% interest rate or the 9 months free and 16.9% rate, what do you think Tarquin?

Many of these people will find themselve liberally gouged for interest rates of anything up to (and even beyond) 171% by an industry that the Competition Commission admits is overcharging its customers by £100 million a year and yet is too spinelessly in thrall to the ‘market’ to regulate properly.

Still, if it is competition that the ‘regulator’ wants then perhaps we should give it to them, and them some.

Perhaps it time for Gordon Brown (best wishes for Fraser, BTW) to don his Santa costume in time for the next budget and arrange for a fitting Christmas present for those who’ve been screwed over by Farepak and are getting screwed over, again, by the ‘home credit’ industry.

An industry that has been gouging its customers to the tune of £100 million a year in excess profit must surely be ripe for a visit from the windfall tax man and that £100 million (or maybe more, this has been going on for years) would make for a nice little social investment in, say, local credit unions, who would, of course, provide the home credit industry with just exactly the kind of competition that the regulator believes it need.

Its a win-win scenario all around.

Whaddya say, Gordon? Would you be up for donning a bushy white beard and bringing a few good honest folks a bit of Christmas cheer? I happily shout you a wee dram or two, if you do.
(And all that, I suspect, is probably the most openly socialist thing I’ve written in quite some time - damn it feels good!)

Wahey, it’s arrived! The Blog Digest 2007, I mean - and bloody good stuff it is, too (and I’m not just saying that because I’m in it).

Like his predecessor, Tim Worstall, Justin McKeating of the inspirational* Chicken Yoghurt, has done a fine job of collecting together a worthy selection of the year’s finest missives from the blogosphere, some familiar, some new and well worth keeping an eye on (damn, more blogs to add to the RSS reader) and one, at least (World Weary Detective), sadly missed.

*Inspirational is an adjective well deserved, to my mind, as the name of Justin’s blog helped to inspire the best wind-up I managed to pull on my 14 year old son all year, in which I managed to convince him that the hastily scrawled phrase ‘Rooster Pots’ (meaning a variety of potato marketed under the brand name ‘Rooster’), on a shopping list supplied by my partner, referred, instead, to a newly released brand of chicken-flavoured yoghurt. The little sod spent 15 minutes scouring the aisles of Asda for this non-product before realising that I was having him on - I do deadpan pretty well when the need arises.

As for the ‘why’ of this wind-up? Well let’s just say it does teenagers a power of good to be reminded, from time to time, of the virtues of experience and an agile mind; especially by their old man. Call it a form of social darwinism, if you like, much like the old joke about the two bulls in field, where the young bull spots that the gate to an adjoining field fill of cows has been left open and suggests to his older companion that they run over quickly and shag a few of them, only for the older and much wiser, bull to reply, ‘No. We’ll walk over and shag the lot of ‘em’.

‘Best’ is a subjective thing, at best - if you get what I mean - and it can be no easy task to compile a ‘year’s best’ anthology of writing from Britain’s 7 million blogs, yet its perhaps a sign of how far blogging has come in such a short space of time that many of the blog (and blogger) names one encounters as one sifts through the book and not only instantly recognisable but provide a clear and comforting reassurance that whatever it is you’re about to read is going to be well worth the effort. Justin, Tim Worstall, Tim Ireland, Rachel North, Jim Bliss, John Band, DK, Mr Eugenides, Daniel Davies (D-Squared), Chris Dillow, the esteemed blogging physician Dr Crippen, Jarndyce, Nosemonkey, Curious Hamster; the names keep coming and every one a “good ‘un”. It’s both gratifying and not just a little humbling to find one’s own work amongst such fine company.

That’s more than enough lionising of one’s (blogging) peers for the time-being; suffice to say that you should go out and buy the book, if only because, as Larry Teabag points out, with all his usual joie d’vivre, ‘it’s truly excellent, and would make an ideal stocking-filler for anyone with 6.1 x 9.2 inch feet.’

