Infinite Coincidence

Thanks to Wikipedia I have acquired a new hero: José Figueres Ferrer, aka ‘Don Pepe’, the Costa Rican President in the 1940s-50s, who certainly achieved a great deal more progressive change in his nine years of power than Tony Blair has: in his first term in office he nationalised the banks, gave women and illiterate people the right to vote and abolished the army. This last move is of course absolutely laudable – it is difficult, let’s say, to imagine Blair or even Gordon Brown doing the same – but it led to short-term problems during the, ahem, war with Nicaragua seven years later.

In 1958 the then vice-president of the US, Richard Nixon, was spat at by a crowd in Caracas, Venezuela while visiting on a goodwill tour. An inquiry was held to attempt to ascertain the causes of the incident, and Ferrer was asked to speak before the Congress in Washington. The wonderful speech he gave reminded me of one of something I posted last year on the politics of spitting, actually my second favourite thing I’ve wrote here, in which I typed:

One of the other potential uses of staring, spitting and other generally anti-social behaviour is in the field of International Relations. A logical and non-violent way of resolving the territorial disputes of the world is in the same way that cats do – if Saddam Hussein had had the foresight to piss all over Kuwait in 1990, the Americans would have been understandably less keen to go in and remove him. Similarly , if Mao Zedong had sent all those young Chinese soldiers to North Korea in 1950 armed only with the simple order to stand on the border and spit, maybe one million lives could have been saved.

Somehow I’ve always managed to restrain myself from adopting expectoration as a form of direct action, although the constant vigil outside the Marie Stopes Centre in Ealing next to where I work presents quite a challenge to this. In the speech Ferrer explicitly cites spitting as a form of resistance against imperial power, against what he calls the ‘moral spitting’ of the powerful. It is well worth reading the whole thing; it is a rousing piece of rhetoric, which may just make you want to, regardless of the potentially drastic consequences, run up to the gates of the nearest American embassy and let fly:

“As a citizen of the hemisphere, as a man who has dedicated his public life to promoting inter-American comprehension, as an educated man who knows and appreciates the United States and who has never tried to hide that appreciation to anyone, no matter how hostile he was, I deplore that the people of the Latin America, represented by a fistful of overexcited Venezuelans, have spat on a worthy public officer who represents the greatest nation of our time. But I must speak frankly and even rudely, because I am convinced that the situation demands it: the people cannot spit on a foreign policy, which was what they tried to do. But when they have exhausted all other means of trying to make themselves understood, the only thing left to do is spit.

“With all due respect to Vice-President Nixon, and with all my admiration towards his conduct, which was, during the events, heroic and ultimately noble, I have no choice but to say that the act of spitting, however vulgar it is, lacks a substitute in our language to express certain emotions… If you’re going to speak of human dignity in Russia, why is it so hard to speak of human dignity in the Dominican Republic? Where is intervention and where is non-intervention? Is it that a simple threat, a potential one, to your liberties, is, essentially, more serious that the kidnapping of our liberties?

“Of course you have made certain investments in the (Latin) American dictatorships. The aluminum companies extract bauxite almost for free. Your generals, your admirals, your public officers and your businessmen are treated there like royalty.

“Like your Senate verified yesterday, there are people who bribe the reigning dynasties with millions, to enjoy the privilege of hunting in their lands. They deduct the money from the taxes they pay in the US, but it returns to the country and, when it arrives to Hollywood, becomes extravagant furs and cars that bring down the fragile virtue of female stars. And, meanwhile, our women are kidnapped by gangsters, our men are castrated in the torture chambers and our illustrious professors disappear, lugubriously, from the halls of the University of Columbia, in New York. When one of your lawmakers calls this “collaboration to fight communism,” 180 million Latin Americans feel the need to spit.

“Spitting is a despicable custom, if done physically. But what about moral spitting? When your government invited Pedro Estrada, the Himmler of the Western Hemisphere, to be honored in Washington, didn’t you spit upon the face of all democrats in (Latin) America? … I can assure you that, when it comes to international economic policy, the United States seems to be willing to repeat certain errors of domestic policy that inflicted much damage in the past, including, of course, the ones that led to the great crisis of 1929.

“We, the Latin Americans, are tired of pointing to these mistakes; especially, the lack of interest in the prices of our products. Every time we suggest a plan to stabilize prices at a fair level you answer with economic slogans, like “the law of supply and demand” or “the free market system,” or with insults like “Aren’t we paying you enough money now?” We don’t beg, except in emergencies. We’re not people who will spit for money. We’ve inherited all the flaws of the Spanish character, but also some of its virtues.

