Journal of the Plague Years

• Olympic Park Development.
• The Chinese may have good reasons not to listen, but we should still tell them...
• The Master Race.
• Splittism.
• To Beijing or not to Beijing?
• Written in fulminating anger...
• Running the 100 metres is more important than the human rights of millions.
• Are 'Free Tibet' t-shirts legal?
• Just a reminder...
• Brown Deng.
• How does it feel to be a London policeman taking orders from a Beijing heavy?
• Homage to the IOC.
• The Olympic Torch through London.
• Not just Tibet.
• As a ratepayer, all I can see so far is that the Olympics have already cost me a lot of money.
• For God's Sake, Milligramme, Shut Up.
• Criticise China because China is not a basket-case.
• The Games. They're just games.
• Tibetan Protests.
• Soon, We'll Have Moved On.
• Priorities.
• Darfur and Tibet.
• The Chinese Olympics.
• Tibet.

Olympic Park Development.

3 June 2008 .

The Times reports today ('Olympic body "bulldozed" businesses out of the way') that 350 businesses, as well as over 400 residents and 35 traveller families, were moved to make way for the Olympic Park under compulsory purchase orders (CPOs).

People evicted under CPOs often complain that they've lost out, to which the authorities' response tends to be along the lines of 'they would say that, wouldn't they?' The supposed victims seldom get much sympathy (even when, if, they're lucky enough to get the support of paper which happens to have a political agenda at the time).

I've only seen a CPO from close up once, way back when, but it was enough to leave me profoundly suspicious. A (girl)friend lived in a terraced house in Hammersmith (W. London) which was compulsorily purchased to make way for an urban motorway. As I remember - which is accurate in principle if not in detail - the house, free of mortgage, in which the family had lived for years, was valued at about 14,000. They were given 5,000. In the event the road wasn't built, and the authority sold the house as it stood, about four years later, for 25,000. No recompense to the family which, unable to afford to buy another house, lived thereafter in rather unimpressive rented accommodation. Your correspondent did rather learn the lesson.

So when folk complain that they have been mistreated by the London Delivery Authority, which delivered the orders (and doesn't that name just so catch the new labour parteigeist), I for one would not be inclined to dismiss their claims too quickly.

In the event, the Times says that after three years, more than 80% of the businesses are still fighting for compensation.

• The CEO of one business, which is taking the LDA to the High Court, claims that most businesses were scared that 'if they fall out with the LDA, they won't get anything'. (Ivor Gershfield, HMM; my italic.)
• Another: 'We said, "That figure (the offer) isn't very high." The LDA then said, "Accept it, or we'll give you something less and you can go to court and fight it."' (Christine Norman, T&N Commercials.)
• And: 'I'm not frightened to speak out because I'm getting screwed anyway. They bulldozed me.' (Seamus Gannon, Bedrock Cushing, who's off to a lands tribunal and claims losses now amounting to 6 million, much of which I suspect he can prove.)

How many small businesses can take on an authority which is backed by the taxpayer to the tune of billions?

Companies which have been able to settle have been forced to accept a confidentiality agreement, which, where the government is involved, is usually bad news.

The figures reported by the paper, of investments that had been made by the businesses, valuations, loss of business and other consequential losses, make cogent reading (but rather too lengthy to repeat here).

Tellingly, Balcombe Group - the LDA's own loss assessors - are in legal dispute with the authority over losses they themselves have incurred because of late payments ('Everything has dragged on and on').

Never mind. Tessa Jowell (minister 'responsible' for the Olympics, who appears to have shown no interest in the plight of so many locals whose lives have been disrupted) and Ken Livingstone (quondam mayor, who certainly didn't) promised us that the games would be good for us.

To conform with new labour reality, I believe the correct 'on-message' response is (a) we've never heard of these people, who don't exist. Or, (b) if they do, they're perfectly content and not complaining. Or, (c) if they're complaining it's because they're deluded. And anyway (d) we've aware that these people were troublemakers long before 1997, and are just using these events, which have been misunderstood (by you poor dupes who read the Times) as an excuse to settle imagined old grudges.*

* These are tried and tested new labour responses: c/f, for example, Margaret Hodge, unlamented ex-mayor of the People's Republic of Islington, when faced with the unfolding story about sexual abuse of children in care of the borough under her watch. (qv.)