Moving swiftly on (sort of), the one thing that shines through most clearly from the book is the sheer quality of the material emerging from Britain’s bloggers, not simply in terms of how well written many of the articles are but - and I do recall saying this of last year’s anthology as well - in terms of the ideas and arguments being advanced by bloggers across a whole range of different topics and themes. There could well be a lot of dross out there in blogland, the kind of ‘verbal diarrhoea of the under-educated and banal’ that Janet Street-Porter railed against, in a column in the Indy, before going on to discuss the joys of porridge (? - go figure…), but I have to say I rarely run across it - which doesn’t prove that its not out there, just that one doesn’t have to look too hard to find the good stuff.

On a few occasions throughout the year, the always thorny topic of abortion and abortion rights has cropped up - there’s at least two ‘debates’ going at present on Comment Is Free, courtesy of Zoe ‘it shouldn’t be stigmatised’ Williams and Mary ‘of course it should’ Kenny - Kenny is, of course, a Catholic, so stigma and guilt are not so much an issue as a way of life.

I’ll come back to the Graun’s contribution to the debate in a moment, but abortion, as one might expect, is an issue that has taxed the minds of bloggers over the course of the last year or two and spawned not only some excellent commentaries, such as these from Dr Crippen, Emily at Doing It All Again (read the comments and this follow-up as well) and even my own humble offering, which I include here only because because the good Doctor liked it. There were also several posts that spawned quite extensive debates, the longest of which was at the Sharpener, this being revisited fairly recently (and at the same venue) by Jarndyce, with other excellent debates having been sparked off by Tim Worstall and Owen Barder.

What makes all these articles worth reading is that they afford the reader a genuine debate, a proper argument. Opinions differ from participant to participant but pretty all  those involved in the discussions share a common understanding that no matter what one’s views on abortion might be are, this is a complex and difficult issue in which there are no easy answers.

This, as I see it, is blogging at its best - a real debate in which, as it ranges from personal experience and opinion to science and on to to philosophy and morality and even the question of what it is to be human, the participants understand that one must do more that simply state ones position, one must also back up that position with real argument and take the time to explain not only how you see this issue but also why see it that way.

That the debate remains unresolved at the point it leaves off and no single consensus of opinion is formed does not really matter, as in any debate where there are strong, opposing and even incommensuable views on display, the most one can ever hope for is that people will agree to disagree. But that does not mean that readers leave the debate having gained nothing from it. Far from it, if just one person reads these articles and comes away from the debate feeling that they understand just little bit more about the many and varied views that different people hold on the subject of abortion, and more importantly, why they those views, then the debate has served its purpose, their understanding of world has increased just a little and they are just that bit better informed for the experience.

By way of contrast, the most notable thing about the two debates on CiF, aside from the generally poor overall ’signal to noise ratio’ of the discussion, is just how poor much of the argument is, on both sides of the debate, and this has, sadly, long been a facet of the wider public debate surrounding abortion.

Even if one can wrestle one’s way past the inevitable and vitriolic slanging matches that break out at the drop of a hat - abortion is well known to experienced internet trolls as being precisely the kind of lightning rod issue that provides a whole cornucopia of malicious entertainment on online forums - one find that with rare exceptions, the vast majority of the arguments put forward are such debates are, not to put too fine a point on it, crap.

Before going any further I should, perhaps state my own position on this issue.

I am pro-choice, to a point, that point being 24 weeks gestation, after which I consider it right an proper that abortion be restricted to situations in which there are clear extenuating circumstance, be they medical necessity, serious disability or a genuine risk to the mental health and well-being of a pregnant woman.

That I choose 24 weeks gestation as the cut-off point at which I consider an absolute right to abortion on demand to be acceptable is, for me, based on a rational transaction that is derived from my knowledge and understanding of foetal development and, in particular, neurological development.

