Tescopoly and the Destruction of Independent Retailers.

Peter Wilby has written a critique of the way large supermarket corporations are driving out small independent retailers.

Across the country the small retailer is being wiped out. In the whole of Britain there are fewer than 1,000 specialist fishmongers, 7,000 butchers and 4,000 greengrocers, and barely 3,000 independent bakeries. In all these categories, the number of specialists has fallen by 90% since the 1950s, and at least 40% in the last decade alone. They have been driven out by supermarkets, which now sell 97% of our food, with four chains accounting for 76%.

Next to the motor car, nothing else has so radically changed the look and texture of our environment over the last half-century – creating what the New Economics Foundation calls "clone-town Britain" where every high street has the same shops. Next to the motor car, nothing else has so radically changed the look and texture of our environment over the last half-century – creating what the New Economics Foundation calls "clone-town Britain" where every high street has the same shops.

The age of the motor car is responsible for the decline of the small independent retailer with out of town supermarkets and banal retail parks. With peak oil, increasing global competition for diminishing supplies of oil and high oil prices the high octane consumerism of the times will soon become less viable anyway.

In 2011, the predominance of the supermarkets, the proliferation of Tesco Metro's and Sainsbury's Local's is a threat not only to diversity on the high street too ( a buzzword beloved of trendy leftists ) but will diminish the quality of community life as even check out assistants are being replaced by self service machines.

So jobs will be lost and gained or preserved only in the floodlit wastelands of whole deracinated zones of warehouses where produce is imported from around the globe to provide the consumer with out of season fruit and vegetables all year long.This again is oil intensive and environmentally cretinous.

As is the fact that supermarkets are supremely wasteful of so much food that has supposedly passed its "use by date". The wastage of food can be afforded by huge supermarket chains. But it is a colossal waste of food on an overpopulated planet.

Also, the principle of "economies of scale" works not only to entrench large supermarket corporations. Small bakers were put out of business by chains such as the appalling Greggs and Wenzels which offer bleached flour rubbish. Public taste, the pace of life has led to the decline of small retailers.

Britain is a land where depersonalisation, the disconnection between consumers and the natural environment is being accelerated and ultimately the coming epoch of resource conflicts, high oil prices and global instability will put an end to the infinite supermarket growth retail Utopia.

Unfettered "free markets" are not actually free markets if the power behind the oligopolies depend on the role of government, both local and national, genuflecting to the power of large corporations. If they are given tax breaks, as in neoliberal economies in Central Europe, e.g Poland, it is a rigged market.

In Krakow, there are now special buses provided to ferry people to the Tesco there. Small retailers are closing down. Tesco has the unfettered power to achieve this though money power and the collusion of supine politicians who are the middlemen between corporate power and "the people".

There is nothing natural about these distortions of the free market as the level playing field does not exist. Adam Smith was scathing about such distortions and lived in a period when most enterprises depended on family businesses and limited corporations subject to the same rules of competition as others.

Terms such as 'the free market are abstractions if they are not placed in a historical, political and economic context. That's why evidence about the way Tesco and other supermarkets drive out free market competition need to be based on the empirical evidence regarding how they actually operate.

The Mob Celebration on Bin Laden's Death: Tribalism not Patriotism.

The jubilation in the USA that greeted Bin Laden's killing was vulgar and unseemly. But certain journalists have tried to use it to discern some systemic malaise connected to the idea of being loyal to a nation. Gary Younge makes some good points and states today, (Osama bin Laden's death: The US patriot reflex, The Guardian 3 May 2011 ),

The national unity that Barack Obama has sought to harness following the announcement is indeed eerily familiar. Albeit in joy rather than sorrow, it's the same kind of unity that followed 9/11. It is also the same kind of unity that rallies around flags, dismisses dissent and disdains reflection.

But he writes,

The patriotic impulse in American society is intense and pervasive. The kind of national fervour reserved elsewhere for occasional events like royal weddings, World Cup victories or major tragedies is a dormant reflex waiting for a trigger.

The mob reaction in reaction to Bin Laden's assassination is more akin to "tribalism" or nationalism which is different to patriotism which has often led to an impassioned and sceptical questioning of power, not only of government but of those whom Orwell called "transferred nationalism".

The fact that the neoconservatives used terms such as "Patriot Act" to impose measures that curtailed civil liberties in the USA should not detract from the fact that the word "patriotism", as in "patriot missile" is an Orwellian misappropriation of the word. In the same way that Soviet communist regimes were termed "people's republics".

Younge conflates nationalism with patriotism due to the adherence to the ideology of anti-colonial discourse that derives from the 1960s Leninist radicals and those such as Franz Fanon. Nationalism is only good if it is yoked to victim nations or to hyper identities such as militant Islamism.

It is quite possible to be simultaneously against US global policy, even "neo-imperialism", without being scathing about the ordinary ties and loyalty to a country and being against those who write drivel about "the Iraqi resistance" or support Islamo-Bolshevik movements such as Respect.

Such movements fall under the rubric of what Orwell called "transferred nationalism" and are conditioned by the same power hunger, fanaticism and hatreds that are fomented by bad governments that those who care for their own countries seek to bring an end to. Nationalism is not the same as patriotism. To conflate them is disingenuous.

Gadaffi Foundation Members Rediscover their "Ethical Foreign Policy"

Benjamin Barber, a member of the Gaddafi Foundation until February 2011, has accused those promoting the war against Colonel Gaddafi's forces of "hypocrisy" after one of the Libyan dictator's sons was killed in a NATO bombing raid.

.... it is the plain stupidity of the Nato commitment to assassination and violent regime change that is most disconcerting. What on earth is the endgame?

The ultimate endgame is control over Libyan oil, just as it was for those fawning on Said Gaddafi before 2011, including those such as Benjamin Barber who lauded the dictator's son as a force for human rights and progress through collaborating with his Saif Foundation which states lots of worthy NGO style guff and public relations.

Such efforts to rehabilitate Gaddafi's regime from Tony Blair to his Third Way guru Anthony Giddens and others associated with the financial largesse of the Gaddafi Foundation in the LSE and within the ranks of New Labour grandees. As Giddens absurdly claimed ( My Chat with the Colonel )

Will real progress be possible only when Gadafy leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite.... My ideal future for Libya in two or three decades' time would be a Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking. Not easy to achieve, but not impossible.