All in the finest traditions of the Olympics, under the guidance of correct party thinking (Beijing, 2008).

'Olympic Park' 'Margaret Hodge' 'Borough of Hammersmith' 'Compulsory purchase' CPO 'Balcombe Group'

The Chinese may have good reasons not to listen, but we should still tell them...

14 May 2008 .

Bruce Anderson (in the Independent, today) is of course right to say that we have little or no influence over how China behaves, whether at government level or through our popular protests. Sadly, he's even right to suggest that public opinion in China has rallied behind the government there over the last few weeks. He refers to our efforts as a 'sentimentality' which won't wash in a country which has a justified memory of 150 of exploitation and military adventure by the West.

But, is he right to conclude that therefore we shouldn't even try to affect what's happening there and in Tibet?

Mr. Anderson, our concern for the people of Tibet is almost anything but sentimental: empathy certainly enters into it, as does a firm belief that the people of any country (or none) should not be abandoned; but there's also selfishness - a world in which the strong can oppress the weak is a world in which one day unpleasant folk might oppress my children... best do something about it now, don't you think?

But even if we were driven by sentiment, would that be grounds for throwing up our hands? I suspect that the present regime in China will continue - but there's no certainty of that, and I'm not at all sure that the seemingly unstoppable economic and military growth there is as inevitably ongoing as it appears. After all, as late as 1982 Soviet Communism was a fixture we assumed would outlive any of us. We do not know that we're expressing our views to an empire to whom the gods have given ten thousand years; anything may happen.

As for myself; I may be English, and heir to the ashes of a flawed empire, but I'm not going to let the shenanigans of Blair, let alone the actions of governments before I was born, no matter how misguided, inhibit me from trying to take political action, or to express political opinions.

Mr. Anderson says that we let down the people of Hungary in 1956, and the Marsh Arabs when they rose against Saddam - each of whom had hoped for support from the West - which never came. I sort of understand what he thinks this means - that we'll fail again; I don't go along with him... on the contrary, I suggest it reinforces the importance of maintaining out support for Tibet.

'Bruce Anderson' Tibet sentimentality

The Master Race.

20 April 2008 .

As the media, with depressing predictability, move on from the protests surrounding the carrying of the torch (to a more gripping story about some princeling's romance)... The point's been made again and again that the modern story of the torch (along with the rings, I believe) started in 1936, with Hitler's PR machine. The problem is that the Nazis understood glamour - just look at those uniforms: so I suppose it's too much to hope that London in 2012 will do what it should have done in 1948 and abandon these arrogated symbols of aryan superiority.

Olympic torch rings 'Berlin 1936' Nazis uniform 'London 2012' Beijing

Splittism.

10 April 2008 .

The governor of Tibet, no doubt a charming man who loves children and animals... but not monks, evidently... has made it very clear how he's going to deal with 'Splittists' and other counter-revolutionary and incorrectly educated Tibetans who make any squeak of protest over the next few months: the exact words he used were, 'no mercy'.

From 'San Francisco Sentinel'

Splittists

To Beijing or not to Beijing?

09 April 2008 .

To be honest, I couldn't give much of a damn what that man gets up to, now; but, purely out of fleeting interest... Why on earth could the Moral Compass Of The British People not have told us weeks ago that he never had any intention of going to the opening shindig at Beijing? (If it's true that he didn't...)

Added later, and in passing: I'm not sure it's the place of the leaders of any of the erstwhile great powers in the west (or Japan) to be telling the Chinese what to do or not to do, in view of how the great powers behaved in China in the 19th and early 20th centuries... Which is why boycotts by Sarkozy or Brown (whom the Chinese believe to have blood on his hands anyway) are of no interest to me. The Chinese aren't going to be moved by hand-wringing politicians, which is why these protests have to be by ordinary people around the world, and why we have to engage the ordinary Chinese (including by visible protest) and not turn our backs on them.

'Brown in Beijing'

Written in fulminating anger...

09 April 2008 .

It turns out that to be the Chinese Military Police who have threatened, manhandled and apparently assaulted British citizens and residents on the streets of London... in the full view of the Metropolitan Police (to whom they gave orders), the media and thousands of witnesses. Without sanction. And without comment from the Prime Minister, outside whose official residence (while he was inside), these boys in blue continued their antics.

