What's wrong with the mainstream media? Westminster Skeptics debate

That comatose science fiction writer and his dystopian fever dream I keep writing about has been stirring of late. Giant solar flares and supermoons exert malign invisible forces. Planet Earth splits apart and shifts its axis. Middle Eastern tyrants cling on to power while the West short-circuits itself into a state of paralysis: to act or not to act? All that oil would come in handy now that nuclear is screwed and we await the outcome of Fukushima. But how do we justify armed intervention in Libya's civil war while turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia sending troops into Bahrain? Oh and Niall Ferguson continues his long march back to Empire on Sunday night TV, gland in hand, enlightenment values in retreat.

Monday's Westminster Skeptics debate turned its attention to the media that brings us the news and shapes our views about such events. Just how bad is the mainstream media? asked our host, David Allen Green, judge in this year's Orwell Prize for blogging.

On call to answer him at the Old Monk Exchange pub were journalist Laurie Penny, columnist Suzanne Moore, lawyer Mark Lewis, resigned Star writer Richard Peppiatt, and yours truly.

Bumped at the last minute into going on first, I opened with my personal experience. I had wanted to talk about the shameful way the media had allowed the Tories free reign to rewrite history and blame the deficit on Labour (only partly true), as bankers and global recessions were forgotten, leaving us with perhaps the biggest class fight our lifetime. Expecting others closer to the student fightback to take this up in their contributions, I pursued another line that disturbs me: the hypocrisy of the media when it comes to free speech, and growing sinophobia. Niall Ferguson may have featured.

I am a Chinese dissident. In late 2009, I found myself banned in the media for arguing a line oppositional to the state’s agenda. The state happened to be the UK under Labour, the media was the Guardian, and the isssue was climate change as thrashed out at the Copenhagen summit. (More here and here.)

Banned by both the Guardian Comment is Free (har!) and the Great Firewall of China, I was once mightily pissed off but am now beginning to understand what a great position this is to be in. Skint and with my skills underexploited, at least I don't have to toe no steenkin' party or editorial line, or court an audience. My mind is free (as far as false consciousness under capitalism will allow, comrade), and my opinions are my own.

I gave further examples of the Yellow Peril fears that stalk academia nuts and the media, not just the blatant China-bashing diversion away from the Danish treaty stitch-up by the rich nations, or Niall Ferguson suggesting the Chinese were responsible for the opium wars, but the sniggering fit on Twitter from one Guardian editor who thought the photo of Morrissey having a cat on his head was the most remarkable thing about a prominently plugged article in which he said the Chinese were a subspecies. And that Sherlock episode.

The point I was trying to make was that the liberal media are slipping in all kinds of poison, whereas we sort-of-know what the tabloids get up to, as Richard Peppiatt would tell us most entertainingly.

After a long enough time of being compelled to act like a champion prick on the Daily Star, with no regard for the truth or harmonious race relations, Peppiatt finally bit the hand that had fed him and wrote this resignation letter to proprietor Richard Desmond, copying in the Guardian.

Funny and self-deprecating, Peppiatt deserved a somewhat warmer welcome than he got from Laurie Penny, who tore him off a strip for his past behaviour. While collusion with PRs who service the slebs is pretty nauseating, he had, after all, added to the gaiety of the nation by getting up Richard Desmond's nose, and provided some parties with the opportunity to pressure the PCC to investigate claims of Islamophobia. Better late than never.

There followed contributions about the truly awful state of phone hacking by the press, mention of Chomsky from Suzanne, and tales of careers tainted by fancy canapés, the dangers of being recognised as a famous person, and how anything more than a basic living wage is spoiling journalists.

So what are the aims of the media in these interesting times? In the second half, when the discussion was opened to the floor, I said I thought they were supposed to hold power to account, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I quoted my friend Dan Hind, who'd noted that the US government had said, 'communications is not just a business ... the mass media transmit and help establish the country's shared values.' Dan also wrote, 'The broadcast & print media have amply shown that when they are faced with determined and powerful lobby groups. they cannot provide the bulk of the population with a tolerably accurate account of the world.'

So what do we have instead? In my notes, I wrote 'STIR-FREUD CHINESE PENIS' because it appears that dark unconscious compulsions are at work. It does look as if the liberal media is terrified of the Chinese male penis. Maybe even the Chinese female penis, coz we are evidently built differently.

When a top British intellectual can call for Westerners to 'Lock up your daughters' because testosterone-maddened Chinese are headed this way and no-one thinks this even worthy of comment, then we have already hit the skids and have no rubber left to burn.

