Words Out of Season

Some months ago I wrote about London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s late night verbal spat with an aggressive journalist who happened to be Jewish and which saw the Mayor under investigation by the Commission for Standards in Public Life (Standards in Public Life, October 22, 2005). I said then that this Commission looked like it had come straight out of George Orwell’s vision of a technologically repressive society in 1984. Non-British perspectives on British events interest me and this week a columnist in Al-Jazeerah wrote of the Mayor having “dared to insult a Jew. He neither referred to any Jewish characteristic the journalist may have had, nor did he refer to the reporter’s ethnic origin. The Mayor was just insulting a man who happened to be a Jew. In politically correct Britain this is unacceptable”. This week the three-man tribunal announced its finding that the Mayor’s behaviour was not consistent with maintaining standards in public life, suspended him from his job for four weeks from the beginning of March and hit him with costs of £80,000.

The brouhaha which has erupted following the Commission’s findings looks like knocking the Mayor’s behaviour into a cocked hat. Critics and friends alike have rallied to his support with much of the comment in the newspapers, whether of right or left wing sentiments, commenting on the impropriety of members of an unelected body having the power to remove a democratically elected politician from office. Many have pointed out that Members of Parliament who are regularly given to words and actions far more inflammatory that those of Ken Livingstone, may as a result of this judgment also find themselves victims of the Commission and suspended from office. The Mayor is to appeal the judgement to the High Court and commentators agree that there are very important political and democratic principles at stake here, and that it is ultimately the responsibility of London voters, if they really are all that concerned by the Mayor’s behaviour, to democratically remove him from office in the same manner as they put him in to office. Even Sir Anthony Holland, Chair of the Standards Board, has embraced the debate the Board’s decision has triggered, and says he would welcome changes to the way the Board polices the code of conduct in respect to elected representatives.

The mayor’s mention of the holocaust and insinuation that the reporter was acting so aggressively that his behaviour was akin to that of a concentration camp guard has been deemed to be offensive to all Jews. Some members of that community have labelled the mayor’s language as “anti-Semitic” although most Jews seem to have taken the more moderate line represented by a spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews who intimated on TV that their brief was not to punish the Mayor in the way the Commission has done, but merely to seek an apology or an expression of regret from him.

That there is a great deal of sensitivity about what one is free to say about Jews and the holocaust was again demonstrated this week when the erstwhile British historian and Hitler apologist David Irving was jailed for three years by an Austrian court for seventeen years ago in a lecture in Austria denying that the holocaust had ever taken place. Despite the fact that Irving claims to have revised this view, and his admittance on British TV covering his trial that millions of Jews had died in the gas chambers, he has been convicted for many years ago espousing a view that is abhorrent to most civilised people. The issue here is whether freedom of speech includes the freedom to promulgate ideas which the majority of people find abhorrent?

Both the British and Austrian instances indicate that we are moving on to dangerous territory here. It is almost as if it is now being implied that words like ‘gas chambers’, ‘holocaust’, ‘concentration camp’ and ‘Nazi’ provoke such a sensitive reaction amongst some Jews that they constitute anti-Semitic sentiments and must therefore never be employed in case they cause offence. This is beginning to look even more like 1984.

On Monday one of my friends, Canon Paul Oestreicher, had a comment published in The Guardian. Paul, a German émigré, lost his Jewish grandmother in the holocaust and records how as a child who had fled Nazi Germany for Britain he was the butt of anti-Semitic jibes. His family made their way to New Zealand where he was eventually ordained an Anglican Priest. Most of his ministry has been spent in the UK and probably the most significant aspect of that was when he joined Coventry Cathedral as a Canon and Director of its international ministry of reconciliation. Paul cherishes both his Jewish and Christian heritages and has consistently worked to bring about international understanding, reconciliation, justice and peace.

In his Guardian article which was addressing the British Chief Rabbi’s complaint over the Church of England withdrawing its investments in the Caterpillar company (See my Blog Poor Housing of February 11, 2006) Paul challenges the view that any criticism of Israel and presumably also of individual Jews is always anti-Semitic. He writes that he wishes to “nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler’s racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel’s betrayal of its true heritage. When world Jewry defends Israel’s policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel but against all Jews. I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible”.

