The Cost of War

I remember during the run up to war on Iraq watching a Question Time special, in which Tony Blair fielded (or evaded) questions from a live audience. Having by this point moved his justificatory position away from the suspect "45 minute" claim, towards the humanitarian one, I fumed at the television. Admitting that the war would cost around £4 billion (around $8 billion), but proclaiming that it would liberate the 30 million population of Iraq, I wanted to play Blair at his own game of numbers, trading off financial costs with humanitarian benefits.

For my bargaining chips I chose HIV. According to the later UN 2004 report on AIDS, 5 million people are in need of AIDs treatment worldwide, with the annual cost of treatment in the Third World around $300. For $8 billion you could have treated 26 million AIDs victims; that is, for the UK's involvement in Iraq, we could have treated every current sufferer in the world for the next five years. So pretty much the same as the number of Iraqis who would be liberated from authoritarianism, but without the inestimable risk, inestimable moral cost and inestimable future impact of fighting in this field of the War on Terror.

But if I was angered by Blair's refusal to take his moral relativism to the obvious conclusion that the war was relatively (and now objectively) bad value, at least I cannot grumble too much now about his financial estimates: the current cost of the War on Iraq and Afghanistan has been a mere four times the estimates, £8 billion ($16 billion). Compare this to the case in the US, as exemplified on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week of a couple of weeks ago. This includes an interview with Joseph Stiglitz about his controversial new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the War in Iraq. Unwittingly, the discussion is hilarious, because the ultimate stakes are so serious.

At the outset, the US contribution to the War in Iraq was supposed to cost $50-$60 billion (one economist at the time dared to claim it would cost $100-200 billion...but he was fired). The cost today is estimated in Stiglitz's new book to exceed $2 trillion.

Marr then asks, "so that's a mistake of around 20 times as much?" to which Stieglitz replies, "Probably more than that. it's of that order of mistake. It's huge." Marr continues for a moment, before Stieglitz interjects, "No, no, it's actually 200, because remember 60...10 times would be $600 billion, and, er so" - remember, this is a Nobel prize-winning economist - "we're talking about, er...more than that." Masterfully, Marr concludes, "Well I can't even get the order of the mistake right!"

But this is paradoxically hilarious, because of course the stakes, financial (not to mention those less easy to quantify), are so enormous; one simply cannot do other than laugh at the whole, elephantine error of it all. It has its own bleak humour, because one can only imagine that it is the result of a sleepily casual theorising conducted over coffee and croissants in the White House a few weeks before the invasion:

So, Dick [Cheney], how much is this expedition gonna cost?
Well, Mr. President, I'm pleased to say that we have a special offer on all our Middle East invasion range, yours for just - well, sir, for you, just $60 billion. No, $50 billion (what's $1 000 000 000 between friends?)
Oh, mmm [mouth full of buttery pastry] I'll take one of those, and throw in a couple of insurgencies while you're at it.

One could, of course, contest Stiglitz's estimates, which rely on extrapolating the indirect costs such as increased oil prices and future health care. But the government's own facts about the direct costs in the present speak for themselves: they are investing $12 billion per month on the war. Compare that to $5 billion given in aid to Africa each year. That budget represents just ten days fighting in Iraq. Or, to use my original comparison, for one month in Iraq the world's AIDS victims could have been treated for the next decade. Stiglitz's hesitancy was apt: the whole thing does not add up.

The Credit Crunch

Question: Which literary character is a Collatorised Debt Obligation (CDO)? Obvious answer: Faustus. Listening to a recent Radio 4 documentary on the crisis in the international banking markets, the Mephistopheles of the recent Credit Crunch is the financier who has concocted clever ways of wrapping up essentially bad or high risk debts into attractive packages, and selling them to a banking system lusting not for anything so beautiful as Helen of Troy, more that end of year bonus and swanky basement conversion to their house in the suburbs. Whispering in the ear of bankers in the bars of the city, the economist has proposed:

But now thou must bequeath it solemnly,
And write a deed of gift with thine own blood;
For that security craves Lucifer.

Unfortunately, that "security," or CDO seems to have been not so safe after all. As several bankers in the programme rued, we have been here several times before since the 1930s, and failed to learn from each crash, always believing "this time, we're cleverer than the previous lot. Except, of course, we're not." The burning of books (or the run on the bank) ensues.