A Guardian report made clear the "ethics" of Blair's entourage in this respect,

Lord Giddens, guru of Labour's third way, twice met Gaddafi on trips in 2006 and 2007 organised by Monitor Group, a US lobbying firm. Leaked documents show at least one trip was disclosed in advance to Abd Allah al-Sanusi, blamed for atrocities in the present uprising.

Giddens, 73, was LSE director for six years until 2003, is the author of 34 books published in 29 languages, and is credited with devising the "third way" political philosophy taken up by Tony Blair.

Monitor Group was paid more than £2m by the Libyan government in 2006 to conduct a "cleansing" campaign of its image, according to leaked documents.

A letter sent in July 2006 by executives at Monitor Group to Sanusi, also known as Abdullah Senussi, is about targeting influential academics to emphasise the emergence of "the New Libya".

Once Gaddafi had lost control of Libya, it was clear "regime change" was sought most by Cameron in the UK and Sarkozy in France.

The foreign policy strategy of both those in Demos in the US, or the liberal left in Britain who rationalised closer trade ties with the dictatorship in order to gain oil concessions, such as the deal with BP negotiated by Blair in 2007, and those who saw the breakdown of his power as a chance to get "regime change" is concerned with oil interests.

The charge of hypocrisy lies as much with those who were part of trade delegations selling arms to the Gaddafi regime after he committed a volte face after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 created havoc and made the necessity for oil diversification even more pressing.

In the longer term, Europe needs to wean itself off dependence upon oil and gas supplies from dangerous lands where politics is a pathological struggles over who controls the oil revenues. The reduction of reliance upon the car and a high octane economy is vital to avert a future of resource conflicts

A Rationalisation of Bin Laden's Terrorism.

Let that be it. The killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a fork in the road of world politics.

One way lies a fundamental rethink of US and British policy towards the Arab and Muslim worlds, a chance to drain the swamp that bred 9/11.

That way is the end of the "war on terror" launched in the aftermath of Bin Laden's atrocious crimes of September 2011. His act of violence became first the cause and rapidly the pretext for many more such acts, vastly more costly in terms of lives lost.

Andrew Murray, ( Bin Laden's death is a fork in the road The Guardian, 2 May 2011 )

Murray, chairman of the "Stop the War Coalition" in Britain has used the killing of Bin Laden to trot out the usual line that Al Qaeda terrorism is merely a reflex action to US and British foreign policy. Despite the fact Al Qaeda fighters have been active in places outside the Arab and Muslim World such as Indonesia and Chechnya.

There is no need to take the propaganda claims of the Bush administration and the "war on terror" at face value, for if 9/11 was a pretext to go in to Afghanistan and, partly, into Iraq, Al Qaeda's commitment to terrorism and the USA/UK's quest for energy security pre dates both what are essentially resource wars.

The same is true of Russia's role in the war against Chechen insurgents with connections to Al Qaeda. In fact, the assassination of 'Moganned', Al Qaeda's main Saudi born militant in Chechnya occurred recently on April 22nd 2011 and who had entered the Northern Caucasus since 1999 and by 2005 emerged as the handler of foreign funds for the jihad.

Hence Andrew Murray's crude "either-or" interpretation of the relationship between "the West" and "the Muslim World" is an inversion of the clash of civilisations idea: that Al Qaeda is simply the most extreme and violent form of reaction against Western Imperialism in Arab and Muslim lands.

This crude Leninist propaganda line denies the agency of Arab peoples themselves unless they fit into the notion that they are anti-Western as opposed to against the autocrats that dominate them e.g decayed secular dictatorship of Egypt was created by military power under those such as Colonel Nasser.

The absurdity is that one of the greatest admirers of Nasser is none other than George Galloway, an erstwhile ally of Murray in the myriad of groupuscules that try to hi-jack anti-war sentiment amongst British people into support for fanatical ideological agendas-including that of Respect.

Galloway's hero in Nasser executed Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual progenitor of modern militant Islamism in 1966, one reason the alliance between the hard left and the MAB, influenced very much by Qutb, is based only on hatred of the West as opposed to a principled criticism of Western foreign policy.

Al Qaeda has its own history and agenda: it's original raison d'etre under Bin Laden was less to do with Western foreign policy as such but with antagonism to the corruption of the Saudi regime and not being permitted to fight in the First Gulf War of 1991 against Saddam Hussein and which was blamed later on the US and it's 'occupation' of the Holy Land.

Murray is active in campaigning against the governments cuts: but the British economy and hence living standards would collapse without a steady and secure supply of oil from Saudi Arabia, one reason why the British government simply cannot give decisive public backing to democracy activists in Bahrain.

Obviously, as Malise Ruthven wrote in A Fury for God on 9/11 the long term interests of the Western powers are in having stable democratic regimes across the Middle East. The Arab Uprisings at least provide an opportunity that this could be brought about.

Ruthven also sensibly argued that Islamist solidarity always works negatively: the interests of Arab nations and the political groups within them from Bahrain to Libya and Saudi Arabia to Palestine and Lebanon are diverse and to yoke them all as "anti-Western" is to accept precisely the narrative of Al Qaeda.

This narrative accepts the concept of an Islamic hyper identity in which "the Muslim World" and the ummah is largely united in opposing Western "crusades", a term used repeatedly by neurotic and self promoting radical journalists such as John Pilger who want to motivate Muslim youths as new force for militant challenge to Western power from within.

The rationalisation of terrorism that has continually been offered since 9/11, whether by Pilger, Milne or Galloway, has acted as a ruse to ramp up militancy against the system in Britain as a substitute for the decline of the forward march of the labour movement which has petered out and fragmented.

It is true that it is both vital and justified to criticise the foreign policy and the dangerous over dependence upon the oil that fuels Western high octane car and supermarket societies and that leads to contradictory and botched entanglement and meddling in the Middle East.

But equally so, it is necessary to understand that Al Qaeda was not caused wholly by "the West" but as a spin off from the dysfunctional Saudi regime's investment in the Arab Afghan campaigns against the Soviet Union and an ideology that has an existence in its own right, one rejected in the recent Arab Uprisings.

Bin Laden's Demise, Afghanistan and the War.

