Why I will vote Remain

It is with a heavy sigh that I will be voting Remain in the EU Referendum.

My reluctance stems from the fact that I can't help but feel that this whole campaign has been a waste of valuable time, energy and political will.

There are many good reasons to leave the EU.

As much as I would like to believe in Corbyn's notion of a reformed EU built on social democratic foundations, I fear this is idealistic in a Europe that is shifting ever further to reactionary right wing politics.

The EU is run by an anonymous bureaucratic elite that is concerned solely with maintaining its plutocratic influence over the whole of Europe no matter what cost, as was evidenced by its response to the Syriza government of Greece.

There is also the little-mentioned fact of the subsidies it distributes among the wealthiest landowners in Europe, that account to approximately 40% of the total EU budget. As George Monbiot writes in this excellent article, 'as much as 80% of the funds are harvested by the richest 25% of recipients.'

There are no two-ways about it, the EU is an undemocratic monolith. Two of Tony Benn's oft-quoted questions for a functioning democracy are 'To whom are you accountable?' and 'How can we get rid of you?' With the EU, it is very difficult to answer these questions in a way that would convince of democratic virtue.

This democratic deficit however, may in fact be an advantage when it comes to the major issues effecting the continent and the world. The EU as a power-body holds considerable weight against the US, India, China and others in terms of securing real and tangible commitments on the environment and climate change.

Short-termist national governments all competing to achieve growth in a slowing global economy are the wrong vehicles for achieving anything substantial on the environment, as can be seen by the Tories' sudden scrapping of the Zero Carbon Homes initiative in 2015. Anything even remotely positive on environmental issues has been achieved at EU, not national, level.

Despite all my reservations, I will be voting Remain because the alternative that has been offered by the Leave campaign is far more troubling. Were there a Brexit option that involved closing the equality gap, reassessing the land subsidies, investment in housebuilding, public services, infrastructure and manufacturing, and improving conditions for workers, it would be well-worth voting for.

As it is, Brexit would lead to a right wing government, most likely led by the oafish Boris Johnson, that in its desperate effort to secure the economy would sign the country up to any number of dreadful TTIP-style agreements, making us even more subservient to the whims of the United States, and turn the City of London into a glittering Las Vegas, a deregulated financial playground.

This is the crux of the issue. The great neoliberal capitalist experiment of the last 30-40 years - which the IMF only recently conceded in a report paper that it had on balance failed - has succeeded in changing the nature of the country whilst remaining so illusive and intangible that the disaffected who now back Leave have focused their ire on the EU instead.

The real focus of attention and debate should be directed at whether or not we can move away from this economic system, that has been entrenched by the political class as a form of inarguable orthodoxy, that perpetuates and widens the wealth gap, shifting ever more concentrations of wealth to the top level of society, diminishes public services, and buttresses social mobility with ever higher levels of personal debt.

The great irony of this free market capitalist system is that it means nothing and cannot operate without the associated free movement of people. For the right wing Tories who have banged the free market drum for decades to use immigration as a basis for leaving the EU is the height of insouciance.

The fact remains that the defining challenges of the 21st century - adjusting and responding effectively to the environment and unstoppable technological developments - operate with little-to-no acknowledgement of national boundaries.

Anything that attains to entrenching national borders is archaic and irrelevant in the face of these issues, which will have to be addressed on a continental, if not global, level at some point. Pining after a nostalgic vision of Britain's 'glorious past' is no doubt attractive, but misguided.

The referendum, at the heart of it all, is a vote on which rich over-privileged elite you want to govern over you. Nothing else. Undeniably, Project Fear has been operating in full force on both sides, with a machete of scepticism needed to hack through the forest of lies and fabrications that have been allowed to grow out of all control.

I'll be voting to Remain, but I suspect in the long run it won't matter much either way.

There is no future in England's dreaming...

The EU Referendum has stirred ghosts within the body politic that globalisation was supposed to have exorcised.

Instead they have remained below the surface, restless forces and emotions that once disturbed will be very hard to ignore.

Myths of Great Britain's glorious past, the land of hope and glory, have been invoked by those claiming the leaving of the EU to be an act of patriotism.