Our Chorus for the complexities of the money market is John Lanchester, who in a brilliant explanation of "Cityphilia" in the London Review of Books allows us "to wonder at unlawful" (well, almost) "things":

A well run bank is a machine for making money...Imagine, for the purpose of keeping things simple, a country with only one bank. A customer goes into the bank and deposits £200. Now the bank has £200 to invest, so it goes out and buys some shares with the money: not the full £200, but the amount minus the percentage which it deems prudent to keep in cash, just in case any depositors come and make a withdrawal. That amount, called the ‘cash ratio’, is set by government: in this example let’s say it’s 20 per cent. So our bank goes out and buys £160 of shares from, say, LRB Ltd. Then LRB goes and deposits its £160 in the bank; the bank now has £360 of deposits, of which it needs to keep only 20 per cent – £72 – in cash. So now it can go out and buy another £128 of shares in LRB, raising its total holding in LRB Ltd to £288. Once again, LRB Ltd goes and deposits the money in the bank, which goes out again and buys more shares, and so on the process goes. The only thing imposing a limit is the need to keep 20 per cent in cash, so the depositing-and-buying cycle ends when the bank has £200 in cash – all the cash there is – and £800 in LRB shares; it also has £1000 of customer deposits, the initial £200 plus all the money from the share transactions. The initial £200 has generated a balance sheet of £1000 in assets and £1000 in liabilities. Magic! In real life, it’s even better: the UK cash ratio is 0.15 per cent, so that initial £200 would generate £133,333 on both sides of the balance sheet.

I though I had a handle on the way the stock markets work, but it appears not. Enter, yours truly, the clown. Having recently acquired some inheritance, I decide to invest rather than paying off my student loan, and trot into the Co-Operative bank, they being the most ethical of a pretty bad bunch. The happy consultant grasps my hand, and thrusts in my face a series of graphs and charts that flow inevitably upwards towards monetary heaven, promising a 10 - nay 20 percent - return on my investment, staggered to receive greatest tax benefits, risk spread - like a low fat version - across different environmental and ethical funds. I turn to leave with a guide tucked under my arm, and swear as I do that the consultant is secretly congratulating himself on another sale:

when thou took'st the book
To view the Scriptures, then I turn'd the leaves,
And led thine eye.

Luckily, I am not so blind as to fail to read the small print. Wherein I discover how banks, even the nicer ones like the Co-Operative, make so much money. Thank you for your deposit, Mr. Faustus. Now, we'd just like to chip off 1.5% here (a management fee, you understand); oh, and we'll take 3% of whatever you gain; and how about 0.1% (just for the hell of it). So if I invest £3000, by the end of the first year I will have lost about £285, and over five years for every pound of my money I risk, and assuming I do gain with an upturn in the markets, the bank will get themselves the same amount again.

Count me out of this opportunity (yes, that's right, the markets being so low and volatile at the moment, this is a great time to invest, Sir!). This scholar wags his philosophical finger, and heads over to National Savings and Investments.

Where is the University?

This week's (stylishly revamped) Times Higher has an extended article by Matthew Reisz on what a university is for. Is it for pursuing knowledge for the sake of it? For engaging with business and the demands of the economy? For promoting social mobility? My own impression, and the implication of Reisz's survey of opinions, is that universities are blank slates upon which, although (or because) relatively free from state control, the government can impress its broader ideological and social abstractions. In the current climate, this is the use of private finance for the improvement of public services. In part, then, universities are simultaneously where the state of the culture is writ large, as well as where that culture can be modified by new research and technologies. This is why the question "What is a university?" is also a question about "What is society?" and so far from being a peripheral issue to be discussed behind closed doors at university senates, it should be of concern to all, whether readers of the Times Higher or not.

One aspect of Reisz's article struck me in particular, which is that one of Cardinal Newman's original principles in The Idea of a University was that a university should bring academics and students into proximity, not necessarily in terms of their ideas but physically, as a community living over an extended period under one (or several) roofs. However, with the expansion of higher education, halls of residence have become distributed (where they still exist at all), and the commendable open-access policies that inform institutions like the Open University suggest that geographical centredness is not itself central to the idea of a modern university.

