Race: The Forbidden Word of the Political Classes

David Starkey in his latest piece on the Summer Riots of 2011 Revisited (which I urge you to read before reading further) begins by quoting T.S. Eliot: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." How true.  How very true.  Once again, as is his wont, Starkey hits the nail right on the head.

Just over five years ago (9 August 2007), in the first rumblings of trouble, BNP (Banque Nationale de Paris) reported a 'total evaporation of liquidity'.  A year later, amid scenes none of us can forget, a man identified only as 'Big Ben' went to the US government and grabbed a $700 billion bank bail-out.  Since then, those scenes have been repeated over and over, as huge sums of money have been taken from ordinary people - people like you and me - and given to this, what we can surely only call a 'criminal overclass' to 'bail them out'.  And then that money has been recouped by 'austerity' measures, with ordinary, decent people losing their jobs, prices going up, basic services being cut back and sold off to the menacing gangs known as 'the private sector'.  It has become so bad that recently the army had to be called in to rein in the damage done by one such 'massive', which calls itself the G4S (which, though I am out of touch with young people, I am informed plays on the names of the infamous 'Gang of four' and 'SClub7').  Remember them?  Remember those extraordinary scenes that played out, night after night on our TV screens?  As men in suits walked away from the wreckage of national economies openly clutching their huge 'bonuses'? As these people ostentatiously avoided paying their taxes? It certainly seemed impossible to forget such bare-faced wrong-doing.

Yet forget is what our political masters seem determined to do.  In typically sanitised language, parliamentary 'inquiries' have been called for and launched.  Our leaders have publicly wrung their hands about it all.  But actual confrontation with the root causes has been safely filed away, labelled 'too difficult to talk about'; 'don't touch with a barge pole' or 'our economy depends more on the financial sector than other countries''.  Since then, silence. A blessed amnesia has swept over our political class, and now it’s almost a case of “banking crisis? What banking crisis?”.

There is a perfectly innocent explanation, of course, if hardly an edifying one. We live in an age of multiple crises, with new problems cropping up at every turn. We are also enduring a regime of omnishambles, with a weak Government drifting at the mercy of events. In such circumstances, things, even big ones, do just get forgotten.

But I fear there is more to it than that. For something rather odd started to happen, even as events were unrolling: we were told, with increasing firmness, not to believe our own senses.  It was obvious from the beginning, to anybody with eyes to see, that these were irresponsible financial foul-ups on a global scale in which the race of many of the participants played an important part.  Almost every one of these 'fat cats' was white.

A stop should have been put to this nonsense by the official reports and public pronouncements. Instead, shamefully, the financial crisis was subjected to every sort of blame-shifting: it was the fault of the Labour government for not regulating the City, or for regulating it too much; it was the fault of ordinary families for borrowing too much; it was the fault of the Euro; of the Welfare State and the 'Something for Nothing' culture; benefits scroungers; the disabled; and so on. There was one glaring omission: there was no tabulation of ethnicity. Nevertheless, and having rehearsed no evidence whatever, the government still does not believe that "this was a banking crisis.”

The proper, unvarnished picture is incontrovertible: over 90 per cent of those involved were white. These figures must of course be read against the proportion of the various groups in the population as a whole: in London, where the unregulated 'wild west' of the financial sector is located, some 12 per cent of the population is black and 69 per cent is white. Whites, in other words, were significantly over-represented among the fat cats.  The conclusion is inescapable and painful. Far from being merely opportunistic, the core of the financial sector was formed from an already existing class and that class is disproportionately white. This is the reality. But in our present society it is unbearable (in Eliot’s formulation). And unsayable.  No wonder the Government and the media worked so hard to suppress it. And no wonder outraged media and public opinion came down like a ton of bricks on those naive or foolhardy enough to tell the truth.   “Libtard” and "Deficit Denier" have been among the least of the insults thrown at those who point out the unsayable truth.

Actually I don't believe in race.  But I do believe in culture.  Not “white culture” of course, since such a uniform construct does not exist any more than a uniform “black culture”.  But there is a “a particular sort” of white culture: the “greedy, selfish, nihilistic, culture” of the market. I deplore its specific linguistic forms: the “management” patois in which these City denizens speak, thuggishly glorifying salaries, glossing over sexism and homophobia: 'blue-skies thinking to deliver sustainable growth from a competitive spend year on year going forward'.  We are all familiar with it as it creeps everywhere into our day-to-day culture.  This sort of white male culture militates against ethics, social responsibility, merit and education (as opposed to 'training').  I would emphasise (in anti-racist terms) its insidious attractiveness to white youth.