In a culture that is marketed and devoted so fervently to nostalgia, it is only natural that politics should follow suit, and that misty-eyed visions of 'better yesterdays' come to inform and influence decisions for the future.

Because we once had an Empire and led the world so proudly, it is assumed that we will be able to slide back into our former role on the global stage if we 'take our country back'. But what does this slogan actually mean to those who espouse it? Does it mean that we can isolate ourselves on our island of white cliffs and rolling fields and finally be masters of our own national destiny?

Power and influence was ceded to global capitalism a long time ago, and the ills that so many decry as not having control over our country directly follow from this.

Disenfranchisement and disillusionment derive from austerity politics that is a response to boom-and-bust neoliberal capitalism that Britain was signed up to by Margaret Thatcher and has been pursued ever since.

Immigration is perhaps the most emotive issue, the one most likely to provoke the nastiest 'Little England' response from those who have been corralled by right wing media to feel like they are under siege by swarms of 'others'.

The hysteria of the campaign, that has ultimately lead to the death of an MP, is due to the abject failure of both left and right to appropriately address the issue of immigration.

Regardless of being couched in ignorance or xenophobia as undoubtedly many people's views across the country are, this should not detract from the many others who have legitimate concerns about the ability of public services, housing and infrastructure to accommodate increased numbers.

Meeting such concerns over and over again with platitudes, correct though they are, about how immigration has a net economic benefit, and that they are 'good for the country' is to treat the issue with an intellectually insulting dearth of seriousness.

The great irony is that those Conservatives who banged the drum so keenly for power to be handed to the markets and for the unfettered free flow of capital, cannot come to terms with the fact that this necessarily means the free flow of people as well.

Meanwhile, the left has wallowed in its blind spot over immigration. Supporter though I am of Jeremy Corbyn, this is the issue on which I think he will prove most unelectable. Large numbers of the working class, who have been hit hardest by austerity and who have been enchanted by the ghosts of petty nationalism that swirl in the toxic mire, have turned to UKIP out of frustration at the left's inability to grasp the nettle.

It is my view that there is very little point in coming to a decision on leaving or remaining in the EU based on immigration. It will remain as difficult to control as ever, and any trade agreements that are signed up to post-Brexit will undoubtedly involve allowance for the free movement of people.

Instead, it is essential that the tenor of the debate changes in this country.

The facts have to be accepted that immigration benefits and enriches the country to a considerable extent. But similarly there has to be firm and committed plans in place to ensure that it is managed well. I am sure that people would feel differently were they to be assured that an actual plan was in place, that immigration was encouraged in certain places that might benefit more from it, and discouraged from those that may not.

Government funding should be allocated to areas, weighted according to the numbers of migrants they have absorbed, as a means of helping address concerns over strained services. All of this should be transparent and open, with the emphasis on there being a plan in action, rather than people's feeling that they have been left to become 'out of control'.

Because if that is allowed to continue happening then the inevitable result will be for the politics of fear and hatred to further take hold, as they have across Europe, and the awakened ghosts of a Britannia that no longer exists will haunt the stage.

Those who lie together...

It is a mistake to compare too freely, as many seem to do, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

Yes, both look like bloated dirigibles inflated with the air of born-to-rule self-entitlement. But it is more appropriate to compare Johnson with Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton.

It is scarcely worth enforcing the axiom that suggests politicians are natural born liars, and yet it is a curious sign of the times that possibly within a matter of months, the UK and America could both be led by two politicians who, perhaps more than any other in western politics, are characterised by their almost pathological inability to tell the truth.

Johnson has been fired from cabinet and from newspapers as a punishment for lying about an extra-marital affair - itself a deception - and for fabricating quotes.

Look at character profiles of him and you can't help but be left with the perception of a man as ruthlessly hungry for power as he is devoid of any tangible plan of what to do with it.

His record as London Mayor is woeful. Firm campaign pledges he made in both 2008 and 2012 elections on homelessness, tube fares and ticket office closures were all broken, and then some. Only very recently, he was subject to painful scrutiny by a select committee who burst the various anti-EU balloons that Johnson had clownishly blown up with calumnies, exaggerations and outright fabrications.

Clinton is a woman who, if you opened her closet in search of skeletons, would likely result in a scene not dissimilar to Pieter Bruegel's 'Triumph of the Death'.

