Orange is not the only suit

Guantánamo Bay is a prison. They might call it a “detention camp”, or a “facility”, but it’s a prison, in Cuba, where people are held, and have been held since January 2002, during the panic after 9/11. It exists outside of US legal jurisdiction. The plan, under “war president” George W. Bush, was for it to operate outside of the tiresome Geneva Conventions, which held until 2006, when the Supreme Court ruined everything by conceding rights to certain protections under Article 3 (which offers “persons not taking active part in hostilities” immunity from various “outrages upon personal dignity” and “judicial guarantees … recognized as indispensable by civilised peoples”).

Amnesty International named Guantánamo a “gulag.” In January 2009, President Barack Obama promised to shut the ghoulish, lawless place down “within the year.” Historians will note that this promise was not fulfilled. Admittedly, this is mainly because a Republican congress blocked it, as it has successfully blocked anything approaching a commonsense debate or ruling since Obama was sworn in.

At a press conference in Washington this week, surely politically engorged by now in his second term, Obama said it was “not sustainable” to keep Guantánamo open. Never mind that it’s an international embarrassment, an insult to all of our freedoms, and a permanent stain on the United States’ standing in the world, that’s not enough of a sell. He had to resort to scare tactics (which is ironic, considering how much fear of fear itself lies at the heart of Guantánamo’s “open for business” status), warning that the gulag’s continued existence was a “recruitment tool” for extremists. So its effect on extremists who are not in the prison is the best reason for releasing those largely unconvicted, uncharged prisoners who are in it.

There are around 160 detainees still inside, rocking the orange jumpsuit of 21st century iconography. Many are now on hunger strike and of those 100 or so, 21 are being force fed. The main effort there currently is to keep its inmates alive. After ten years of institutionalised, unpoliced torture and outrages upon human dignity, it seems like small beer that the prisoners’ protest began over allegations that guards mistreated Qur’ans, rather than human beings, although torture comes in many and various forms, including psychological, emotional, religious and material.

Never mind that the so-called “terror suspects”  have not been charged with anything, half of them have been cleared for release. (Only five – five – have gone to trial.) So why are they all still there? It is an outrage. Obama has once again promised to shut it down. Why should we believe him? (And I speak as a non-American who totally bought into the “HOPE” he peddled in 2008.) “I am going to get my team to review everything that is currently being done in Guantánamo,” he said in that press conference, which is a bit like someone you’ve complained to on the phone telling you they will “escalate the issue” and give you a “ticket number”. There’s not much he can promise, I guess, other than to act “administratively” (the government is an administration), but how about acting “physically”? Just going down there and opening the gates, with a few helicopters waiting?

You may same I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. “I don’t want these individuals to die,” Obama said. Good. Guards are said to have attempted to “break the resolve” of the hunger strikers by moving them to single cells, for ease of monitoring. So they’re in solitary? That’s nice. Some of them have been there for the full 11 years, while the world turned without them, and their families started to forget what they looked like.

The Boston “terror attack” – a horrible tragedy whose attendant local and national panic led to some uneasy flag-waving triumphalism when one of the alleged perpetrators was dead, the other unable to speak in hospital – has put “terror suspects” back in the spotlight. But nobody’s rounding up Chechnyan immigrants and sending them in hoods to Cuba past the big sign reading, “You are now leaving US legal jurisdiction, have a nice stay!” So some progress has been made since the dark, dismal days of Bush.

But still Obama will need to win congressional support In order to close Guantánamo and release its inmates. He may not be able to pull it off, but if he doesn’t, it will be a stain on his presidency too. It’s easy for Americans, he said, to “demagogue the issue.” He’s an eloquent, persuasive president, liberal on the whole if not in totality, but if he can’t condemn this unsafe building, who the hell ever will?

According to the Guardian, which penned a stirring leader on the subject today (“An Indelible Stain”), the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said, “The president can order the secretary of defense to start certifying for transfer detainees who have been cleared, which is more than half the Guantánamo population.” The video of the press conference is here. I say: get to it.

Reprieve, the charity that makes this kind of thing its calling, provides an excellent Guantánamo timeline here.

Korean opportunities

What interesting connections we can make on this week’s telly on Telly Addict. Brushing Up On … British Tunnels with Danny Baker on BBC4 is essentially a middle-aged man reading out words he has written between some archive clips; Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States on Sky Atlantic (from Showtime in the US) is essentially a middle-aged man reading out words he has written between some archive clips; in Panorama: North Korea Undercover, easily the most talked about TV show of last week, reporter John Sweeney attempts, as does Stone, to get under the skin of a country whose propaganda is all-powerful (and in both cases, Stone and Sweeney risk excommunication from the nation which they criticise); 30 Rock‘s Season 6 finale, on Comedy Central, includes jokes – aired in May 2012 on NBC – about the totalitarian quirks of the North Korean regime; Modern Family, an imported US comedy not given to inter-textual cross-media jokes that are the stock-in-trade of 30 Rock, tries one on for size with a coda based on The Godfather on Sky1; and I also review new ITV three-parter The Ice Cream Girls, which has no link whatsoever with the other shows. Ah well. You can’t join everything up.

A few sentences

To the National Theatre on London’s South Bank on the first balmy evening of 2013 for an event laid on by the actor David Morrissey (who I can’t pretend I haven’t recently befriended) and his wife, the writer Esther Freud, to promote the good works of the charity Reprieve.

I’m not really used to these things, but the idea is to assemble a roomful of media and arts folk who find “a social” hard to resist and shamelessly talk up a charity with a view to either financial assistance, or some other payment in kind. I consider myself neither a mover nor a shaker, but the guest list turned out to include one or two affable giants of comedy whom I have the pleasure to know – Al Murray, Sean Hughes – as well as other familiar faces like Simon Mayo, Tracey MacLeod, Dan Maier and James Brown, so the terror of walking into a room on my own was quickly salved.

Also present: Olivia Colman, Polly Harvey, Peter Capaldi, Sam West, Tom Goodman-Hill, Sinead Cusack, Stephen Campbell Moore, Tom Hollander, Mariella Frostrup, Alain de Botton … here are some pics.

Reprieve’s aim is simple enough: to deliver justice and save lives. You shouldn’t really need a charity to cover those two things. But then, neither should you need a charity to prevent cruelty to animals or save the children, but that is the world we live in. Reprieve, founded by unstoppably energetic and courageous human-rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, describes itself as “a vibrant legal action charity … that punches well above its weight.” It only has 28 full-time staff, and yet its lawyers were among the first into Guantánamo Bay, a cause that has come to define the charity. They have acted for 83 prisoners there in total, 66 of whom have now been freed and 21 of whom are being assisted by Reprieve’s Life After Guantánamo (LAG) team.