Two anecdotes occur here to suggest that, in this particular aspect of his argument, Newman may have been short sighted (as Reisz shows, it is surprising how many other aspects remain pertinent today). According to these two, universities are really functions of action rather than place.

The first is from Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind. He imagines a prospective student touring a university. He or she sees the library, the labs, the sports arena, but then asks the tour guide, "But where is the university?" According to Ryle, the mistake made by the student is a failure to realize that "university" and "library" are terms that belong to different logical categories. (The analogy signifies Descartes' mistaken assumption that there is a ghost inside us that works a merely mechanical body, without understanding that mind labels a behaviour, which - like the university building - is a different category to things, including the brain that may give rise to mind). In the advertisements section of the same issue of the Times Higher, a university campus in Croatia is listed as being for sale or rent. The buildings may exist, but this particular university is no more; likewise, just because we have the infrastructure of universities in the UK does not mean that - whether in Russell red brick or Million+ concrete - they exist unchanging and for all time. Much of New Labour's secondary education policy seems to have been directed at changing the architecture and nomenclature of schools, building glassy new academies - and they may be right that in this case changing the physical form of education for the better will also improve its chances of success with those who are involved in it. But, though that new physics lab or supercomputer may provide for a glossy photo opportunity, this rule does not hold true of a university in general.

The second anecdote comes from the U.S. When Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia University in the 1950s, he was introduced to senior faculty. He remarked how pleased he was to meet with the employees of the university. He was interrupted by the physicist I.I. Rabi: "Mr. President. We are not the employees of the university. We are the university!" (Thanks to Heinz R. Pagel's The Dreams of Reason for this).

Censoring Ourselves

When fascists come to power, their first act is to stifle free speech such that their one-dimensional view is all that can be heard in the new political climate. But a healthy democracy also exercises censorship - in the self-reflexive form. Whilst theoretically preserving the right of anyone in a democracy to speak out, in practice we are made through our free press and our right to vote hyper-sensitive to extremism, such that the immoral voices that are the inevitable tributaries of an all-encompassing political system rarely flow into the mainstream.

There is consequently a fine line between the shape of censorship from above, which is the hallmark of fascism, and the result of censorship from below, which is the mark of a democracy. It is a line which was drawn - not finely, but in the mass of two opposing crowds - outside the Oxford Union last night, and one that those protesting against the debate started to cross. Naturally I deplore David Irving, and am aware that his writing is opinion masquerading as "history"; the facts of the Holocaust simply do not sustain Holocaust denial. Likewise, Nick Griffin is a right-wing thug in a pin stripe suit. But to prevent these two from sharing a platform, from exercising their right to speak their misguided minds, shows perhaps the more worrying move in politics than fascism (given that the BNP have no chance of power): the belief that a politically correct society which maintains a monoculture of opinion equates to a politically healthy one.

It does not. A democratically robust society is one in which Griffin and Irving are permitted to raise their voices, so that the majority of us - supported by the proof of the factual errors of Holocaust denial and our historical knowledge of where the right wing has the potential to lead us - can censor them through the evidence alone, allowing the facts to speak for themselves on our behalf. As it is, the chants outside the windows of the Union building were - inadvertently, naively - ringing out for the central censorship Griffin himself would probably like to exercise. Were this debate to have taken place outside a mosque in Bradford or a Synagogue in Israel, I would have some sympathy with the protesters, presuming them to be driven by personal anxiety rather than a misguided reason (and it is true that when the BNP comes to town, racist incidents increase). As it is, for such scenes to occur in that great secular cathedral of supposedly enlightened and rational debate, the University of Oxford, is deeply depressing. At least one of the newest universities, East Anglia, is leading the way by rejecting the NUS policy on "no platform for fascists."

God Save the Queen: Why I Won't Sing

Driving through flood and storm to get there, we went to the Ludlow Festival this week to see A Comedy of Errors. The play is Shakespeare's most farcical, and there was a real pantomime feel to it (particularly when the trousers of the lead actor fell down in the final tumultuous scene). I suspect it would probably be difficult to act this play badly, and the performance was assured and colourful, though it may not be particularly memorable or distinguished, since the Comedy is not as deeply provocative as Shakespeare's later comedies with their darker undertones.