Curiously, the strongest voices who agree with me are white, like George Monbiot, the nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and the educator Richard Drayton.  "Something must be done,” they have said. It must indeed, otherwise we are doomed to repeat the bail-outs and disastrous austerity packages in an ever-shortening cycle. But, my experience has taught me, only a white leader can do it.  None of our current crop of white politicians quite fits the bill. David Cameron is too rich; George Osborne is too compromised; Ed Milliband is too ineffectual; while David Starkey, with his mindless comments about the need confront the intrusion of black culture into white society and to shift the blame from class and capitalist economics onto race, his outrageously un-pc views (which he has for money, to a deadline*) is himself part of the problem.

Only one person is of the necessary stature: Her Majesty the Queen. Imagine if she turned her passion, energy, political skills, organisational drive and burning sense of moral righteousness into tackling head-on the destructive culture of unrestrained neo-liberal capitalism.  She has already appeared, as James Bond heroine, in the Olympic opening ceremony; if she took on this task she would become great indeed. 

Oh.  What's that you're saying?  That this has nothing to do with culture, skin colour or ethnicity? That it's to do with economics, class and differential access to wealth and opportunity? Ah, right.

*(c) Stewart Lee

There is Unrest in the Forest, there is Trouble with the Trees (or 'Climate change brought down the Roman Empire, scientists *don't* find')

[Research on Tree-Rings has recently grabbed the headlines as showing that 'Climate change may be responsible for the rise and fall of the Roman empire'.  This is unlikely.  The problem lies principally in the scientists trying to explain phenomena which are not now thought to have existed in the form the scientists believe.  Furthermore, there are all sorts of logical problems in arguing that climatic features explain the multifarious, divergent features of a 300-year long period of European history!]

The chance to use the opening lines of a Prog classic as the title for some writing on late antiquity comes but rarely in a career, so when it does it should be seized with both hands. 

My texts today are taken from The Daily Telegraph and from the BBC's news website:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8262919/Climate-change-may-be-responsible-for-the-rise-and-fall-of-Roman-empire-scientists-find.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12186245
The abstract of the research in question can be found here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/01/12/science.1197175

Reduced to a couple of headline-grabbing paragraphs, what the research is claimed to show is that:
"Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from 250-600 AD coincided with the demise of the western Roman empire and the turmoil of the migration period," the team reported.
"Distinct drying in the 3rd Century paralleled a period of serious crisis in the western Roman empire marked by barbarian invasion, political turmoil and economic dislocation in several provinces of Gaul"

The first thing that needs to be said is that this approach is not new.  Back in the mists of time, when I was preparing to go to university, I read Geoffrey Parker's Europe in Crisis (recently a second edition has appeared, which I have not read [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Europe-1598-1648-Blackwell-Classic-Histories/dp/0631220275] - these comments may well not apply to the new version, though a quick skim on Amazon suggests they do).  This began with a discussion of climate history and how tree-ring research suggests that the seventeenth century was a period when bad weather might have helped to produce the turmoil of the era.  At the time this fired my imagination (if I hadn't turned out to be an early medievalist I would almost certainly have specialised in the sixteenth or seventeenth century) as a real New History.  Over time, of course, my faith in this sort of environmental determinism (as in all other sorts of determinism) waned.  I ceased to be convinced by this kind of explanation, parodied by a friend and colleague as 'there was an unusually heavy frost, so the Thirty Years War broke out.'

As with my comments on DNA, my gripe is not (it cannot be) with the science itself, with the reality of the observations.  Similarly, if the aim of the researchers is to use these findings to try and spur governments on to act further and faster on climate change, then I can cut them quite a lot of slack.  But we do need to show a considerable degree of caution about their historical conclusions, at least as far as the Roman Empire is concerned.  Here are some points which you might like to bear in mind:

As with the DNA research, the scientists have not critically probed the reality of the historical phenomena they claim their research explains.  First, recent research has poured considerable doubt on the idea that the third century was an economic crisis in the sense that used to be understood, that is as a period of economic decline.  It might have been a crisis in terms of a weakening of the economic unity that had characterised the Empire in its very early phase but in large parts of the Empire (such as Britain) there is no trace of any decline at all: quite the opposite.  And the fourth century in Britain and elsewhere was an era of prosperity.