Added later: The 'fulminating anger' in this item is aimed at our lot, here, not the Chinese - all they did was sail close to the wind and get away with it... But if Brown can't have them behave in small ways here on our own streets, how can he be expected to have any influence at all over far-away Tibet?

Added 09.05.08: I don't know why I was so exercised when I wrote this: after all, Chinese military policemen on the streets of London simply reflect the new order in the world... One World, One Dream...
'Chinese Military Police' 'Streets of London'

Running the 100 metres is more important than the human rights of millions.

09 April 2008 .

On ITV news, last night, a British athlete, in an interview, referred to the spectators who had lined the streets of London in order to see the torch 'in the right way'. I have no interest in who she was, nor in anything she has to say, now, beyond noting the widespread and mind-numbing assumption of these people that their sport somehow (and in some moral sense) transcends the reasons for protest.

'Olympic priorites'

Are 'Free Tibet' t-shirts legal?

08 April 2008 .

It just gets shabbier and shabbier. I'd heard that the police ordered the removal of Tibetan flags from along the route of the torch on Sunday (why?); now it's being alleged that demonstrators were told that they weren't allowed to wear 'Free Tibet' t-shirts.

If the shirts really were banned, this country is in far deeper trouble than I'd imagined; the immediate question then has to be asked, as to who was responsible for the ban; after which we have to kick up a stink. If we don't, we really do deserve whatever happens to us. If they weren't banned, but officers said they were, then part of the Met has sold out - and again we need to know why.

Personally, I doubt if the allegations are true. The worry is that now we live in a country where such rumours can gain circulation and be believed.

'Free Tibet T-Shirts'

Just a reminder...

07 April 2008 .

Don't let the Tibetans have all the fun... save some for the Uighurs.

Uighurs

Brown Deng.

07 April 2008 .

Please do visit www.medialens.org if you have time ('correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media').

This extract from their recent essay bears repeating:

On March 22, an Economist magazine editorial described the recent violence in Tibet as a "colonial uprising", a "revolt" against foreign occupation. This was accurate, as was the implication that China has no legitimate claims over Tibet. ('A colonial uprising - Tibet,' The Economist, March 22, 2008)

By contrast, recent media coverage of the fifth anniversary of the 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq depicted the conflict as an "insurgency", with the US military engaged in "counter-insurgency". American media analyst David Peterson commented:

"In other words, in Tibet, China is a colonial power and doesn't belong there. Okay. But in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military forces are not a colonial power imposing their will from the outside, but do belong there, quite unlike the people who are resisting the U.S. forces, who clearly lack this right." (Email, March 22, 2008)

'colonial uprising' insurgency

How does it feel to be a London policeman taking orders from a Beijing heavy?

07 April 2008 .

The torch escorted through the streets of London by Chinese chaps in blue yesterday... they were apparently telling our plods what to do; they were seen and filmed 'dealing with' our protesters, on our streets, in a markedly firm manner; and they screened the torch with their bodies... in Downing Street.

Today there's some speculation as to who they were - Chinese security forces, it seems. The IOC wouldn't comment. The British Government wouldn't comment. The Chinese government wouldn't comment.

Humiliation larded on humiliation, ever so politely, by the Australian Prime Minister (standing by The Father Of Our Nation at a press conference) as he explained that in his country, it will be Australians who handle security, not Chinese minders.

Thanks a bundle, Mr. Brown.


Homage to the IOC.

07 April 2008 .

Papers and TV have sometimes implied, and once or twice said in so many words, that the protests are against the games. They're not: they're against a barbaric government; they're against the fact that the Olympics were awarded in such a way that that toxic government could politicise and spin them; they're against the fact that an unsustainable promise was made that the games would somehow change the government (yeah, right!).

Not protesting against the games... but...

from Paris poster, May 1968 (Popular Workshop)

The International Olympic Committee are concerned that, as they try to maintain the 'peace and harmony' of the journey of the torch through Paris, they might become 'identified' with the Chinese government. An establishment interested in their own power and wealth, tainted with corruption? Surely not.

'International Olympic Committee' 'peace and harmony'

The Olympic Torch through London.

06 April 2008 .

I don't think our police covered themselves in glory dealing with protesters as the torch passed along the streets today; but, then again, it's difficult to know quite how else they could have acted.

