Just got usual weekly missive from the Groan’s ‘backbencher’ and its looks like the ‘crits’ for Fox News Lite aren’t going to be good ones…

What is it that makes 18 Doughty Street (
http://www.18doughtystreet.com/ )’s new attack ads so different - so
appalling? You might have thought PPBs couldn’t get any worse, but
Tim Montgomerie, Iain Dale and their team have found a whole new way
to inflict desperately unsubtle political messages on a gullible
public.

The first ad, for those who didn’t have the pleasure, featured a bloke
so accustomed to swiping a “tax card” on demand that he tries to
insert it between a woman’s breasts. The second, a daring expose of
MPs’ cynicism about state funding for political parties, is little
better.

Suddenly, the free airtime parties enjoy for their PPBs and PEBs
seems, well, entirely reasonable - which is surely not what the
free-marketeers had in mind. 

Hahahahahahahaha…

Sound less like Fox News and more like ‘Confessions of a Frustrated Tory‘ - wonder if they’ll be hiring Robin Askwith for future ads and getting Christoper Wood to write the scripts…

Oh well, today sees the release of the Ajegbo report on Diversity and Citizenship in the national curriculum, which means yet more harping on about ‘Britishness’ as is obvious from the Beeb’s opening gambit…

Schools in England should teach “core British values” alongside cultural diversity, a report says.

A more predictable outcome to a report on diversity and citizenship one cannot possibly imagine.

The report itself is going to take a little digesting, weighing in as it does at 126 page, but my initial impression is that its best taken as offering ‘more of the same’ and contains little that could be considered either innovative of illuminating.

In fact, the one thing I’m finding most intriguing about the current welter of reports and political rhetoric on the subject of ‘Britishness’ is not so much what’s being said and what isn’t - a very important word seems to have suddenly gone missing, a word that, at one time, would be first out of the traps in any discussion on this subject.

Here’s let me give you couple of examples and see if you can see what I’m talking about; this is from the Beeb’s report linked earlier…

The report, by Sir Keith Ajegbo, says pupils should study free speech, the rule of law, mutual tolerance and respect for equal rights.

And this is the Maximum Tone, holding forth on much the same subject in a speech entitled ‘The Duty to Integrate: Shared British Values‘ given last December…

But when it comes to our essential values - belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage - then that is where we come together, it is what we hold in common; it is what gives us the right to call ourselves British.

I wonder, have you spotted it yet?

‘Britishness’ and the idea of ‘British values’ is not a new debate by any means. Its a recurring theme in political and popular discourse that ebbs and flows in the public eye according to the times - sometimes its hotly debated, as now, other times its taken rather for granted and its assumed that whatever Britishness is, we all pretty much understand it without getting to het up about the specifics.

But, the more our present crop of politicians talk about it, the more obvious it become that something important, even fundamental has gone missing, something that was certainly there when I was younger but has now seemingly disappeared off the face of the debate…

Justice.

When I was younger if ever anyone was asked what it meant to British or what British values are, the very thing you would hear was, ‘Justice and fair play…’ - yes all the other stuff about democracy, the rule of law, etc. would follow shortly behind, but the very first thing than anyone would say, the ‘British value’ par excellence was ALWAYS Justice.

So where has it gone?

Why is it no longer number one?

Have we, as a nation, ceased to care about the blind lady who sits atop the Old Bailey and who has served us well for so much of our history?

Of course not… because its not us speaking here about British values, its the political elite and what they’re talking about are the values that matter to them, the ones that serve to sustain their privileged position in society.

I could be wrong, here, but I strongly suspect that if the question of what are British values is put to ordinary folk, then even today, Lady Justice will win out or, at worst, be beaten by a very short head by that other grand old Lady, the one they call Liberty.

Justice is not a uniquely British value, of course, it is one that is universal and belongs to everyone, but it was, and I believe still is, the pre-eminent value by which we would like to define our own sense of what it means to be British, the value with which we, as a nation, would most wish to be associated… and yet in Blair’s vision of Britain is seems conspicuous only by its absence, replaced by the altogether more stentorian tones of ‘the rule of law’.

