Tag Archives: Democracy

Britain, Government, Politics, Society

Disaffection is threatening our free and stable society

BRITAIN

FOR WHOM really was the winner in last week’s by-elections? “None of The Above” Party seems a more appropriate declaration given that 60 per cent of the electorate did not bother to exercise a right to vote in either of the seats being contested for. That’s a democratic crying shame. We elect our MPs about a dozen times during our adult lives.

Some will not try to diminish the Tory failure, but it was considerable. Nor should we assume that Labour is too weakly supported that it cannot win a General Election, for it is not. Or that the Reform Party is not a major threat to Rishi Sunak, because it is. Disaffected Tories are moving in their droves to Reform, unsettling for the Conservative Party if they have ambitions of holding on to power. More than ten per cent of Conservatives have already migrated. Yet, these simple truths are mere squalls on the surface of British politics.

Troubled depths lie beneath, which are full of potential dangers for our stable and free society.

Politics in the UK has fractured over the past quarter of a century. Until the eras of Thatcher and Blair, this country was still divided politically on much the same lines that had divided it in 1950. One big party stood for the industrial working class, the inhabitants of council estates and 19th Century terraces, and also for a small layer of city-dwelling radical intellectuals. The other stood for tree-lined suburbs and the countryside, white-collar workers, for small businessmen and professionals.

But by the time Mrs Thatcher had finished, and Mr Blair had begun his swinging social revolution, we were a different country.

All the old frontiers had melted away, just as the Iron Curtain bulldozed down made headway for a new Europe. Vast new problems grew and overshadowed the old ones: the replacement of industrial jobs with high-tech work or with call-centre drudgery, the flood of women into the workforce and away from the home, the astonishing expansion of universities, the transformation of family life, the computer revolution, and, perhaps above all, large-scale immigration.

Loyalties shifted and blurred, as the Brexit referendum showed beyond doubt. Politics had become troubling and deeply divisive.

In spite of that, Tory and Labour politicians still sought to win votes by using the old spells and incantations, which no longer worked – more police officers on the beat on one side, ever-expanding promises to fix the NHS on the other. The wider public, unfooled, look on with increasing dismay.

How is it so many pledges and promises are never fulfilled? Why is a rich country, full of skills and talent, now so lacking in good government that we navigate our lives amid a maze of potholes and crumbling roads, unprotected by an absent police force, and the many who are stuck in queues for everything from a dental appointment to hospital admission for a medical procedure or major operation? Public angst is growing.

We should not, however, despise our politicians; of whatever affiliation they may be. We live in an ancient and free democracy, and it should be allowed to thrive. Most people will understand that politicians bear a heavy responsibility and in many cases are personally devoted to serving their constituents. The great majority of parliamentarians are honest and well-intentioned.

But something has gone badly amiss in their relationship with those they represent. If left uncorrected, and the widespread discontent and disengagement now rife among us are not assuaged, a portal will open through which dangerous extremists can enter mainstream politics.

Such extremism is personified in the worrying figure of George Galloway, who appears now to have a real chance in the chaotic Rochdale by-election. As a lone maverick, Mr Galloway can do little harm. But what if other, similar figures, begin to profit from discontent and disaffection? A gateway certainly exists for trumping exploitation.

Our mainstream politicians should stop trying to placate voters with mere slogans and instead recognise that their concerns are real and pressing. The whole point of democracy is that such discontents be addressed.

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Arts, Culture, Human Rights, Politics, Society

Book banning in the US is inspiring educational censorship elsewhere

CENSORSHIP

BOOK BANNING is spreading at an alarming rate in school districts across the United States. PEN America recently documented more than 2,500 books that have been banned stemming across 32 different states during the 2021-22 academic year.

These bans are not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated assault on public education that’s taking aim at the teaching of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities and US history.

Demands to ban books in American schools is not new. But book banning now has erupted into a national movement. Coordinated and highly organised activist groups have transformed school board meetings into political battlegrounds, threatening educators and undermining the freedom to learn.

These efforts to censor books are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. Equally worrying, however, is the fact that these patterns of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven’t had as much success there yet.

In the UK, officials are raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools – an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern – to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That’s part of what authors have described as a mood ‘shift’ in the UK – a budding ‘culture war’ that is leading to the censorship and removal of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children’s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.

Echoes of US-based group tactics are also manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books – again with LGBTQ+ content – and seeking to change curricular topics that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory.

The book banning movement has also gained the attention of politicians. Australia’s Senate voted against the inclusion of critical race theory in the country’s school curriculum in 2021.

Of course, educational censorship laws and book bans, particularly aimed at silencing certain peoples, religions, or viewpoints, are tactics that have long been used by governments.

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China, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Under China’s watchful eye

ORWELLIAN CHINA

Intro: The reality of modern China is no longer Orwellian science fiction. Every face and every move are being tracked. ‘Wrong’ political thoughts punished. All citizens’ lives are being controlled by the State. There are chilling implications for us all

TROUBLE in Hong Kong began earlier last month. Police ruthlessly beat protesters with batons and showered them with pepper spray in violent running battles. Rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas were fired into the crowds of angry but until then peaceful demonstrators.