Reprieve hates the death penalty. It hates drones. It does not believe in killing people, full stop. It also hates secret prisons and rendition, whether ordinary or extraordinary. (You’re getting the feeling that Reprieve has its work cut out in a post 9/11 world, and you’re right to.) The charity’s death penalty team have assisted hundreds of prisoners sentenced to death around the world and it knows how to use the media to the advantage of its various causes.

Let’s not be coy, it attracts a lot of celeb supporters, including the aforementioned, and David and Esther – who hosted the evening from behind the lectern and gave impassioned speeches; they also corralled actor chums to read out shocking statistics – and a number of big-name patrons including Vivienne Westwood, Alan Bennett and Jon Snow – and none of this glad-handing hurts.

It’s a serious business, of course. Clive Stafford Smith’s self-effacing but involving presentation was simply to describe his “average day”, which starts early and ends late, and often criss-crosses continents. Most of the trouble Reprieve seeks out is abroad, for self-evident reasons. We may live in a country whose compassion has been trampled underfoot by market-led politicians, but at least we don’t put prisoners to death. Our American cousins do. Although I learned last night that Pakistan has the most prisoners awaiting death in the world.

You can read more about Reprieve’s work here. It’s ongoing, it’s endless, and their to-do list isn’t going to get shorter any time soon. When the HOPE-defined President Obama reneges on his promise to close Guantánamo Bay, what HOPE is there? Well, it resides with Clive and his team.

Only this week I have been reading about waterboarding in two separate places: in the New Yorker, and a long article (“The Spy Who Said Too Much”) about John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower who spoke to the press about the torture used, specifically, on “high-value detainee” at Guantánamo Abu Zubaydah, a suspected Al-Qaeda lieutenant who was waterboarded 83 times, among other nasty “interrogation” techniques, and has never been charged with anything; and in Jason Burke’s The 9/11 Wars, which I’m still ploughing through and which has reached “the Surge” in 2007, by which time George W Bush was in the process of handing over power to his successor, who, to his credit, banned waterboarding. (If only that was the whole picture.)

I spend my days trying to write funny scripts. It’s what I was doing yesterday, and it’s what I’ll be doing today. But I think very seriously about serious matters, and I’m constantly haunted by the wickedness that men do, whether it’s leaving a nail bomb in a bin in Boston, setting fire to a house your own children are asleep in, or signing off on the torture of individuals from behind a desk. Obama is no angel. Blair was a warmonger. If leaders on the left can’t deliver us from evil, where do we turn?

Well, we turn to people like Clive Stafford Smith, whose selfless campaigning and tireless publicising are as much weapons in his peaceful armoury as his legal fleet-footedness. If I can pass on some of his sentiments, then I won’t have wasted another day on writing jokes.

Reprieve links:
Get involved
Buy stuff
Read about their successes

Have a look at this:

Or this:

Tramp the dirt down

You may recall the Elvis Costello song from his 1989 album Spike. It began:

I saw a newspaper picture from the political campaign
A woman was kissing a child, who was obviously in pain
She spills with compassion, as that young child’s face in her hands she grips
Can you imagine all that greed and avarice coming down on that child’s lips?

In 1989, Margaret Thatcher had been in power for ten years. Still riding high and roughshod over the remnants of our society. Within the year, she would be driven, tearfully, down Downing Street and away to a well remunerated dotage ($250,000 a year for being a “geopolitical consultant” for tobacco giant Philip Morris, anyone?), only latterly diminished by senility and a series of strokes. For anyone who remembers the 1980s, she looms large. She was the leader who wrote the instruction booklet for what David Cameron and George Osbourne are trying to do now: that is, to squeeze public services and sell off as much silver as possible to the private sector until we have a shareholder-run state which answers only to the bottom line.

She is dead now. Death was explicitly wished upon her many times, and not just in protest song, and now those casualties on the road to serfdom have their wish. Her loss is lamented by those on the right who regard her as a figurehead, an achiever, an icon. Some on the left are organising street parties, which seems a bit harsh now that she’s actually died. I wonder if Elvis Costello is planning a trip to St Paul’s. Maybe he has mellowed since 1989. They do say you get more right wing as you get older. I find I get more left wing.

I would love to rewrite history and say that I despised her and her monetarist policies from the day she swept to power in 1979, but I was 14 at the time, and not politically educated. My politics, such as they might have been described, were simply handed down from my father, the sort of benign provincial Tory who put his working-class background firmly behind him, reads the Telegraph and believes in lower taxes, but who is anything but a foaming-at-the-mouth old colonel. I thought of him then, and think of him now, as a gentle, fair-minded soul. I did not feel indoctrinated by him. But I had to leave home and get to London before a more informed and passionate politics overtook me.

Educated by the NME – hard to credit that by looking at it now, but in the early-to mid-80s it was powerfully polemical and driven by Marxist doctrine, like much of the best music of the era – I read a book from the library by Jeremy Seabrook about the failure of the Labour movement called What Went Wrong? and it set me on the path I’m still on today. It was actually fashionable to be left wing in that decade, and I don’t mean to make voting Labour seem like a hollow lifestyle choice, it’s just that it meant something more profound and full-blooded than a party-political cross in a box. It was tied in with CND, and the GLC, and Red Wedge, and the NME, and Anti-Apartheid and, in Scotland, with the SNP.

The zeitgeist was embodied by the 1930s protest song Which Side Are You On?, powerfully covered by Glaswegian folk firebrand Dick Gaughan in 1985 for the miners’ strike. You were either with Thatcher, or against her. To be against her was, in my experience, to be alive.

I was a student between 1983 and 1987. As a constituency, we were hardwired to bristle at Tory policy. Listen to the contempt Thatcher has for students, as related in her second memoir, The Path To Power, (this comes from a chapter on her years in the Dept of Education, 1970-74): “This was the height of the period of ‘student revolution’ … it is extraordinary that so much notice should have been taken of the kindergarten Marxism and egocentric demands which characterised it … the young were regarded as a source of pure insight into the human condition. In response, many students accordingly expected their opinions to be treated with reverence.”

She idolised Macmillan-government ingenue and national curriculum cheerleader Keith Joseph – and later, of course, brought him into her cabinet, where his education policies were so punishing, my Dad wrote a letter to the local paper complaining about them – and, in The Path To Power, she defends Joseph against charges of being a “mad eugenicist” after an infamous speech in 1974 at Edgbaston where he said that “our human stock” was “threatened” by mothers “pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5.” As far as she was concerned, “the speech sent out powerful messages about the decline of the family, the subversion of moral values and the dangers of the permissive society.” That the permissive society was tied up with the liberation of women, and that the “decline” of the family was a coded Tory way of encouraging women back into the kitchen helps us to understand why Margaret Thatcher was no feminist.

