Chilcot faces Blair: Justitia interrumpere

Updated 30 January 2010 (scroll down to see update)

Tomorrow is Tony Blair’s big day — actually, in this blogger’s view it may well be the day when it is revealed just how small a politician he was. Here is a quick thought about the crazy times we live in.

A large number of people — quite possibly a substantial majority of Britons — probably have little doubt that Tony Blair committed a crime of agression in Iraq. (For an analysis of the case for this, see Monbiot’s Arresting Blair). Another significant portion of people — again, quite possibly a majority of Britons — probably have little doubt that Tony Blair’s New Labour allowed what Seumas Milne has described as a ‘culture of corruption‘ to seep far into the UK’s government.

The latest news — that Hutton, the judge who absolved Blair of any wrongdoing in Dr David Kelly’s death, sealed some of Kelly’s medical records for 70 years — raises even more devastating possibilities with respect to Blair’s government. It is early days yet, but the possibility that Kelly might have been murdered cannot be discounted. This is, to be sure, a possibility that has been mooted for some time in both factual and fictional accounts of the events surrounding Kelly’s death — see for example the Telegraph’s Who Killed David Kelly?

Of course, the number of people who believe one thing or another does not mean that something is true; but it does recommend the need for a very thorough enquiry of the kind that the Chilcot is not. Indeed, the extraordinary thing, to this observer at least, is that tomorrow Blair will most probably provide perfectly (un)reasonable justifications for his actions (he has already admitted that he would have invaded Iraq, WMD or no WMDs). And that will be that. Life will, of course, go on, and Blair will continue to rake in his mysterious millions (mysterious in the sense described by The Guardian).

In the opinion of this blogger, in any other society, either there would have been a complete cover-up, with the oligarchy closing ranks to defend the man that has, after all, so furthered their interests; or in a real democracy, the man would be, if not in jail, then certainly awaiting trial. Here we will get the satisfaction of neither. Pardon the slightly crude simile, but frankly, this is the judicial equivalent of Catholicism’s traditional recommendation of the advantages of coitus interruptus.

Justitia interrumpere [any experts in Latin please advise on translation!]

Update: 30 January 2010, the day after Blair appeared

Simon Carr really puts his finger on the true nature of the Chilcot Enqury when he notes in today’s Independent that

‘Decent old Chilcot began by saying two new documents had been declassified. Terrific, one would be the devastating Manning Memo, leaked some years ago, and now all over the internet. One of Blair’s big advisers had met with Condi Rice before the Crawford signed-in-blood meeting, and he reported this: “I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and… public opinion.”

Incredibly, that’s still classified. It’s a state secret that everybody can read.

Google the full text and in six seconds you’ll see things the Inquiry can’t mention. It’s a line directly into Blair’s brain and backs up his Fern Britton interview. Confronted with that text he couldn’t have got away saying, “I didn’t use the words ‘regime change’”.

The memo makes it impossible to believe him when he says: “I really hoped 1441 would avoid conflict.”

There isn’t space for full denunciation of the committee but as ever, they really didn’t nail it.’

Financial Scandal, Corruption and Censorship: Part 1

...to engage in corruption, and to expect to survive in public life is to have either a generous faith in the mechanisms of secrecy or a confident sense of what one can get away with in the event that activities hitherto hidden are suddenly made visible to others. —John B. Thompson, in Political Scandal

Please note: the following is the first part in a series of posts:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: When Knowledge Is Exchanged
Part 3: Case Study A: the Beeching ‘Axe’
Part 4: Case Study B: the Newby-Mandelson ‘Axes’
Part 5: Scandal in the Times of the Internet
Part 6: Conclusions: Financial Scandal and Neoliberalism

In Political Scandal, the sociologist John B. Thompson notes that, despite the massive resources poured into government PR organisations, and despite the fact that politicians and other public figures know very well that their activities may be the subject of intense media scrutiny, ‘scandal has lost none of its capacity to disrupt the flow of events, to derail the most well-constructed plans, and from time to time, to destroy the reputations and careers of individuals engulfed by it’(1). Even so, Thompson notes that scandal is often regarded as being too frivolous to merit serious academic study; ‘[s]candal should be left to the tabloid journalists and the gossip columnists; a subject so trivial—or so many [academic commentators] might claim—does not deserve the attention of serious scholars’(2).

