On "British Values", the Conservative Party and Crimes Against Humanity

Justice, forced to take on tree surgery on a zero-hours contract because it has become too expensive to live in London

I shall set out here to make a simple case: that democracy, freedom, tolerance, the rule of law and respect for human rights are not British values. That is, there is nothing about them in any way present in, or exclusive to, Britain’s national essence.

As far as democracy is concerned, let us be clear. What this country did have, emerging from Anglo-Saxon practices then formalized in its beloved Magna Carta of 1215, was one thing: the idea and norm that power had to be accountable. In other words, that the person in charge of the country was obligated in some sense to do right by his or her people, and could be challenged, held to task, or even rightfully kicked out, if he or she failed in this duty. Many societies have had their own variants of this basic political principle, of course.

In Britain this idea was contested right from the beginning by practically every new generation of monarchs. Kings roared one after another that their power was absolute, flipping over the table of documents designed to constrain them, and provoking wars and coups and foreign interventions to drag their noses and signatures back to it. Not even the monstrous civil war of the seventeenth century sufficed to settle this matter, despite reducing much of the British Isles to ruins and mutilated corpses in the attempt. On top of that, the “people” to which the rulers were so obliged only ever referred, until more recent times, to an extreme minority of privileged elites, from the medieval barons to the early-modern parliamentary plutocrats whose conflicts with the crown tended to be more about protecting their own interests than any concern for some general principle of liberty.

To the extent that Britain is free, inclusive and tolerant, it is because such basic humanity had to be pried piece by piece from the tentacles of an establishment that kicked, screamed, hanged, beheaded and fired from all cylinders all the way. Those British who dared to think, fight and suffer in this struggle faced tyranny and bigotry towards women, foreigners, children, poor people, disabled people, people of unsanctioned religious beliefs or sexualities or ways of thinking and goodness knows what else – oppressive hierarchies and us-versus-them tribalisms, that is, that many and perhaps most people in British society would have considered normal. Many still do.

For those so left behind, taking back recognition as human beings has taken literally centuries. Every real victory in the struggle to win that recognition, and the rights that come with it, has had its corresponding price in blood and anguish. Peasants’ revolts, workers’ marches, slave rebellions, dissident literature, conscientious objectors, secret religious meetings, colonial independence struggles, hunger strikes in prison – a great deal of those who won the British their liberty – or won their liberty from the British – did not make it out alive, and the enemy that trampled their carcasses into this country’s cemeteries was entirely native.

Most of their victories, such as of women, are relatively recent in this story and are not yet complete. Many more, as of people of marginalized sexualities or family structures, have barely begun or have yet to come at all. All are under perpetual threat of rollback if not for the constant vigilance of British civil society. That such a civil society has emerged is to Britain’s credit, formidably so, but the reason it has been so needed in the first place is the historical fact that British values, in practice, have most often meant violence, exclusion, and utterly shameless dehumanization.

What we recognize today as Britain’s parliamentary system, in which the country’s politics are argued over by competing factions without resort to violence, began to take shape following the revolution of 1688. Yet another king had been thrown out (for appearing tolerant of Catholics, which to most people meant tyrannical – the way all this was framed is fascinatingly instructive on the almighty mess that Britishness has always been, but it is too involved a chapter to go into here). A new bill of rights officially gave parliament more power than it had ever held before – even insisting these rights were ancient and fundamental, from before the monarchy existed – and effectively bound the monarch’s own power to parliament’s will.

But within that parliament, there had emerged a faction which disliked this intensely. They wanted a supreme king or queen with whom final authority lay, even if they were gradually distancing themselves from the old idea, still popular on the continent, that the monarch was the representative of God and every right or freedom was granted by the monarch as an entirely optional favour, not by any natural entitlement on one's own part. This faction was ridiculed by its opponents, who called them tóraidhe, a term for Irish bandits (notice again the use of foreignness as a scorn factor).

Tóraidhe. Tory. These were the ancestors of today’s Conservative Party.

And they have been through all kinds of transformations since, those Tories. In a diverse and balanced British politics they very much had their place, and it may be fairly argued that valuable intellectual and political contributions to the shaping of this country emerged on account of them. But in our day, through a process begun under Margaret Thatcher and now consummated by its present and recent leadership, the Conservative Party has arisen as the prime inheritors of those coercive, exclusionary, prejudice-driven and physically and structurally violent British values whose proponents have considered the country their own arbitrary property for as long as Britain, indeed England, has existed.