In an article she wrote in the Telegraph in January 1975 when she was shadow Education Secretary but challenging Ted Heath for the leadership, she defended what she called “middle class values” as “the encouragement of variety and individual choice, the provision of fair incentives … for skill and hard work, the maintenance of effective barriers against the excessive power of the state and a belief in the wide distribution of individual private property.” She ranged these against “socialist mediocrity.” She won the leadership by appealing to the Tory party’s misty-eyed nostalgia for these values, which, when you break them down, are about looking after yourself: “individual choice … individual private property.” She was, if nothing else, consistent, right through her reign, which began here.

In reading her autobiography, which ends as she enters Downing Street, at which point the book turns into a sort of manifesto, I felt I understood a bit more about her character. She seemed interested only in politics and policy, from a very young age. There was little sense of a human being interested much in culture. (This probably explains why she cut arts spending.) She was, if nothing else, dedicated to her line of work, and to work in general, famously sleeping for four hours at night at her peak.

And she was confident that she was right. She treated the men around her in the cabinet as lower life forms, and forged on with what she felt she needed to do, and in the end, they turned on her, probably trying to claw back a bit of self-respect after years of emasculation around long tables. She believed in the individual over the state, in private over public, in self over society.

These tenets found purchase in a Britain previously beset by industrial unrest, which she attempted to wipe out by crushing the unions and literally removing the industries where they flourished. (If you read The Enemy Within by Seamus Milne, and it’s a set text as far as I’m concerned, you’ll see how Nicholas Ridley was charged with preparing for a showdown with the miners that would lead to the dismantling of the coal industry in order to give a boost to the British nuclear industry.)

All because she had read Hayek and Friedman and Walters, who warned against state intervention in economics (“central planning”), which Hayek claimed, in 1944, would lead to totalitarianism. He believed that the economy should be left “to the simple power of organic growth,” and it sounds so harmless in that phrase. But it’s the market we must bow to, and yet the market which has left this country in tatters – left, as it heinously was by New Labour, untrammeled on their watch – so that the current Tories can bulldoze their own ideological notions through the wreckage.

Well I hope I don’t die too soon, I pray the Lord my soul to save
Yes, I’ll be a good boy, I’m trying so hard to behave
Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live long enough to savour
That’s when they finally put you in the ground
I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

It’s difficult on the face of it – even mean – to celebrate the death of an 87-year-old woman with dementia, who hasn’t wielded political power since 1990. Except that her policies, pushed through with the trademark defiance and zeal that her admirers credit as her greatest qualities, linger on. Where were you when you heard that Thatcher had died? The same place as me: in her long shadow. She did change this country. Or at least, she saw its dark soul and changed the way we thought about ourselves. She championed Reaganomics before Reagan. She unleashed the selfish bastard within, and sold council houses and privatised utility shares to an electorate apparently desperate to improve their lot at any price. The price we paid was the loss of community, the loss of compassion, the loss of perspective.

When England was the whore of the world, Margaret was her madam
And the future looked as bright and as clear as the black tarmacadam

The blanket media blitz has been predictable. (It doesn’t take a newspaper insider to surmise that her obituaries have been “on file” for quite a few years.) The not-quite-state funeral next Wednesday – and oh how appropriate that it’s a public-private finance initiative – will hopefully draw a line under all the nostalgia. Blair was as much of a statesman as she was a stateswoman, and there my admiration for both ends. She was more honest than Blair, and more forthright than Cameron. She fed the satire industry while taking apart all the other ones, and comedians will never have it so good again.

I’ve heard miners on the radio and TV unabashed in declaring their hatred for a dead woman. You can easily understand why. But I think I would find it difficult to concentrate at a street party – or do a dance on the dirt – when her legacy is all around us, not least in the anecdotal and statistical evidence of a nation convinced by a right-wing press and a few scare stories that the welfare state is a bad idea. Beggar thy neighbour? It’s what she would have wanted.

I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap
But when they finally put you in the ground
They’ll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down

Fool Britannia

I’m alright, Jack. Most of the tax and welfare cuts in what today’s Guardian calls “a new social order” do not directly affect me. Hooray! The “bedroom tax”, introduced today, robs 14% of housing benefit from those in social housing with one spare room, and 25% for two or more spare rooms. Not me. Nor am I among the two-thirds of those hit by the tax who are disabled. I am not affected by the lowering of the household income cut-off for eligibility for Legal Aid. I do not claim Council Tax benefit, so will not be affected by the system that administers it being transferred from the Government to the already financially strapped local councils.

Not being disabled, I am not affected by the disability living allowance being scrapped next Monday, and nor will it affect me that written applications for the benefit are replaced by face-to-face interviews. As I am not currently receiving benefits, or tax credits, I will not notice when, next Monday, they do not rise in line with inflation for the first time in history. Nor do I live in the London boroughs that, from 15 April, will cap welfare benefit. (The other boroughs will follow in July and September, by which time I do not expect to be a welfare claimant, but you never know in this economy, do you?)

The changes to the regulation of the financial industry do not affect me directly today. Nor does today’s unpopular handing over of NHS budgets to “local commissioning groups” made up of doctors, nurses and other practitioners affect me directly today.

So, it would be easy for me to be smug – my life goes on as normal. But I’m not smug. I’m f—ing furious, and deeply worried. These latest changes, particularly to benefits, and much more broadly to the NHS, are on the face of it designed by the nasty ideologues in the Conservative government (I think we should stop calling it a Coalition) to save money. Simple as that. The “under-occupancy penalty” (the Bedroom Tax), which some are optimistically and wishfully calling this government’s Poll Tax, will – we’re told – save £465m a year. Even if this is true – and I tend to disbelieve anything that comes out of George Osbourne’s mouth – that doesn’t count the cost. The cost to lives, to dignity, to pride, to social cohesion, and, if I may be airy-fairy for a moment, to the general mood of the nation.

Attacks on benefit claimants, the poor, the out of work, the disabled, the sick, are easy to tot up as net gains. But – and here’s where every single one of these cuts affects us all, even people who live in gated communities and have second homes in the country – I don’t personally want to live in a society where the worst-off are treated with corner-cutting contempt. This is the seventh richest nation in the world. In the world. And yet a report commissioned by the TUC predicted that by 2015, almost 7.1m of the nation’s 13m youngsters will be in “homes with incomes judged to be less than the minimum necessary for a decent standard of living”. This report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation about poverty makes depressing reading, too.

The National Housing Federation – the independent body representing 1,200 English housing associations – calculates that the Bedroom Tax risks pushing up the £23bn annual housing benefit bill. Its chief executive said the tax would “harm the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.” (It will hit 660,000 households with each losing an estimated average of £14 a week. And if you think that £14 isn’t much, then you have no empathy, or have lived a charmed life. Hey, maybe you’re among the cherished 310,000 who will gain today because of the scrapping of the 50p tax rate.)