This is no mistake, no erroneous omission, but a deliberate and careful crafted attempt to engineer the public discourse around Britishness in a direction favoured by the political elite, one that above everything else, stresses and emphasises the ‘legitimacy’ of their position. That’s Blair’s message in his speech, we should value, first and foremost, democracy and the rule of law, that from which he derives his authority and status - justice doesn’t even merit a mention, not as a value in its own right.

In that whole speech he uses the word justice on only two occasions, once in referrring to the ‘criminal justice system’ but even then only as a means of streesing the pre-eminence of parliament…

There is thus no question of the UK allowing the introduction of religious law in the UK. Parliament sets the law, interpreted by the courts. All criminal matters should be dealt with through the criminal justice system.

…and on a second occasion in terms of ’social justice’ to bolster arguments for requiring migrants to take an English test in order to become citizens.

Sixth, we should share a common language. Equal opportunity for all groups requires that they be conversant in that common language. It is a matter both of cohesion and of justice that we should set the use of English as a condition of citizenship. 

Blair’s ‘vision’ of what it mean to be British is, as if ever the case with him, a completely ahistorical vision, and because of that one that fundamentally not British at all (or English, Scottish, Welsh or even Irish).

To be British is NOT to value, the rule of law, but to value the of law only in so far as the laws of land are just laws. Yes, we value democracy, but only so far those elected to lead this nation exercise the powers granted to them with due regard and respect for justice.

To view and understand the history of this nation properly is to appreciate that it was the value that we place on justice that brought King John to heel at Runnymede and that took Charles I to the executioners block - unlike the French, who during their revolution put the entire notion of monarchy on trial and found it wanting, in Britain we disposed of a King because he was simply an unjust King - to say that no one is above the law is, in reality, to say that no one is beyond the reach of justice.
Blair’s vision is one in which the sovereignty of parliament and the laws it passes should be respected no matter what, a false vision of a ‘Britishness’ that is both absolutist and authoritarian, the kind of ‘Britishness’ that belongs, properly, to Henry VIII and not to the 21st Century.
Whatever else Blair’s vision might be, it’s not my vision and not, I think, the vision of the British people, and that’s why we should have none of it.

If we must discuss the concept of Britishness, then lets do it properly and restore Lady Justice to her rightful place as the paramount value amongst all those values that we claim to as our own…

…because that is a very British thing to do.

It’s difficult to know quite which is the least enticing prospect; that of the government setting up its own ‘Ministry of Propaganda’ to promote ‘British values’ to the Muslim community as part of ‘The War Against Terror’ (T.W.A.T) - I know, altogether now, ‘whaddya mean ’setting up’? - or that of putting Dr Demento in charge of compling the ’script of British values’ that they intend to use.

(Incidentally, the Dr Demento ‘you know what’ I’ve been running for a few months has successfully pushed his biography page on the Downing Street website up to third in the rankings on a search of UK webpages.)

If you’ve read of my previous articles on the subject of ‘Britishness’ then you’ll know that I tend to view the efforts made by politicians, of all parties, to arrive at a precise definition of ‘British values’ with all the disdain and contempt that the practice deserves.

It is, without any shadow of a doubt, a source of great personal satisfaction that such a definition remains, today, as elusive and intractable a proposition as it was back when John Major was maundering on about warm beer and cricket on the village green - not that I harbour any great dislike for either - and Norman Tebbit was suggesting his infamous ‘cricket test’. As to why I should feel that way, this is perhaps best answered not in terms of a discussion of the difficulty one naturally faces in trying to define precise what it is to be British, but rather in terms of why it is best that no such official definition of Britishness should ever be arrived at by government, or accepted by the British people.