Not that what I thought mattered a toss. No-one on the panel or in the audience or anyone who commented in the blogs or on Twitter picked up the fact that one of their own had been banned in the very mainstream media which was under discussion. So I shall consider hiring myself out as a Ninja pundit in future.

And fuck the mainstream media.

Apart from BBC Radio 4 which is lovely and has commissioned two more programmes from me.

Thanks to Louise for taking the pic.

Working for the Clampdown: Niall Ferguson's testosterone theory of history

'Dominate, dominate, dominate.' No, not an S&M dalek, but Niall Ferguson on the telly. I lost count of how many times this word, or variations thereof, came up in the first five minutes of Episode One of Ferguson's Channel 4 series, Civilisation: Is the West History?

Coming on like an Oxbridge Jeremy Clarkson, Ferguson promises an explanation as to why the West is in decline and about to be overtaken by Asia, as represented by China in the first programme. However, instead of presenting a cool economic and political analysis of history since 1420 when China was the most advanced nation in the world and England was a 'septic isle', this heavyweight intellectual rammed home a barrage of triumphalist tub-thumping which quite startled me. His nostalgia for Empire, as once observed by an astute Eric Hobsbawm, was cranked up to eleven as he attempted to nail his viewers to the headboard.

Fear of the Yellow Peril evidently stalks academia, and Ferguson stoked himself up to confront the threat of the Other.

Much of his thesis seems predicated on the supremacy of the penis because, on Planet Ferguson, the human cock is central to his might-is-right narrative. It's all eunuchs (them) and size (us) and grrr ... He may think that the overblown use of macho terms is punching (see what I did it there, 'pushing' being far too effete?) buttons in his audience which will identify him with the power he craves, but there's a danger of thus drawing attention to what he lacks.

Achieving patronising machismo in one tiny phrase, 'Killer Apps', the first of his six apps, 'Competition', is the theme of this opening programme, so I laid back and thought of England while Fergy strutted his stuff.

I recognised some of his reading material. Ferguson is able to draw on 1421 and 1434 by Gavin Menzies for his enthralling account of China's massive 15th-century Ming Dynasty fleet: a veritable ocean-going city, while much of his list of China's achievements in science, agriculture and warfare can be found in Robert Temple's masterful The Genius of China (Joseph Needham). This, plus the superficial nature of his enquiry, gives the unfortunate impression that little information has been gleaned from original research but has instead been sourced from best-sellers and airport potboilers.

Following an amazing period of voyage and discovery, when vast 400-foot ships sailed as far as Africa, and possibly further to the Americas and Greenland, the new Emperor issued an order in 1424 that China clam up.

I eagerly awaited an explanation as to why China closed down in the 15th century. Was it fiscal troubles? Squabbling in court? Wars in Annam (Vietnam) proving to be too expensive? And the master's answer? 'We may never know.' But Niall, honey, you're paid to at least come up with a likely answer.

At this point he must have been experiencing performance anxiety, but nonetheless on he ploughed. His next trick: a brief dismissal of the opium wars as a reaction to something done by China to the British, as if the Brits were mere passive unwilling participants, thereby absolving them of any responsibility ... "We got the coffee houses," he says, "while China got the opium dens." Admire the cunning linguistic gymnastics, distancing Britain from its role as drug pusher-in-chief.

The opium wars were airily dismissed as 'retaliation' for an 'over-zealous official' who had the temerity to 'burn' the Britishers' opium. The 'over-zealous official' happens to be Governor-General Lin Zexu, something of a hero to many Chinese for his bid to stem the tide of opium, about 1,400 tons of it per year, but Niall couldn't bring himself to even give him a name. (And the opium wasn't burnt for obvious reasons: it was dissolved in water, salt and lime and dumped into the sea.) But what's a little drug addiction when there's cash to be made?

'Size isn't everything,' Fergy growls manfully. Hence his admiration for tiny Portugal's Vasco da Gama, who wrested the spice trade from the Arabs and other Easterners in what he tortuously calls the 'first spice race'. Ba-doom! Never mind that da Gama set up trading posts in the East with 'ruthlessness and downright nastiness', you can smell the envy. 'G'wan my son. Who's the daddy?' as Fergy might have thought but thankfully never said. At least not in this programme.

Portugal was followed by Spain, Holland, France and then England which, in 1635, sent its first ship to Chinese waters. 'With each new trading post, Western capitalism uploaded its killer app of competition.' Western lust for money made the interlopers 'hungry enough to kill for it.' Good grief, where's the competition in the bloody brutality this entailed? Is this his definition of competition?