But, problematically for a play that is so plot-driven (twists of fate, mistaken identities), I could not concentrate on the first quarter of an hour or so. This was because myself and Helen did not stand for the collective singing of the national anthem which preceded the play, in response to which the gentleman behind, in a plummy voice, turned to his wife and said, deliberately loud so I would overhear, "Such a shame. Clearly they're not British." It frustrates me still that I did not turn around and make eye contact, as I would have loved to have justified myself in argument with him. As it was, I spent the first part of the performance running a response through my head, and hence not following the play. But, partly in the vain hope that that patriot may come across this blog, and mainly to get my rhetorical rehearsal out of my head and onto the public stage, I want to share my justifications here.

Firstly, I am British - it says so on my passport. But whilst I feel privileged to be a resident in a country with such a landscape, cultural heritage (not least Shakespeare), and democratic standards, I do not see how my failing to sing the national anthem suddenly makes me "not British." Indeed, since I justify my refusal on the basis of my independently held attitudes, and the thought police (posh gents excepted) will not arrest me for my refusal, in many ways my sitting down is a greater endorsement of the United Kingdom's principles of intellectual imagination, and its accommodation of independence of spirit.

Indeed, A Comedy of Errors in part is a comic deconstruction of too rigid social mores. There is a certain irony in witnessing hundreds of people rise unthinkingly to their feet to sing, before watching a play which condemns petty nationalism divorced from independent moral judgement. In the first scene, Solinus, Duke of Epheus, tries to act with clemency towards Aegeon of Syracuse:

Now, trust me, were it not against our laws,
Against my crown, my oath, my dignity,
Which princes, would they, may not disannul,
My soul should sue as advocate for thee.

I do not sing, because I am not subject to such intransigent laws of crown and oath, and because I want to exert the independence of my personal ethics, as Solinus wishes he could, but cannot under monarchical system.

And, according to the personal politics of my individual soul, I have no reason to sing. I am ashamed to be living in one of the world's smaller islands that nevertheless somehow has the world's fourth richest economy. I am ashamed that in reaching that position that economy has put money before environmental or ethical concerns. An atheist in a multicultural world, I do not see why it is a positive to plead for religious help for a secular democracy. But, most of all, I cannot maintain a pride in my country when it is engaged in an illegal, illegitimate, and immoral conflict with another.

I first stopped being British, stopped standing for the anthem at the festival, in 2003, when we had just entered Iraq. There is surely something hypocritical in calling on God to save the Queen, the head of our armed forces, when that army is engaged in a war which is, so we are told, for democracy, not against Islam and its different breed of god. Though not sung, in the full version the second verse runs:

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!

Though we may not sing this verse, since the anthem receives its prestige precisely from the history of its usage, these meanings also must lurk beneath the explicit words. The evident irrationality of pleading to God to "confound their politics," when our attempt to "export" our own democratic politics through force has been such an admitted failure, adds weight to my argument against singing the opening verse.

Finally, there is the fact that to sing the anthem implies my support for the queen. I am not necessarily a Republican, but I do think the case for constitutional monarchy rather than elected presidency needs to be argued (and, to be fair, the monarchy has become much more transparent in its accountability), and that the monarchy needs to provide more than a tamely acquiescent voice in government, and to express individual opinions - with which I may or may not agree. Prince Charles has done this with his views on farming (which I support) and architecture (opinions I would challenge), and so I will hold my revolutionary calls until he takes the throne. But as I wait for this transition, for me to unhesitatingly and wholeheartedley sing to the queen would be a personal contradiction.

Whenever that happens, though, I will still feel, in a political sense, more European than British. In an age of ethnic and economic globalisation, I believe in working beyond the confines of the nation state; in my travels across Europe, I found more in common with the young of my age of every country - liberal, positive about Europe, anti-war - than I do with many of my parent's generation back home. Verse four of "God Save the Queen" expresses many of these sentiments:

Not in this land alone,
But be God's mercies known,
From shore to shore!
Lord make the nations see,
That men should brothers be,
And form one family,
The wide world over.

An anthem that transcends insular nationalism would see me on my feet. Alternatively, and with great irony since it is an invective against British political and economic forces and a plea for the restoration of landscape, I might just sing Jerusalem. It also has the better tune.

Realistic Religion

In relation to religion, I tend to get riled very easily, partly because of the effect of fundamentalism exercised in the name of democracy, and partly because of the abuse and misunderstanding of science perpetrated by proponents of Intelligent Design. So the short fuse of my indignation was lit quite quickly by a couple of issues in the news last week.