The first and most practical reason is simple enough. Whenever politicians attempt to define what is to be British in terms of values or character traits, the list they produce invariably ends up being so generic that one can hardly consider anything on the list to be defineably British at all. According to the Independent, Dr Demento’s draft ’script’ of British values includes “respect for the law”, “freedom of speech”, “equality of opportunity” and “taking responsibility for others”, none of which are uniquely British - on the basis of such a list one could just as easily be taking about America, France, Germany or any other modern Western democracy - nor do any of the items on this list say anything at all about the ‘British attitude’ towards these values and how this might differ from attitudes towards the same values in other countries.

Yes, in Britain, we value freedom of speech, but the manner in which we both regard and exercise that freedom is markedly different to that one would find in the US, where it not only valued but subject to express constitutional protection. To say simply that freedom of speech is a ‘British’ value is largely meaningless, such ‘universal’ (as in generic) values neither exist nor operate in isolation from their cultural context - what make freedom of speech ‘British’ is not simply that its valued in British society but also the manner in which it is exercised in the context of British culture; for example the British approach to free expression often exhibits rather more self-restraint and even self-censorship than one would ever find in the US, although this is certainly changing, not least in terms of free speech as practiced by bloggers.

Second, and more importantly, whenever the state involves itself in efforts to define the national ‘character’, as in this case, it will inevitably place the greatest emphasis on those characteristics, traits and values that are perceived to be most supportive of its own interests.

Notice that the first item on Dr Demento’s list is ‘respect for the law’, which could, indeed, be thought part of the British ‘character’ - but only within finite limits. If one looks at British history, turbulent as it has been, then it becomes obvious that a quality such as respect for the law only goes so far with the British people. It is not the absolute principle that one suspects the government would like it to be, and certainly like to present it as; this being because there is another ‘British’ trait; a keen sense of justice (and injustice) that is both seen as having greater value and as applying limits to the extent to which one might reasonably be to treat the law with respected. In short, British people will respect the law only is so far as they perceive it to be just, fair and equitable; and if it not seen to embody those qualities then not only with they not respect the law but, in many cases, they will have no compunction about defying that law open, as was certainly the case in regards to the Poll Tax (on both occasions such a tax was introduced).

The tension that exists between a state-sanctioned definition of ‘Britishness’ and British values and that espoused by the British people is to be found nowhere more keenly than in the ongoing debate around civil liberties, in which the government has, in recent years, consistantly sought to de-emphasise the importance and value of Britain’s strong civil liberties tradition and, by extension, its history and deep-seated culture of liberal individualism, in favour of its own preferred values, which emphasise collective responsibilities and security of individual liberty.

That the government’s efforts in this area have met such stern and unyielding resistance from across the whole political spectrum stands as proof both of the extent to which Britain has such a strong tradition of liberal individualism and that it is a value that is seen by many British people as one that is part of our ‘national character’, much as one suspect the government wishes it wasn’t in anything like the same degree.

This leads neatly to the third, and perhaps, most important reason why the efforts of the government to define ‘Britishness’ British values to its own specifications should be resisted at every possible turn.

In the absence of a clear, and state-sanctioned, definition of what it is to be British, it is impossible to say definitively what is, or may be, ‘un-British.

If the importance of that last statement is not immediately apparent then one need only review the history of the United States of America during the mid-1950s and the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) - of which, despite popular myth, McCarthy was never a member, and which was only finally dispensed with in 1975 - to see how rapidly and easily even a liberal democracy can descend rapidly into paranoia and political persecution and lose sight of those values which it is supposed to protect.

The absence, in Britain, of a clearly delimited and universally accepted, not to mention state-sanctioned, definition of ‘Britishness’ serves as a bulwark against the very excesses that, for time during the 1950’s, enabled a paranoid and delusional man to bring the US Congress into disrepute, let alone that it also permitted the HCUA to implement a blacklist of ‘Hollywood’ performers, artist and writers that included such notable cultural figures as Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller and Orson Wells and is all the more important for the fact that Britain lacks a written and codified consitution to curb the excesses of the British government, should one ever take a turn in just such a direction.