What “British values” means to this Conservative Party has been made plain by its record. It means scapegoating Europeans, Muslims, migrants and people of darker skin pigmentation for problems of the country’s own creation. It means traumatically tearing people from those they love and summarily deporting them on various pretexts of foreignness, even if they have lived in good standing in Britain for decades. It means cutting support for the most vulnerable members of society, whether physically disabled, economically devastated, mentally shattered or sexually violated: mocking and reprimanding them like criminals or wayward infants, burying them in meaningless paperwork, pronouncing them fit to work where they lie comatose, in some cases tormenting them to the point of suicide. It means allowing refugees – refugees! – to be called cockroaches, and treating them like cockroaches. It means abuse and exploitation as core dynamics of the very concept of work. It means free rein for a sadistic and predatory tabloid media that rampages around the country in a storm of slavering prejudices, reshaping the public discourse into a carnival of toxic ignorance and hysteria. And it means the willingness to slaughter millions of foreigners with nuclear weapons, should it at any point deem it necessary, as a reasonable price to “keep the country safe”, while at the same time furnishing violent and oppressive regimes and fuelling conflict and hatred around the world, as in the Saudi destruction of Yemen, under the same pretext.

In other words, for today’s Conservative Party, to be British is to be gloriously cruel and proud of it.

The point here is not that they are merely nasty. It is that their nastiness is a British nastiness. Because none of this is new; Britain has always had people like them. Each of their abuses is but another strand in of a sprawling web of callousness and revelry in others’ pain that clings to every page of the British story, extensions of a structure that produced so many miserable slave ships, poorhouses, smokestacks, mental asylums and scaffolds for dissidents and dreamers. Infused into every brick of this structure are the same British values the Conservative Party has now taken it on itself to stand for: the belief that society, defined as it is by relationships of mutual care and support, should not exist; the attitude that your fellow human beings are beneath you; and that conviction that the more you can get away with wringing their hearts, minds and bodies dry for your own benefit, the better.

It is the fact that millions of British are satisfied with a country like that, and so eagerly prepared to vote for it, that more than anything challenges the notion that liberty, tolerance, respect and free thought are the real British values. There is very much a Britain of compassion, righteous rebellion and support for the vulnerable too, but it is there because exceptional people have fought to the death for it, maligned and threatened and ridiculed all the way. But beneath that vision, or that façade depending on who is talking, sits the same rump of nastiness that has occupied this land for centuries, and replacing it will likely take centuries more.

I am a stranger in this land, and make these observations as an outsider who has experienced the worst of this country but also seen what it is capable of at its best. So it is at the level of a human being, no more and no less, that I make this condemnation of the Conservative Party, whose leaders and adherents have abused their power to inflict misery and hurt upon those who most needed – most *obliged* – their protection, and responded to their cries for help by manufacturing a culture of unrelenting mass hatred and contempt, a tide of bile to drown them in the insistence that they are inferior vermin whose suffering is their own fault.

The history makes clear that this barbarity did not begin with the Conservative Party, and it certainly will not end with it. But the party is terminally corrupted. A true conservative, including many who have stood among the Tories in each generation, even today’s, is one who seeks to preserve the best things from his or her people’s past. Such people have a vital place in any society. But the party now belongs to impostors who would preserve Britain’s worst. The torch they carry is the torch of authoritarianism, forced conformity and submission, slavery, colonialism, heteronormative patriarchy, the terrorization of the different, and a destruction of people’s lives for fun and profit that will not stop till they have ground from our veins the final impulses of love and care, and all submit to joining in their social cannibalism and human sacrifice on the altar of the cult of the nasty world. That is not conservatism. It is an unspeakable thing that has no legitimate place among human beings – not now, not anywhere, not forever.

I will not call for the overthrow of the Conservative Party in the coming election, although that would be a good start. The response to what it has visited upon Britain, and to its choice of British values, must go far deeper if the hope that these can mean good things is to be safeguarded. The party in its present form should be considered a constitutional threat and never be permitted near power again. Their atrocities over the last seven years must be documented, exposed, memorialized and never forgotten. Their true crime has been to normalize these deeds, to blend them into the mundanity of everyday life, and only when the British de-normalize them will they awaken as a nation to the true magnitude of what has been suffered in this country. Thus a special tribunal should be set up to hold the party’s leaders and enforcers to account, with the power to jail them if deemed appropriate, for their abuse of the United Kingdom through violent austerity; the destruction of vital public services and support systems; forced deportations and separation of families; collaboration with the media to create a conducive environment for hate crimes and dehumanization of the vulnerable and unpopular; and support for murderous regimes which all together, as intended consequences of systematic policy, constitute a failure in their responsibility as a government to protect their people and could in sum amount to crimes against humanity.