As an atheist and a humanist. my view of the nature of what it is to be human is bound up in the concept of the mind. That which makes us definably human, in my estimation, is our capacity for thought, reason, emotion, empathy, compassion, love, hate, aggression and so many other things besides, subjective qualities that derive primarily from high brain function and our capacity for conscious thought.

A foetus, prior to 24 weeks gestation, has no such capacity, for that portion of the brain from which it stems has not yet begun to develop. A foetus to that point in time has no capacity for understanding and those facets of its development that are most often portrayed as being ‘human’, images of a foetus seemingly walking, the capacity to experience pain, etc. are no more than autonomic responses deviod of consciousness, understanding or meaning. This I know to be a biological fact, at least inasmuch as we currently understand the process of foetal development, and, as such, it affords me a point from which I can make a value judgment as to my opinion of the moral and ethical acceptability of abortion. It is not perfect, by any means, but it is the best that I can do in terms of reconciling my own views on this complex issue.
I do not agree with the concept of an unfettered and absolute right to abortion right up until the point of birth. I feel that this fails to take into account the moral questions that arise from the point at which a foetus begins to develop the capacity for consciousness upon which I based my personal assessment of the nature of humanity, but I understand why it is that some take that view.

And I certainly do not accept the views of those who would seek to restrict access to abortion below 24 weeks gestation or prohibit it entirely, whether those views are expressed in terms of moral objections founded on religious belief or by way of any number of a trojan horse arguments that purport to be based on science, biology or the advancement of medical technology. This, again, ignores important moral, ethical and practical  questions, not least of which being that of the restriction of personal liberty and the unilateral imposition of the beliefs of a particular social group on those who do not share those beliefs, which I consider unethical unless one can show both clear benefit to the common good and a democratic acceptance of such a position by the majority. Arguments for prohibition in the case of abortion, to my mind, demonstrate neither when properly assessed against the ramifications of prohibition.
To tackle head on, one of the most popular of these trojan horse, that of the presumed ‘viability’ of the foetus, this is a view that I do not like at all as it amounts to nothing more than a definition of humanity based on the viccisitudes of medical technology - that which makes one human does not depend on the quality or availability of an incubator. The concept of viability is not merely weak, but is wielded most often by those whose real intentions are merely to restrict or prohibit abortion in line their moral/religious beliefs and to chip away at our current abortion laws to a point where they are rendered near worthless. Such tactics are both disingenuous and hypocritical, not least as, for the most part, those who cite viability and the advancement of medical technology as grounds for restricting abortion are, equally, those who would throw up their hands in absolute horror at the prospect of following this argument to its logical conclusion, which would lead one inevitably to foetal transplantation and to forms of mechanical gestation that take place entirely outside the human body, after the fashion of Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’.

And so, for me, 24 weeks it is and it will stay until and unless clear evidence of earlier neural development persuades me to reconsider my position - and I should, perhaps, also add that in concert with this position I also support the provision of high quality sex education in schools and ready access to contraception and take the view that abortion services in the NHS should be geared towards ensuring that those who seek an abortion are dealt with as speedily and as early in their pregnancy as possible. 24 weeks may be my preferred upper limit, but I would still prefer to see the vast majority of abortions taking place before 9 weeks, at which point the procedure afford the least degree of (physical) trauma to the patient. I would also like to see considerable and wide-ranging improvements in after-care including ready access to counselling and support services.
That, is what I consider an argument - a commodity in desperately short supply in the comments in both Guardian articles and, more often than not, in the debate in general.

Tempting as it is, I won’t spend time picking apart some the arguments advanced in these threads, suffice to say that one does not need to look very far or very hard to find stellar examples of bad science and piss-poor logic, themes than run inexorably through both threads.

I will, however, address one final point to Mary Kenny.

You may, because of your background and beliefs, be entirely comfortable with the use of guilt and stigma as whips to goad the faithful, and not-so-faithful, down the path of (self) righteousness. I, most certainly am, not.