Jonathan Steele has written on Bin Laden's assassination by the CIA and US special forces that,

Osama bin Laden's killing is a huge victory for the Obama administration and it will go a long way towards giving closure to Americans. But will it also revive the 10-year-old question about the wisdom of the war in Afghanistan, in which half as many Americans have already died as Bin Laden killed on 9/11, not to mention the many more Afghan civilians who have lost their lives in the attack that George W Bush launched on their country in October 2001?

Bin Laden's haven in Taliban country was a short-term marriage of convenience, which the Bush administration made no real effort to break other than by its rhetorical demand that the Taliban hand him over or else they would be punished.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban were never always so tied together and often hostile to each other. Now that Bin Laden has been disappeared into the depths of the ocean or "buried at sea", the "war on terror" pretext for continuing involvement in Afghanistan is going to be harder to maintain.

Though the Taliban have sought to use Bin Laden's liquidation as a reason to up the ante with its struggle with the USA and NATO in Afghanistan, the continued killing of civilians by drone bombers and continuation of a futile war that cannot be won will continue to give the Taliban a level of support.

The need to defeat the Taliban permanently in Helmand and the dogged struggle against NATO in areas such as Helmand reflects the underlying geopolitics of the Afghan War: the need to secure the region in order to facilitate the construction of the TAPI pipeline.

In recent months Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders have given numerous hints that they would be willing to break formally with al-Qaida as part of a peace deal that involved a full departure of US troops from Afghanistan. Will Barack Obama now finally put his weight behind exploring that option?

This is unlikely precisely because US troops will not depart until the Afghan security forces are trained to guard the pipeline agreed between the regional powers which will bring gas from Turkmenistan through to India and forms part of the US strategy of hemming in Iranian influence from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is not exactly a "war of choice": it is a geostrategic imperative if the West is to gain a commanding stake in controlling the supplies of oil and gas from Eurasia. The fact is that whilst Iraq was a oil grab, Afghanistan is a more sophisticated gambit in the New Great Game.A recent update from the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis states,

Despite problems, if the pipeline does succeed in being constructed, it will be due to the US’ uncompromising support for the project. While Washington’s raison d’etre is that it will help stabilise Afghanistan as well as assist the country in its development, not least by allowing it to earn around USD 300 million per annum in transit fees, it would also allow the Central Asian countries to find an alternate market in the east and thereby lessen their dependence on Russia as well as feed the energy-starved South Asian nations.

However, the US’ main objective is to ensure that the IPI project is effectively killed, thus denying Tehran much-needed revenues for its nuclear programme that will accrue from selling gas to an expanding South Asian market. This is not the first time that the US has pushed through a pipeline project which had appeared unfeasible both from political and business perspectives.

In 2005, despite substantial opposition by business and political circles in both the US and the Caspian states, the hugely expensive and logistically challenging BTC pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in Turkey, transiting a fractious Georgia, was built by a 11-member consortium led by BP under pressure from the US government.

The reason: Washington was seeking to provide a route that would not only circumvent transiting through Russian territory and break Moscow’s stranglehold over the European gas market, but would also assist in diminishing Russia’s strategic hold over the Caspian region.To overcome the reluctance of business in underwriting such a costly project and whose economic viability was questionable, the US government made financing from government agencies, such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the US Export-Import Development Bank, available.

Naturally, the reading public in the UK watching body bags of troops coming home to Wootton Bassett are never allowed to get any real sense of why Britain and NATO are out there and will not be as the electorate, that is the children, must be fed easily digestible sound bites about wars on terror and opium"

Anti-Royalism and the Left.

With the Royal Wedding, there have been the usual voices calling for a British Republic, though usually this is based less on coherent arguments for a republic but merely loathing for monarchy as representing class society and privilege. Toynbee opined ( This royal wedding is Britain's Marie Antoinette moment, The Guardian Friday 29 April 2011 )

Of course Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had no invitation, being the prime ministers who held back the forces of conservatism for 13 years. Notwithstanding repellent sniggers of the Eton set who call the Middleton girls "the wisteria sisters" for their social climbing, or the "doors to manual" giggle at their former air steward mother, the Middletons belong in the top 0.5% of earners.....Besides, Kate Middleton, Samantha Cameron and the Hon Frances Osborne all went to the same school.

The irony is that by the standards of privilege in Britain, Toynbee is very privileged and had she not belonged to the right family, the Hampstead upper middle class intelligensia, she would not even be in the position to criticise the system of privilege. The lady who criticises those who complain about fuel duty whilst jetting off to her villa in Tuscany.

Polly Toynbee attended Badminton School Girl's School and later Holland Park School, a comprehensive in one of the richest parts of Central London also known as the "socialist Eton" and went up to Oxford University after getting only one A Level. Toynbee cannot change her family background but could have chosen not to send her children to fee paying schools.

Toynbee represents the inertia and sterility of public life and politics, even those on the gilded liberal left, is dominated by those with the "right connections" and elevate themselves to a position to pontificate about the class system that effectively ensures that they are where they are.

From a left wing or liberal perspective it was possible both to want to fight against privilege and the class system without necessarily abolishing the monarchy, even if it could be reformed and scaled down to that of Sweden, the Netherlands or Denmark.

George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn ( 1940 ), when calling for a transformation of the war effort to harness the patriotism of the British people and a democratic socialist state to then created after the defeat of Nazi Germany, did not call for the abolition of the monarchy. He wrote of an English Socialist government that,

It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons.

Curiously, apart from the more unsophisticated and mulishly resentful "class war" bores, much Republicanism comes from the privileged middle classes and their "party" today in London did not excite much interest. Presumably a social democratic position could argue for a reformed monarchy

Just as Timothy Garton Ash argued ( Should a democracy have a King Wills and Queen Kate? You can do worse The Guardian, Thursday 28 April 2011 )

I don't think countries like Sweden, Holland, Denmark and Spain, all of which have monarchs, are worse off than those that have party politicians directly or indirectly elected to be president. Or would you rather have Buckingham Palace occupied by a President Blair?

With one brief interlude, when English revolutionaries experimented with decapitating one of them, there have been kings and queens in England, kings and queens of the English, for more than a thousand years. That is an amazing thing. It is the stuff of poetry. Imagine Shakespeare purged of all references to kingship. Before you abandon a thousand years of poetry, you should be very certain that you will fare better in prose.