Second, the turmoil of the migrations.  Again, one needs to think much harder about what these migrations were like.  No one sane denies that people migrated in the last century of the western Empire's existence, but people have always migrated.  We do not know whether more people migrated in the fifth and sixth centuries than did in the third or fourth, or the first or second.  There were, allegedly, tribal movements on a considerable scale in the Roman Republican period too.  Large numbers of people migrated from the heart of the Empire out to the peripheries during the centuries of Roman expansion.  It is a curious view that sees the Roman invasions as a period of 'prosperity' and the probably far less dramatic migration of barbarians in the fifth century (as stated, the continuation of a set of relationships that had lasted for centuries) as one of turmoil.  More curious still that one movement might be explained by one climatic set of conditions and the other by another. 

So, again, this science is bolted on to explain a historical 'problem' whose outlines have been entirely changed as the result of serious historical enquiry.  Sometimes they have changed so far as to make it no longer a problem at all, or at least no longer a problem that can be explained in those terms.  How to explain this by analogy?  This is the best I can do.  It is 'a bit like' a situation where 'scientists' claim that the kind of wheat grown in later ninth-century England would produce a flour that, if used in cakes, could suddenly and unpredictably burn.  'Scientists show Alfred unfairly blamed for burning cakes!' then gets plastered across every news site in the land.  But we now know that the story of Alfred burning the cakes at all is a twelfth-century invention...

That is the main flaw in these sorts of explanation.  But there are myriad other issues.  The collapse of Roman civilisation in Britain was the affair of a couple of generations around 400, after a century of prosperity.  Difficult to explain that through climatic variations over the longue durée, but socio-political explanations do perfectly well.  Migration is a constant of human existence.  Barbarians had been moving into the Empire for centuries, from Caesar's time (and indeed before) right through to the fifth century, and the factors and processes behind their movement remained demonstrably analogous throughout.  Whether any more (or fewer) moved in the fifth century than the third is impossible to know, but the migrations of the third century did not spell doom for an Empire in the thoes of all sorts of other political problems, whereas those of the fifth century did become a focus for political developments that ended up in the fragmentation of the western Empire.  Climate seems incapable of explaining this difference.

Equally, the fourth century was a period of strong imperial rule and remarkable coherence for the Roman Empire, in spite of its situation in the heart of the period where climatic features are supposed to be causing crisis.  The economic revival of the West during the seventh century could be said to fit with the findings of this research but again problems soon arise.  It seems clear (to me, at the moment, at least) that this revival began in the late sixth century and has perfectly adequate socio-political explanations.  More importantly, this does not explain the fact that, although the north-west may have revived, the Mediterranean world experienced a comparative economic decline at this time.  What about the Arab invasions of the seventh century?  Is this sort of 'turmoil' not explained by climate (people used to think it was but - as far as I am aware - this is an explanation in desuetude)?  If it is explained by climatic optimum, then the opposite climatic conditions cannot in themselves explain migration, can they?  Not without considerable modification to the thesis.  And if the Arab expansion is to be explained by politics, society or ideological/religious factors, then why can the northern barbarian migrations not be explained in those terms?

And so on, and so forth.  Let us be clear that this research is valuable and interesting and that it doubtless adds important and interesting details to the picture we have of these centuries.  But we need to think much more carefully about how and why they are important and interesting.  That means asking new and better historical questions that these data can go some way towards answering, not in bolting them on to explain problems which they can't explain and which, in some cases, are no longer problems in any case.

The article concludes with the researchers in question saying "We are very interested in understanding past civilisations and making our research more dense."  More dense.  Ah, that'll be because of the 'less favourable growing conditions' then: the funding 'drought'.  That, at least, is one conclusion that all of us in British academia will currently find it hard to disagree with!

The Revolution begins (in which I become involved with ‘rampaging’ student ‘protesters’ ‘fighting running battles with the police’ throughout central London … apparently)

I went to the demonstration against the government’s education cuts in London yesterday. It was very well attended. The organisers had expected 24,000 people but in the end claimed that 45,000 came, with other estimates topping 50,000. From where I was it was impossible to judge (fill in a comment here about the difficulties of estimating the size of early medieval armies…) though I would hazard a guess that it was closer to the latter figure than the former. Who knows? Anyway, after a trio of lacklustre speeches from representatives of the organising bodies (believe me, I could have done better myself) we were off, slowly moving down Whitehall past the Houses of Parliament (timed to coincide with Prime Minister’s Questions) and to Millbank. I think it took our bit of the march about an hour and a half to complete the route, which ought to give an idea of the numbers present, and we were very far from being at the back; people were still coming in large numbers all the way along the route as we walked back to central London to get something to eat. So it was good to see such a huge turn-out but, being the disillusioned type, I felt there were nevertheless grounds for concern. One (obviously) was that it is disheartening if not unexpected that students only get politicised and active when it is a matter of their own pockets (if our students are anything to go by, I imagine that a fair number of them voted for this government; indeed I quipped that the 'Poppleton' student contingent was probably there to protest that the proposed fees were far too low…). Disappointing, but I suspect it was ever thus, to some degree at least.