Venice, Frankfurt, Lubek and London wanted their own 'autonomy'. Small was beautiful, according to Fergy, because it meant competition between states. But it was still within a great schtonking Western capitalist system. So not exactly competing systems, then.

Chaos can produce energy, and Karl Marx approved of the productive energies released by the early competitive stages of capitalism. However, Marx saw that the system contained the seeds of its own destruction, and predicted that capitalism would be its own gravedigger. For many of us being chewed up by this great juggernaut, this is true: even if it does mutate and survive, it will be for the benefit of a shrinking number at the top, not humankind as a whole. Capitalism took us out of feudalism and makes a better springboard to a more humane system than it does a place to stop and ossify.

Fergy fetishises capitalist competition out of context, out of time. 'By being divided, the West was able to rule the world', he says, as if this is a good thing on its own. He wants this 'killer app' applied as a principle where we are all atomised and competing against each other for dwindling resources. Haven't we moved on from this barbarism?

Casual racism aside, and noting that slavery was at no point even mentioned, Fergy's crowing about the success of capitalism — despite 2008's catastrophic and ongoing recession — may be considered by some to be short-sighted, out-of-touch and perhaps even a tad corrupt. As others have pointed out, we are only now beginning to feel the effects of a recession with its roots in the untrammelled 'competition' of the banks since they were deregulated by Reagan and his fellow Milton Friedman acolytes.

Seaumas Milne writes:

... there is a determined attempt in Britain to restore the economic model so comprehensively discredited in the crash of 2008. ... the banks' survival might depend on the greatest public handouts and guarantees in history.

In Wisconsin, collective bargaining rights have just been removed, while we face devastating cuts to our services in the UK. Right now, it is the working class and proletarianised middle classes who are paying for the bankers' crisis, capitalising the ruling business class. Where is the competition here?

Ferguson glorifies the nasty, brutish and short values of Hobbes in a world of every man for himself, dog-eat-dog, devil take the hindmost. You know what happened to civilisation? Masters of the Universe like Ferguson ate it.

Perhaps the key to Niall and his strange obsessions is to be found in the latest issue of Newsweek. In a piece about the gender imbalance in China, titled 'Men Without Women: The ominous rise of Asia’s bachelor generation', he writes:

That has scary implications. Remember, most of Hemingway’s stories in Men Without Women are about violence. They feature gangsters, bullfighters, and wounded soldiers. The most famous story is called simply “The Killers". It may be that the coming generation of Asian men without women will find harmless outlets for their inevitable frustrations, like team sports or videogames. But I doubt it. Either this bachelor generation will be a source of domestic instability, whether Brazilian-style crime or Arab-style revolution—or, as happened in Europe, they and their testosterone will be exported. There’s already enough shrill nationalism in Asia as it is. Don’t be surprised if, in the next generation, it takes the form of macho militarism and even imperialism. Lock up your daughters.

Once upon a time, such paranoia would have earnt you a spell of therapy or a nice basket-weaving holiday. Nowadays it gets you a TV series. Funny old world. No wonder civilisation's going down the pan.

Looks like de Niall is a river in Egypt.

In the Evening Standard, Civilisation: The West and the Rest is imperial history without the nasty bits by Alex Von Tunzelmann

Glorious British Imperialism in action or bullying by gunboat diplomacy? 'China's Age of Fragility' by Robert Bickers in History Today.

Ken Livingstone challenges Niall Ferguson on the Tory cuts.

Guardian review 25th March 2011

Review of Nial Ferguson's Channel 4 series, China: Triumph and Turmoil, 12 March 2012

Niall Ferguson threatens to sue London Review of Books writer over unfavourable review in the LA Times.

Julia Lovell on The Opium War

No lead from Camden councillors on anti-cuts

Last night's Camden Council budget meeting

A lively 1,200-strong march from Mornington Crescent through the backstreets of Camden to the Town Hall was followed by a protest as cowardly council held their final budget meeting behind closed doors.

A thick yellow line of police prevented the protesters entering the public gallery meaning that the vote was taken in secret. Luckily, one activist from Beyond Clictivism, Tim Hardy, managed to get in with a handful of others and Tweet reports using the #camden hashtag from the meeting, exposing what a sham of democracy this was.

"over £100,000,000 in reserves but they refuse to use them to protect the vulnerable", he tweets, and your blood runs cold at the level of cowardice in the council's quisling complicity.