Paul tells me that the day following publication of his article, he received 250 E-mails from around the world, some of them as we might expect abusive, but many very positive. Meanwhile it looks as if the Ken Livingstone drama will move to the High Court which may well reach a conclusion about the propriety of an unelected body removing elected officials from office, but is unlikely to resolve what is my view is the more important matter of whether describing someone’s behaviour as akin to that of a concentration camp guard constitutes anti-semitism.

Guantanamo Bay

Guantanamo Bay is never far from the headlines these days as European nations become increasingly concerned by allegations of torture of the so-called terrorists incarcerated there, as well as by the fact that there appears little willingness on the part of US authorities to allow those in custody to proceed to a fair trial.

The US facilities at Guantanamo Bay are themselves an anomaly. The base which covers 45 square miles was first established as a coaling station for American shipping in 1898 when the US seized control of Cuba from Spain following the Spanish-American War. The treaty signed at that time gave jurisdiction and control of the port to the USA while Cuba was recognised as retaining ultimate sovereignty. In 1905 following a Cuban uprising, the USA occupied Cuba for three years and the island became to all intents an American colony. An agreement in 1934 added a requirement that termination of the lease of the base requires the consent of both governments, or the abandonment of the site by the US. Under US influence the island became a haven for drug running, money laundering, prostitution, and other activities promoted by American gangsters, who because they were not on the American mainland were left relatively free by the authorities to pursue these interests. Fidel Castro’s retrospectively Marxist revolution put an end to all forms of American exploitation as it set about re-establishing Cuban identity and dignity. A series of tit-for-tat measures saw the American government establish an embargo upon all things Cuban in an unashamed and unsuccessful attempt to use economic muscle to re-establish US hegemony over the island and its people. The Cuban government continues to strongly denounce the Guantanamo treaty on the grounds that article 52 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties declares a treaty void if it was procured by either the threat or the use of force.

Given what has transpired at the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities one can only conclude that the transportation and imprisonment of US prisoners to Cuba from places as distant as Afghanistan and Pakistan was a cynical strategy because the lack of legal representation, the withholding of human rights and the torture of prisoners on such a large scale would not have been permitted on mainland America. The fact that Guantanamo is on foreign soil, and to the American mind what is even worse, communist soil, has rendered it less likely that American citizens would object to what is being perpetrated there.

This week however, the world’s condemnation of the Guantanamo Bay regime as one of the instruments of President Bush’s War on terror, became more strident. First there was the report issued by five inspectors for the United Nations’ human rights commissioner alleging that US techniques used on Guantanamo prisoners such as shackling, hooding, forcing detainees to wear earphones and goggles, unacceptable interrogation techniques and excessive violence used to force-feed prisoners who are on hunger strike were all unacceptable. True to form the White House’s press secretary dismissed the allegations as a “rehash of old allegations” and a discredit to the UN. Insisting that the prisoners were being treated humanely he added, “Remember these are terrorists”. This classification of people as “terrorists” rather than as “alleged terrorists” is a consistent ideological ploy of President Bush’s War on Terror. Everyone is regarded as guilty until proven innocent by judicial processes which are denied them. Even the UN’s General Secretary spoke out on this occasion, saying he was opposed to imprisonment “in perpetuity” and insisting that sooner or later the Guantanamo camp would have to be closed.

Meanwhile in the UK both the legal profession and the Church added to the controversy. A British Judge, Mr Justice Collins, hearing an appeal against the refusal of British ministers to request the release of three British citizens languishing in Guantanamo Bay, did not mince his words. “America’s idea of torture is not the same as ours”, he said, “and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations”. In speaking thus he was echoing the law lords judgement reached last year by Lord Bingham who, when at his home in Wales, attends our Cathedral here in Brecon. He judged that US techniques such as sensory deprivation and inducing a perception of suffocation, would be defined as torture in British law. And Britain’s Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith has insisted that the military tribunals Washington has proposed to try detainees within the prison at Guantanamo do not amount to a fair trial “by standards we would regard as acceptable”.

