Red Pepper » Jeremy Hardy

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about the state

admin — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 21:03:40 +0000

I will admit to having drawn a morsel of comfort from the defeat of the last government. I foolishly hoped grumpy libertarians in the Tory fold might consolidate their blossoming romance with Liberty and team up with the Lib Dems to restrain the ever-growing state. Not the state we like, which is about schools and hospitals, but the other one – the one that spies on us, beats us, curtails our right to protest and treats the criminal law as a plaything.
In fairness, Theresa May is no more authoritarian than Jack Straw or John Reid. Indeed, she didn’t have their Stalinist origins. Tankies change, but their methods don’t always. State capitalists become market capitalists, but retain their affection for secret policemen. For those enamoured with the Soviet Union, the problem was never that the British state was oppressive but that it was oppressing the wrong people. In an ideal world – one run by them – the state would have been spying on enemies of the Party; instead it spied on CND, anti-apartheid activists, radical vicars and even Labour governments.
Some old commies have moved so far to the right that they pretend those things never happened, or quip that it was just cold war public-school silliness, and that nothing like it happens now. Most of them embraced the New Labour project of restraining the state by putting it entirely at the service of capitalism, whether in subsidising low pay, marketising public services or battering anarchists. And here we are, with capital and government pooling their resources to crush anyone who pops up to resist war or climate change or poverty wages or gangster banking or the security apparatus itself. A right state we’re in, as I was bound to say.

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about people’s concerns

admin — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 13:55:03 +0000

I am not in receipt of any benefits, apart from roads of varying quality and occasional firework displays. And policing, I suppose. And a fire service, should I need it. And museums, parks and art galleries. And free healthcare. And the advantages that have flowed from a free education to tertiary level. And some other bits and bobs. But that’s it.
So, by rights, I should be livid that asylum seekers are given a free house on arrival, that prisons are like holiday camps and that unemployed single mothers are paid more than the prime minister. Except I know that these things are not true.
I don’t wish to suggest that people are stupid, merely ignorant. As a rule, only people who are in receipt of benefits, or who administer them, know how much they are. No one who’s never been inside a prison has any grasp of the realities of incarceration. Only a refugee knows what it’s like to be one.
But most people are not cold-blooded and are quite shocked when they learn how low benefits actually are. If they were to spend one night in a cell, they would cry throughout it. When asked what sentences they think are appropriate for various offenders, they show themselves to be more liberal than judges. And if they were to meet an asylum seeker and hear their story, they would probably want to open their own wallets to help them out.
There are three types of ‘you couldn’t make it up’ stories: the ones that are about very rare instances, the ones that are misrepresented, and the ones that are made up. The duty of politicians of conscience is to say so. To listen, yes, for a bit. Then to say, ‘I hear your concerns, but they’re bollocks.’ That’s just common sense.

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about the right to exist

admin — Tue, 07 May 2013 11:34:08 +0000

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cannot easily attack the state of Israel because he doesn’t recognise it. I don’t know why he doesn’t recognise Israel; it’s the same shape as Palestine, give or take – mainly take, obviously.
I jest; it is Israel’s right to exist that he refuses to recognise. But should people recognise it? Well, it does exist, so it’s childish to pretend otherwise. But whether states have rights is another matter. Whether people have rights is a moral rather than a biological question. The right to statehood is not like a liver. People are not born with one. Saying someone has a right to something just means you reckon they should have it.
But at least such judgements apply more sensibly to human beings than they do to geo-political entities. We’d all say a person has a right to a home, but we wouldn’t say their home has rights. Let’s imagine all Israel’s critics recognising its right to exist – although why should they say that if they don’t believe it? One can accept a fact on the ground without thinking it was historically right. But anyway, let’s say everyone accepts that Israel has a right to exist. That would still not guarantee its existence, in its present form or any other.
Did Yugoslavia have a right to exist? Does the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? We once laid claim to the South as well, and might not always be able to claim the North. And what if Scotland leaves the United Kingdom? Or Wales? Or England? What if we become a republic or we’re sold to America as Walt Disney’s Cockney World of Adventures? States come and go, and their populations change. Will Israel exist as presently constituted in 30 years’ time? It seems unlikely. Israelis will still exist, but that’s a different matter.