Part of the importance of this is that other peoples, too, could then learn from yet another case study of how easily the disqualification of segments of the people from consideration as human beings, especially the most unheard, unloved and invisible, leads to depravities of indifference that damn a whole generation. But for the British, it is only through such a reckoning that British values can stand up to the greatest threat that faces them, which, as ever, comes not from foreigners but from the depths of their own national soul. The greatest threat to British values is British values.

I am still here

…although I will not deny that the thought of bringing this blog to a close has come to mind of late.

After writing here regularly for the past six years, I am now attempting to rebuild my life after the disastrous ordeal of my final years in Japan. For now I am preferring to focus on that, rather than this blog. I post this short note only as reassurance that the blog is not dead, and that I hope to go on developing it in future (and also, perhaps, so first-timers here do not get my bitter deconstructions of happiness and gratitude as the first things that show up when they open it).

Those of you who have been following will have seen how those recent experiences took my writing here in a much darker direction. The articles and poems that emerged from that crisis will remain up, because they are a sincere reflection of what this period has been like, and because, as I state on the introductory page (go here first if you haven’t already), I believe it is important that the issues involved in mental health problems, especially those that relate to structural failings in society, be dealt with in an open, frank and critical manner.

For now, please feel free to explore the last few years’ worth of articles through the category tabs or the links on the intro page. In one form or another, this work will continue. It cannot be stopped. A world based on love, free from all the cruelties of gender and where no-one is left behind, will be realized.

If you too are interested in this goal, or in what I do more generally, I am eager to make contact with you. Please feel free to reach out to me with a message through the blog's Facebook page (button on the right).

Conclusions on Happiness

A drawing from the midst of catastrophic mental breakdown. Tokyo, March 2016

In general, we wish happiness for the people we care about.

Nowadays I find it very difficult to feel this wish. Now it may just be that I am a terrible friend. But maybe there is something else to it, too.

In Japan, a country I am about to leave after five years, I experienced for the second time a long, dark night of the soul. It was most of all in the unspeakable pain of this ordeal that I became conscious of the smiling masks and proclamations of happiness that surrounded me everywhere. Here there is no escape from it. It appears that displaying happiness at all times is seen as an obligation, policed in everyone by everyone; while on the other hand, expressing a hint of dissatisfaction is a considered a sin which merits the punishment of social death.

For long, long months, I would find not a shred of compassion in my surroundings. Even while butchered inside by neverending heartbreak, I was shunned, judged, rumoured about, lectured to on Reality and How Life Works, and told I was faking it for attention. There were even those who condemned me for writing critical stories and sad poetry, and said, as though it were obvious, that I should try writing happy things instead. Tokyo was a perfect zero-empathy environment which I barely survived, has at the end left me shipwrecked, and whose wounds on my soul will burn for years to come.

Perhaps that is why I have come to look upon happiness as a loathsome, horrible thing.

Tokyo, March 2016

Indeed, in a world as oppressive and exploitative as this one, there are few things I find so repugnant as happy and comfortable people. The instinct, when faced by those people, is to rage: how dare you find it in yourself to be satisfied with this world, where your happiness is necessarily enabled by systems whose defining feature is their destruction of the bodies, minds, hearts and souls of every person they were not designed to benefit?

In other words, each of us who is in a position to be happy, is there not because he or she has chosen it – enough of that feeble fakery, those endless platitudes that you make your happiness for yourself. No: if you are capable of choosing to be happy, it is because you are privileged with at least a certain condition of resources, relationships or power over your life to be able to do so. It is because you are not shrieking with the impossible pain of having those conditions robbed by the social and economic structures under which you live when they deem you different or inferior.

And that is why to wish happiness for those I care about would feel like wishing a curse upon them. Wishing upon them a toxic condition: the ability to be alright with a broken reality, to be happy while knowing that it makes them complicit in, say, the established structures of family or affectionate relationships, the employment structures, and the hierarchies of race, sex or class that they happen to be privileged by, and which in the same action exclude and tear down so many others. What astronomical selfishness, what barbarous indifference, is required to feel such happiness! Is that not a dehumanizing condition to live in, in the same way that torture also breaks the torturer?

Perhaps that is why happiness comes across as so hideous to me. Only a heart of the darkest villainy could truly feel happy and satisfied in a world like this. It does not matter if it was not their hands that built their pleasure boats, or shaped and filled the canals of blood and tears through which they ride them. They are wilfully benefiting from that infrastructure, and that makes them complicit in its crimes.

Tokyo, April 2016. The allusion is to the convenience stores and separation of rubbish types in Japan. Above the door: “Society”. On the bins, from left to right: “unhappy people”, “thinking people”, “feeling people”, and “non-burnable rubbish”.