There are damagingly undemocratic elements in the British political system – above all, the House of Lords – but the monarchy is not high among them. If we are talking about the power of a single unelected individual, Rupert Murdoch is a far greater threat to British democracy than our hereditary head of state.

According to the constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor, no monarch has refused his or her assent to legislation since 1707. Some undemocratic obscurantism still derives from "crown prerogative", and the constitutional doctrine that sovereignty resides in "the crown in parliament", but the lawyer Richard Gordon has shown how the UK could have a thoroughly modern written constitution, firmly based on popular sovereignty, and still keep a hereditary monarch as head of state.

Sensible politics should in Britain entail reform of much of that which is decayed, against the interests on the long term future of the majority of the people, the rentier financial economy, decline of manufacturing in favour of over privileging the City and the reducing the country to a banal Heritage Theme Park.

The cloying media commentary on the Royal Wedding is annoying but it is merely for one day. It is of less importance than having an increasingly deracinated land where economic power and sovereignty has been ceded away and where the "leftism" is often associated with rather silly trendy poses and "identity politics".

The British are known for being a people given to cussedness. Tell them the Royal Family is merely a banal fairytale, that long term commitments to something as abstract as a "nation" are meaningless and to denigrate the entire history of the UK and people will instinctively rebel.

That means that sensible proposals that could challenge existing abuses of a dysfunctional political system, curtail the power of unaccountable corporations, bring about a change as regards the mindless deification of miraculous "market forces" and corruption is less rather than more likely to happen.

Thoughts On the Royal Wedding and "Class War" Bores

The interest in the Royal Wedding is nothing to do with "feudal nostalgia" as Tanya Gold asserts and more to do with a celebrity and media driven society obsessed with spectacles and ways and means of averting the boredom that comes from excessive consumerism and toxic affluence.

The monarchy became a popular symbol of Britain during the nineteenth century along with Empire, Protestantism and other pillars of a now crumbled order. The flying of the Union Flag for the occasion in London, an increasingly socially and ethically ghettoised global city with little connection to the rest of the UK makes the attempt to unify 'the nation' seem absurd.

Indeed, the Royal Wedding seems to be exciting more interest around the globe from foreigners than from those in Britain themselves who no longer primarily see themselves as "British" . This is why David Cameron's attempt to drum up support has in most areas of Britain north of the Home Counties and more prosperous towns and cities not been met with such tremendous enthusiasm.

The number of applications for street parties from what I can gather are down from what they were in 1981: this is partly due to the way the mystique of monarchy was tarnished by adultery, divorce, and banal soap opera into which Charles and Diana's marriage descended into.

More than that Britain in 1981 is a very different place than 2011. Society is more atomised. People do not know their neighbours and national identity has fragmented into English, Welsh and Scottish nationalisms. The English identity has become little more than obsession for the football team.

In the part of North London I live in there are virtually no posters advertising Royal Wedding parties, at least in Wealdstone. Only in wealthier white English areas is there any significant public indication of an attempt at celebration, as in Ruislip where some houses wear a festive air with huge flagpoles running up St George's flags.

Along the motorway towns there is a flicker of enthusiasm. But it's less about celebration of the Royal Wedding than a defensive proclamation of English identity which accompanies the wearing of sport casual wear with St George's flags on it. The flagpoles are there all year long in any case.

The Wedding Parties will be more about a "get together" in order to have the chance of socialising and meeting people for a drink in a country where this happens often via Facebook. In the same way as watching football on the telescreens in clone pubs in the motorway towns fulfil this function.

Those protesting against the Royal Wedding are also playing their banal cliched role in being "radical" in a bored society where the need to "feel" something is paramount. The wedding is partly about "identity" but it is also an event that will bring tourists and money to London. It's also a business-"The Firm".

By global standards most Britons are pampered and privileged: they are consumers with higher levels of affluence than ever before. The boredom is one reason why people value 'right on' class war poses . This is also folkloric ritual. Britain is deeply bored. And increasingly very boring.

The Royal Couple still have more in common with the average affluent consumerist Briton than those Eastern Europeans who do cleaning in London, those Chinese who make the cheap goods people in Durham or Derby consume, those who stitch together the clothes that are sold in High Street retail outlets.

The Royal Family are celebrities but most celebrities are elevated to their position by the masses. Whether the latest pop pap purveyor or those talent shows run by Simon Cowell. If people just switched these manipulators and morons off, ignored the X Factor and so on then 'the system' might be changed.

But the Royal Family are not that so bad for Britain compared to Simon Cowell, the recycled celebrities on TV. Making the point in public of not watching one wedding is pathetic when the system of manufactured wants, desires and consumerist alienation is really run by those who give consumer-citizens what they have been conditioned to want.

All Britons are privileged because they happened to have been born here or permitted to live here. It's hereditary and also an aspiration. British people are aristocrats compared to the condition of most people across the world, those who exist to stitch together the consumer goods with brand logos that define the consumer's status.

The point is that the Royal Family could be reduced to the level of the monarchy in Sweden or Spain. The doltish swipes against monarchy on the basis of 'them 'n' uz' are class war tropes that some British get off on because they are no less infantile than those who personally identified with the life of Diana as an exciting soap.

As in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, where the aristocrats are almost oblivious to the condition of the people outside their own cocoon, the affluent consumerist Briton cares little for those living beyond their own shores nor the tourist complexes they visit in corrupt undemocratic nations.

Money power is the prerogative of rich Westerners when they go to Thailand or Cuba to exert their global droit du seigneur. Like bored aristocrats, a significant number of Britons drink themselves stupid due to boredom, are obsessed with sex and debauchery.They have a sense of entitlement.

In global terms, Britons are global aristocrats. Britain makes little of use, lives off its past by flogging itself as a playground and pleasure nexus for other globally privileged, and is one colossal parasite sucking in capital from other nations to keep its consumerism- one hardly merited by anything it actually produces with the country going.

In that sense, the Royal Family is a perfect symbol for Britain, where pre-modern meets post-modern but less so where public life is defined by celebrities, rock stars, and other assorted halfwits are more obsessed with image, status and their malignant egotistic pursuits.