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about entitlement

admin — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:00:15 +0000

The prime minister bemoans what he observes among the poor as a sense of entitlement. In reality, it’s something most of us have but, in the mythology of government, it is at its most acute among workshy, dysfunctional people on benefits. Irritable Duncan Syndrome, the workhouses and pensions secretary, believes the link between labour and income has been severed in their minds by a dependency on the state, leaving them unappreciative of the respectable life of powerless exploitation available to them through the jobs market.
By turns, we on the left keenly observe the overweening hubris and self-assuredness of him and the other born‑to‑rule hoorays poncing about in Downing Street. There is no greater culture of entitlement to be witnessed. Well might we muse upon the entitlement of a chancellor who, upon his father’s passing, will be titled.
And we, for our part, believe unflinchingly in our right to stroll safely through well-paved streets, with as many state-educated children as we choose to produce, on our way to a free world music festival in our freshly-landscaped municipal park.
In our defence, we believe it should be an opportunity for all. We don’t believe in exclusive rights. Perhaps the strongest and most deluded sense of entitlement is the belief among the rich that they or their forebears acquired their wealth by hard graft and natural justice. Most deluded of all are the arrivistes, who believe their earnings are something they’ve actually earned.
It’s not work that makes you rich. It’s money.

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about the death of the coalition

admin — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:00:50 +0000

It is a sign of the sterility of Westminster politics that the best Ed Miliband can do is to make mischief by exploiting the coalition’s most visceral divisions, and that the most visceral divisions in the coalition have been about the constitution and the European Union. These dry and tedious matters are the two issues that have derailed the Liberal-Conservative love‑train, emboldened the Tory right and fatally weakened both Clegg and Cameron.
Tories delight in a spat with Brussels, because upsetting foreigners is second only to killing them in stimulating the pleasure centres of the Conservative Party. Liberals, on the other hand, love Europe. They adore anything continental: the cheeses, the voting systems, anything. Their party’s whole raison d’etre is the vast superiority of French campsites. I refer, obviously, to sleek, modern Liberals, not the old-fashioned radicals who were content with a good cheddar, a thermos and a wet walking holiday, reading a biography of Joe Grimond.
And to be fair to Liberals, all of them have always loved democracy. The left is ambivalent about it. We pay lip-service to it but can’t help suspecting that people might be too stupid to realise the high regard we have for them. And Conservatives, despite belligerently enthusing about western democratic values, have never truly been convinced by this country’s experiment with universal suffrage. Their greatest terror is the mob. That’s probably why they want the troops home from Afghanistan. They don’t want to be left without a squadron of dragoons when the millworkers get restless.
If they were honest with themselves, they’d admit that they were perfectly happy with the House of Lords as it used to be. Conservatives like things that are inherited: money, land, property, titles. Most of them even have hereditary disorders.

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about competition

admin — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:00:15 +0000

Competition is not healthy. I enjoyed the summer’s sport as much as the next lazy asthmatic. I felt proud of my city, the drama was exhilarating and many athletes had an endearing humility or cheekily-harmless hubris. And it must have been irksome to racists. Mo ran so well that hardly a soul in the land questioned his nationality. It’s only right he should run for the country in which he lives: America. I jest.
But watching the long-distance running, I started to wish each athlete had run separately, unaware of how others had run. All the ‘intelligent’ and ‘talented’ stuff seemed to involve messing up the opponents, deliberately tiring them, making them run at a pace they didn’t like, getting in front to slow the race down, holding back to let others burn themselves out. It’s quite cynical, and realising that is like the moment you realise boxing is genuinely fighting.
I’m being too serious; sport isn’t important. That’s the joy of it. People can be competitive because nothing much is at stake. And competitiveness is not the whole story. Courage, dedication and the pursuit of excellence are involved and all have value in other areas of life. But competition doesn’t, so why inculcate kids with it?
Did sibling rivalry make you happy? Would you like to be treated by a more competitive doctor? Would the roads be safer with more jostling for position? Do you want hypermarkets to win the battle with local shops? Do you want your kids fattened on competitively-farmed fried chicken? Do you want the sky full of cheap flights and greenhouse gases? Do you want elections determined by a tiny margin of difference among the runners and the amount of money spent on them? Does it matter that this isn’t the best column you’ve ever read?

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about greed

admin — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:00:15 +0000

Judging the rich is like judging the poor: if you’ve never been in their situation, you don’t know what you’d do if you were. But we like to think that the reason people have too much money is that they are morally flawed, and that the world of finance is so morally flawed that it’s almost impossible to understand. You’d have to be incredibly greedy or have a personality disorder even to find it interesting.
And we all like to hear of a big pot of unpaid tax that could be put to good use. All we have to do is lever it out of the hidden hands of the morally repugnant. Just as the left pretends that every penny of dodged tax would otherwise have been spent on hospitals (by George Osborne?), the right, I presume, has it earmarked for weapons and the bankrolling of the private sector.
Because conservatives especially bemoan immorality. They would have us believe that a creeping and recent venality is blighting capitalism’s good name. Greed and sharp practice have replaced philanthropy and propriety, goes the narrative.
In fairness to conservatives, they have a long tradition of economic intervention that stands in contrast to the economic‑liberal theory that everything sort of sorts itself out somehow. Tories are close enough to capitalism to know that it doesn’t actually work – not without a lot of help. They also know it has nothing to do with morals. In a market-driven society, it is a tribute to human decency that anyone behaves with any morals at all.
Furthermore, while it’s fun to point out that the worst tax-dodgers are always Tories, when Conservatives put financial gain before everything else, they are being entirely true to their principles.