In fact, Political Scandal explains why scandal deserves to be treated as a social phenomenon worthy of academic study, one whose often puzzling characteristics require critical analysis of the kind long devoted by scholars to subjects such as ideology or social mobility. Thompson is particularly interested in studying scandal from the perspective of its relation to the mass media—hence the book’s subtitle, ‘Power and visibility in the media age’.

In this series of posts, I would like to both build on, and further develop Thompson’s work in two ways. On the one hand, I’d like to investigate the subject of financial scandal via a comparative case study that examines such scandals in the 1960s, and in the 2000s. I’ve chosen to focus on financial scandal because it seems to me that it holds a key to the link between neoliberalism and what many believe to be a creeping ‘culture of corruption’ in the New Labour government. I borrow the notion of a ‘culture of corruption’ from Seumas Milne, who in an article for The Guardian titled ‘A culture of corruption has seeped far into the government’ noted that

‘[s]ince 2006, 37 former members of the government have been given permission to take private sector jobs within two years of leaving office. As with their Tory predecessors, many of these jobs involve working for companies directly bidding for government contracts and privatised services. They include Blair himself, of course, whose £12m annual income now includes multimillion contracts with banking groups JP Morgan Chase and Zurich Financial Services, in a sector lovingly protected during his time in office’(3).

Milne goes on to explain how the ‘revolving door’ principle has also affected a variety of the public sector institutions in Britain. These include institutions located in the defence, transportation, and health sectors.

As I see it, in the context of neoliberalism, financial scandals make visible, however fleetingly, the nocturnal connections between individuals’ and institutions’ championing of allegedly ‘free markets’, and the covert actions taken by those selfsame individuals and institutions to manipulate the markets for personal or institutional gain–especially but not only economic gain.

The second way in which I hope to build on Thompson’s work is by focusing on the question of the visibility of scandal, as mediated by the media of mass communication. I’d like to develop this aspect of his work by considering a genre that had not become established at the time that Thompson did the research for Political Scandal. I refer to the genre of the weblog, better known as the blog, which has arguably changed key aspects of the politics surrounding efforts to publicise, but also to suppress the disclosure of activities leading to, financial scandal.

This post is divided into several parts; I expect to publish a new part each week.

References

1) John B. Thompson (2000) Political Scandal: Power and visibility in the age of the media. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. ix
2) Political Scandal, op. cit. 5
3) Seumas Milne, ‘A culture of corruption has seeped far into government’ in Guardian online, 1 July 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/01/corruption-business-government-transport-health. Accessed 25 January 2010.

What really did happen to David Kelly?

A very short post to say that there are weeks in politics when one senses that there is something akin to a telluric movement about to take place, one which, left uncontrolled or managed badly by the powers that be, can lead to the most sudden, and spectacular transformations in the lie of the political land.

There is, of course, no pun intended in the last expression. That said, we may be about to witness a chain of revelations that may yet show how far members of you know who’s government were prepared to go in order to cover their tracks regarding the legality of the Iraq War.

If you still don’t know what I’m writing about, watch out for the news concerning the incredible fact that the Hutton Enquiry closed the medical records concerning David Kelly’s death for 70, yes seven-oh years. Here is a quote from the Guardian that suggests that there is suddenly a veritable crescendo of suspicion growing around Kelly’s very strange death.

“Lord Hutton’s decision to classify documents about the death of Dr David Kelly is likely to face a legal challenge amid claims by experts that there are increasing grounds to question the inquiry’s verdict of suicide. The Hutton inquiry, which reported in 2004 that Kelly’s death was suicide after he cut an artery in his wrist, has come under scrutiny from doctors who claim the medical account is improbable. Five doctors who made an application to the Oxford coroner to have the inquest reopened have been told Lord Hutton made a ruling in 2003 to keep medical reports and photographs closed for 70 years. “This is a revelation,” said Michael Powers QC, a former assistant coroner and expert in coronial law. “I can’t think of anything that would justify these documents being treated any differently.”

EcoLogics, a significant swathe of the country, and perhaps even Michael Powers himself, most certainly can.