The real problem apparently is over the definition of what constitutes torture. As we might expect the Bush regime defines torture differently from Justice Collins’ civilised nations. The American administration’s understanding is a particularly narrow one establishing criteria of intense physical injury and organ failure. But as every schoolchild is aware, there are forms of physical torture which leave no scars, and forms of psychological torture which can ultimately be more damaging than physical measures. It is presumably on the basis of this narrow US definition that Secretary Condaleeza Rice can confidently assert that the US never engages in torture.

The newly installed Anglican Archbishop of York, once a victim of Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda was similarly outspoken. In an interview with The Independent Dr Sentamu urged that should the US fail to respond positively to the recent Human Rights Commission Report, then the Commission should take legal action against the US through the US courts, or the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The latter suggestion is a non-starter because isolationist America does not recognise the legitimacy of international courts. Dr Sentamu, in his earlier life a lawyer and a Judge, recommended also that the Commission should seek a writ of habeas corpus, to compel the US to bring the detainees to court to establish whether they have been imprisoned lawfully.

The Archbishop continued “The main building block of a democratic society is that everyone is equal before the law, innocent until proved otherwise, and has the right to legal representation. If the guilt of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay is beyond doubt, why are the Americans afraid to bring them to trial? Transparency and accountability are the other side of the coin of freedom and responsibility. . . . .The events of 9/11 cannot erase the rule of law and international obligations . . . . To hold someone for up to four years without charge clearly indicates a society that is heading towards George Orwell’s Animal Farm”. Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of South Africa similarly claimed that he was alarmed that arguments used to sustain the apartheid regime are now being used by the US to justify anti-terrorist measures.

Meanwhile British citizens are being tortured by Americans in Guantanamo Bay. One of them is a Moroccan, Ahmad Errachidi, who has been a cook in London for eighteen years. He was arrested in Pakistan and is said to have been sold to US forces. Held in solitary confinement for two years, the Americans accuse him of participating in a terrorist training camp in July 2001. There is both documentary and witness proof that he was working in a London kitchen at that time. My guess is that the Americans are reluctant to bring Ahmad and many of his fellow prisoners to trial because their innocence will constitute a further stain on that country’s already discredited system of justice.

Church Housing

For a second week in a row the news transported me back to the late 1960’s when I served as parish priest in a deprived working class area of South London. This era was hailed as one of social progress (some considered it social engineering) as old three-storied slum housing was demolished to make way for vast new estates of buildings ranging from maisonettes to huge tower blocks. The architecture was modernist, the construction modular based on huge slabs of concrete fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Most parishioners were glad to move into a new home with all modern conveniences, despite some social drawbacks. The most controversial of these was that whereas three generations of a family could live together in the old housing, thus establishing a strong family identity and providing childcare facilities enabling young couples both to be employed, in the new provision, the grandparents were housed in designated housing for the elderly which could be some distance away from the rest of the family. In time some of the new housing would prove socially disastrous, and today most of the tower blocks celebrated in the sixties have been demolished to make way for user-friendly low-rise accommodation.

There was no private ownership of housing in my parish, or those that it adjoined. The major landlord was the local Council to whom the tenants paid their rent. The only other housing was in smaller estates provided by charities of which the Peabody Trust, the Guinness Trust and the Church Commissioners are the best known. The Church Commissioners are the body which includes parliamentary appointees, who manage the Church of England’s financial, business and investment interests.

In addition to being parish priest of St Christopher’s Church, I was also Warden of Pembroke House, a large building attached to the Church. The House and Church together constituted a mission founded by Pembroke College Cambridge in the nineteenth century, at a time when many Oxford and Cambridge colleges developed a concern for those living in abject poverty in the great cities. The principle of these foundations was to provide accommodation so that undergraduates could spend part of their time living amongst the poor and addressing their spiritual and social needs. A vestige of this practice still remained in the sixties, but more importantly, Pembroke House provided one of the rare places in which professional people like teachers and social workers who had a real commitment to the locality and wanted to share in the local community’s life could be accommodated. The only other possibility living out this kind of commitment was by renting accommodation in the nearby Church Commissioners Octavia Hill Estate.