However, the asinine swipes against monarchy on the basis of 'them 'n' uz' are class war tropes that some British get off on because they are no less infantile than those who personally identified with Diana. D Carter took issue with this,

You dismiss concerns over the British class disease as if it were completely unrelated to the monarchy and didn't exist. In reality, they sit atop the whole rotten edifice. "Think yourself lucky" is the argument of medieval serfs defending their masters, not 21st Century citizens.

But Britons are not medieval serfs are they ? They are privileged consumers.

But by any standards, the British people are better off, live affluent consumer lives amidst the brands and logos and all year available supermarket produce and holidays abroad that make them aristocrats by global standards. Do Western consumers really work so hard as to merit all what they have ?

Does a corporate PR exec really produce something far more valuable than a miner in China ? A factory worker in a developing nation ? A graduate in an Arab nation who cannot get a job because the West inc Britain shore up corrupt dictatorships to control the oil supply that fuels the average Briton's lifestyle ?

Arguing that we're all Kings because of our own accidents of birth is no argument at all.

Yes it is an argument. Not necessarily in favour of the Royal Family but of the parochial idiocy of "class war" tropes when the real class war might become one in an age of globalisation between the 'have not' nations and the haves. Given that "the masses" are now as affluent and bored as C18th nobles.

It's how to stagnate and devolve. It's how British manufacturing declined. "Of-course they'll buy our stuff, no need to invest, they always have haven't they?".

If you had not noticed, Britain doesn't make much any more. The wealth comes from servicing the needs of the global economy. The Royal Family is part of the Heritage Industry. They could be replaced by actors, of course, but Britain lives off its past.

Just accept the status quo and be glad of small mercies. That might be acceptable when we're really all in it together, world war for instance, but in peacetime it's a hopeless excuse for all the things that beset us and the class system in general.

Britain should be glad of small mercies. The consumerism that alone defines the lives of most of them, the brand snobbery ( endorsed by the monarchy from Glade Air freshener to Walkers Butter biscuits ) is part of their identity. Only football gives an outlet for emotion.

Footballers come from lower class backgrounds but are , by any standards, overpaid. Unlike the Royal Family, they do not entertain for life. And if you hate football ( as I do ), it's a mystery why hordes of screaming crapulent dolts chant and get passionate for a brand name like Chelsea.

But few criticise football fans for being stupid blind serf like beings who elevate people who happen to be able to kick a ball well to the status of icons.

It's not as if Chelsea means anything is it ? 11 players kicking a ball across a field and all performing because they are paid colossal sums of money to do so. By those with enough money, those who affect working class or plebian culture but are wealthy by global standards.

It can be argued whether the Royal Family is relevant. It can be argued whether it provides value for money and finances itself. It can be argued whether it should be scaled down to Dutch or Swedish proportions. But the crap about "class war" should be dropped.

Face facts: the class system is still there partly but people are not that bothered because there is no "working class" any more: there is an underclass and the fresh waves of migrants who do the jobs Britons think they are above doing. The class system has been globalised.

D Carter criticised this,

That there are others worse off in purely fiscal terms beyond our shores does not diminish the point that the monarchy and aristocracy are the representatives of a class of foreign invaders who have kept us and our ancestors in servitude for a millennium.

The concept of the Norman Yoke is not one particularly relevant.

Consumerism is their tool, not ours, designed to keep us in debt and servitude.

No, consumerism as a way of life is something that large numbers of people willingly collude in because it has become an essential part of their identity and also of part of the sense of entitlement that animates those who have grown up in a land in which the desire for more and more is now normal.

The obsession with image and egotistical self assertion, something known perversely as "individualism"- is even at the heart of the most vociferously anti-monarchical groups. Those who crave attention such as the boring group known as "Class war".

Take the doltish Ian Bone. On his website he writes this, unintentionally hilarious,

Cometh a Tory government and a Royal Wedding and cometh Class War. London Class War was re-established on Sunday and Croydon CW coming soon. CW will be organising actions against the royal wedding soon and on the day.Theres the Better dead than Wed cd to get out. We urgently need to do 5,000 FUCK THE ROYAL WEDDING POSTERS and a 5,000 re-run of the wildly popular CLEGG/CAMERON WANKERS POSTERS.

Such moronic protests are counter culture becoming consumer culture. The CD's, the posters. It's all part of the folkloric ritual of "anti-monarchism" in Britain that appeal to the rebel market niche. It's as boring, if not far more so, than the at least unpretentious older fan of The Queen.

Ian Bone's loathing of the monarchy is largely part of rebellion against his the system which made his father a Butler, mere toytown revolutionary politics of the sort that gets him invited on to The Johnathan Ross Show and ultimately to sell his books to film makers who want to make a profit.

Class War Anarchism sells and helps youths to work off excess energies. whilst deluding both City financiers and radical activists that there is something more exciting and interesting in their lives than banal consumerism.

The Whitechapel Anarchist media and computer blogs show a devotion to virtual anarchism in which an organised club form anarchy becomes a kind of day trip out in the City. An account of the WAG's day out to the Climate Camp 'Peasant's Revolt' during the G20 Protests in 2009 starts off like this,

The day started off with us trudging down to our old haunt Bank for 12 Noon prompt, despite the usual stereotypes of Anarchist time keeping we were there bang on time, but then the waiting began. Two hours in total. The Police presence was tiny, though they did enjoy ducking behind pillars and spying on us when we met up with some more famous anarchists, though being a WAG means the police are always interested in your activities anyway. We spotted the FIT Copper from television programme Bargain Hunt who took the wisecracks on the chin to be fair. He never should have bought those stones though!

Lifestyle anarchism of this sort is no less ritualistic than the obsession with watching Princess Diana's life

Rather like battle Civil War re-enactment societies the WAG tends to like hoisting banners, frequenting ale houses and staging events like Spitalfields Fair.According to their 'favourite' anarchist magazine Freedom, it had 'tug of war, five a side football, and a 'plethora of stalls and entertainments'.

'Most popular though was ye old stocks, wherein many malefactors and ill doers were righteously bombarded with wet sponges'.( My italics )

Without any sense of irony, the report boasted, 'the fair drew several hundred people and to the merriment of all, no cops'.