Academics Who Lost Their Way (1): The Other Newton

New Series: Academics Who Lost Their Way

In this series, I will be publishing posts about academics who became the enforcers of government policies of their day. I will begin with a story that is particularly relevant in the week that the Royal Society decided to publish online a manuscript written by the physician William Stukeley, who wrote the Memoirs of Newton’s Life.

* * *

The Newton that everybody knows usually fits with the kind of account offered of him in Wikipedia:

‘His 1687 publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually called the Principia) is considered to be among the most influential books in the history of science, laying the groundwork for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.’(1)

There is, however, another Newton: a Newton who not only became an alchemist, but a Newton who was a brutal enforcer for the Bank of England.

In 1696, Newton travelled from the Cambridge where he’d written Principia to become both a maker and a policeman of money, first as the Warden, and then three years later, as the Master of the Royal Mint in the newly formed Bank of England. King William III had established the bank to raise funds for his war against France, and the new national bank was to issue bank notes in return for deposits in coins or gold. However, by the beginning of the 1690s, the new system was on the verge of collapse; the war had taken its toll on the economy, the Royal Mint was disorganised, and counterfeiting was rampant.

Newton was granted the job as a political favour in recognition of his academic career, and his work at the mint did not disappoint. One aspect of the work involved using Newton’s mathematical and observational skills to develop more efficient ways of minting coins. Another, more sinister aspect was to engage in a veritable war against the counterfeiters (‘coiners’ as they were then called) that were undermining the monetary system. If women had been burned at the stake in the previous century for alleged crimes of witchcraft, by the beginning of the 18th century the fury of the dominant institutions was turned against the many impoverished women in London and other towns whose coining allowed them to eke out a living. Newton pursued the small-time coiners and the more organised crooks with the zeal that inquisitors had once reserved for those whom they regarded as Satan’s agents. He went so far as to disguise himself to hunt down the coiners, and had some of the more notorious criminals accused of high treason so that they might be not just hung, but also drawn and quartered (2).

It is possible to interpret Newton’s severity in personalised terms. But Newton, like other natural philosophers before and after him, was a man of his time, and this is true in more ways than one. Even as he combined the abilities of a natural philosopher-cum-mathematician with that of a statesman—that is to say a state’s man—he was himself something of a closet alchemist. Indeed, decades before Newton used modern rational principles to reorganise the Mint, he pursued what today seem like altogether less mundane interests. In 1669—the same year that he was made Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge—he purchased books about alchemy and the equipment required to engage in alchemical experimentation. In the years that followed, and for a period that lasted until the mid-1690s, Newton devoted much of his time to exploring alchemy. His notes reveal the extent to which he became well versed in alchemical discourse. In Praxis, a treatise which Newton wrote in the 1690s, he suggests in the beginning of the fifth chapter that ‘This rod and the male and female serpents joyned in the proportion of 3, 1, 2 compose the three headed Cerberus which keeps the gates of Hell’ and further on that ‘The black pouder is our Pluto, the God of wealth, our Saturn who beholds himself in the looking glass of [iron]…’ (3). These and numerous other passages contradict the mechanism of Newton’s rather more widely published philosophy, and suggest a return to the organicist cosmologies which his famous theory of mechanism had begun to displace.

The historian Jo Teeter Dobbs argues that Newton’s interest in alchemy was a way of reconciling the mechanism of his theory with God’s non-mechanical intervention in the world. Dobbs further suggests that it is possible to establish a certain continuity between the two sets of discourses. Whatever the case, and as noted by a number of critical social scientists, historically it is only when peoples are not allowed to speak that academics become interested in their language, and one is tempted to suggest that Newton is yet another example of this tendency. (In another post, I’ve noted that another policeman, working in France some 150 years later, became so fascinated by the chapbooks that he censored that he went on to write the first treatise on popular culture.)

It is fascinating to see how, even today, Britain’s predominant science institutions work, directly or indirectly, to keep this other Newton away from the headlines. It would be great if people could be taught that the great man was also a state’s man, an extraordinary proto-scientist and an unspeakably brutal policeman who used his knowledge in the service of money, and to pursue all those who dared to contest the power of what was to become one of the key institutions of capitalism: the Bank of England.

Here’s one last thought: ‘Fred the Shred’ and other leading bankers are lucky that there is no contemporary equivalent of Sir Isaac Newton. Then again, even if there was, would s/he have hung, let alone drawn and quartered, other bankers?