Perhaps deep down, many of them know this. Perhaps all such happiness is a mask, however thick, to conceal a conscience wracked with poison and decay, and which, deep in its inner sanctum, knows its own feebleness, and dreads a day when it will be measured and held to account for what it has done. Perhaps the happy person is really a broken and fearful wretch who deserves to be pitied, rather than despised.

Of course, the same has been said of torturers too.

Or maybe they are just ordinary humans trying not to be driven mad by this world, and it is I who is the villain for attacking them for this abominable crime of being happy. But perhaps who is right and who is wrong no longer matters – who after all can judge?

What it means though is that happy people cannot be my friends. We seek opposite things for the world. They seek the continued existence of the systems that enable their happiness. I seek to cast those systems down in flames and remake this as a world for everyone – myself not included, for I am exhausted of it all and long only for my end, the release from this pain. But if by then I have succeed in upsetting those happy people, in injecting enough doubt and discomfort to make them reconsider whether this world is really as okay as they insist on believing it to be – maybe then, this wretched life will have accomplished something worthwhile.

An Intermission to Beijing - and, with sadness, some reflections on Toyko after five years living in it

There is an irony to coming up for air in a city synonymous with some of the worst air pollution in the world.

These days the sun does not stand at midday so much as stagger and clutch at curtains of smog.

But after five years in Tokyo which have descended into a desolating and futile ordeal, a brief escape to China to visit some old friends provided a valuable dose of perspective.

Tokyo is a bubble: an artificial self-contained world which soaks at your soul, slowly dissolving away any distinguishing features until – if you are not destroyed resisting – you have been absorbed into that city’s socio-economic illusion, by when everything outside that membrane appears universes away. And now, as I contemplate with growing finality whether to bring my time in Japan to an end, just a few days looking in from outside proved invaluable.

I was a Chinese Communist once. During my school days in London, in an environment of arrogantly triumphalist right-wing capitalist menace, it was all I could do to draw upon my interest in East Asian history and half-Chinese ethnic heritage to build up a defiant identity-fortress of revolutionary ideology and red books and banners to counter them.

Nowadays I no longer do -isms, but this was a crucial period in developing values of my own, as opposed to submitting to allow any society to feed me its own. However I was never a friend to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has yet to face up to the many atrocities it has caused and errors it has made, most or all of them needless, and most tragic perhaps in their squandering of the real opportunity and hope that movement represented in creating something better for the world, all the more so today.

 

And yet for better or for worse, China has always been in some way a part of me. Perhaps family connections were also involved, whether in the China of great upheavals from my parents’ own stories, or in those heroes of the 1980s democracy movement I came to know and in some cases meet through my father’s diplomatic work. Although I would never call myself Chinese any more than any other nationality, this is a country which has always held a certain connection to my soul.

Which is strange, considering I had only been there once, in the mid-1990s, long before my own communist period. I was too young then to remember much of that trip now; it lasted only a few days, its outstanding memory my father’s finger-waving altercation with the clerk at the Forbidden City who attempted to charge him a higher price to enter for being foreign.

That at least they no longer seem to do. Much has changed in this country in the last couple of decades, or so it is said.

 

Perhaps on that visit I also entered the hutong (胡同) streets and alleyways to visit my parents’ own old friends, made in the turbulent days of transition from the madness of post-Cultural Revolution xenophobia (I have heard that it was too dangerous for my parents, one Chinese and one British, to walk down the same street together) to the opening and reforms of Deng Xiaoping.

This time at least I was better aware of these alleys’ significance. The hutongs are the traditional heart and soul of Beijing – hence why, in the name of that strange religion we call development, we have seen fit to wipe them from the map to make way for soulless high-rise apartments and skyscrapers.

Nonetheless no small number of hutongs remains, and at first sight, especially if one is used to the relatively immaculate streets of a city like Tokyo, they can project a shabbiness that disconcerts. Walls and vehicles lie in rusting decay; rubbish overflows from bins uncollected, and all around drift the sights and scents of questionable foodstuffs being prepared under still more questionable sanitation. But from beneath those first impressions rise reassuring currents of genuine humanity: the dwellers here know each other, greet each other with warmth or properly shout at each other when angry. There is a real community here, living amidst walls whose purpose seems less to keep people out than to whisper stories of hundreds of years of continuity: any alley may have its own tale to tell of ways of life unchanged down the centuries, illustrious sons and daughters, thriving markets and businesses, abiding temples, or dissidents hiding from palace or party authorities.

Beijing and Tokyo are both cities that have utterly transformed over the last seventy years, and been heavily critiqued for what they have sacrificed to do so. But in the hutongs of Beijing that remain, the livelihoods and community bonds of the laobaixing (老百姓, “old hundred surnames”) – the ordinary people of the city – are in plain view, in a way which to my knowledge has no real equivalent in Tokyo.