For all the posturing about the cops and the Ruling elite, such activity is merely plebeian affectation for the pre-consumerist age on a 'Merrie England' theme. There is never any real criticism of consumerism because Whitechapel Anarchist Group is about self-presentation and brand differentiation.

If anyone posting here cannot tell be that certain forms of anti-monarchical posturing are not as much part of the obsession with spectacle and the need to work off boredom, or that anti-monarchists and those who see it necessarily as class repression are not as tedious as David Dimbleby, then it would be interesting to know how.

It's not that the British public regards itself as somehow cap-doffingly inferior to the royals; On the contrary,at the bottom of the widespread mania and enthusiasm for the coming wedding spectacle is the sense that 'we' own the Royal Family.

Which is precisely why there was that absurd outpouring of kitschy demonstrated grief after Diana died back in 1997 and Tony Blair was able to exploit it to put forth the idea of "the People's Princess" to a generation obsessed with celebrity because they have reached a higher stage of consumerist boredom.

Supporting the Royal Wedding and the monarchy ( or hating it as the apex of "class oppression" ) is an exercise in consumer choice. But more than this, with regards the monarchy as celebrity they are at least polite and despite being aristocrats there are many millionaires with "class war" pretensions in public life who are far more annoying than the royals

Take the idiotic Paul Weller, that erstwhile class warrior who penned Eton rifles is now a class warrior millionaire who gets drunk out of his brain with women much younger than him. But he's not a modern day aristocrat ennobled by the housing estate masses now is he ?

If Britain is hardly a serious nation any more, it due to these radical hypocrites more than the ruritanian charade ( as J G Ballard characterised it ) that is the Royal Family.

"Mission Creep" in Libya is nor Folly: It's a Geostrategic Deperation.

Throughout the west there is a desire to relieve people in distress, but when humanitarians arrive with screaming missiles and a clear political agenda, those being attacked are understandably suspicious of motive. I do not believe Cameron is after Gaddafi's oil, but tell Tripoli's residents, whose sufferings were happily ignored by British governments when their leader seemed secure. The first humanitarian duty to those who are suffering should be to relieve that suffering, not to fight their civil wars, suppress their dictators, partition their countries and destroy their infrastructure. Something has polluted foreign policy.

States Simon Jenkins ( These humanitarians come to Libya with missiles, and an agenda, The Guardian April 19 2011 )

Well, no Cameron is not after Gaddafi's oil as an individual. It is somewhat silly to look at foreign policy as if it were merely the personal folly of politicians, those who lack the sense and knowledge that the older generation who grew up during World War Two had in doing everything to avert war after 1945.

In the long term the far bleaker and more frightening reality is that the profligate fuel use inherent in British consumerism, one common across North America and Europe, means that the future will be one of resource wars. That and the New Great Game with China over control of oil rich regions.

There is no point pretending that this is "rapacious imperialism" organised by sinister corporate elites: most people, including anti-war types, collude in creating resource wars when they fly EasyJet to the Algarve, buy out of season strawberries from Waitrose or have three cars on the drive.

The cretinous statement that Britain's wars are "all about oil", as it this were some trump card that proves moral superiority and the hypocrisy of "Them" and not "Us", ignores the way that Blair went into Iraq in 2003 to give the people what they wanted-cheap and abundant fuel.

Just as the fuel protest in 2000 had convinced Blair that high petrol prices could potentially bring chaos, so too the global crash of 2008 and instability in the Arab nations in 2011 has threatened to push petrol prices up to levels that consumers will not like, that is most Britons.

Hence the Chancellor George Osborne's fuel duty reductions and promise to put "fuel in the tank of the British economy" in the March budget. Labour also sought to exploit discontent over petrol prices. When the Libyan crisis broke out, it threatened to disrupt another important source of oil.

So the fact is if that control of oil supplies is part of the geopolitical calculations upon which power operates, then the intervention in Libya is clearly about advancing Britain's oil interests, not least as in 2007 BP negotiated the development of a huge oil concession in the nation.

When Gaddafi lost de facto sovereignty over Libya and the rebels looked as though they could win, only then for the stronghold of Eastern Libya in Benghazi to be threatened with protracted destruction and death, Britain and France sought to use the humanitarian impact as a pretext to remove Gaddafi.

Policy is formulated by politicians, statesmen and 'experts' according to a variety of objectives, often ones that quite clearly are contradictory and clash. No doubt Cameron and Sarkozy thought that a Libya under anti-Gaddafi forces and committed to destroying the dictatorship would be preferable.

It is clear that the endgame all along was the removal of Gaddafi was increasingly seen as unreliable when set against the control he had over Africa's prime source of high grade low sulphur oil. China was also making inroads in Libya.

Here is the rub: now that the Western powers have staked all on backing rebel forces against Gaddafi, it will be impossible for them to avoid continuing to back them by putting military advisers on the ground and continuing to give aid as if Gaddafi returns British oil interests will be threatened even more.

The US seems to have scaled down its role, probably adopting a policy of "wait and see" as it is European nations that have far more at stake as regards drilling and exploration rights. Something which invalidates the idea that the US is primarily behind an attempt at "neo-imperialism" in Libya.

The struggle for diversification over oil supplies is one that connects to the preservation of the consumer lifestyles the great majority of people in the West want, even if they fail to connect it to foreign policy and certain journalists waffle on in bemused fashion at why these wars are happening.

The Royal Wedding and Boring Posturing.

It's understandable that many in Britain are going to be somewhat indifferent to the Royal Wedding, if only because they are tired of the media hype. Yet the sheer scale of the resentment demonstrated by some anti-monarchical leftists, however, presumably lies in their hatred of the symbolism.

The fact that the British monarchy is held to embody the class system that prevails in Britain. However, if the Royal wedding was not hyped up to such proportions and if the monarchy became more low key as in the Netherlands and Denmark or Sweden, then far fewer would have problems with it.

But a key difference is the mulish legacy of bitterness in Britain that it has not become a more equitable society. Plus the cultural tendency towards a doltish kind of cynicism of the sort demonstrated by the pseudo-proley pose of Paul Heaton on why Hull would not celebrate the Royal Wedding.