The scenes in Hong Kong were as shocking as any seen there since the former British territory was handed over to China in 1997.

The handover was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong considerable autonomy and democratic rights under a “one country, two systems” agreement. But now its China-friendly parliament is debating plans to allow the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China, and a very different legal system. Which is why thousands have continued to besiege government buildings in the city, prompting the brutal crackdowns that have become more prevalent.

Hong Kong is the only spot on Chinese soil where any such protest is still imaginable. But for how much longer?

Be under no illusion, Hongkongers are protesting not in an act of hope but of desperation. With the new extradition law looming over them, they feel that this is their end game.

Beijing’s aim is clear: to turn Hong Kong into a Chinese city like any other. In the new China that means a place with harsher and vastly more efficient repression than we have seen in recent memory.

There are several reasons the Chinese Communist Party deeply distrusts Hong Kong and its way of life and is intent on destroying it.

One is the ability of Hong Kong to remember. In China remembering events the Chinese Communist Party chooses to erase from history is a subversive act and thus forbidden and punished.

Take Tiananmen Square. It was 30 years ago that a brave demonstrator carrying nothing more than a plastic grocery bag was photographed as he stood in front of a tank during protests in the Beijing square against China’s Communist government.

The starkest of images, it encapsulated in one potent frame the struggle for freedom against dictatorial oppression.

 

BUT the courage of this man, whose identity and fate has never been discovered, was to no avail. The regime of Deng Xiaoping cracked down on the revolt, beginning with a massacre of the Tiananmen protesters, followed by the widespread suppression of liberties.

The bloodshed, bullets and bayonets of Tiananmen Square in June 1989 only served to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party, cementing its grip on power and laying the foundations of the China we know today – a China which is now more determined than ever to eliminate all memories of Tiananmen.

In the two decades after the massacre, the Beijing Government pursued a twin-track policy of political authoritarianism combined with economic liberalism. Essentially, the nascent urban middle-classes were offered a deal: share in prosperity and keep your mouths shut.

But this dual approach, while fuelling record growth, gradually began to undermine the authority of the communist regime, as its guiding ideology decayed, and corruption spread. All that changed in 2012 with the arrival in power of the new Party chief and President Xi Jinping, an apparatchik who has turned out to be a ruthless autocrat.

Now effectively President for life, Xi has overseen the return of a merciless Leninist dictatorship, complete with relentless state propaganda, the eradication of dissent and the domination of civic life by the Communist Party.

What makes this development even more forceful is that his Government is using today’s high-tech tools, such as mass video surveillance powered by artificial intelligence, to enforce its rule.

The internet and the cyber revolution have been often hailed as instruments of liberation, but in the hands of Xi Jinping’s state, they have become instruments of repression, mind control and political manipulation.

Communist dictatorship has been given a digital rebirth.

This is not the story we are usually told in the West. Politicians in Europe tend to focus on the threat of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They all but ignore the reality of the far greater challenge from the evermore ambitious China.

Many Westerners have, indeed, long clung to the delusion that a more open economy and increasing growth will automatically bring political liberalisation to China.

The argument went that if we engaged and traded with China, the country would slowly start to resemble us. But that was nothing more than wishful thinking. Domestic repression is accelerating, while the regime seeks greater global influence.

The inability of officialdom to effectively face up to this threat is perfectly illustrated by the explosive controversy over the British Government’s plan to allow the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei to play a key role in the creation of the new generation 5G network here, despite the profound reservations of allies like the United States and Australia, who remain gravely concerned about the security implications.

Trying to downplay such anxieties, Huawei’s boss Ren Zhengfei has given assurances that his company “will never cause damage to a nation or an individual”. But this ignores the fact that an intelligence service law from 2017 obliges all “Chinese organisations and citizens” to “support, aid and co-operate with the work of the national secret service”.

There is breathtaking naivety and complacency about the true nature of Xi Jinping’s China. Far from being more pluralistic, China’s structure as a one-party state has been reinforced.

“The party rules everything,” says Xi, a chilling statement of fact that embraces every institution from the universities and the media to the civil service. Indeed, the party is now an organisation with no fewer than 89 million members, more than the entire population of Germany or, indeed, Britain.

In this climate, a new cult of Xi’s personality is accompanied by the punishment of any deviation from the ruling orthodoxy. The lives of China’s 1.4 billion citizens are saturated in Communist propaganda, including patriotic songs in nursery schools, banners on urban buildings, posters of Xi and output in the state-controlled media. Some taxis carry LED screens on their roofs showing party slogans.

Chairman Mao had his little Red Book. Xi has his Little Red App, launched in January this year, whereby citizens can collect reward points while reading socialist texts.

More aggressively, through show trials and arrests, the Communist regime aims to strike terror into anyone who still dares challenge the state.

This quest for ideological control has seen bloggers, journalists, campaigners and civil rights lawyers silenced; some have disappeared all together, others are forced to appear on TV, confessing to misdeeds. According to Xi, the Chinese legal system is “the handle in the knife of the party”.