“Our poverty does not diminish our pride. We have our dignity. What we want is to be paid a fair price for the sweat of our people, for the impoverishment of our land, when we provide a product needed by another country. That would be enough to live, to raise our own capital and to carry on with our own development.”

Isn’t that great?! Costa Rica sounds like a jolly nice place. Personally I’m hoping for los costarricenses against my beloved Angola in the World Cup final, and a tournament largely free of regrettable spitting incidents. Let everyone save up their ‘moral saliva’ for those who really deserve it!

Provocative funnyman Charlie Brooker just took the words right outta my mouth and wrote something about the current fashion for hoisting the England flag out of car windows:

Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation’s dimbos to wear dunce’s caps in public. No one would stand for it. There’d be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and co to the Nazis. We’d see rioting in the streets – badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.

Those protesters who burn flags outside embassies have got the right idea – but they shouldn’t be burning them because they disagree with something the country in question has done. They should be burning flags just because they’re flags. And flags are rubbish.

I’m not sure if I dislike flags as such, although I certainly share some of this writer’s concern about recent displays of my country’s emblem:

Is it just me, or is anyone else slightly worried about the number of St George’s flags flying from road vehicles right now? Of course, these displays of patriotism are to be expected in the build-up to next month’s World Cup – which England enters with more confidence than at any time since 1970. This time, though, the flags seem to be on show earlier than ever.

In fact, they started appearing the day after the local elections on May 4. Apart from the Labour meltdown and the Tories getting their first respectable vote for 14 years, the big story of the election was the rise of the British National party, which gained 28 seats, nearly 20 in London alone. Could it be that many of the England flag-wavers are in fact supporters of this racist party, glorying in their “victory” and celebrating their racial pride?

I agree with both articles in that I think that the only reason anyone would want to buy and display their country’s flag is because they are either right-wing or a little bit thick – or possibly, in a tiny minority of cases of course, both. Taking pride in the place where you happen to have been born is, in my humble onion, akin to holding up a piece of paper with ‘MY MUM’S BETTER THAN YOUR MUM’ written on it. At the same time, it is true to say that there have been a lot of people who aren’t white proudly displaying the flag, so it may well be that we are witnessing one of those ‘look at me I’m queer!’ reclaiming-abusive-words-and-symbols-from-the-right-wing moments. I sincerely hope so.

In the meantime, if we do have to distinguish different parts of the world with colours and images on a piece of cloth there is a sound argument for changing that image every couple of months or weeks. I think one representative image of our country over the last few months would be a photo of some people sitting on a tube train on the Hammersmith & City Line looking very, very pissed off. Either that or Damien Hirst cut in half and stuck in a formaldehyde tank. You could have a competition, and the winner could spend a couple of weeks somewhere nice. In a completely different country, for example – like where most flag-waving England fans choose to spend their annual holidays every single year.

I digress. Personally the only reason I’d consider buying a flag is to burn the thing. I really enjoy watching people burn flags; if there was a satellite TV channel dedicated solely to live coverage and classic footage of people burning flags I’d give up my stupid job and spend the entire week glued to it. I genuinely believe that it is one of the most uplifting sights that the human soul can behold.

Of course there’ll be no end of flags on display all over the world in a couple of weeks, which I don’t mind much, not really. As long as they don’t have ‘OLDHAM BNP’ written on them, like some of the ones I saw during the Euro 2004 thing in Lisbon a couple of years ago. I’m certainly not going to be grabbing them out of people’s hands and setting light to them, that’s for sure. The conviviality that attends these events almost makes the spectacle of a ninety minute game of football less spectacularly dull. According to legend, people actually start conversations with strangers on the tube! I can hardly wait.

Not that I’ll be watching all the matches – I’m thinking of organising a flag-burning ceremony in Hyde Park to coincide with the first England match. Anyone care to join me?

George Orwell, in his book ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, describes in detail the physical hell that Britain’s coal miners had to endure in return for a living wage:

Most of the things one imagines in hell are in there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust.

The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National … by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

This strength that the miners exhibited, invisibly, underground had to have some counterpart on the surface. And so the National Union of Mineworkers fought on their behalf to defend their safety and their livelihoods.