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about the press

admin — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 10:00:58 +0000

I have never disliked the Sun as much as I dislike the Mail. I’ve always believed the latter to be more dangerous because its readers think it’s a proper newspaper. I don’t think Sun readers make that mistake.
Nor do I believe they pay much attention to its voting instructions. I remember that, in its Thatcherite heyday, an independent poll of readers revealed that most assumed the Sun was a Labour paper, which must have been both reassuring and disconcerting for the Labour Party at the time.
How a paper allied to what was nominally a party of the left might have delivered a verdict such as it did on Hillsborough is hard to imagine. That was in the days before Kelvin MacKenzie was re-invented as a loveable curmudgeon. His lies about Liverpool fans managed to shock without being surprising. The Sun had long been a vicious bag of hate and fiction. It continued to be so when it did start to support Labour.
Neither did the Mail or Express lighten up on travelling people or refugees when they fell in love with Tony Blair. The fact that they are read by so many people and that the country is not overrun with lynching parties must mean that, despite my second sentence, not all their readers take them seriously.
This is not to say the ‘quality’ right‑wing papers are covered in glory. The Telegraph is okay, so long as you know that a belief that the army should run the country informs even the punctuation, and that many of its readers use the word ‘abolitionist’ pejoratively. But the high-end News International papers are impossible to take seriously. The Kim family must passionately envy the Murdochs, wishing they got such an easy ride from the Pyongyang Times. No, it really is called that.

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about the jubilee

admin — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:27:33 +0000

Having read ‘Royal Babylon’, a phenomenal piece of writing by Heathcote Williams, on the website of the International Times, I am reminded that we have every reason to loathe the monarchy and yet have become inured to its existence. This is in part because of the way it has humanised itself.
Gone are the Germanic strangulated vowels and clipped consonants, to be replaced with the public-school cockney favoured by Tony Blair and Peaches Geldof. Prince William can kick a football about, with no apparent urge to pick it up and run for the touchline. Black people are glad-handed as often as possible, and even picked up if small and sick enough.
The royals seem pretty much like any other celebrities, and other celebrities relate to them as such. Is that Christopher Biggins or Princess Michael of Kent in the audience? Either way, they can take a joke, so long as it’s delivered in a spirit of ingratiating bonhomie.
And it’s all for charity. If Prince Charles can’t reach out to disenfranchised youths, raised on vast estates, surrounded by guns and having no hope of worthwhile employment, who can? And look at all those teenagers getting Iron Crosses as part of the Duke of Windsor’s award scheme.
Do we really want the bother of an elected president? Isn’t a Windsor a familiar and convenient alternative? In the same way, I’d rather my funeral were moderated by a vicar than have my corpse exploited by the humanists. However irrational religion might be, I prefer the diffident mumbling of a cleric to the outpourings of people so unrelentingly pleased with themselves. I’m serious about that.
Perhaps abolition of the monarchy isn’t a priority right now. We could get round to it when we get round to abolishing capitalism. Which reminds me…

Jeremy Hardy thinks… about Margaret Thatcher

admin — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 10:53:49 +0000

This is set to be Margaret Thatcher’s year. At the time of writing, she is still with us, but obits are being updated. I know this because I am sometimes asked to appear in programmes being prepared for posthumous broadcast. I refuse, because I have no wish to speak ill of the dead, even when they are still alive. But I’m sure all manner of people have lined up to pay homage, Tony Blair gushing, ‘She was the People’s Pinochet.’
No mention of her friendship with the Chilean mass murderer and torturer appears in the rather silly film The Iron Lady. Indeed, according to that version of history, her motivation in taking on General Galtieri was in part that he was a fascist. But, in common with her friend Reagan, fascist dictatorship wasn’t something she frequently held against people.
The one thing the film usefully reminds us of, as the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War descends upon us, is that she had sanctioned the winding-down of naval protection for the Falklands. The film might have gone further and shown that Argentina was being given a growing role in the future of the islands until they blew it by invading. In trying to use military force to rescue his popularity, Galtieri only succeeded in rescuing Thatcher’s. But in a sense, Argentina won the war. They got rid of their crazy, right-wing ruler; and we were stuck with ours for several more years.
In the end, it was her own party that ditched her, denying us the chance. Today, I bear her no malice. I’m sure she thought she was right. People generally do. But I’ll say it now rather than when her loved ones are grieving: she did terrible harm, and little of any merit.