Firstly, there was the case of Exeter Students' Guild being taken to court because it had suspended Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union from the student body. The guild decided on the measures because the religious group asked members to sign a statement of religious belief; the union argued that"as students fund our societies and as our Equal Opportunities Policy states, all activities should be open to all students. The Evangelical Christian Union is the only society identified that has barriers to entry - both for membership of the society and to be on the committee of the society." As barrister Schona Jolly analysed, this is a tricky case now being tested under the Human Rights Act, and "is about a clash of competing equalities." On the one hand is the right to have the freedom to maintain and assert a religious faith, and on the other is the right of all minorities to have equal access to any publically funded group. I hope that the courts find for the Students' Union, since they represent the majority of non-evangelical students at the university: there are probably more people of other faiths, or of unorthodox sexual orientations who might potentially be excluded from joining the single Christian group, than there are fervent Christians who are going to be excluded from the rights and funding other societies receive from the University.

Nevertheless, the case is a difficult one to judge, and I await the outcome with interest. Less ambiguous is the moral issue surrounding Christian protests against the new Gay Rights bill. This piece of legislation would prevent discrimination in the provision of goods, services and employment on the basis of sexual orientation; it thus provides similar legal protection as the sexual, racial and disability discrimination acts afford. At the rally, however, Michael Reid, the leader of a pentecostal church in Essex complained that:

I believe in freedom of conscience, and when anyone starts imposing views that are against freedom of religion, then we are moving into a state that I think is evil

But is it not equally possible to substitute "sexuality" where "religion" appears in the quote? Because there is no finite scale against which "evil" can be measured, then one can equally well say that to impose views against freedom of sexuality is wrong. The United Kingdom is not a theocracy but a democracy, and if religious people feel against this bill - and I can understand why under some interpretations of the Bible they might well do - then they are more than welcome to exercise the freedom of conscience they enjoy in such a state, and vote against the government. But, as it is, we have a government which, in accordance with the Human Rights Act, has decided to protect a sexual minority, just as it protects the minority of Christians (and it is now a minority, according to one pre-Christmas poll) from abuse and prejudice. Can you imagine the headlines if a gay rights group decided to exclude all Christians?

Tobias Jones, who has written a new book exploring religious communes, notes that, "religion is like a swimming pool: all the noise is at the shallow end, and that is the only end people see." I agree. To me, the great failure of religion in the modern age has been its failure to separate its ethics from its theology. As I said before in my comments on the Eagleton vs. Dawkins debate, a religion does not last for two thousand years without having something of moral value to assert, and our culture, secular though it may be in a popular and political sense, is still saturated with the morality of Christian faith. However, too often the Biblical position is taken as a absolute prescription for resolving contemporary issues, rather than the Biblical text being taken as a general foundation for ethics; thus for an atheist, with the Bible and ethics remaining closely tied, it becomes hard to acknowledge the reason of the Christian speaker, because that reason is so inextricably linked to a text I simply don't believe, except as an historical narrative.

However, just as I start to get cynical and sarcastic about these shallow religious voices at their end of the swimming pool, I hear a more considered voice as I munch on my cornflakes one morning, a voice which reminds me (even chastises me) that I risk becoming prejudiced against a Christian stereotype I construct for myself. Speaking on Radio 4's "Thought for the Day," the Bishop of Putney, Reverend Dr. Giles Fraser, explains why he thinks the law on sexual discrimination should be accepted by the Christian community as a whole. Judging by the comments on the BBC message board, he caused many non-liberal Christians to splutter into their breakfast bowls. He caused this atheist, however, to pause, and to take a more objective stance on what threatened to become, for me, two more pieces of black-and-white evidence of the dangers of religion.

What Am I Optimistic About?

Another year turns, and it's time for John Brockman, editor of the influential "Third Culture" forum, Edge, to pose his annual question to a range of cultural commentators, scientists and philosophers. Previous questions have either been highly open-ended - "What Now?" "What's Your Law?" - or implicitly directed at a particular contemporary issue. The question for 2005, "What do You Believe is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?" was aimed to provoke religious or scientific fundamentalists, and the resultant book, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty provides a fascinating snapshot of the boundaries of the age-old contest as it is played in the early twenty-first century.