This Estate, named after a woman who was a tireless worker for better conditions for the poor of this locality, has been in the headlines recently. The Church Commissioners have put the Octavia Hill Estate, along with several other estates in South London, up for sale. The Commissioners are arguing that they are not realising a sufficient profit on their investment in social housing, so want to sell out and invest elsewhere. The proposal has met with fierce local opposition, from existing tenants, from the local council and from Members of Parliament, including Simon Hughes who featured so prominently in last week’s blog. Local churches are also opposing the sale and I would like to think that the members of St Christopher’s church, in the spirit of some of our 1960’s campaigns, are just as involved today. When questions were raised in Parliament about both the Christian and social implications of the proposed sale, the response from one of the Commissioners was to suggest that the Commissioners needed to get the best return possible on their investments, so that they could continue to support provisions like the Clergy Pension Fund.

The Church Commissioners have had quite a chequered career in my time. It was while I was at Pembroke House that an enormous scandal developed around housing in Paddington which was one of the Commissioners’ investments. It transpired that this housing was in a ‘red light’ district and that many of the houses were being used as brothels. Such was the outrage that the Commissioners had to sell its Paddington houses and invest elsewhere, but controversy broke out again when several years later it was revealed that the Commissioners had invested in enterprises linked to armaments production. This raised further moral issues and prompted talk of the need for ethical investments. It would be several decades before the resistance of the Church Commissioners, who still maintained the argument for realising maximum profits, could be overcome and ethical investment became an acknowledged principle. There was an instance of this policy this week when the Commissioners announced they were withdrawing their £2million investment in the earthmoving equipment firm Caterpillar, because of the firm’s complicity in providing equipment to Israel to the detriment of Palestinian homes and lives. Despite some advances, a few years back the Commissioners became involved in an even greater fiasco, by investing in land near Ashford which they believed would be a prime development site when the channel tunnel project was realised. These development hopes were dashed, and the Commissioners lost hundreds of millions of pounds on the deal. It was this particular piece of mismanagement which so affected the stand-alone Church Pension Fund that today individual diocese are having to make an increasing contribution towards the support of their retired clergy.

The present controversy over the Octavia Hill Estate turns the spotlight once more on to the degree to which the Church should be involved in social housing as an aspect of its ministry of social justice. In one sense the Church in the UK is deeply involved in this kind of provision, both through the enterprises of individual parishes making land available for such developments and through the work of Christian housing associations, and this is to be applauded. The Commissioners’ proposals raise questions of a different order concerning the degree to which housing originally provided to address the needs of the poor should more than a century later be regarded primarily as a source of revenue for the Church.

The provision of low-cost housing in an age in which a spiralling market render it difficult for young couples in poor communities to secure decent accommodation is an almost universal phenomenon and it is a tragedy when the Church is seen to be contributing to this problem. Some years ago, when I was working in New Zealand, the appropriate use of some vacant land belonging to the Cathedral was debated in diocesan synod. The then Dean who happened to be Chair of World Vision which tries to address the issue of world poverty, argued against the site being developed with low-cost housing on the grounds that professional housing ‘would attract more cathedral-type people into the area’. How’s that for a symbol of the Church’s commitment to social justice?

Politics and Sex

Politics and Sex have always been a heady mix. I still recall the great scandal of the 1960’s which, it was claimed, rocked the foundations of western society to their very core. John Profumo, by all accounts a gracious and charming man serving as the British Conservative Government’s Minister of War (this very designation being a product of the Cold War, but subsequently altered in line with later ideological priorities to Minister for Defence) was exposed as using the services of the same call girl, Christine Keeler, as a Russian named Eugene Ivanov, a naval attaché and spy. What state secrets might the Minister of War have whispered into Christine Keeler’s ear, which she may have subsequently whispered into Eugene’s ear? Profumo, having lied to Parliament about his relationship with Keeler, exited in disgrace, the butt of many anecdotes, and as I recall, the subject of an hilarious radio skit performed by Peter Sellers, Joan Collins and Anthony Newley, in which, to the background of opening and closing doors, frantic entrances and hurried escapes, Profumo and Eugene end up in bed together whispering directly into one another’s ears. Profumo incidentally, would late in life earn a degree of rehabilitation and win public recognition for his tireless voluntary work amongst the poor communities of East London.