There are simple social equations here. Either you believe in society or you do not. Either you link the experience of the poor to the experience of everybody else, or you do not. If you do not live in one of the 3.7 million low-income households whose council tax benefit is cut as of today, then you do indeed seem to be alright, Jack. And if you can step back from the bigger picture – from “breadline Britain” as it’s been branded – and still not care, as it doesn’t affect you directly, then you are a better person than I am. I don’t want to live in a country where new food banks are being opened every week. Caroline Spelman, when she was Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, described food banks as an “excellent example” of active citizenship. I describe them as a crying shame.

The amazing Trussell Trust, the charity which runs the UK’s main food bank network, now have 325 running across Britain. They say that in 2011-12 food banks fed 128,687 people nationwide; n 2012-13 they anticipate that this number will rise to over 290,000. God bless them. But their good works should not be necessary. Charity should be a safety net, not part of our social infrastructure.

So, take a look around you, at your immediate circumstances, on this most unfunny of April Fools Days. If, like me, you are unaffected, directly, today, by the latest cuts, then slap yourself on the back, and hope that you are not affected by them, directly, tomorrow, or the next day.

Then walk out of your front door, and look down your street; look at the streets you walk past tomorrow on your way to work, if you have a job, and wonder about the people who live in the houses you pass. Are they affected, directly? Some of them will be. Even more of them will be affected indirectly. We are all affected indirectly, right now.

This government is run by people who do not think about or care about how other people are getting on. They truly believe, as if it were a religious creed, that if you fall by the wayside, it’s your own, lazy fault. If you’re not an “entrepreneur”, if you don’t do three jobs, if you haven’t saved, then you’re a shirker, or a sponger, or a waste of space. If you agree with this creed, sleep well. If you don’t, then you’re alright by me, Jack.

How does it feel to be the father of 172,907* dead?

Who’s old enough to remember the Falklands War? I know we’ve experienced some sabre-rattling about the Malvinas from the Argentine and British camps of late, but it seems unlikely that anybody would go to war over their sovereignty in 2013. I hope not, anyway. Having grown up under the long shadow of the Second World War (my parents were born during it, my grandparents lived through it, one of them fought in it; it influenced the films we watched, the toys we desired and the games we played), and, as a boy, having been fascinated by all aspects of the 1939-45 apocalypse, it was surreal in 1982 to live in a country that was at war, with our tank-straddling Prime Minister sending something called a “task force” to this contested 12,173 square kilometres of dry land in the South Atlantic to repel a South American invader.

There was a war! Alarmist rumours went around school that conscription might be introduced, and, as a paranoid 17-year-old, I had to process what that might mean – even though it was highly unlikely. Anyway, around 900 people died in that stupid war, hence the title of the subsequent 1983 single by anarcho-syndicalist squat-rockers Crass: How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of 1000 Dead? In many ways, the title was enough, not that it would have robbed Margaret Thatcher of any minutes of sleep on her notoriously short nights.

I hadn’t even fully assimilated my politics at that point, and was still living under the long shadow of my Dad’s, but my eventual conversion to left-wing idealism was taking shape somewhere inside my brain, and it was the accumulation of persuasive signposts like the title of that Crass song – and the collage that packaged it – that helped to build it.

Since 1982, the country I live, pay tax and vote in has been involved in a number of other wars, invasions, air strikes and “humanitarian interventions”, notably the Gulf War of 1990, and the Iraq war, which began with the illegal invasion in 2003 and was never officially declared. We are currently “celebrating” its tenth anniversary, and this means that Tony Blair’s face is back in the news, albeit mostly in montages. In Iraq, which is pretty much universally acknowledged to be in a far worse state than it was before we invaded it, the anniversary was marked by bombs killing 56 people and injuring 200 in Shia areas.

I say “we invaded it” – I didn’t invade it. Irag was officially not invaded in my name, because I marched on February 15, 2003 to say so, along with millions of other sane souls around the world. Ours was the largest march in London’s history, even according to the police’s massaged-down figure. (I also marched against the invasion of Afghanistan two years earlier, on October 13, 2001.) When I look back, I feel proud that I cared enough to march, although it also makes me a little sad, as the marching spirit was beaten out of me by the feeling of democratic powerlessness I felt after Operation Iraqi Freedom (cheers) kicked off regardless at 5:34 am Baghdad time on 20 March, 2003 (9:34 pm, 19 March EST).

What optimism I must have had in 2001-2003. I did not decide to march; I had no choice. I love the foregone conclusion of the way I felt then. I dislike the lack of fight in me ten years later. But there is, at least, one man to blame. And I still hold him to account for what happened: the Christian sense of destiny behind his dead eyes as he told us that Saddam Hussein could attack us with only 45 minutes’ warning with weapons of mass destruction that he was definitely hiding in Iraq. I didn’t believe a word Tony Blair or George W Bush said. And although this might have been viewed as kneejerk leftist aversion, history tells us that I was right not to. That he continues to stand by his decision to follow Bush into Iraq to help assuage his Oedipus complex rankles with me. He always says he “regrets” the loss of life, but not the decision to do the thing that caused the loss of life.

* He may or may not be the father of 172,907 dead, as a definitive figure is impossible to put your finger on. It could be more, it could be less, but is probably more. This is the best current estimate of the Iraq Body Count project – and of course it’s recently shot up after the violent protests to mark the tenth anniversary – and it’ll have to do. You might say I’m being melodramatic dredging up the Crass lyric, but the whole sorry, disgraceful episode offends me, yeah? And the rich, tanned, our-man-in-the-Middle-East Tony Blair really needs to get out of my sight, please.

And, as previously declared, I am reading Jason Burke’s The 9/11 Wars, a pretty exhaustive account of the mistakes, assumptions and dangerous strategic miscalculations made by the invading forces in Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mentions the abuses and crimes committed). We’re just at the point in 2006 when the author declares “the beginning of the end” for bin Laden loyalist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s archaic “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” network, whose worryingly broad stated aim was to “bring the rest of the Middle East and potentially the Islamic world within the boundaries of a new caliphate.” In November 2005, he claimed responsibility for suicide bombs that killed 60 people in three hotels in Amman in Jordan (including 38 members of a wedding party), after which opinion polls showed that Jordanians turned against the Iraqi insurgents, indicative of a wider rejection. If Burke’s book tells us anything it’s that the country, and the region, fell into factional chaos after the US/UK invasion, and took until 2006 before the death toll abated. Claiming strategic victory for the American “surge” strikes me as patting yourself on the back for removing some of a red wine stain you made by pouring white wine onto it.

So, you’ve got my kneejerk reaction, and you’ve got my well-read, analytical reaction. I’ll give the final words on this blood-stained anniversary to Crass.