Stories abound in endless quantity of her penchant for lying; from accusations of harassment and bullying of women making allegations of sexual misconduct against her husband, to the Whitewater scandal, to her ongoing private email debacle, to her infamous story of coming under hostile fire in Bosnia (footage existed showing her calmly strolling from a helicopter in perfect safety...)

Christopher Hitchens said "one should not become President for therapeutic reasons." Similarly, with regard to Johnson, the role of Prime Minister should not be given to someone who covets it for no other reason than to fulfil the arrogant proclamations made in an Eton dinner hall.

It is said that the pathological liar is someone who is oblivious to their own lying. Perhaps in these illusory times, the only statesmen we can trust are those who at the very least believe their own lies.

Encaged animals and our outrage

Over the last couple of weeks, two water fountains of viral outrage have been curiously synchronised.

Harambe the gorilla was shot dead by zookeepers after a child managed to infiltrate his enclosure. Cue social media shock and outrage. The suitability of the mother and the family were all held up to scrutiny, with calls for prosecution being klaxoned at high volume.

Likewise, Johnny Depp has been encaged within an enclosure of the celebrity zoo and left there to peddle his rackety, faux-bohemian, Hunter Thompson-wannabe schtick to all those who stop and goggle and him.

He has been accused by his estranged wife Amber Heard of being mentally and physically abusive towards her, including acting very much like a wild animal with a magnum of champagne.

Both encaged animals have been made victims of a social media storm that is as reductive about its subject as it is morally misguided.

Individual cases such as the death of Harambe, and Cecil the lion, serve as useful lightning conductors for us to channel our collective rage at animal cruelties. How dare those vile humans destroy such beautiful creatures?!, we cry.

(By the way, what has happened to that American dentist Walter Palmer? Have animal welfare zealots strapped him to his own surgery chair to perform sadistic orthodontic experiments on him?)

We repost viral memes and sign online petitions about these events, but the truth is we still cannot shake the underlying belief that animals are entirely subject to our own superiority as a species. We hate on a rich dentist because of his recognisably deplorable human traits, but we turn a blind eye to the mass extinction of animal life because we know our own lifestyles are to blame.

According to estimates, the rapid loss of species is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate, and is being termed the ‘sixth mass extinction event’. This is being exacerbated, if not outright caused, by human behaviour-led global warming and habitat depletion. And yet there is silence as we prefer to get enraged about a mother from Cincinnati…

In the case of Johnny Depp; his famous friends and former wife were quick to come to his defence, with not-so-subtle insinuations and questioning as to the malicious ulterior motives of Heard.

Just like endangered gorillas and lions, we hoist megastars like Depp up on the iconic pedestal, unable to countenance the fact that as human animals like the rest of us they are perfectly capable of being flawed and liable to do bad things.

Just as it is quite possible for someone to fabricate lies about abuse in an attempt to extract revenge or reward, it’s also possible for them to be the victim of domestic abuse. Just as it’s possible for a megastar to be the victim of blackmail and lies, it’s also possible for them to be a flawed human who sometimes abuses his partner.

Either way, it’s always interesting to watch the tune to which the fountains dance…

Introduction to The Drone Age

On January 26, 2015, the White House was sent into lockdown mode. The cause was a remotely-piloted, unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that had crash-landed on the front lawn. While no malicious intent lay behind it, the accident served as an ironic symbol of the military-industrial complex, mandated by successive US administrations, having lost some semblance of control of a technological innovation that it had helped to pioneer.

What the automobile was to the 20th century, the drone is to the 21st.

Similarly, the other defining technology of the last century, television, is in the 21st represented by the arrival of virtual reality.

While the earlier technologies exemplified the modern age desire for freedom of the consumer and gratification mediated through the largely sedentary pursuits of both place and entertainment; the later technologies represent a yearning on the part of the collective unconscious for self-transcendence, for an escape from a reality that feels increasingly confusing, isolating and intractable, and from a world with which we appear trapped in a self-destructive relationship.

The drone is the defining technology of the digital age.

An age in which everything is capable of being replicated and immersed in the hyperreal spectacle, where technology appears increasingly autonomous, and where, in the face of a mass surveillance culture, privacy is fast becoming an obsolete concept.