The sight of our police in yellow and Chinese escorts in blue running side by side wasn't too edifying, either... The problem is that whatever the police did today was going to be political: as it is, they worked in support of the Chinese state, whether they saw it that way or not. (Interesting how quickly our media edited out the police batons; a bit of a waste of time, surely, considering how many mobile phones with cameras were out there.)

On the other hand, I don't think the protests were very inspired. They came across as undignified, like bumptious children acting up in a playground. I think I could have done a better job of organising something memorable (I could produce a winning England team, too); but then again, part of the point is spontaneity and individual expression.

A great deal, including our understanding of the importance of today, is going to depend on what happens in Europe and elsewhere during the next few weeks.

'Olympic Torch in London' 'Chinese state'

Not just Tibet.

03 April 2008 .

Good that protest on behalf of Tibet is mounting; I hope I'm wrong in thinking that once the games are over, it'll all fade away again.

But... where are, for example, the Uighurs in all this?


As a ratepayer, all I can see so far is that the Olympics have already cost me a lot of money.

03 April 2008 .

BBC finds that 6 out of 10 Londoners do not believe the promises made by politicians about the 2012 Olympics - only 4 out of 10 believe that the games will benefit London in any way at all. The figures for the rest of the country are even worse.

One of the Blair Babes has just been hauled out to say 'we (the politicians) are not idiots, we know what we're doing'. So that's all right, then.

In passing: why is promoting bicycling as a sport worth 5 million p.a. of the taxpayer's money, while frontline research at Jodrell Bank isn't worth a mere 2.5 million?

'Cost to Londers'

For God's Sake, Milligramme, Shut Up.

28 March 2008 .

I've criticised Brown here for being interested only in Business when he talks to Beijing (as if he'll take any notice). The toe-curling embarrassment of Foreign Secretary Miliband lecturing the Chinese on Tibet has given me pause for clearer thought.

The protest against China in Tibet has to be a worldwide groundswell. Nothing else is going to impress the Chinese government. UK politicians (and officials*) should keep out, except on the personal level of the rest of us, because (a) the Chinese simply aren't going to take any notice of Brit party hacks telling them what not to do and (b) our government is morally tainted by Iraq and the Chinese know it. [Bush may or may not have more clout in Beijing, but moral lectures from him have the air of the surreal.]

It is Brown's job to promote UK interests, including commercial, when he talks to Beijing. Perhaps he should simply have made less song and dance about how he interpreted that at such a sensitive time.

*Is it true that the British Olympic officials are still trying to gag our athletes?

'Miliband in China'

Criticise China because China is not a basket-case.

26 March 2008 .

Discussion of China's trade unions is on BBC Newsnight at the moment, with a not much more than passing reference to the way Wal-Mart outmatches even the state itself there in refusing to recognise the rights of workers to organise.

This is a grumble site, devoted in part to raging against outrage by the government and the powerful (primarily in the UK). However... there is only a point in grumbling in this country because there's so much worth defending; in Saudi Arabia I'd be keeping my head down, because (a) I'm not very courageous and (b) the present system is past helping anyway. In light of the Tibetans and the Uighurs, and too much more, I have plenty to rage about with the Chinese government; but, and here's the point, it's with the awareness that the Chinese people and even in many ways the government have so much that is worth the fight.

And you can't just sweep Saudi Arabia away; at least in extremis you can sweep arrogant corporations away (a fact too many haughty CEOs fail to recognise): Wal-Mart might be as good a place to start as anywhere.


The Games. They're just games.

25 March 2008 .

Meanwhile we have ironies revealed by the talk of boycotts of the Beijing Olympics. The British Olympic committee, already a laughing stock because of their attempt to muzzle our athletes, are equally clearly terrified of a tit-for-tat reprisal affecting the Olympics here in 2012. There are calls from Americans for boycotts - overlooking the last time they did so, in 1980, when the US boycotted the Moscow games because of the Soviet invasion of... Afghanistan... Representatives of the IOC, who claimed that awarding the Games to China would lead to a political opening up of that country, are now ducking the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever of any such opening up having taken place. And while the Europeans are becoming increasingly restive about the behaviour of the Chinese, particularly in Tibet, Brown clearly regards anything which gets in the way of Business as a distraction (despite what he says about meeting the Dalai Lama).