Your arrogance has gutted these bodies of life
Your deceit fooled them that it was worth the sacrifice
Your lies persuaded people to accept the wasted blood
Your filthy pride cleansed you of the doubt you should have had
You smile in the face of death ‘cos you are so proud and vain
Your inhumanity stops you from realising the pain

In the same casual manner

Yesterday, this man was sentenced to eight months in prison for perverting the course of justice. He is Chris Huhne, one-time Liberal Democrat MEP, MP, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the coalition government and something of a “star” of the party. (He ran Nick Clegg pretty close in the leadership battle in 2007, and, if you included postal ballots, which they didn’t, he would have won.) I think we’re all well aware of his crime: after being caught speeding in 2003, when he was a Member of the European Parliament, he convinced his then-wife, Vicky Pryce, also convicted yesterday, to “take” his points by claiming she was driving when the vehicle was photographed by a speed camera. (Ironically, he was banned from driving for three months in the same year for driving while using a mobile phone and she had to “drive him around”, the very inconvenience their deception was designed to prevent.)

Huhne, who pled “guilty” at the last minute, and Pryce, who pled “not guilty”, both received the same sentence. As we speak, they are being “processed” at Wandsworth Prison, which nobody says is going to be a lot of fun for either of them, but will then be moved to open prisons for something like six weeks, after which they will be released, but put on house arrest for the remainder of their sentence. He is no longer an MP, but, after legal costs, he will still own seven properties, and certainly went into prison with a fortune of around £3.5 million, much of that earned when he worked in the City, before entering politics. (When he was the Lib Dems’ environment spokesman, he was criticised for having shares in “unethical” companies.)

For better or for worse, I have a kneejerk reaction against the following types of people:

• MPs and other elected representatives of either gender who lie
• Men who abuse power (and it is so often men)
• Men who leave their spouses and their families for a younger woman (essentially because it’s such a cliché, especially if the affair is conducted “at the office” – what is this, a 1970s sitcom?)
• Male politicians who give the impression of being a “family man” in order to get elected – as Huhne did in Eastleigh with the family snapshots in election material (“Family matters to me so much – where would we be without them?”) and his public displays of unity at the ballot box with Pryce – when they are in fact conducting an affair in secret and plan on leaving their wife and children when they get in

Here’s where I stand:

I do not think putting Huhne, or Pryce, in prison, even for a couple of months, is a good use of taxpayer money. I stated this on Twitter and, as usual, enraged some who felt I was letting him off the hook. I mentioned “his sort” (which is kind of all of the above), which was misconstrued as “posh/rich/establishment” and taken to mean that this “sort” are “too good for prison”. Far from it. If I really thought that the £800 per week we’ll be paying to keep Huhne in an open prison would change him, I’d consider it. But to my mind – and this is a pure hypothetical as the sentence has been passed – community service would be a far better option. It would cost us less. It would – shall we say – inconvenience Huhne more. And it would put something back into the society he clearly felt he was above.

I state these facts only because, as usual, I felt I was struggling to make my views heard in the ridiculous medium of Twitter. I do not believe that the purpose of community service is “humiliation”. Although I do believe that picking up litter or washing police cars would be humiliating for an arrogant prick like Huhne. (I have never met him, but I know a lot more about him after the court case than I ever expected to know, and I don’t much like the sound of him. Do you?)

Had I been on the jury, I feel in my bones that I would have been less harsh on Pryce. She is, on paper and in a court of law, as guilty as him for the misappropriation of those speeding points, but it certainly sounded like she was “maritally coerced,” which was her defence. A couple of weeks fewer in prison, at least? She is anything but “the little wife”, and she certainly put all of this into motion by going to the press after she was dumped by Huhne, but she seemed at the time to me to be the injured party. It’s hard to know for sure, but that’s the impression I took away from what remains a sordid affair.

Chris Huhne is now hated by his ex-wife, and, presumably, by the three kids he had with her during their 26 years of marriage. That’s their private business. I only care about him because he is an elected official who asked the electorate to trust him and to represent them. Call me a dreamer and an idealist, but I expect Members of Parliament to be honest and to set a good example. I do not give a toss whether or not they are happily married, or have families, those trappings of apparent trustworthiness are not as important to me as they are to many other voters; I merely expect them to do their best, to be upfront with those who elected them, to put their constituencies first, and not to behave as if it’s one rule for them and another rule for the rest of us.

Much of my reaction to this story, which can go away now, is rooted in my own prejudice – and no doubt coloured by the disgust I feel for the Liberal Democrat party since they enabled the worst Tory government in history to take power, while abandoning all their promises – but I am being honest about that, and anyway, nobody elected me. Most people who drive have broken the speed limit. Many have points on their licence. Equally, for most people, a fine and a driving ban would be deterrent enough not to sail too close to the wind too often. When the offender is Chris Huhne, a man with a personal fortune and a property portfolio (two words that really shouldn’t go so casually together), a fine and a ban aren’t going to be enough. He needs to be made an example of, I agree, but sticking him in an open prison isn’t going to do the trick.

And we don’t put people in the stocks any more.

Valentine’s Day isn’t over

Forgive the reveille on my own horn, but today is Publication Day, and that’s not something I’ve been able to say, in truth, since July 2008, when the third part of my trilogy of memoirs, That’s Me In The Corner, was published in “B-format” paperback. (B-format is when your book isn’t important enough to come out in hardback, so instead comes out as a large-size paperback first, and then in a cheaper, more manageable size a year later. This never made much sense to me, but it does give you the chance to have the cover redesigned, which we did with That’s Me In The Corner, not that it had any impact whatsoever on sales.) Today, the first book I ever wrote is re-published, and re-printed, in a new edition: Still Suitable For Miners, the official biography of Billy Bragg.

This is what it looked like when it was first published, in 1998, with a portrait by my old pal, the late Hugo Dixon on the cover (from the session he took for Q). I’m not sure I can convey how proud I was when I first laid my hands on a copy of this “A-format” or “trade” paperback.

And this is what it looked like when it came out in “B-format” paperback, the “revised and updated” 2007 third edition, in fact, with a photo by Steve Double in more austere black and white. (It’s funny. I’m sitting in the British Library right now with a copy of the third edition on my desk next to me, as I was due to be interviewed by a student about Red Wedge, so I was refreshing my memory about the era. I wonder if anyone has ever ordered it up in this very reading room?)

The brand new cover, at the top, has been designed by Marc Woodhouse at Chemical X, with the pugnacious photo from Billy’s Fight Songs albums. Here are some grabs from a little film the now generously-bearded Billy and I made, with director Jack Lilley behind the camera, at Billy’s house in January, where we discuss the origins of the book in our jumpers.