The British identity, such as it can be said to exist, has worked and, to my mind, continues to work effectively precisely because of the absence of a clear definition of precisely what it is or might be. This, in turn, encourages migrant communities to discover within themselves their own sense of what to actually means to be British. In that, it offers both a beautifully utilitarian - and one might say uniquely British - solution to the question of national identity, one which flexes and adapts to fit the changing character of the British people rather than seeks to place them in a cultural straitjacket that demands conformity.

To become British, one simply needs to find one’s sense of Britishness within oneself and not conform to the values and expectations of others, a solution that is, in all respects, consistent with the traditions of liberal individualism that the present government are seeking to do away with.

I spotted this yesterday, while out shopping, in one of the Sunday tabloids that had been left open on the news stand is Asda (didn’t notice which one, sorry).

St Alban is holier than St George

THE Church of England will debate making St Alban an alternative patron saint because critics claim St George is too militaristic, potentially offensive to Muslims — and foreign.

Supporters of the change, to be unveiled in a General Synod motion this week, claim Alban may be more appropriate not only because he was real while George may be mythical, but because of his self-sacrifice.

St Alban? Somehow I think the CofE would have more luck persuading people to accept Dr. Alban as a replacement for St George.

The Times, always being quick on the uptake, have noticed one obvious wrinkle in this particular plan…

The proposal may dismay many England fans, who have been flying George’s banner in support of their football team. The flag of St Alban would be a diagonal yellow cross on a blue background.

Yes, quite… and it would rather fuck up the Union Flag at the same time, amongst other things, not that this seems to have deters St Alban’s supporters…

Philip Chester, vicar of St Matthew’s, Westminster, who is gathering support for his private member’s motion, called the choice of George, who according to legend was a Roman cavalryman from what is now Turkey, “dotty”.

He added: “We are not at all sure George even existed . . . but we are sure St Alban is a real figure. What’s more, he lived in this country.”

So, St Alban is, apparently, a real figure who lived in this country, where St George may be entirely legendary… and the evidence for this is?

Well, actually, not that much better than the evidence for the existance of St George.

Timewise, it’s not entirely clear when, exactly, St Alban is supposed to have lived (and been martyred) - the best guess seems to be somewhere around 303 to 313 AD, based on ‘evidence’ supplied by the Venerable Bede, who stated that he was executed ‘when the cruel Emperors first published their edicts against the Christians’, which is presumed to place St Alban within the reign of the Diocletian. This makes St Alban a contemporary of St George, who is also supposed to have been executed at around the same time, for refusing to take part in the persecution of Christians ordered by Diocletian.

However, things get a bit more problematic from here onwards - while St George was supposedly honoured within two or three years after his death, with the building of church in his name in the Eastern city of Lydda and his cult developed rapidly in the centiry following his death in the Eastern Orthodox church, St Alban seems to disappear entirely until he gets his first mention in The Life of St Germanus of Auxerre which was written around 480 AD - 170-180 years after St Alban’s death. The book mentions St Alban only the context of Germanus having visited his shrine while on a trip of Britain.

After that, St Alban next turns up in Gildas’s 6th century polemic De Excidio Britanniae before being written up more fully by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which was not complete until 731 AD.

On that basis alone, it would seem that the evidence for the existence of the real St George is neither better nor worse than that for St Alban, which rather shoots down one of Phillip Chester’s main lines of argument.

St George was certainly foreign, yes, but then St Alban’s origins are also matter of assumption and guesswork - he could well have been Romano-British, but then as a pagan he could easily have been a Roman or from any other part of the Roman Empire, which was far from being ethnically homogeneous.

Is St George too militaristic? Well that’s a matter of opinion, given that the story St George and the Dragon is quite obviously a myth in which a Christian saint has been translated into a much older pagan legend. As far as the arrival of the Cult of St George in England, this is thought to date to the return of English knights from the Crusades of the 12th Century, with St George being adopted as the patron saint of England during the reign of Edward III, who was notably big on the whole business of medieval codes of knighthood and instituted the Order of the Garter - and, of course, St George crops up most notably, in English literature, in Shakespeare’s Henry V with the rallying cry - Follow your spirit, and upon this charge cry ‘God for Harry, England and St George’.