A few years later, I would become parish priest in a very deprived area of South London which was solidly Labour in its politics. Our Member of Parliament was a conservatively-minded Labour politician named Robert Mellish who would serve in Parliament for thirty-seven years. Mellish was very much a local institution, known affectionately as ‘Our Bob’ and regarded as having the interests of the poor of Bermondsey at heart. Such was his influence and authority in the community that it was often sufficient to curb anti-social behaviour by threatening to report the matter to Our Bob. However, a decade after I left that parish the Bermondsey constituency was to become the battleground for another issue of sexuality and politics.

In 1983, disenchanted by the leftist lurch of the Labour Party under the leadership of Michael Foot, and having as it turned out being recruited by the Conservative Government to the Board of the London Dockland Development Corporation, Our Bob resigned thus forcing a bye-election. To the shock and horror of many of its constituents, the local Labour party selected Australian born Peter Tatchell, a young local activist who also happened to be gay, as its candidate. This prompted the most openly homophobic political campaigning in British history, with male supporters of the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, sporting badges saying ‘I’ve been kissed by Peter Tatchell’ and their electioneering pamphlets describing the Liberals as ‘the straight choice’ or asking ‘Which queen are you going to vote for?’ this latter sporting photographs of Queen Elizabeth and a made-to-look effeminate Tatchell. In an unprecedented reversal the huge Labour majority became instead a Liberal victory, which has turned out to be something rather permanent as Simon Hughes remains Bermondsey’s Member of Parliament to this day. And one of the great ironies of this piece of history is that Bob Mellish who actively campaigned against the Party’s candidate Tatchell because he way gay, and was a married man with a family of four, was later outed as bisexual and having himself pursued gay relationships.

Why drag up this piece of history today? Because the Liberal Party which these days call themselves the Liberal Democrats, are currently in the throes of selecting a new party leader and one of the leading candidates is Simon Hughes of Bermondsey. Indeed, many people considered him, on the basis of his exemplary parliamentary career and personal qualities, the front runner. But the Bermondsey campaign of 1983, has returned to haunt Simon Hughes and diminish his chances of securing the leadership. This turnaround was prompted by revelations that another of the candidates in the leadership stakes, Mark Oaten, married man, had been visiting a Rent Boy. When this news became public, Oaten withdraw his candidacy. Meanwhile it has long been rumoured that the unmarried Hughes is also gay, but until recently he has never publicly addressed that issue, claiming that politicians’ private lives must remain private. However, with the inevitable press references to his party’s tactics in the 1983 Bermondsey campaign, and the withdrawal of Oaten, he was placed on the spot, and in replying to questions from the press corps, he was initially equivocal in his responses, but later confessed to being bisexual and having had relationships with both women and men. Little wonder his ratings began to plummet.

So it was that last week, another piece of the jigsaw that has been described by one senior Labour politician as the ‘most wretched and hateful’ of political campaigns, fell into place. In Bermondsey in 1983 the gay labour candidate Peter Tatchell was pilloried both by the outgoing bisexual Labour stalwart Bob Mellish, and by the incoming admittedly bisexual and probably gay Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes. Well, well, isn’t political life full of sexual surprises!

And lest you should think that sexual shenanigans in politics are the preserve of the British, there was last week news of an equally bizarre public announcement from the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who is gearing up for a general election in April. Arch-conservative and ally of Tony Blair, Berlusconi is frequently criticised for his intentional use of sexual innuendo and his recounting of sexist jokes. All this is ignored by the Italian Right because the Prime Minister is a staunch defender of ‘family rights’ and an equally staunch opponent of so called ‘gay marriage’, stances which endear him to the Roman Catholic community. At a political rally in Sardinia Berlusconi was blessed by TV preacher Father Massimiliano Pusceddu. In a grand political gesture the Prime Minister in return publicly promised ‘two and a half months of complete sexual abstinence until April 9’. This may not prove too difficult a task for a man about to turn seventy, but this piece of religious cynicism will no doubt capture a few extra votes. Personally I would regard it as a significant political act were he to abandon his intemperate sexual innuendo and sexism permanently, rather than forego sex for two months.