Anyone who suggests that the decision to have an abortion or the process of reconciling one’s feelings after having an abortion is somehow easy, comfortable or guilt-free is a complete and utter idiot. An abortion is always a difficult and traumatic experience, for all that individuals surface reactions may vary considerable and create impressions to the contrary. No one who has an abortion has it easy and there is no justification for seeking to compound their personal trauma by heaping one’s own sense of guilt and stigma upon them.

Which reminds me of yet another reason why I dislike religion and religious orthodoxy.

I never could stomach the sight of those who profess to follow a credo of compassion and forgiveness  treating others with such abject inhumanity and poverty of feeling simply to bolster their own feeling of self-righteous superiority.

If a report in the New Statesman (newly redesigned and, like the Indy, subscription firewall free) is correct, then Lord Nazir Ahmed may shortly be re-styling himself not Britian’s first Muslim, Labour, Peer but as Britain’s first Muslim, Crossbench, Peer, assuming he doesn’t just cross the floor the whole way.

Labour’s most prominent Muslim peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed of Rotherham, urged support for the Conservative Party during the last general election. The claim comes from Labour MP for Dewsbury, Shahid Malik, who has provided evidence to the Labour Party that Ahmed campained for his opponent, Sayeeda Warsi in 2005. Warsi is now the vice-chairman of the Conservative Party and a rising star of Cameron’s new look A-list of black, Asian and women candidates.

Sadly, for those of us living and working in urban areas with a large ethnic minority population, the report looks all too plausible, based on experiences of recent local elections.

If the report is correct, and Shahid Malik will find himself out on a limb if it isn’t, then this will be the first real national exposure of an issue that some local parties have been aware of for quite sometime, a developing strand of communalist politics emerging in, and being exploited by, mainstream parties.

Thus far, the growth of identity politics in Britain has, for the most party, been viewed through the lens of openly communalist fringe parties like the BNP and Respect. What has drawn much less attention has been the extent to which identity politics has been coming into play within the mainstream party structures at a local level, particularly (and sadly) in relation to Muslim communities.

To experience difficulties arising out of nakedly communal interests is nothing new to the Labour Party. As the party that has traditionally been closest to many ethnic minority communities and, more often than not, their greatest political friend, we have rather more experience of the issues that can arise than most. For the most part this has been a fruitful and productive relationship that has enriched both party and community alike, but it would be a lie to suggest that this is a relationship that has not been without its difficulties - Off the top of my head, I can think of several wards where memberships have had to closed, for a time, and then carefully reviewed, after allegations that a communalist-inspired takeover has been engineered or is in progress have come to light (although, naturally, you will be getting no names from me).

Some, outside the party, might look on this as being Labour’s dirty little secret, yet such a view misses an essential point. For a long period, Labour’s close relationship with urban minority communities served as a bulwark against the emergence of flagrant communalist politics at local level. It was our problem, yet it was one that we were careful to manage out. We understood, and still understand, both that communal politics is deeply divisive and has a corrosive effect on local communities and that, at a local level, it is animated not by a desire to serve the local community but by personal ambition. Those opportunists who attempted to take the communalist road to local power were invariably interested only in the own personal ambitions and their own personal status and authority within their own community. While we could not prevent the occasional outbreak of communalism, we could ensure that it was pushed to the fringes and confined, as much as possible, to fringe parties and the occasional independent candidate.

Communalist successes were, for a long time, rare and usually short-lived. The most successful local non-white communalist venture was the now defunct People’s Justice Party, which began life as Justice for Kashmir, and at its peak held at best a two or three seats in wards in East Birmingham, having been bolstered in effort by opportunistic support from the local Lib Dems (on disbanding the party in 2006, both its sitting councillors joined the Lib Dems).