When this film is posted somewhere, I’ll put a link to it. But in precis, this is how the book came to be written:

In 1997, two important events conflated: I gave up my day job, and Billy Bragg turned 40. I’d been in a series of full-time desk jobs in music magazine publishing since 1990 – NME, Select, Q – and my first taste of professional TV scriptwriting had given me the courage to go freelance. And old inkies cohort, Ian Gittins, had just left Melody Maker to take up a post at Virgin Books, where he was charged with commissioning some official music biographies. He asked me if there was anyone I had a burning desire to write a book about. There was only one, really. I’d met Billy in 1991 when I first interviewed him for the NME, and we’d it hit off (I’d been a fan since the early days). I interviewed him again at Q, this time writing a career piece, punctuated by what I’d noticed were the “epiphanies” in his life. The big four-oh had convinced him to allow his life to be turned into a book, and in his wisdom he decided I was the man for the job (mostly, it turned out, because I was never po-faced about his work, and he was desperate to avoid a po-faced account).

I love telling people this: I researched the book, over six dedicated months from the end of 1997, by sifting through plastic bags full of cuttings. I had a computer, but not a modem, and no email address. All of the interviews I conducted were in person, or over the phone, or, in the case of Neil Kinnock, by fax between London and Brussels. That’s how analogue Still Suitable For Miners was. Billy was more than generous with his time, and his petrol money (we drove to Barking and all around the Essex of his youth, and to Oundle where he recorded his first music with Riff Raff), and I ended up with hours of first-hand testimony. I also flew over to Dublin, where he and Wilco were finishing the career-changing Mermaid Avenue sessions. In order to access the message boards on his brand new website, I had to sit at his then-assistant Tiny’s kitchen table and log onto her PC.

It would be true to call it a labour of love, in that I loved doing every minute of it, and my publishing advance was modest, as befits a first-time author, but the fact that I’ve been able to update it with a brand new chapter three times, in 2001, 2007 and 2013, makes it less a job, more a way of life. This gives me the excuse to spend some time down in Dorset with Billy and his partner Juliet, who became real friends during the writing of the book.

I have never stopped admiring Billy for his principles and his drive, and his honesty. Though the book is authorised, and fact-checked by Billy and Juliet each time it is reprinted, it is still the book I wished to write, and I remain grateful that the subject of the book never tried to edit it, or rewrite his own history. That said, if you’re looking for scandal, you’ve come to the wrong place. The one truth that works against Billy, but for him at the same time, is that he’s no man of mystery. He really is the Ronseal rock star. What you see is what you get. If you go to a Billy Bragg gig, especially in a far-flung place, you’ll know that the meet-and-greet is often as long as the concert. He likes to engage personally, as much as politically.

I once pitched the idea of a definitive Billy Bragg story to Mojo magazine, and was turned down flat by the then-editor, who reasoned that there was nothing the magazine’s readers didn’t already know about Billy. It’s true, he’ll never be the subject of one of those Reputations-style documentaries, exposing the “real Billy Bragg” behind the public image. But that’s why he’s such a constant in an ever-changing world.

To be Billy Bragg’s Boswell is no bad outcome as I hit my 25th patchwork year in the media, I must admit. It may not make me rich, but it makes me very proud. And to have my first book out now as an eBook feels like an important enough milestone to provide a link to my publisher’s website, which at least offers alternative download routes as well as the contentious Amazon. (Billy provides one-click links to Amazon, among others, on his website through industrial necessity – an ideological anomaly he’s happy to debate with you via the official forums including Twitter, which is really him on the other end, by the way.) For all your Billy Bragg needs, this is his HQ, with everything about his forthcoming new album Tooth & Nail - out on March 18, and among his best, I’d say. The new chapter covers this, his previous album Mr Love & Justice, his 50th birthday, the Jail Guitar Doors initiative, the current Tory government and the 2010 general election, plus honest accounts of the death of his Mum and the graduation of his son, Jack, to aspiring musician.

If you wish to buy the print copy, you can of course do so direct from Bragg Central and, as the old song goes, “cut out the middle man”!

Oh, and if you spotted the reference in the headline to this blog entry, you probably don’t need any more encouragement from me.

Double history

On Thursday 30 October, 2008, just five prehistoric days before America elected its first black president, BBC’s Question Time came live from Washington DC, something of a coup and a justifiable use of the licence fee. “Welcome to our normal viewers,” snuffled David Dimbleby from behind his standard-issue Corporation poppy. “But also to people around the world, who are going to be watching this on BBC World News – great to have you with us.”

A great advert for the Beeb. The panel was impressive: Elizabeth Edwards, Obama adviser and wife of Senator John Edwards; Christopher Nixon Cox, John McCain exec and grandson of Richard Nixon; Simon Schama, fidgety expat historian; Pulitzer-winning Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune for civil-rights ballast; and leopardskin-jacketed Republican strategist Cheri Jakobus (“it’s a lovely name,” cooed Dimbleby). A lively discourse ensued for the next hour. Unfortunately, on this particular night in history, Question Time was in the wrong place at the wrong time and heatedly debating the wrong two men.

The two men who made Question Time look woefully off the scent that Thursday night, four years ago, were not a great advert for the BBC. Dimbleby’s “normal viewers” were less interested in the US Presidential race on 30 October than they were in “Sachsgate”, a little local difficulty involving Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross that had reached the point of national seizure on that very day.

Four years on, and the BBC is going through another, worse crisis, also zealously fanned by a right-wing, axe-grinding press but one whose story extends well beyond the walls of Television Centre (or, in the case of Sachsgate, Broadcasting House). Meanwhile, America decides once again. In November 2008, the electorate made history when Barack Obama took battleground states Pennsylvania and Ohio, rewarding those of us who’d stayed up for the Portillo Moment; in that moment, the “retard cowboy fella”, as Sachsgate co-architect Brand had labelled George W. Bush in September as Hollywood-hungry host of the MTV Video Music Awards, was all but forgotten. Never mind that Bush would still be in office for 70 more days; his epoch was so over. Oliver Stone rush-released biopic W., in which Bush is seen in a dream sequence waiting to catch a ball in an empty stadium. Meanwhile, a quarter of a million Obama supporters filled Grant Park in Chicago to roar their approval.

Despite sweaty pre-election Democrat palms about the Bradley Effect (after the black candidate for California governor in 1982 who was ahead in the polls but denied in the booths), Americans who claimed they would vote for a black man did just that. A change came not just to America: Jesse Jackson, another previously unsuccessful black Democratic candidate, cried tears that were mopped all around the world.

This time round, with Obama fighting for his political life in the face of malleable private-equity action figure Mitt Romney – and the real face of post-Tea Party Republicanism Paul Ryan – the US Presidential race is said to be neck-and-neck, with the usual “swing states” holding all the cards – Ohio, again, Florida, again etc. In 2008, I stayed up for Ohio, as I was at the CNN Election Night Party in Central London, surrounded by other politicos, and one or two select celebrities. (You may read my account of that night here.) Weirdly, the party ended at 3am, before the election had been called, which I felt was a massive swiz. I watched them call it from a friend’s sofa, on my own. I shan’t be staying up into the early hours this time, as, uniquely, I am four years older, and I need my sleep. History, or not, will be made without me.