This year, however, rather than looking to the present or to the abstract, Brockman looks forwards, asking: "What Are You Optimistic About? Why?" Although, oddly, I was not invited to contribute, my answer would have been: not much. War burns in the Middle East; the promises of the campaign to eliminate poverty, made so loudly above the riffs of guitars at Live 8 this summer, now seem little more than a whisper in the dark. There are hints that environmental issues are becoming more prominent in politics and business: if you had told me last year that the Terminator was going green I would have thought it a joke. But faced with this most global of catastrophes, we need to move the world with the levers of technology and lifestyle revolution, and when Blair or Arnie wiggle their fingers from a podium, they may as well do nothing at all.

And yet, and yet. In the flurry of retrospective analyses of 2006 and the predictions for 2007 that fill the glossy pages of magazines and newspaper supplements, I see a common theme emerge that may be, just maybe, a reason to be optimistic. Time magazine's "Person of the Year" is - who? - me. By writing these very words, and publishing them online to be read around the world (at least by the few visitors the site actually gets) I am participating in the creation of a new form of culture, one not driven by great men:

It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

It is also a story about, predominantly, the young, the tech-savvy, collaborating freely and in fun to produce the arts and news outside the boundaries of the conventional, ideological establishment. Later, on the BBC's Start the Week, Andrew Marr asks his guests for their surprising predictions for 2007. One of them suggests that this will see the increasing influence of the younger generation. On a news programme, I hear a Labour politician suggest that, as politics seems to have alienated so many, new forms of political activism, enabled by the internet, will take shape, and the younger generation will be its catalytic force. At my sister's twenty-first birthday, my dad makes a brief speech at which he observes that the older generation, represented by my ninety-year-old grandfather, got us out of the most intractable mess during World War Two, and that my father's generation have done a pretty good job of messing things up again. It was to the younger generation, myself, my sister, our friends, that my father raised his glass.

In the Western world, if you look beyond the sleek plastic veneers of their I-pods and laptops, the young are suffering as a result of the lifestyles of their parents. In the United Kingdom, with house prices at record levels, the number of first time buyers is rapidly decreasing. I have little doubt that the economy must head for a fall: if house prices are increasing at 10% a year and wage inflation is running at around 3%, you do not have to be a mathematician to realise that things fundamentally don't add up, and that the gap has been filled, temporarily, by the mockery of cheap credit. However, with my generation priced out of the housing market now, we will have little to celebrate when the inevitable crash occurs, though we may have time to feel a hint of schadenfreude before recession hits. When it comes to the environment, we are the ones who are going to be choking on the smoke of our parents, whilst they are rotting beneath our feet, feeding the natural cycles they have violated. And in our education system, our parent's generation refuses to subsides university degrees, and we are forced to enter work with huge debts.

And yet, and yet. That financial debt is one being accumulated in return for an education which is better and more widespread than at any time before. In spite of all the hyperbole about the liberating power of the internet (try telling the 94% of Africans who have never used the web how wonderful it is that Wikipedia is democratising encyclopaedias), I do believe that we possess a tool unprecedented in human history to spread knowledge, ideas and moral values. If we can direct our skills in technology, our liberal education, and, above all, our anger at the world we have inherited from our fathers, we might just start to change it.

E-Petition Tony Blair

Not that it will do the slightest good, if the Iraq war is anything to go by, but the government has just launched a new e-petitions service, whereby people can submit petitions to Tony Blair online. Organisations such as Amnesty International and Live 8 have been running these sorts of online systems for a couple of years, but going direct through Number 10 feels a little more satisfying (although I cannot imagine Tony Blair glued to his monitor, anxiously watching as the numbers of angry voters clock up before his soon-retiring eyes). Among others currently running are a petition to not replace the Trident nuclear deterrent and a petition to tax horrendously inefficient and antiquated incandescent light bulbs.

I have signed up to both of these; it has only taken two minutes, and it makes me feel a little more moral, even if its practical impact will be nil. However, I do worry that this new system will do away with those quaint local news clips, in which angry-young-mum or fed-up-of-Milton-Keynes trots up the steps of Number 10 and hands a wedge of paper to the bemused police officer, who passes it on to a hassled civil servant, to add to the pile on Blair's in-tray.