The PJP could, perhaps, be considered the harbingers of what was to follow. Many, if not most of its members were, at one time members of the Labour Party, who then broke with the party for entirely communalist reasons, blaming the Labour government for failing to deal ‘adequately’ (meaning take their side) with ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan over the future of Kashmir.

However it was the Iraq war that, not unsurprisingly, opened up the main rift between Labour and its one-time Muslim supporters, opening up not only the crack through which Respect were able to creep through into the mainstream, but also emboldening both the Tories and Lib Dems into thinking that they could play the communal game to their own advantage by taking on candidates whose appeal would be solely to the communal vote; most all of whom were disaffected ex-Labour members, many of whom complained that the party would not give them ‘their chance’ to stand as candidates for election.

What the local Tories and Lib Dems did not realise (and perhaps didn’t care about either) was that many of those that they were now happily adopting as candidates had seen their efforts to secure a Labour nomination blocked for good reason. One candidate who stood for the Tories in a local ward was, I know, refused a place on Labour’s panel of candidates because it was found that the individual’s wife had three entries on the register of electors, at three different addresses. Others were well known only to be in it for themselves. None of this seemed to matter to the other parties, such that there was a sudden rash of politically itinerant ex-Labour members cropping up on the lists of both opposition parties anywhere and everywhere that it was felt that there might a communalist vote or two to be had in one ward locally, there was what amounted two a completely communalist election; Sikh vs Muslim, and all conducted under the guise of it being Labour vs Conservative.

Much has been nade, in recent times, of the various allegations and even proven cases of ballot-rigging, whether it be the Lib Dems successful election petition in Birmingham or the recent case in which two Lib Dem councillors in Burnley were jailed for electoral fraud. During the Birmingham case, the local Lib Dems made great play of attempting to label the entire Labour Party as being corrupt - although one now finds the ‘feerless’ leader of the Lib Dems campaign against electoral fraud, John Hemming, to be rather more reticent of the subject. On the matter of the Lib Dem councillors in Burnley he appears to have nothing to say, much as the same cat (white, Persian) got his tongue when the Lib Dems, themselves, found it necessary to suspend one of their own Birmingham constituency parties, amid claims of infiltration by militant ‘Asians’.

What goes around, comes around, eh, John?

The common factor is many of these incidents is that they are predicated on opportunism and the deliberate use of identity political and communal appeal as a vehicle for individuals to pursue their own personal ambitions and, as importantly, bolster their position and status with their own community. In Birmingham, in particular, the Lib Dems have gone out of their way in recent years to opportunistically court the communal vote for their own benefit, without ever understanding properly the dangers and pitfalls of such a tactic, only then to learn, the hard way, that Texans mean when they say of politics that ‘you’ve gotta dance with them that brung ya’.

Few things, at local level, are quite so corrosive as communalist politics. It is no great surprise to find that the growth of communalism in ethnic minorioty communities, whether openly - as in the case of the PJP and Respect - or covertly by way of mainsteam parties opportunsitically courting and buying into communal interests, has coincided with a revival in the electoral fortunes of the far-right and, especially the BNP. The forces being dabbled with and released here are but two sides of the same divisive coin.

THe charge that a candidate (or councillor) from a minority community is only in it for their ‘own people’ is one that has been a standard tactic of the far-right for as long as I can remember. The BNP have long relied on the deliberate fostering of division and false envy to bolster their own support and often the toughest doorstep ‘battles’ when canvassing areas where the BNP are standing is simply that of getting local people to see the truth; that what refugees and asylum seekers get from the state is but the bare minimum, and many would say less than the bare minimum, the need to live, and not a fully-furnished mansion, a Lexus and Rolex watch, as the BNP so often like to claim, or that the reason that the area down the road, the one inhabited by the local Bangladeshi community, is getting the windows ‘done’ (i.e. double glazed) while their part of the estate is still waiting is because it genuinely is the turn of those down the road to have this work done and not because ‘their councillor’ has put in a word for them or because the council is prostrating itself to some absurd notion of ‘political correctness’.