 

A KEY element of Chinese propaganda is, as stated above, the rewriting of history. “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 – a stance the Beijing regime has eagerly adopted.

A permanent state-run exercise in collective amnesia is under way, as shown by the way any reference to the Tiananmen Square atrocity has been gradually eradicated.

Over the years, the “counter-revolutionary riots” became known first as “the riots”, then “the political storm” and eventually just “the incident”. In the end even the “incident” dissolved into silence, as if an old photograph had faded until only a meaningless silhouette remained. Many of those under 30 years of age have no idea that it ever took place.

Chairman Mao once said that the Chinese Communist revolution “relies on guns and pens.” Guns and pens also go together in the case of Tiananmen Square. The state’s troops murdered the protesters; the state’s writers murder the truth.

By promoting freedom of expression, modern technology was meant to be an antidote to the poison of oppression. But it has not worked out like that in China.

Under Xi’s regime, this sophisticated technology has been harnessed as a weapon for the classic Communist Party tactics of intimidation, indoctrination and censorship. What we are witnessing is the return of totalitarianism in digital guise. When he was first installed in power, Xi gave the order to “win back the commanding heights of the internet”, a task that Westerners might have thought impossible given the web’s reputation for anarchic freedom.

But the Communists did it. They intimidated dissident bloggers, deleted accounts and demanded ideological compliance and censorship from providers.

Users of one of the most lively and popular social media tools, Weibo – China’s version of Twitter – were brought to heel in 2013 by the simple device of threatening jail sentences for “spreading rumours”. Political discussions were quickly dropped by Weibo, with the site confining itself to entertainment, commerce and propaganda.

Perhaps even more stunning is the Chinese state’s exploitation of monitoring techniques and facial recognition systems powered by artificial intelligence to impose strict conformity on its citizens.

Unlike much of the West, China is unencumbered by concerns about data protection and privacy, so it is using its cyber-expertise to forge ahead in this field.

The process is fuelled by the state placing a priority on cutting edge research and the population’s enthusiasm for mobile technology – no less than 60 per cent of all the world’s cashless transactions in 2017 took place in China, while the country is the world’s biggest market for e-commerce.

A new society is being born, one dominated by the all-seeing, all-powerful eye of the Government. By next year, China plans to have 600 million CCTV cameras, strengthening the apparatus of the surveillance infrastructure.

Already, the impact on individual life is phenomenal. At railway stations in cities like Guangzhou and Wuhan, for instance, entry is only allowed to people once their faces have been scanned and checked against a police database. And this is just the beginning.

The citizens of Hong Kong understand the extent of the state’s reach. During the initial protests there were long lines at the metro ticket machines because people didn’t want to use their rechargeable Octopus cards for fear of leaving a digital trail that could connect them to the protest.

A central component of the new China is the planned “Social Credit System”, which will gather data on the behaviour of each citizen to ensure, through rewards and penalties, adherence to the state’s rules on personal responsibility.

It is being trialled in places such as Rongcheng, where residents start with 1,000 “social credit” points, then earn bonuses or reductions according to their conduct, like obedience at traffic signals or remarks about the party on social media.

Digital technology even dictates the supply of lavatory paper in some of Beijing’s public facilities, with users given a restricted number of sheets in their allotted time once their faces have been recognised by the dispenser.

In China’s bold new vision, omnipresent algorithms create economically productive, socially harmonised and politically compliant subjects, who will ultimately censor and sanction themselves at every turn. In the old days, the party demanded fanatical belief; now mute complicity will suffice.

Of course, China’s plans are not just for domestic consumption. The country is exporting its surveillance and artificial intelligence technology all over the world.

And other autocracies are eager buyers, keen to ape China’s authoritarianism. Western democracies are also supplicants – as Britain proves with its courting of Huawei, hailed by Chinese police as being a “close partner” in “technological” and “digitalised” police work.

 

THE technological export drive is part of China’s concerted effort to expand its global influence. Until the recent past, the Beijing Government was deeply reluctant to play any role on the international stage, preferring to concentrate on domestic problems. But again, all that has changed under Xi Jinping, whose outlook combines socialist ideology with nationalistic pride.

The latter impulse is demonstrated in a host of initiatives: in the massive expansion of China’s military; in the funding of Chinese institutes in Western universities and think tanks; in the control of Chinese student associations overseas; in the creation of global propaganda machines like the television’s “Voice of China” whose European headquarters was recently set up in London; in the vast Chinese investments in Africa and South America; in the support for colossal infrastructure projects like Britain’s new nuclear power plant at Hinckley Point; any in the ferocity of response to any attacks on Xi’s regime.

The brave and proud Hongkongers out in the streets are a living rebuttal for the party’s claim that the Chinese aren’t cut out for democracy. And that is exactly why our governments should stand by them.

Xi’s regime has shown that it sees itself in ideological competition with us. Through its slide back to totalitarianism, it has rejected our values and tries to undermine them. For the sake of our own future, we must be willing to defend them.

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