Update: At 12.07pm today, according to my Statcounter, this blog entry was tracked by someone at gateway-101.energis.gsi.gov.uk. Who is watching the watchers?!

Sweet Success

On the day our Prime Minister gives evidence to the Iraq Study Group, I hear on the radio Emily Dickinson's poem, "Success is Counted Sweetest."

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of Victory,

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.

History Repeating Itself? Lebanon and Northern Ireland

Having difficulty trying to see beyond the number's game in relation to the conflict in Lebanon and Israel, I come up with an analogy. It seems from my perspective that Israel's incursions are equivalent to what might have happened in a parallel universe twenty years ago, if at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict the UK government had sent Tornadoes across from RAF Lossiemouth to blitz North and West Belfast where IRA support was at its strongest. If such a blanket atrocity had happened, it is hard to imagine peace having come about today; equally, it is certain that without an intense military and intelligence operation taking place on the ground rather than from 30 000 feet, terrorist activity would have been far worse than it ever was in reality.

But recognising how the analogy does not quite fit the current conflict in the Middle East balances my impulse to condemn Israel outright. In the Northern Ireland situation, the IRA and Sinn Fein were like Siamese twins: respectively terrorist and political organistions conjoined physically and ideologically, yet in some sense recognisible as separate entitities. The UK government and Unionist parties could never have sat round the Stormont table with the IRA, but with Sinn Fein as their representatives a solution was workable, albeit uneasy. Back in Lebanon, and Hezbollah have been, rightly, condemned for using civilian areas as their base for militaristic operations. But by far the more dangerous merging of civilian and terrorist lies in the fact that Hezbollah is simultaneously a party in democratic politics and armed conflict. Negotiating a settlement through peaceful means is therefore going to be all the harder, many times more so than the resolution to the Northern Ireland conflict was.

Irrepressible.Info

In my essay "Online Text Databases and the Literary Canon," I noted that "the popular proclamation that the texts found on the Internet (either within academic databases or in informal online publications) democratically represent, or are equally accessible to, the body of global authors and readers, is a fallacy. The "democracy" of the web and the "accessibility" of the Internet are rhetorical phrases commonly proclaimed by the media and political institutions to describe the globalisation of information; however, these claims, when used in a literal sense, are not endorsed statistically: fewer people worldwide can access the internet, with its online books, than have access to paper media through public libraries."

With a similar demythologising intent, though with greater import, the Irrepressible.Info campaign run by Amnesty International and The Observer is designed to highlight the fact that governments around the world, often in collusion with IT companies, are repressing online content, censoring information, seizing equipment and arresting people who use the internet to challenge official politics. As part of the campaign the group is offering web publishers in free countries the opportunity to undermine censorship by publishing previously censored material on their own sites. With a brilliant irony, through this system the more content is repressed, the more distributed it might become. I am smugly happy that from today, in the sidebar to the right of this blog, the information some one doesn't want people to read is now displayed to the 10 000 or so visitors who access this site each year.

The Middle East Number's Game

Listening to a radio debate on the current Middle East crisis, one of the panellists for the Israeli position condemned what she called "the game of ratios." This is the use by pro-Palestinian (and now Lebanese) groups of the ratio of civilians killed by Israel in comparison to their own side. In both cases, Israel, with the world's fourth largest army, invariably wins by about 6:1 over terrorists.

In both figures, of course, the proportion of civilians as opposed to legitimate targets killed is probably relatively the same. And this is why this number's game presents too simple a case of the situation in the Middle East. If it were 6 civilians killed on the Palestinian side to 1 Israeli military target assaulted on the other, then the figures would immediately illegitimate Israel's response. But, of course, neither suicide bombers nor military planners who factor in collatoral damages stand on such morally elevated ground.

And yet, in spite of my efforts to read a respectable newspaper, to listen to the Today programme, I find it impossible to avoid looking at the numbers behind this reportage. The political context that underlies the mathematics is so turbulent and densely intertwined with thousands of years of historical contest that the ratios of death are the only thing that, to this naive observer, seem to make any form of comprehensible sense in a conflict of which the successes and aims of both sides are otherwise starkly unclear.