Despite having vastly significant implications on both legal and moral grounds, drones are characterised, like every technology, by their teleological ambiguity - in simple terms, the nature of their intended purpose.

At present, drones are viewed through the matrix of two overriding drivers – military and commercial.

But as they become more ubiquitous, and the ‘dronisation’ of everyday life continues apace, so the range of possibilities for how they could impact on social, phenomenological, political, cultural, spiritual, philosophical, even sexual, levels are far from being mere fantasy.

In terms of the primal instincts, drone pornography is already being experimented with, but how long will it be before the first non-military drone atrocity, and what will be the lasting implications?

Already we see what once was a technology used as a ‘humanitarian weapon’ by the President to strike names off a kill list with all the detachment of swiping through profiles on a dating app, now being promoted for purposes as benevolent as tracking whales in the sea or capturing the perfect view of a winning goal.

Despite all his great intelligence, charisma and panache, Barack Obama was hoisted up on a petard of his own moral character to be stained by the blood of drone warfare. The man of such potential and historical significance, being compelled to state that he had "no regrets whatsoever" about the children killed or made orphans in Waziristan.

In this sense, Obama and his legacy, not to mention the hopes of a nation that were rested upon his shoulders, is another victim of the drones, to an extent that perhaps he is only just realising.

The symbolism of this, in simple terms, is his visiting the shrine of Hiroshima and, caught in the crosshairs of the world media, attempting to show contrition for the lives of so many thousands, in the name of a war which revealed such evil, and in pursuit of a devastating technology that would claim so many lives but which from that point on we would never to able to live without.

The subliminal or dominant, subtle or profound roles that people will ascribe to the drone as it becomes another feature of the technological virtual theatre, can as yet only be imagined.

Will we come to prescribe to them certain meanings all of their own, a personalised logic mandated by our psychologies or neuroses, see them as a curious measure of comfort in uncertain times, or as an omnipresent threat, the small shadows cast by the post-Hiroshima world of possible annihilation, whether by our hand or by nature’s sweeping arm?

When starting to think about my new book 'The Drone Age: Streetview Stories', before writing anything I spent many hours sat in front of Google Maps and Streetview. I sank into an almost hypnotic state as I roved across the entire world, diving down completely at random, taking screenshots of anything I landed on.

The people and scenes captured in these images served as inspiration for the characters in this book. As author, by striking indiscriminately and without aim, I have played the role of the drone.

The book itself can be seen as a form of literary drone.

Throughout, I have used the concept of the drone as a metaphor, sometimes explicitly, other times more subtle, for an array of alternate conditions, from guilt and memory, to paranoid delusion and mental breakdown, to capitalist greed and dreams of flight.

It is my hope that this will be the first example of drone literature.

Back again

Last May 2015, I was walking in the Bavarian forest on a trail that spiralled away like a plume of smoke from bonfire of tourists engulfing Schloss Neuschwanstein. As I scampered higher, the castle looking increasingly like a child's plastic toy against a cartoon sky, was struck with clichéd immediacy by a fictional idea. It was obviously inchoate yet furnished with enough potential to inspire the decision to shift my focus away from beginning work on a novel I had been psyching myself up to start.

The intrigue of the concept, coupled with the pertinence of the drone theme, lead me to fasten all my attention on the project from that point on, leaving me with no time for any other written output.

'The Drone Age: Streetview Stories' is now complete, and so I embark on the Sisyphean task of convincing anyone to read and consider it seriously.

In the mean time, I fully intend to resuscitate this blog with renewed invective. I will write about everything and anything that comes to my attention and interest, however menial, trivial or controversial. And why not?! The world is as confusing and fractious a place as ever, with leading figures increasingly creeping towards extremes while real powers hide away behind concocted myths of their own making, that exist solely in order that these are perpetuated. There is simply too much not to have anything to write about.

I can claim no insight or expertise in any of these subjects. I offer no salient view on anything, being as distracted, puzzled and entrapped by the modern way of life and thought as anyone. And yet I can offer a view that will have been considered, however wide of the mark some may see it to be. A view that will try to excavate beneath surface narratives and received wisdoms in the hope of chancing upon some semblance of real perspective and alternative vantage over these issues as they stand.