Challenging such views is difficult enough at the nest of time. it can be nigh on impossible when a local minority community is also campaigning on an openly communalist platform.

One of the main reasons I am opposed to communalism, in all its forms, is that by its very nature it tends to define everying it touches by reference to race, religion or whatever other basis isat work in defining a communal identity, irrespective of whether it is relevant to a particular issue or not.

This is something that many self-styled community leaders seem either to forget or be entirely unconcerned with, even though most of the issues they deal with, particularly at local level, are issues that affect all communities equally. In an area where the housing stock is of poor quality, everyone in that community is affected equally, no matter their ethnic, cultural or religious background, and in such cases there is, believe, a duty incumbent on anyone who professes to be a ‘community leader’ to recognise that ‘their community’ in such matters is everyone and not just those who share in their community identity. Too often that is where community leaders and communal politics fails, creatimg division and disaffection, the natural home and breeding ground of extremism.

If the allegations made in the New Statesman are shown to be true, then the position of Lord Nazir Ahmed will be clearly untenable and he should resign, or have the whip withdrawn immediately, not because he has been shown to be disloyal to the party but because he been caught playing the communalist game, and that is something that as a party we cannot and should not tolerate from any member, be they a Peer of the Realm or one of the rank and file.

Right, this post needs a big opening. Cue lights… Cue Scenary… Cue Richard Strauss…

And… ACTION!

Dahhh Dahhh Daaaaaaaaaaaaah Dah Dahhh (boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom)

Dahhh Dahhh Daaaaaaaaaaaaah Da-Daaaaaaahhh (boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom)

CUUUUUUTTTTT! Right, which one of you bastards forgot to order the apes?

…

There are times when it is necessary, if one to experience the full richness of blogging, that one acquires a genuine and finely-tuned sense of the surreal. There are bloggers, of course, who make surreality their speciality; one thinks immediately of Harry Hutton and Scaryduck both of whom could be said to approach the world from left-field… but only if that left-field happens to exist several dimensions away through a moebius wormhole.

Others find their inner surrealist entirely by accident. They enter the twilight zone of un-reality not by choice but by omission and neglect, following trains of thought that were derailed mere moments after leaving the station without ever noticing the spray of sparks they leave in their wake.

Ellee Seymour, press consultant, journalist, political and PR blogger, is not happy - and she has a graph to prove it…

Let’s ban the sale of knives

There can’t be a person in the land who wasn’t appalled and sickened by the pointless murder of Thomas ap Rhys Price who was stabbed to death for his mobile phone.

Poor Thomas was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he met his callous killers who showed him no mercy - and have shown no remorse since.

With our knife culture increasing, surely we should be banning their sale from shops. They should be as difficult to buy as guns. Those who require them for countryside pursuits or any genuine activity will have to prove it, get a letter of consent from local police.

I know these weapons will always be available at sources like the internet, but we must make them as inaccessible as possible. Many violent crimes are probably committed on the spur of the moment, they are done for kicks, a sad indictment of the age we live in. We need to respond to that. My fear is that one day it might be my son, it could even be your child, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time…

There is something of a central flaw in this argument, one that I strongly suspect you might have already noticed. Ellee hasn’t.

Still, all is not lost. Ellee has an open comments box and with the British being what they are, an island race with a keenly-honed sense of the prosaic, one can be assured that someone will be along in a moment to clue dear Ellee in on her mistake.
Comment 1.

Courtney Hamilton says:

…(t)he ban on knives would mean we would simply have to empty out our kitchen draws for the authorities.

Congratulations, Courtney, you named that flaw in one. But just in case Ellee needs a little more convincing…

Comment 2.

Gary Monro says:

Of course, making as difficult as possible the sale of knives to minors is a good idea but the killing isn’t just done by minors - and domestic meat knives are easy substitutes if we ban the hunting variety.