Amplifying this point and underlining my general unease, was the fact that – overwhelmingly – the student placards were concerned only with the fees issue. One at least made a demand for ‘value for money’ (I wager groans from 90% of any HE teachers reading this)! But the fees issue is only a symptom, not the cause. Successive governments (Labour as well as Conservative) have cut back on the funding of higher education and focused what government money there is on satisfying the perceived demands of ‘business’, something that utterly misunderstands the nature of ‘education’ as opposed to ‘training’. This, incidentally, is not a complaint limited to arts and humanities students; the ‘hard sciences’ were amongst the most vocal in protesting against the imposition of Mandelson’s ‘Impact’ agenda (indeed the official response from my own professional body, the Royal Historical Society, was so pathetic and lily-livered that I nearly resigned my fellowship in protest). So much the worse in a profoundly anti-intellectual culture, but the cuts threatened by Cameron and co. will so slash university funding that the universities will have no option but to raise fees, or else cut jobs and departments (they had already started this after the last Labour government’s cuts, and it’ll hardly get any better now). The focus on the placards suggested to me, though, that as long as fees are not raised (or are cut) the student body will be happy enough. The response will inevitably be more ‘mass-delivery’ teaching (i.e. lots of lectures) from fewer staff, but then my suspicion (alluded to in a previous post) is that, provided they get their increased ‘contact hours’ (students have a *very* poor understanding of this issue) telling them what to write for their exam, they’ll be happy enough. Maybe I’m wrong. I very much hope that I am. The chants didn’t always suggest a particularly tight focus on important matters but anyway, in the jargon of British journalism, ‘a carnival atmosphere prevailed’. I’d have liked a bit more anger, to be honest. No middle class revolution, this. Shame.

But, no. Apparently I was mistaken. On the Tube on the way home, having spent the rest of the afternoon in the middle of London, in an area encompassed by Victoria, Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, I read The Evening Standard (latterly given away free, and so now changing hands at a price only marginally exceeding its value) and was struck by the coverage of the event. ‘STUDENT SIEGE’ shrieked the front page, which described how thousands of student ‘protesters’ (nothing so becomes a demonstrator as being called a protester) had ‘brought central London to a halt’ by ‘fighting running battles with the police’. Having spent all afternoon in central London this came as a bit of a surprise, I have to admit, as the only time I had been brought to a halt was by the usual slow-moving crowds of shoppers on Oxford Street. I certainly hadn’t seen or heard any sign of the alleged ‘running battles’, although clearly there were angry confrontations – the Standard had pictures after all – and clearly some students had broken into a building containing conservative offices on Millbank.

A look at various editions of the Standard was interesting. The earliest version simply had a picture of three young female students with placards (the sort of thing that Private Eye would satirise along the lines of ‘Journalists fear education cuts will reduce the number of fruity* female students they can photograph’ [* the word the Eye always uses]), a later version went along the lines of peaceful protest hi-hacked at the end, before the ‘all hell breaks loose’ version I saw.

Because I know (vaguely) one of its co-authors (a former York student, as it happens), today I read this piece in the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8124834/Student-tuition-fee-protest-lone-call-to-hit-Millbank-then-the-mob-descended.html
(Read the comments if you want to peer into the void, and see just how dim the British public [or Telegraph-readers at any rate*] is; note in particular the visceral islamophobia of the second comment.
* How did the old joke go?  The Times is read by the people who run the country; the Telegraph is read by the people who think they run the country; the Guardian is read by the people who ought to run the country; the Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; and the Sun is read by people who don't know who runs the country and don't care either, just as long as she's got big tits.)

Now, all this puzzles me further, because I reached the end of the march at 2.00, and then walked most of the way back down Millbank and didn’t see any of this mayhem, though I did see Police vans heading off somewhere with sirens going. Yet apparently, to read this piece, one could be forgiven for getting the impression (as the commenters clearly have) that the capital had been in the grip of anarchist outrage for half an hour by this point. Indeed I have spent most of today in baffled consideration of the print media’s coverage. What one notices very quickly is the repetition of the same pictures, none of which seems to show a huge crowd of ‘anars’ storming the bastions of English democracy. Look closely, and you will see the same few people, often doing the same thing but photographed from different angles. Look closely and you’ll see a lot of people standing about in anything but aggressive posture. Look closely and you’ll see a lot of police looking on, not doing very much, clearly not needing to. There are some shots of physical confrontations between some policemen and some ‘hard-core’ demonstrators. No one familiar with the media coverage of the Miners’ Strike can look at a photograph of a protestor and a policeman shouting at each other and blithely assume that it was the protestor who started the shouting (which isn’t to say it was necessarily the policeman either, of course).