Whether they like it or not, it seems the church had little or nothing to do with the adoption of St George as parton saint of England and, real or not, he is firmly embedded in English culture to the extent that its doubtful that most people would accept anyone other figure as patron saint of England.

What bothers me most in all this, however, is the apparent contention that St George should dropped, or at least downgraded, on the basis that he’s potentially offensive to Muslims.

Well hang on a second there - for one thing (and here’s something that’s likely to be new a lot of people) it appears that having been born in Lydda, which is the Palestine, there’s rather more to the ‘cult of St George’ than his adoption as patron saint of England, his mythical battle with a dragon or even the crusades.

In doing a bit of background reading I came across a rather interesting reference to an Islamic figure, Al-Khidr, whose status is rather disputed but who, nevertheless, appears to be venerated by Sufis, in particular.

What makes Al-Khidr particularly interesting in this case is that amongst the Maronite church of the Lebanon and other Christian groups in and around Jerusalem and even in Egypt, the figure of Al-Khidr has come to be associated with St George, who ministers to Christian and Muslim alike:

But in the Middle East, St. George is very much alive, dragon or no dragon.

In a hot office in downtown Beirut, a white-haired Greek Orthodox gentleman will tell you confidently that St. George is working scores of miracles today, for Muslims and Christians alike. He will recall his own experience, when St. George came one night with the lance and pierced his abscessed leg. Next morning the abscess was gone.

Another 70-year old Maronite lights a mammoth white candle every April 23 in the Maronite Cathedral of Beirut. He maintains the saint appeared in a cloud of dust, mounted on a white charger, when a group of Bedouin tried to kill him in the Syrian desert. St. George told the attackers he was al-Khidr, and the Bedouin released the Christian.

But what of St George’s association with the Crusades? Does this really cause such offence to Muslims that we consider choosing an altogether more benign patron saint.

Well, okay, yes, the Muslim world did get an apology from the Pope a few years back, which does suggest its a bit of issue for some - but then when it comes to my Muslim friends and people in the Muslim community that I’ve over the years, not once can I recall ever having a conversation with any of them on the subject of the Crusades, let alone been given the impression that this period, and anything associated with it, is a bit of problem for them, even today.

And more to the point, if one comes to look at what passes for public knowledge and the public’s impression of this era of history, what one invariably finds in that most people in England, and in Britain in general, know very little about the Crusades, and what they do know doesn’t tend to show up Muslims in a particularly negative light.

Given the systematic dumbing down of the teaching of history over a significant number of years, probably the main source of public perceptions of the Crusades is likely to come down to one historical figure - Richard I - whose public image is hopelessly rose-tinted and historically inaccurate- and two main sources - the legend of Robin Hood and Sir Walter Scott historical novel, Ivanhoe. In fact, I’d take matters even further and suggest that for the most part, public perceptions have been shaped much more by film adaptations of these stories than by having read either as a work of literature.

What this means is that the public image of Islam during the period of the Crusades is largely bound up in the profile of one historical figure, Salah Al Din (usually Anglicised in the form ‘Saladin’) who doesn’t really come out too badly as his reputation as a superb military commander and worthy adversary on the battlefield gained him recognition during the later medieval period as a distinctly chivalric figure such that, by the 14th century, there was an epic poem dedicated to his exploits, while Dante virtuous pagan souls in limbo, which turns out to be much the most attractive and benign circle of hell in the Divine Comedy, it being pretty much a medieval version of the Greek Elysium.

If anything, through Salah Al Din, the Saracens who fought against European Crusaders, acquired a public image that was, by medieval standards, pretty noble and civilised - and image that carried thorugh, certainly, into Hollywood’s treatment of that era.