I wonder, can you see a common theme emerging yet?

Ellee returns to the fray with comment number 6, and her train just keeps on rollin’

Ellee says:

Let’s see if the tough prison sentences imposed yesterday will bring a reduction in this type of crime, I don’t think it is enough, these thugs don’t seem worried about the consequences. That’s why I feel they should be as inaccessible as possible, we have to try to make a visible difference, it’s one solution, though many more are needed.

Still something missing from Ellee’s argument - like the bleeding obvious, which brings Jim into the fray…

Comment 7.

Jim says:

I was going to say that I have about four knives in my kitchen knife block that would be lethal in the right hands. But the point seems to have been made several times, so I won’t make it again!

And not to be deterred, Ellee’s back again, just a couple of comments later…

Comment 9.

Ellee says:

Geoff, If crimes involving knives have increased 73% over the last year, this proves our laws are ineffective. I just heard the father of Thomas asking for a similar ban on knives.

Jim, I won’t have one of those knife blocks in my kitchen, I keep thinking what would happen if I surprised a burglar one night and his eyes caught the shining steel blade flickering in the light…

I may guessing here, Ellee, but I suspect that Halloween isn’t really your kind of movie. Right?

I must admit to struggling a little with some the reasoning here. You see I, like Jim, have a knife block in my kitchen, but I really can’t say that I’ve ever given too much thought to the idea of surprising a burglar one night and noticing his eye catch the shining block of stripped pine flickering in the light…

In fact, if the burglar were to see anything shining at all in my own domicile then its likely to be the aluminium baseball bat arcing toward his head… but that’s another story.

Reality peeps from behind the sofa, yet again, when we get to comment 12.

Out From Under says:

The vast majority of knife crimes are committed with kitchen knifes. Are you seriously suggesting banning the sale of kitchen knives?

And by comment 16, one senses that James is perhaps getting a tad frustrated…

james higham says:

…With our knife culture increasing, surely we should be banning their sale from shops. They should be as difficult to buy as guns…

They have done that over here. There are certain types and lengths which are off limits. That’s why they use guns instead now.

And still the indefatigable Ellee can’t quite bring herself to reach for the brakes.

Comment 19.

Ellee says:

Well I seem to be pretty much a lone voice on this, I appreciate the problem is that knives are only part of a much broader problem which has evolved from our changing society. I would still like to see our laws toughened up, I agree about the tougher sentences, but just wonder how effective they would be.

Once more into the breach? Comment 20.

Benedict White says:

Ban the sale of knives? What am I going to cook and eat with?

Quite.

…

I’ve not taken the time to check this out fully, but I suspect that the humble knife, that harbinger of doom that will shortly bring about the end of civilisation as we know it, may well represent the very first artificial tool or device that is uniquely of mankind’s own fabrication; the humble otter having beaten us to the hammer (a large rock) and our closest living relative, the chimpanzee having mastered both use of the pointy stick, for wheedling out termites, and the large branch as a generic clubbing device.

At least that’s the impression I get from watching David Attenborough.

It is tool of talismanic significance, emblematic of out first faltering steps on the long road to civilisation.

It is tool that was once given, lovingly, to every small boy by his father, who would then teach him the timeless art of whittling.

And only upon adulthood, in an time-honoured rite of passage, would one have been taught the art of sticking it into another human being… but only on express instructions of the government and only when firmly attached to the end of one’s Lee Enfield .303 rifle.

The knife is… oh fuck it, Benedict’s right.

How the fuck are we going to eat dinner if you ban the sale of knives? Just what the fuck do you live on, Ellee? Soup?

It seem to me that a demonstration is order. Ellee - next time you go out for dinner, just order yourself a nice, thick, juicy steak, rare or perhaps medium rare…

…and then try eating the fucking thing with a spoon.

Now do you understand why banning the sale of knives is a dumb idea.