Being the first black American President to be re-elected for a second term does not have the same epic ring of history to it. But that’s surely what the sensible are hoping for? In four years, he’s managed to frighten those on the right with his universal healthcare plan and support for abortion rights and gay marriage, while disappointing those on the left with his failure to do much about anything else, including blowing up Guantanamo Bay. That this policy deadlock is largely down to the intransigence of a Republican House makes no difference to those who demand action. Obama killed bin Laden, personally, of course, a fact that counterintuitively endears him to the head-on-a-spike right, and confuses the left. (I witnessed a fairly heated debate between two comedians on Twitter the other day – Mitch Benn and Andrew O’Neill – about whether or not Obama was a “war criminal”, and whether or not voting for him at all was some kind of betrayal of left-wing values.)

But the real issue of this election, the most expensive and vicious ever, is surely Voter-ID. If you’re not abreast of this issue – and it’s been all over The Daily Show – it’s the way in which an apparently “non-partisan” group, True The Vote (“by citizens, for citizens”) has been pushing for legislature in various states to attach photo ID to one’s right to walk into a polling booth, which not only puts those without a driving licence at an immediate disadvantage (ie. the old, the poor, the unemployed – Democrat voters, maybe?), but also puts the disadvantaged at a further disadvantage, with households containing many occupants (the poor, again? students? immigrants?), targeted as potential voter-fraud cases. Read all about it in this superb, clear New Yorker article from a couple of weeks ago. For me, this is the 2012 Election in essence: dirty tricks by the Republicans.

Commentators – including, well, me, in Word magazine – said that the “real star” of the 2008 Election was David Axelrod. As Obama’s right-hand strategist, not only did he help create the “change” umbrella, he masterminded the first ever internet donor base, mostly under-30s, who contributed small amounts and formed a – gulp! – socialist utopia of engaged young Americans, each with a genuine stake in their chosen leader. Whether this truly recast the way US politics is done remains to be seen, but when, in 2008, Paxman was called upon to gauge the opinion of Dizzee Rascal (“I don’t think he could have done it without hip-hop”), Marshall McLuhan loomed large.

In a rare case of hype being matched by hope, Obama’s victory was regarded as a poultice for all global ills, from the economy to Iraq. He was even credited with boosting Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, which – hypothetically, as it transpired – earmarked Grant Park as a venue for the archery. (Chicago was knocked out in the first round.) The 2008 Beijing Olympics had provided welcome uplift that summer, with choreographed spectacle from the director of Chinese epics Hero and The House Of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou, whose opening and closing ceremonies seemed designed to remind the world that America is not the only superpower – and that the Chinese Communist Party has a knack of inspiring mass synchronisation.

London’s very own Olympics did it their way this summer, and proved that ideas were as important as money and multitudes. Mitt Romney chose our capital for his first official stop-off in what the Huffington Post described as “a three-nation tour carefully crafted to highlight his diplomatic strengths and personal Olympic experience”. He delivered a world-class gaffe when he criticised his hosts for not being “ready.” (I might have said the same thing at the time, but I’m not a diplomat, and I live in London.) Had we got our first glimpse of the next President of the United States? I hope not.

In 2008, the year in which Professor Brian Cox became famous on television for his ability to explain the Large Hadron Collider to the dim, we found ourselves living on a planet where things could only get better, and many of us put our hope in a black man (or “a black”, as Tory Pauline Neville-Jones rather colonially called him on the post-election Question Time, back in Britain). Can we have him back, please?

For some reason, I’m not allowed to vote. In this, I am not alone, thanks to True The Vote, which may well have clinched it for Romney, a man whose Mormonism might ordinarily disqualify him from being a good ol’ Republican nominee, if not for the fact that his competition – Santorum, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Bachmann – were so lacking in Presidential authority. I sincerely hope that, as I sleep tonight, the swing states swing the right way. I Tweeted a handy link to the New Yorker voter-ID story earlier, and an American expat took umbrage with me for typing, “If the US Election goes the wrong way, at least you’ll be able to say you know why”; he/she responded, “Define ‘wrong way’. Surely whatever we voters choose is the correct way.” Idealism in action. Naturally, if you are a Republican, or more crucially the kind of prevaricating floating voter that actually decides Elections, Romney might be the “right way.” If so, I wish you good luck in that county if he wins. But I warn you not to be poor. I warn you not to be old. And I warn you not to be a multi-millionaire.

Prolocaust

Got your attention? Good. After my open letter to Ed Miliband last week, although the majority who frequent this blog and follow me on Twitter were in broad agreement with my sentiments, I was also accused of holding “sixth form” views. Not exactly high-level trolling, this was still intended to be an insult. But I’ve decided to take it as a compliment.

I’ve accepted that as I get older, if anything, I become more of an idealist; that my views polarise and become more black-and-white. Corporate greed offends me more acutely. Capitalism seems less like a system we can fix. We are “Us” and they are “Them.” The ills of the world seem ever more vividly connected with the dastardly doings of a tiny minority. (The “99%” concept behind various offshoots of Occupy has really fired my imagination, as simplistic as it must seem to more nuanced political thinkers than I.)

Maybe my thinking has regressed to “sixth form” level, but isn’t there something inspiring and direct about the views we form before responsibility and mortgages and family bring the compromises of practicality to bear upon our ideals? Anyway, with this in mind, I intend to forge on, and stay in the sixth form.

I am inspired to write today by the conflation of reading the increasingly depressing stories about G4S and catching up with a little-seen film over the weekend called The Whistleblower, a German-Canadian thriller based on real events that might have been released in 2011 if anybody had been interested in releasing it. (It came out on DVD in January, so keep an eye out for it; unless you attended the handful of festivals it played at in late 2010, early 2011, or live in Germany, Brazil, Hong Kong or a few other territories where it reached cinemas, it will have passed you by, as it did me.)

The Whistleblower tells the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a former police officer from Nebraska who worked as a UN International Police Force monitor in Bosnia in 1999, hired by private security firm fictionalised in the film as Democra. She blew the whistle on an appalling human trafficking ring, whereby young girls from Eastern Europe were shipped in to work as prostitutes in postwar Bosnia, often servicing security and UN ground and diplomatic staff, some of whom were actively involved in what was a trade in “white slaves”. (The film, starring Rachel Weisz, is unflinching in its portrayal of the violence and abuse visited upon the girls, and as such, despite its conventional thriller tactics, was probably deemed a bit “heavy” for wide distribution. It’s a tough sell, but worth watching.)

Bolkovac was hounded out of her job and her investigation shut down, but she sued “Democra”, registered in the UK, for unfair dismissal, and won, and her findings came to light. Some employees of Democra were forced to resign their jobs, but no criminal charges were brought. So, it’s another cautionary tale about the private sector doing public sector work. Which is why it dovetails into G4S and the Olympics farrago.