The pop star, who had a few mediocre songs to his credit a few decades ago, wrote bluntly in The Guardian with contrived Yorkshire bluntness ( Hull is no king's town, 20 March 2011 )

... I heard that Hull's was the only council in the country that hadn't had a single application for a street party for the royal wedding. Nearby East Riding of Yorkshire council has received 12. Lots of my old friends sent me texts that day: "Good ol' Hull. Fuck the royals!"....Personally, I will only celebrate anything to do with royalty when one of them dies.

If certain cultural critics see the existing veneration for the Royal Family as a symptom that it cannot grow up, the same is true of those leaping on an annoyingly over hyped occasion to vent the same sentiments I had when I gave away a Royal Wedding Sugar Spoon to a class mate in 1981.

I was 6. My mother was not very pleased and looking at her disappointment on her face, I retrieved the thing and gave it to her. Ever since this wilful act of rebellion against conformity, I've never had a particular animus against the Royal Family itself. As my mother said, just reduce the hangers on. Scale it down.

On John Pilger and Libya.

John Pilger has written in the New Statesman ( Westminster warriors untouched by Libya’s suffering and bloodshed, April 8 2011 ),

"The Euro-American attack on Libya has nothing to do with protecting anyone; only the terminally naive believe such nonsense. It is the west's response to popular uprisings in strategic, resource-rich regions of the world and the beginning of a war of attrition against the new imperial rival, China".

Perhaps. but the alternative might be for China to be given a free hand to control Libyan oil and its record of supporting dictatorships at least gets around the problem of double standards by not having standards at all, other than the one of backing dictatorships in Africa with no questions asked.

Given that the Libyan crisis began by a revolt against Gaddafi's dictatorship, it's clear that the dictator the UK had supported right until the Arab Revolutions began had lost de facto control and the Western powers had decided that Libya would be better off without him and to support those who called on the West for help.

Pilger asserts,

"The Libyan "pro-democracy rebels" are reportedly commanded by Colonel Khalifa Haftar who, according to a study by the US Jamestown Foundation, set up the Libyan National Army in 1988 "with strong backing from the Central Intelligence Agency". For 20 years, Colonel Haftar has lived not far from Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA, which also provides him with a training camp. ...

And,

"Libya's other "rebel" leaders include Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi's justice minister until February, and General Abdel-Fattah Younes, who ran Gaddafi's interior ministry. Both men have formidable reputations for savagely putting down dissent.

The rebel leadership might "include" such people. But does it necessarily define the leadership? Pilger provides only three names.

Even so, the evidence needs to be provided that all the rebels are necessarily engaged in fighting a tribal war for a new dictatorship to rival Gaddafi's regime, which comes close to suggesting that they are all mere dupes of Imperial Power because they have accepted support from NATO.

If evidence has not been supposedly proved that Benghazi was not in danger of being crushed brutally by Gaddafi, then at least evidence could be given that the rebels are not, in fact, pro-democracy.

Unfortunately, oil fuels the Western economies and in a period of global economic depression in the West, it is hardly surprising that the powers are trying to influence events there.

Pilger earlier suggested that if Libya did not have oil but grew carrots, then the West would not bother intervening. ( West should get out of Libya, Herald Sun, April 4 2011),

“What the West should do is absolutely nothing.....Stay away from other countries of the world, stay away from their resources, stay away from their people, let countries develop in their own way, let the Libyan people deal with (Libyan leader Muammar) Gaddafi...

“This isn’t really about Libya … it’s about the US,”

“If Libya grew carrots there would be no no-fly zone. Libya has oil (and is) a strategic part of the world and is independent … and that is the reason Libya is being attacked.”

Libya's revolt was being threatened by Gaddafi's military. Rebel leaders and activists requested NATO intervention.

And if Libya is about oil, then it it's true that the great Car Economy, the flying in of produce from around the globe to feed Western consumers ( many of whom are "anti-war" protesters ) means that either the West acts to preserve oil supplies or the Western style of life will decline. Carrots do not fuel the economy.

Clearly, Pilger would not want to tell his fans that if the West does not intervene to ensure global oil supplies, then they must learn to live with a lower standard of living.

But, that could be the horrid truth. As John Gray and Michael T Klare have suggested, unless alternatives to oil dependence are found, conflicts over supplies is set to be the norm in the 21st century.

Radical progressives such as Pilger have not dealt with such brutal naturalistic facts because they fail to fit the notion that if only the West was not so "rapacious" and just stopped intervening the world would be better.

Yet Pilger's own failure to mention the scope, cynicism and contempt for human rights in resource rich zones pursued by China in opposition to the West is also an example of perverting truth through omission and comes across as somewhat parochial.

Seumas Milne, an erstwhile supporter of the British StWC and journalist praised by Pilger dismissed the idea of Chinese Imperialism in a recent debate in London. But, as Pilger himself suggested in The New Rulers of the World, the New Great Game is on.

By all means "unearth the filthy truth", as Harold Pinter advocated. However, if that means deliberately omitting the fact that the wealth and comfort of the people of the West will not be affected by non-intervention in areas of oil and gas, then this reduces Pilger's perspective, that it's all about "Them" and greedy politicians and corporations, to somewhat populist and cowardly propaganda riffs.

Diary "Every Little helps"

Food is getting damned expensive. Key tip for saving money: go to Sainsbury's Local at 9.45 pm. Scope out the reduced items and befriend the man with the bar code machine. Get the basket ready and pile in the items reduced down to 20p. I got a basket yesterday that would have cost £50 for £4.20. It's like being a modern hunter gatherer.

I'm in constant competition from a couple of huge Slovak women built like shot putters with greedy peasant faces who have pushed me away from Taste the Difference ready meals a few times. Now I've outwitted them by flinging the half price reduction items before they get there for the knock down prices and getting the manager to take the basket out into the storeroom. It's their fault for shoving bacon in his face and screaming "deescount, deescount" at him.

This avoids the old problem of all of us sharking around at just after 10pm and pretending to be curiously interested in custard tarts ( not out of date ) and then rushing to the man with the price gun and jostling for position to get the lamb chops. My favourite moment was snatching a huge steak for 50p ( was £4.50 ) from right under their noses on the bottom shelf. I'm more agile than them.

April 14 at 12:12am

Tonight.

Just pulled off today's prize scoop from Wealdstone Sainsbury's. An £11.17 New Zealand Leg of Lamb. I shamelessly placed a lamb chop on top of the packet and more or less guarded it for 35minutes until the manager dropped it down to £4. There are at least 4 dinners to be had from it.