'It was painful to witness Labour’s spineless failure to take a stand,' writes our intrepid reporter at the blog, aghast at the empty public gallery and the even emptier hearts and minds of the robo-councillors. Apparently a Green councillor was the only one to vote against the cuts.

Harpy Marx has some thorough reportage at her website with photos and now some great videos. In her third video, hospital worker Candy Udwin reports back on the meeting to the remaining protesters, and actor Roger Lloyd Pack urges councils to refuse to sign off on the cuts. The same old tired argument is that if Labour doesn't implement the cuts then Eric Pickles and his Tory cohort will set the cuts at an even more devastating level. But as Pack points out, "if they refused to vote this budget in they would set a ball rolling that would be impossible to stop. They'd be national heroes and would set an example for the rest of the country."

Wisconsin and the UK students have set the bar which our elected representatives miserably fail to match.

Labour — putting the 'u" into spine.

Afterwards, about fifty protesters blocked Marylebone Road outside St Pancras for an hour, dodging angry taxis and white van man who tried to drive through while the police watched and did nothing. The fight goes on. Watch out for the anti-cuts space.



UPDATE: "No ifs, no buts, no public sector cuts." "London, Cairo, Wisconsin. We will fight, we will win." Excellent short film from thegabber.com via Open Democracy.

'Go Wisconsin. You Are fighting For All Of Us'

'Go Wisconsin. You Are fighting For All Of Us'.

So says Chicago trade unonist Clancy Segal in the Guardian today. And he is totally right.

So appalling is the onslaught of capital on labour that even the police have joined the 600 protesters occupying the State Capitol building, while outside thousands of workers brave the freezing conditions in sleeping bags.

Clancy Segal writes:

This assault is essentially an ambush of the working middle class. It is openly financed by Big Money, like the hard-right multibillionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who also fund – courtesy of the US supreme court's Citizens United decision – the Tea Party groups that supply anti-labour's ideological storm troopers. ... it comes as no surprise when Jeffrey Cox, Indiana's deputy attorney general, calls Wisconsin public sector workers "thugs" against whom he advocates deadly force. "Use live ammunition," he tweeted.

The fight is on. I'm going to my council's budget protest in Camden tonight to demand they do what their voters and ordinary people across the world are donig at the moment: represent us and fight back. Do not do their dirty work for them.

In Hackney, six councillors have signed a letter against the cuts. They write:

Some think we should protest - and wait for the next election. Our view is that we cannot wait until the damage is done. Nobody voted to privatise the NHS or make our communities pay for the bankers’ crisis. The government has no mandate. The bankers’ greed caused the crisis - they and their rich friends should pay for it through targeted taxes and a crack down on the tax loopholes used by millionaires and big corporations. As Labour Councillors, along with supporters of the Labour Representation Committee, we support a campaign to defeat the policies of this government through public protest, opposition and defiance. ... We would like to see local Councils across London leading the charge and refusing to adopt cuts budgets as a result of government enforced policies and producing a Needs Budgets to show what should be funded.

It's not without a little pride that I read the Wisconsin movement was inspired by the UK Uncut actions. Well done, guys and gals.

Wisconsin and Hackney are drawing on the power unleashed in recent events in the Middle East and picked up by UK Uncut. Carry on, you are doing this for us and we are there with you.

Jeff Beck's Rock N Roll Party DVD launch

Anna Chen and Jeff Beck

A busy week included a proper old-school lig at Jeff Beck's Rock 'n' Roll Party DVD launch, and helping to present pictures from my late father's archive at the National Maritime Museum (more on that tomorrow).

Thursday's rock lig spectacular for the launch of Jeff Beck's latest DVD was fun and frolicks from the start. Congregating at Westminster Pier with assorted musos, journos and music biz bods, our Thames Clipper was held up by an animated Ronnie Wood pleading with the crew not to cast off (or is that knitting?). He disappeared, we finally set off, only find ourselves drifting snoozily across the river to the London Millennium Eye pier on the South Bank where Woody's girlfriend had ended up.

With Woody and his snowy-mink-clad paramour on board, there followed a fast booze-laden trip through the dream-like vista of night-time London all lit up in colour like a showgirl in spangles, past the monstrous Shard-enfreude tower looking like the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, to disembarkation at the O2 pier.

We were most generously fed and watered by Harvey Goldsmith, who now runs the British Music Experience under the billion-quid tent that is the Millennium Dome, as well as managing Mr Beck. I dunno about our publicly-funded edifice celebrating the best of British: the Dome looks like any shabby High Street, with all the same chain-sore eateries and coffee houses.