Would we all have regarded the awarding of the 2012 Olympics to London as such an unalloyed blessing if we'd known it would mean censoring ourselves politically until they were over? Unfortunately, I suspect that many, from Coe down, wouldn't lose a minute's sleep about it.

Anyway; despite all the fuss, once this summer's games are over, the Chinese government will simply carry on doing what it does best - destroying people's lives and cultures. And the rest of us will just move on.

'Boycotting the Olympics'

Tibetan Protests.

16 March 2008 .

Best estimates for the number of deaths in Lhasa up to yesterday: 80 (ITN).

'Deaths in Lhasa'

Soon, We'll Have Moved On.

15 March 2008 .

The Chinese government has been threatening to come down hard on protesters in Tibet; but its reaction is tempered, we're told, because it doesn't want to be seen to be cruelly repressive ahead of the Olympics - even if there weren't a boycott, I imagine 'face' still counts for a lot. I assume I'm not alone in wondering what will happen when the circus leaves town; what I'm afraid of is that lots of folks will be asking the same question and yet the opportunity will still pass and be lost.


Priorities.

12 March 2008 .

Airport taxes are to be raised... 'to help pay for the travel needs of the 2012 Olympics'.

Either you'll agree with me or you won't:

Why should Londoners and travellers, particularly, pay for the Olympics? Is this just a way for the government to fund a potential shortfall which they've promised we won't have to pay for? Aren't taxes used in this way normally intended as a deterrent - in which case shouldn't travellers by air be clear why they should be deterred (if we agree that they should be so)? If the Olympics are going to be such a business opportunity, shouldn't the airports be able to pay their own way on standard business investing models, rather than making us pay? Et seq., ad infinitum.

'Heathrow airport taxes'

Darfur and Tibet.

17 February 2008 .

Spielberg's much publicised withdrawal from his connection with the Games in China over that government's involvement in Darfur is extraordinarily welcome. So's the attention - and the debate it's started.

The only thing that worries me is that Darfur now seems to have become the fashionable issue; where is Tibet in all this? And what is ever asked about the peoples (whose ethnic groups most of us can't even name) in the far west of China?

Added later: This item is what comes of relying on the mainstream media to know what's going on. The topic of Tibet was bubbling away, of course, but on the internet and elsewhere: for several days I saw nothing about it on TV or in the newspaper... But an awful lot of people do rely on the media, and the Uighurs and others still hardly get a mention.

'Darfur and Tibet'

The Chinese Olympics.

13 February 2008 .

China wants the Olympics to be a time when the world comes together and leaves the politics to other people.

Well, I never!

[When China was given the '08 Olympics in 2001, some might have thought that the decision was on a par with that to hold the '36 games in Nazi Germany; they were promised that the games would lead to an improvement of human rights in China. Yeah, right.]

At least Chamberlain, the maligned appeaser, was trying to work for peace at Munich. Brown in Beijing is just working for corporate profits.


Tibet.

06 December 2007 .

Sporting, cultural, commercial and familial links with other countries, no matter how odious the governments of those countries, should in principle be encouraged (just as we hope that others won't reject us because of some of what our government gets up to - and there are plenty of rational people, mainly but by no means only in the Middle East, who are in no doubt that our government is criminal).

Encouraged, that is, until those links start to be exploited by the governments concerned.

China is economically powerful, and becoming more so. It is clearly a nation to be taken seriously. Whatever face they may be able to put on it, however, the government there is criminal by all international standards. What's more, it continues its barbaric practices against its own citizens and against those of occupied nations. The obvious, and best known, victim of communist Chinese imperialism is Tibet. Nothing has changed there. All has not somehow become well. China in Tibet is comparable in kind and degree with, say, Russia in Estonia. [At least there is some awareness of Tibet: the nations (Muslim and I believe Turkic) now contained within the western borders of China seem to be totally forgotten by the outside world.] But - though foolishness or naivity - the rest of the world, by and large, stands by, smiles and claps.

Which matters, because the 2008 Olympics have been hijacked by the communists just as the 1936 Olympics were by the nazis.

And we will all celebrate the games, and be taken in by the razzle-dazzle, and conveniently forget the barbarity.

'Hijacking the Olympics'

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