Of course the ‘popular’ view of both Salah Al Din, of Richard I, is a hopeless romanticised one - courtesy, in the main, of Sir Walter Scott - and therefore some considerable way from being historical truth - although the irony in this is that a more accurate historical account of the Crusades, while noting that both men were responsible for their share of atrocities, would probably hoid that the Salah Al Din was the better, and certainly more civilised, of the two.

If there’s a contemporary problem with the figure of St George, and the cross of St George in particular, then it has very little, to my mind, to do with the historical figure of St George having foreign origins, or being too militaristic and too closely associated with the Crusades - such problems as may exist are altogether more modern in origin and lie primarily in the efforts of the far-right, over the last 40 or so years, to appropriate the image, and the flag, of St George to their own racist, white-supremacist agenda.

And the problem that arises whenever anyone, like Phillip Chester, goes off into a quasi-liberal angst meltdown and starts suggesting that we drop whatever it is that’s assumed to be causing offence to particular minority group, is that such suggestions invariably play into the hands of the very people who are causing the problem in the first place, which mean you end up with articles like the one below, on the BNP website…

CoE appeasement

The leaders of the Church of England have recently displayed their contempt for the English people by considering a move to relegate St. George to a lower league and promote St. Alban as the national champ. St. George is a fiery and powerful symbol of opposition to Islam and the Church Synod in a bid to appease those who are already turning former churches into mosques, will consider the proposal which could see the red and white being replaced by a yellow saltire on a blue background – the flag of St. Alban, martyred in Hertfordshire in the early 4th century.

So raise the red cross of our national saint and show your defiance for those who seek to eradicate England and the English nation. St. George is for life, not just for football!

And that’s what really pisses me off about half-arsed ideas like that of downgrading St George, the fact the only people who benefit from such suggestions are those, like the BNP, for whom such ideas provide a ready supply of ammunition in support of their prurient views.

Frankly, people like Phillip Chester and any other supporters of idea of ditching St George in favour of St Alban really do need to learn to shut the fuck up and stop feeding fascist groups, like the BNP, a steady stream of readily usable propaganda to support the false contention that Britain is somehow being ‘overrun’ by Islam.

* St Giles, BTW, is one of several saints whose areas of patronage includes insanity, as is, therefore, the ideal patron for that we downgrade St George, in the absence of an easily identifiable patron saint of guilt-ridden pseudo-liberal fuckwits.

Forget all this crap about the search for a ‘British identity’ - you’d be better served setting out on a Snark hunt - if you want to see the real meaning of what it is to be British then everything you need to know is this story…

Scotland set for first Asian MSP

The Scottish National Party says it is on course to have Scotland’s first Asian MSP sitting at Holyrood.

Glasgow councillor Bashir Ahmad is among the candidates the party has listed as those it most wants elected to the Scottish Parliament next year…

…Mr Ahmad, who came to Scotland from Pakistan at the age of 21, has been president of the Pakistan Welfare Association five times.

In 1995 he founded Scots Asians for Independence, which has aimed to build support for the SNP among the Scottish Asian community.

He was elected to represent the Pollokshields East ward on Glasgow City Council in the 2003 elections and he has been a member of the SNP’s national executive committee since 1998.

Mr Ahmad said party members had "righted the wrong" of Asians having no voice in the parliament.

He said: "The lack of any Asian or ethnic minority voice in the Scottish Parliament has been felt deeply in my community.

"But SNP members have righted that wrong.

"By doing so, they have proved that the SNP aspires to lead a Scottish Parliament that will represent all of Scotland - a truly national parliament.

"I firmly believe the SNP can now earn the trust of the Asian community throughout Scotland and that this will be a bond that endures for generations."

What a cracking story - the guy that may become the first Asian member of the Scottish Parliament is Pakistani by birth, Muslim by religion, a British citizen by naturalisation and Scottish by choice, so much so that he’s joined the nationalist party and campaigns for independence - just how fucking brilliant is that!

That’s what being British is all about - not one single homogeneous identity but multiple identities existing without coming  into conflict, all of which add up to an individual person.

Shame he’s a member of the SNP, but then you can’t have everything…