1) ‘Isaac Newton’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_isaac_newton, accessed 18 January 2010.

2) M. White (1997) The Last Sorcerer. London: Fourth Estate.

3) J. Dobbs (1991) The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 301

When the Censor comes Calling (1): the fascination of the censored

Following efforts to censor the EcoLogics blog, EcoLogics is publishing a new series of posts titled ‘When the Censor Comes Calling’. The series explores a variety of issues involving censorship in both past and present times. I’m particularly interested in investigating unusual or paradoxical aspects of efforts to suppress views that are, or once were, inconvenient to those in positions of utmost power.

The scene is Paris in the 1850s. This is famously the Paris that was starting to undergo a process of ‘Haussmannization’, the modernization of the central Paris quartiers by Eugene Haussmman, the Prefet de la Seine who, in the name of ‘slum clearance’, displaced hundreds of thousands of people to make way for the boulevards and parks that were to make Paris the famed ‘city of lights’. Even as the razing of entire neighbourhoods ‘opened up’ space for the glamorous streets in the centre and fueled a property boom, on the periphery poverty worsened as shanty towns sprang up with the precarious dwellings of all those displaced by the ‘asepsis’ so vigorously pursued by Haussmman and other leading members of the French upper classes.

In the wake of the huge upheavals, street literature flourished. If today we have blogs, the poor in the Paris of the 1850s had popular books and the littérature de colportage, booklets that, according to one directive produced in 1851, had as a common feature ‘that they divide society into two classes, the rich and the poor, that they represent the former as tyrants, the latter as victims, that they incite the envy and hatred of one against the other, and that they are thus preparing, in our society so needful of unity and fraternity, all the elements of a civil war’(1).

This source of potential subversion had to be stopped, and fast. Two years after the French authorities passed the so-called ‘Melun Law’ of 1850 that allowed the officials of the Commission on Unhealthful Dwellings to inspect homes to ‘sanitize’ them—and to check for signs of threats to the above-mentioned ‘fraternity’(2)—the Ministry of Police created a ‘Commission for the Examination of Chapbooks’. Charles de Maupas, the Minister of Police, gave one Charles Nisard the role of under-secretary and master censor of the street literature. According to Nisard’s own account, ‘When Mr Charles de Maupas…realised what a disastrous influence was being exerted on everyone’s minds by this mass of books, which street hawkers had been distributing up to that time with near impunity in every corner of France, he conceived and executed the sensible plan of establishing a permanent commission to examine the books (November 30, 1852), and had the kindness to notify me and allow me to participate, under the title of under-secretary. This gave me the opportunity to collect these booklets, and study them with the most scrupulous attention’(3).

Alas, something extraordinary happened. As Nisard collected and read more and more of the chapbooks, he became more and more fascinated by them. He read and read, and no doubt, became more and more obsessed. EcoLogics has images of a censor sitting perhaps at a desk, surrounded by piles of the booklets, which he cannot stop himself from reading. If today someone in a similar position might click endlessly to access and check allegedly defamatory blogs, in the 1850s it was the feulletins which Nisard must have spent hours, days, weeks, indeed months and years squinting at, wetting his finger to pass each and every page in rapt attention.

Did Nisard do all this work on his own, or did he have an assistant, a partner, perhaps a wife that helped to interpret the more subtle aspects of the chapbooks? Did the partner goad him to take more action against the hapless authors of the livres populaires? We do not know. What we do know, thanks to the investigations of Michel de Certeau and other French scholars, is that Nisard went on to write the very first academic book about French popular literature. Then as now, a censor might also become an academic. The birth of the study of popular culture was, in this sense, the paradoxical outcome of a moment of repression. As de Certeau puts it, ‘At the origin of this scientific curiosity, a political repression: the elimination of the booklets judged “subversive” or “immoral”(4).

Update 27 January 2010 Another post in this series has now been published here.

References

1) text quoted in Michel de Certeau’s (1986) ‘The beauty of the dead’, in Heterologies: discourse on the other, translated by B. Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 123.
2) Ann-Louise Shapiro (1985) Housing the poor of Paris 1850-1902. London:University of Wisconsin Press.
3) ‘The beauty of the dead’, op. cit., p. 120.
4) ‘The beauty of the dead’, op. cit., p. 119.