Baroness Warsi: Not defenestrated
by an angry mob

One estimate places the trouble makers at 2,000. Maybe that’s right. I don’t know. I have not thus far seen any great reason to trust the coverage by the Great British press. Whatever, it was clearly too many for the police in attendance, who had been a pretty light-touch presence for the most part, and who didn’t feel a heavy-handed response was appropriate. Interesting in itself. The total ‘butcher’s bill’ seems to have been 40 arrests, which hardly suggests a repetition of Paris ’68 or the storming of the Bastille. Yet this element of the day's events has dominated the coverage.  Assuming the press figures are correct, 1/26 of the demonstrators (that’s fewer than 4%) stormed the building containing Tory offices, and a small percentage of this number (look at the photos) smashed the place up (not Tory offices apparently, and nor, fortunately as I’m sure we all agree, was Baroness Warsi, who was on the premises, defenestrated by an angry mob, which naturally is a tremendous relief).

This was not A Good Thing. I’m not going to condone it; the only elements I will condemn are those which caused or threatened harm to actual people  (e.g. the fire extinguisher incident). Tactically, it played – as you can see – straight into the hands of the right-wing press who were thus able to conceal the real point completely. Tactically it was a disaster. Morally, some elements were stupid at least and did as much (if not more) physical damage to the fellow protesters than it did to the police (not that the Police had any business being targeted either). Some may have been the usual suspects, the ‘professional troublemakers’. (Where do you get a job as a professional troublemaker? Where are the positions vacant advertised? And what do you earn?) But who knows? If there were some students angry enough to do this – mistaken, misdirected and to be condemned though it was – then someone really ought to listen. The coverage, though, says little or nothing about the 96% of the march that passed off peacefully and is able to take reasonable points and demands and make them into the ravings of extremists. The protest began peacefully; 96% of it ended peacefully too.

You can probably guess where I am going with this. Yes, it is – yet again – the value of a historical education. The press coverage has taken an unpleasant and reprehensible incident and blown it quite out of proportion. You only need to look at the comments on the Telegraph article to see how people have uncritically leapt straight on the bandwagon, accepting it as all the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and stirred in their own personal bigotry. The historian’s training makes her question everything she is told, look closer at the evidence, find other sources, and weigh things up without being too carried away with the rhetoric of autopsy (‘I know; I was there’). I was there, and saw and heard nothing other than the vans leaving the scene; my Facebook-friend Heidi was there and saw people getting glass thrown in their faces and concrete being slung willy-nilly into the crowd; I have no reason to suppose that she’s making it up.  Neither of us has the whole picture. I would say that my experience (I was on Millbank at exactly this time) shows that the extent or scale of the trouble has been overplayed; Heidi’s shows very clearly how unpleasant the business could be at the eye of the storm, and that one can’t just say that nothing happened. The question you have to ask is whether a few dozen idiots behaving dangerously in a courtyard outweighs 50,000 people of all sorts of origins (I saw a Wadham College banner and I saw banners from the post-’92 institutions; there were mature students from Birkbeck too, as well as students of conventional age; artists and scientists) taking to the streets to say that what the government is doing is mistaken and wrong, or (better) balancing the two sides to the event. Which is the headline event? I’d say it was the second element not the first. Why has the press chosen the other option? You decide… Either way, this is the sort of question the historian always has to ask. Not just is this bastard lying to me but ‘why is this lying bastard lying to me’ (the latter element of this at least is attributed to Louis Philip Heren [1909–1995]).

What worries me is essentially what I have said before, that far too many history students don’t want to be taught the value of critical scrutiny of evidence; like the commenters on the Telegraph piece, they just want to be told what is what and what to think. How are they to respond to this sort of issue?  With this attitude among a largely complacent de-politicised electorate, who needs repression!

So, if I go back to Schama in Tuesday’s Guardian, what does it matter what bits of History you study at school, as long as they teach you the arts of critical thinking and reflexion, which I would say are what history is about. In evaluating the information, misinformation or imbalanced information about yesterday’s events, does it do you any more good to have studied Henry VIII or Hitler, or Alfred the Great or the Hittites, as long as you know how to assess information critically, and try and see that there might be more than one point of view?

Anyway, enough of this bourgeois chatter. Pass the Molotov Cocktails, Tarquin; it’s fuckin’ kickin’ off.