Sixty years later Guardian journalist Seamus Milne, in his book ‘The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners’, detailed how the vendetta that Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s Conservative government held against the NUM. Margaret Thatcher regarded the miners, with their collective recourse to industrial action to defend their jobs, their wages and the safety regulations that kept them alive, as ‘the enemy within’. The Chancellor Nigel Lawson felt that the Government had a duty to confront and destroy the miner’s industrial power akin to facing ‘the threat of Hitler in the late 1930s’. The bitter strike which resulted lasted for almost a year and was lost, narrowly, by the miners.

The consequences for the Labour movement were, just as the Tories had calculated, catastrophic. Membership of trade unions has almost halved since Thatcher and Co. began their all out assault on trade union power in 1979, and had already diminished considerably by 1992, when the Government announced that it was to close a third of Britain’s coal pits, with the loss of 31,000 jobs. There were huge protests against the closures but the NUM itself had already lost a great deal of members and a lot of the support which had sustained it through the strike eight years earlier. The Labour Party, which was in the process of concluding that if it was ever to regain power it would have to abandon most of its founding principles, offered no support whatsoever and the battle was lost.

Now what pits survive in Britain are in private hands, employing a tiny amount of people in very unsafe conditions. The communities that came into being because of the mines are now some of Europe’s poorest towns, suffering from high levels of long-term unemployment and heroin addiction. Not that the world has no need of coal, or that its production is not profitable; the regular news reports from China about tragic accidents show us where and how it is obtained, and at what price.

There is a hidden story of the miner’s strike of 1984-5, and particularly of what happened six years later. On 5 March 1990 the Daily Mirror published a front-page attack against the leaders of the miners’ union, backed by an investigative programme on TV the same night, claiming that not only had money been received during the year long dispute from the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, at the time reviled as a sponsor of terrorism, but that the cash had subsequently been used not to ease the hardship of strikers but to pay off the mortgages of officials. The leaders of the union, in particular Arthur Scargill, were vilified and disgraced.

Within a short space of time, after vigorous investigation and campaigning by the few groups on the left who stood by Scargill, the Mirror’s story was revealed to be a complete fabrication. Neither of the officials in question even had mortgages. A subsequent inquiry into the Union’s affairs cleared them of any wrongdoing whatsoever.

Seamus Milne’s book set out to discover who was behind the fake story, and came up with some astonishing revelations if its own.

The union official who instigated the fund-raising trip to Libya was the Chief Executive, Roger Windsor. He had his photograph taken with Gaddafi; its publication in the newspapers, at a time when, as Thatcher later admitted, it looked as though the miners might actually win the strike, can’t have done wonders for their cause.

At the time he was the highest non-elected official at the NUM. He was ideally placed, then, to provide the Daily Mirror with evidence against Scargill six years later; for which the newspaper paid him the sum of £80,000.

Following evidence provided by the Labour MP Tam Dalyell, Seamus Milne looked into the links between Roger Windsor and the British secret services and found that the man behind the allegations, the man who had tried to smear and discredit Scargill, the NUM and by extension the entire Labour movement, had in fact been working all along for MI5.

It is quite possible that if had not been for the damaging impact of the Mirror’s allegations, the Tories would not have been able to push through the mass pit closures they would announce two years later. A certain amount of mud stuck, and the prominence that the newspapers gave to their retractions of the story did not, of course, match in any sense the publicity that the lying revelations had received. It would be twelve years before the Mirror’s editor would make a public apology for his actions.

No-one else involved in the campaign seems to have done so. One of the main promoters of the story, the then Mirror owner Robert Maxwell, would kill himself in 1991, shortly before it was revealed that he himself had been funding his business adventures by stealing from the pension fund of the newspaper. In the course of a lifetime of gargantuan self-promotion and deceit, he himself had had his own fair share of dealings with the secret services, and was described by the Mirror’s then editor as ‘the world’s most intrusive proprietor’.

The role of the Labour Party in the strike was pretty treacherous; they were already coming to the conclusion that in order to regain power they would have to try to abandon most of their core beliefs, and adopt an agenda more akin to the philosophy of their political enemies. The Miners’ Strike would propel them further along the path that lead to Blairism and New Labour.

I first read Seamus Milne’s book when it was published in 1995, since which time a question has been slowly forming in my consciousness; it is only recently that I have become aware of what its implications might, erm, imply: if the secret services in the 1980s would go to such lengths as to plant people among the leadership of the union branch of the Labour movement, what moves would they be prepared to take to divest the political wing of the Labour movement of its popular force and ingrained ideology – that is to say, the Labour Party?