Democra had a $15m contract to hire and train police officers for duty. An even larger private security firm, G4S, has a £284m contract to provide 10,400 security staff for the London 2012 Games. The company boasted to its investors that by relying on “temporary managers” on fixed-term contracts, it could keep costs down. Its bid for the contract was apparently way cheaper than the others; unsurprisingly, it got the gig. Its other key money-saving/corner-cutting wheeze was to hire ground staff as close as possible to the date on which they were needed to turn up to work, again to reduce wage bills. Brilliant. This is why, just two weeks before the Games, G4S went cap-in-hand to the Government to ask for 3,500 Army personnel to help plug the gap in its security force. Many of these soldiers have had their annual leave cancelled, with no right to complain, even if they’ve just come back from Afghanistan as many of them have. Their mission, which they are in no position not to accept: to help out a private company.

You may have read about students’ experiences of applying to become Olympic security staff at the same private company, which came to light via the Student Room forum – in essence, G4S basically showed them a couple of instructional videos and handed them a high-viz jacket. I’m glad I’m not going anywhere near the Olympic venues, if these students’ experiences are anything to go by: “I passed the interview. No experience in security or anything and they signed me up for X-ray scanner … My interviewer told me I failed but I was still successful in gaining a place … The instructors made sure everyone passed … All the interviewers are barely 25, really nice and sympathetic … You don’t do much, LOL. You get registered, listen to an introduction about the Games, and then information on the role you will be doing. They try to make it fun so you won’t get too bored. There were a few who fell asleep … G4S is a disorganized, pathetic excuse for a company.”

LOL, indeed. Little wonder we’ve had to live the cliche and send in the Army. (More recent comments from students on the forum are about the sheer confusion of not knowing when their shifts are, not being able to get an answer out of G4S or discovering that they have to report for work at 5am or 6am and simply not being able to get there by train for that time. Why, if the company really wished to pay peanuts, did it not simply employ monkeys?)

G4S have argued that the use of “temporary managers” (yes, those 25-year-old interviewers who signed off all the studes) is “a common industry model”. Well, that’s OK, then. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, according to today’s papers, is reluctant to criticise the useless G4S – presumably because the hiring of the company reflects very badly on the Home Office, who accepted their cheapo bid in the first place. He went so far as to say that G4S had acted “honourably” by admitting to the Government that it couldn’t fulfill its brief. We now know that the Home Office was warned about potential problems with G4S as long as 10 months ago. He also said: “I don’t think this is a moment for getting into the blame game … It is completely normal that you are going to find some contractors on a project of this size who are not going to be able to deliver.” That’s reassuring.

OK, so G4S’s shares have tumbled this morning, and they are due to lose about £50m after the fiasco, while cocky CEO Nick Buckles may yet have to fall on his sword. But, as is always the way, he stands to walk out with a package of up to £21m. (That comprises his £830,000 salary, shares worth £5.7m, an £8.7m pension pot and, according to the Telegraph, “up to £5.7m shares vesting under a long-term incentive plan.”)

This is how the private sector works. It’s all about the bottom line, asset stripping, buying and selling, reducing outlay, increasing profit. But when the private sector is an employee of the public sector, the spotlight shines upon them. G4S is not a company most of us had heard of until the Olympics mess, just as we’d never heard of the similarly named training company 4Ae (who, you will recall, were coining it from the government but not actually getting people back into employment as per their brief, and accused of “multiple fraud” after multiple whistles were blown).

G4S is a big player; it is the third-largest private sector employer in the world after Wal-Mart and the Taiwanese electronics multinational Foxconn (yes, the one whose factories in China were described in a report in 2010 as “labour camps” and where workers were committing suicide). It already has its fingers in our prisons and our airports, and this is only one of 125 countries it operates in.

Unfortunately, the bigger a corporation is – and this is an objective fact – the greater likelihood that certain practices might go on unchecked in its furthest outposts. (I’m starting to wonder if perhaps amnesiac chief execs like Murdoch and Diamond are actually telling the truth when they claim not to know about what goes on in their own companies. Maybe this is how corporations work, and how they protect themselves? I’ve never run one, so I can only guess.)

While the public sector is decimated by cuts, which includes slashing numbers within the police (6,000 by 2015) and the armed services (20,000), when the private sector fails, who has to take up the slack? Nobody at the Met will be going on holiday in July and August, and now thousands in the Army will be denied theirs too. This government is cutting entire regiments from the services and at the same time telling them that they are vital. Mixed signals.

This is a government who has nothing but contempt for what used to be called – by sixth formers – the “proletariat.” I’m glad that the phrase “working class” is now being replaced in common parlance by “working people”, as you don’t need to work in a mine or a factory to qualify for the stratum of society least cared for by the government, and it’s nothing to do with class any more. What they’re pulling off here is something underhand and insidious, whose subtleties of method are gradually wearing away. This is the Prolocaust.

I saw a moving documentary called Nostalgia For The Light over the weekend, by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, who now devotes his work to the subject of the “disappeared” ie. the thousands massacred by Margaret Thatcher’s great friend General Pinochet after the 1973 coup. In it, women who lost husbands and sons all those years ago are seen sifting through the Atacama Desert for bone fragments where they suspect the bodies to have been buried in mass graves. It made me think. In some ways it’s more honest for regimes to simply murder those who are inconvenient and not required. Just erase them, in whatever numbers they please. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pinochet … they may not have exactly advertised the genocide they perpetrated at the time, but they got on with anyway. (Due to the nature of their dictatorships, we could not call them before a polite select committee and ask them if they knew about their individual holocausts, but if we had been able to, maybe they’d have done what Murdoch and Diamond did, and claimed to have had no idea what was being done in their name.)

To disenfranchise thousands is just a more humane and legal way of committing genocide.

Here’s how I picture the increasingly self-parodic Tory government (which is what they are, for all the good their “coalition partners” the Lib Dems are doing): they are the family at Downton Abbey. The lords and ladies and dowagers who live “upstairs”, whose loyal staff scurry about “downstairs.” The lords and ladies are currently in the active process of reducing the wages and employment rights of their staff, but at the same time expecting them to continue to serve dinner, and launder, and tidy, and polish, and keep the fires burning, and brush the horses, and chauffeur the car, and iron the daily copy of the Times. The family know nothing of the lives of their staff, neither do they care to. As long as breakfast is served, everything must be fine.

But everything is not fine. And one morning, which may come sooner than they think, the family at Downton will come down to breakfast, and no orange juice will await them. In fact, nobody will have woken them from their slumber and offer to dress them. “Downstairs” will be silent. And what will the family do? Certainly not make breakfast themselves. They will call in the Army to come and make it for them.