Europe in Crisis

Although I am no great fan of Tony Blair, I am totally behind him on the hard stance he is taking on Europe's need for economic reform. It is not a question of the money - in the grand scheme of things £3 billion is relatively small change. It is about the intrinsic unfairness of a system which rewards those economies with large and cumbersome agricultural sectors, and penalises those with small and efficient systems.

Chirac's home support is at an all time low, and those who can strike on a whim hold the reigns; Blair has just been returned to power (albeit by an electorate still unconvinced by Europe). This is domestic politics played out in Brussels, but ideologically Blair has the high ground. Were countries to be rewarded for what they put in initially, and get out ultimately, from European trade, and if this meant Britain ended with no credit from the EU directly, although increased trade (and hence taxes) Blair would quite rightly be happy. Chirac (and his farmers) would not.

The General Election

I don't have much to say about what was, as in the previous two, a fairly mundane campaign and a wholly anticipated result. Within the limits always going to be imposed by the farcical British electoral system - in which the Conservatives can gain more votes than Labour but fewer seats, or the Lib Dems have a fifth of the vote but only a tenth of Parliament - the result was very pleasing.

Sitting on the fence, by Stephen Von Der Heyde [From BBC News: In Pictures]The Conservatives did not get in, and thus can not kick those millions (or is it merely thousands?) of immigrants back to where they belong (a war zone on the other side of the globe will do very nicely, thank-you); the Lib Dems achieved their best result in modern political history, and will have learnt the valuable lesson for next time that they need to focus on - and will gain by - splitting not only the Labour vote, but the Conservative vote as well; and with his reduced majority Tony Blair will no longer be able to govern with such presidential style, and those bills which his party disagrees with (perhaps because they are bad bills, TB?) may now get filtered out, regardless of the lashes of the Whips.

Veritable Veritas

So, Robert Kilroy Silk has set up a new party dedicated to restoring Britain's proper relationship with the rest of Europe. One presumes, then, that by choosing the name Veritas for the party, it will be following in the footsteps of the first great European integrationist, Julius Caesar, who introduced the word into the English (or rather, that heterogeneous hybrid of French, Saxon, American, Latin, Greek) language in the first place.

Reasons to be Cheerful?

Life as a liberal on the newsgroups isn't much fun any more. It is difficult to continue to express doubts about the unstable situation in Iraq without being accused of possessing too many "dollops of mournfulness and a soupcon of shit-did-I-have-to-be-right- schadenfraude"; to continue to condemn Bush for his injudicious actions is equivalent to being a bad loser who believes the vote in the US was rigged; to argue why, objectively, Susan Sontag or Edward Said were not a unintelligent idiots regardless of the "rightness" (or not) of their opinions is to be accused of turning them into "martyrs" of the far left; to suggest that it is wrong for religious groups to be permitted to censor drama in the theatres and television is to be an "arty-farty" who conceals racism behind unthinking protests "in the name of art".

Yet behind the screens of cliche (why are all liberals by definition "arty-farty"; are there no "arty-farty" conservatives?) and accusations of a moral superiority complex, perhaps the sheer level of antagonism does demonstrate something positive. Perhaps, with liberals in the minority in the US, the uncanny ability of crowds to be make the correct judgement of the course of an uncertain future is going to shine through again. There are reasons to be cheerful, and there are genuine reasons liberals may appear out of touch with the times.

For it is surely inconceivable that Bush could take unilateral action against Iran or Syria, on which his sights, following his State of the Union Address, are clearly set. Garnering popular support in the US would be challenging, but not beyond their rhetorical strategies: just ramp up Homeland alert to "red!" But he certainly would not, since Blair and Hoon explicitly denied the possibility of military action against these two states before the Iraq war, find an ally in the UK. And even if America did act without a "coalition of the willing," this would undermine claima that this is a global (for which read, English-speaking) war on terror. Diplomacy must, therefore, be the only feasible way forward. Equally, as the War on Terror extends from a temporary snap reaction, to a campaign and a culture of action, as it is seen to be taking a grip on the international circuits of terrorism, so the courts in the US and the UK can feel increasingly confident of restoring due judicial process, without being accused of undermining national security. Finally, the coincidence of Arafat's death pulls the rug from the grounds of "no deals with terrorists" on which the US and the UK avoided engaging with the Middle East peace process.

So, for the next six months, liberalism's on hold. And if Iraq descends into anti-democratic chaos, well, shit happens, and do say I didn't warn you.