But the BME is a great mixture of museum and music venue. Luckily, it's also ideal for parties. Like this one. Sitting one table up from Jeff Beck, Cleo Rocas, Woody and other starry bods, we watched an edited version of Jeff's 'Rock 'n' Roll Party DVD, which was recorded at the Iridium Club in New York, where legendary guitarist Les Paul used to play.

The onscreen atmosphere was hot, stoked up to incendiary by some awe-inspiring guests such as Gary US Bonds, Brian Setzer and Trombone Shorty.

Regular Beck associate Imelda May possesses the warmest womanly voice: rich, textured and expressive like the Old School torch singers. Her "Cry Me A River" sent shivers up my spine, and her handsome rockabilly husband, Darrel Higham — also a champion vocalist, rhythm guitarist and Jeff's musical director for this occasion — could be seen gazing lovingly at his talented missus.

Peter Gunn, with the entire ensemble of Imelda's band and guest musicians – including Blues Brothers baritone saxophonst Blue Lou – was enormous fun.

I had a chat with Jeff afterwards and said how much I like the way he treats his female collaborators with such obvious respect: singer Imogen Heap, bassists Tal Wilkenfeld and Rhonda Smith, and now Imelda May, have all enjoyed the spotlight sharing Jeff's stage.

'I'm glad you noticed that,' he said. 'Women are smart. We are stupid.' He asked me if I'd seen some documentary film about the Spitfire women, and sang their praises to the wild blue sky where they flew so high. This is a guy who loves, likes and admires women. And if that's not catnip for smart cookies like wot I yam, I dunno what is.

We returned by launch along the beautiful Thames, past the scary Shard, and were deposited blissfully pissed back at Westminster having had a great night.

Nice one, guys.

Jeff Beck, Paul Jones and Charles Shaar Murray

Orange Tone: a poem about perma-tanned politicians

When I started to write this poem, I had in mind the startling image of a sleek well-oiled Philip Gould stepping out of a sliver limousine to attend a £600-a-head Labour dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel in Park Lane which was being picketed by us, the Socialist Alliance in its heyday.

If it is the remit of the artist to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, Gould got my impulse to do the latter cooking up a storm.

That was the original image that began this poem, along with a light-hearted thread on Facebook about whether there were any new rhymes for the word 'orange'. Along with 'silver' and 'month' (thanks, Ian S), I recognised this as a hard one ever since I watched Witchypoo sing 'Oranges, Poranges' in 'H.R. Puff'n'stuff' in the 1970s.

As it should, the poem took on a life of its own as I set out to write it. Images of other oleaginous politicians corrupted by their vanity — or their vanity expressing the inner rot — crept in. I'm sure they'll occur to you too as you read Orange Tone.

Oops, nearly forgot to thank Greg B and Ian W for 'sporange'. Heh!

Orange Tone
by Anna Chen 17 Feb 2011

I never could understand
Men who top up their tan with elan
Turn tangerine polished with Mr Sheen
The shiny surface of kidney beans
Looking mean as mahogany would

if no longer home for orangutans
Felled instead for rich men's dens
Men blasted red under UV rays
Glow in the dark, pulsate in the haze
Like zits preparing to pop

Like rotten tomatoes straining to drop
Their sporange burns orange, their blood turns to glop
It would be a fair cop if they weren't very tanned
Leather hides hiding how bland they am
Blancmange with a scab on the top

Unhinged by the heat, derailed in the raw,
Carapace of lies the colour of gore
No, that's not it,
The colour of shit when you've nibbled a week-old prawn
Caught at the arse of a waste pipe at dawn
'Let's diarise'
I like that hue
Not too, too ... ecru?
Remember, contender
It's 'tall, dark and handsome',
Not 'beige, bleached and winsome'

Winsome Losesome
Ditched his pallor for crimson
Flashed a smile that was toothsome
Exponentialised his income.
Travelled the dark zone
Split schizoid twosome
Nicotinised flotsam and jetsam
Oh farce in the mirror,
Who wouldn't want some?
His outsides were wholesome
His secrets were gruesome

What are you hiding apart from your skin
Is there some sort of sin going on you should bin?
How could you sweeten this little hand
Shoved in a blender with marzipan?
That red, that blood, it's not even yours
Extracted from virgins to tighten your pores,
Tighten your wallet exploding with wad
And now you've found god
Have you fallen in love with your maker?
Bully for you, Orange Tone, you foul faker.

Orange Tone can be found in Anna Chen's collection, Reaching for my Gnu, paperback and e-book from Aaaargh! Press.