I'm not joking. These bargains give me an adrenalin rush. The price of food is high these days. In the Arab nations it has led to social revolt and political protest. It's absurd that so much good food gets thrown out. At least I'm using up the food nobody else wants. Apart from the competitors I have, the Romanian gypsies, Slovaks and one Greek labourer who once shared the spoils with me to defuse the potential conflict.

And instead of being a bored consumer, I'm hunting for my food. Maybe that's the point of two for one deals. This little earner subverts the system. Though, as Tesco suggest "Every little helps". I don't suppose their model consumer has lingering around reading novels on the chairs provided near the self service machines has that in mind though.

One thought I had is whether in the future there will be only computer check outs and security guards around to prevent fraud and anti-social elements fighting for knock downs. Though it might be on CCTV and sold off to Reality TV shows

"The Iraq Effect on Libya".

'Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces'-Sigmund Freud.

'Will real progress be possible only when Gadafy leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite. If he is sincere in wanting change, as I think he is, he could play a role in muting conflict that might otherwise arise as modernisation takes hold. My ideal future for Libya in two or three decades' time would be a Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking. Not easy to achieve, but not impossible'-Anthony Giddens in 2007 ( The Guru of Blair's Third Way )

'....my sources are clear that most of those involved with Saif were following the lead set by Tony Blair after he successfully used the invasion of Iraq to force Gaddafi to abandon his arms programme.

Blair deserves no blame for his entente cordiale. Had he not neutralised Gaddafi, the regime would now have weapons of mass destruction to use against the citizens of Benghazi'-Nick Cohen

The question is whether Choen's statement is true or not. Certainly, the US and UK rapprochement had the effect of ending Gaddafi's chemical weapons threat. But that was hardly the sole aim of embracing the dictator again or of selling him other conventional arms.

Yet Nick Cohen is not the only backer of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 who claims that the Iraq War forced Gaddafi to give up his weapons of mass destruction programmes.

Christopher Hitchens has also been plugging the line about 'the Iraq effect on Libya', ( The Iraq Effect.If Saddam Hussein were still in power, this year's Arab uprisings could never have happened March 28, 2011 ),

....very important in the timing, was Qaddafi's abject fear at watching the fate of Saddam Hussein. This has been amply reconfirmed by many Libyan officials in the hearing of many of my friends. He did, after all, approach George W. Bush and Tony Blair, not the United Nations. So now Qaddafi's stockpiles are under lock and key in Oak Ridge, Tenn....

This ex post facto rationalisation for the invasion of Iraq is unconvincing, though, as Gaddafi most likely used the idea that he wanted to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein in order to opportunistically try to restore relations with the USA and Britain.

Gaddafi used the threat of the weapons programme to allow Bush and Blair to claim that the Iraq War had compelled him to give up on the weapons programme, one that would be convenient to the Bush administration after it had failed to find WMD in Iraq.

Bush in 2004 stated in his State of the Union address: "Nine months of intense negotiations succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not...words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America" . Meaning force was, therefore, justified.

The facts, however, are that Gaddafi had consistently attempted to use his abandonment of a nuclear weapons programme and chemical weapons ( mustard gas ) as a trump card that would get sanctions removed before 2003, not least as Gaddafi was even back then facing an economic crisis.

Before 2003, Libya's chemical weapons production was not seen as a priority, even though Gaddafi had in October 1999 offered to enter the Chemical Weapons Convention. The emphasis was upon using Libya's role in terrorism to preserve sanctions on the nation.

The rapprochement in 2004 was more a consequence of the fact that the Iraq war had failed to secure the oil for the USA and UK in the near future and to try and exploit the war for "regime change" as having had a positive effect in "the war on terror" in Libya's case.

The reality was that Gaddafi was now seen as a force for "stability", especially as he had a record of executing Islamic fundamentalists, such as those in Hizb-ut Tahrir even back as far as the 1970s, and so he could become an ally in the Bush-Blair war against Al Qaida.

The Iraq War merely broughtabout the end of Gaddafi's barely existing nuclear programme as it was hardly important when compared to the need of Western powers to continue their search for access to oil and to save face and credibility after no WMD were subsequently found.

The sanctions on Libya had served their purpose by 2004 as by contrast with the Middle Eastern states, Libya's oil was largely still untapped and of a far better quality, without large quantities of sulphur and so better for oil refineries. The realpolitik cynicism on Libya was consistent with the war on Iraq-the over depenence upon oil.

The delusions of the liberal left shown by those ideologists behind Blair, such as Anthony Giddens and others at the LSE, in embracing the potential for regime alteration in Libya under Gaddafi were rationalisations based on in inability to accept how globalisation has caused the potential for resource wars.

Libya, Iraq and Oil.

.... half the dictators in the Middle East always have a warm place in their hearts for George Galloway. I have seen evidence that this familiar anti-democratic leftism has taken hold in parts of the LSE, but my sources are clear that most of those involved with Saif were following the lead set by Tony Blair after he successfully used the invasion of Iraq to force Gaddafi to abandon his arms programme.

Blair deserves no blame for his entente cordiale. Had he not neutralised Gaddafi, the regime would now have weapons of mass destruction to use against the citizens of Benghazi. The fault lies in the British establishment's determined pretence that Libya was no longer a vicious state, a pretence that was very profitable for BP, and the PR companies, lobbyists and academics Saif Gaddafi recruited.

Writes Nick Cohen ( Lord Woolf's conflict of interest at the LSE, The Observer, Sunday 3 April 2011).

The notion here, that Gaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons programme in 2004 because he was afraid that his was another regime under threat from USA and UK military action, can hardly be used as a pretext to argue that the Iraq War was still a good thing after all.

Blair's rapprochement with Gaddafi in 2004 was necessary because the Iraq War, essentially an oil grab, had plunged the nation into chaos, sectarian warfare and thus led oil prices to soar: that occasioned both Gaddafi's 'fear' that he could be 'next' and the need of Western powers to secure access to Libya's high quality oil.

Nick Cohen perpetuates that dealing with dictatorships is all about oil profits only and not, as David Strahan puts it in The Last Oil Shock that wars such as Iraq were due to "geostrategic desperation". It's this hunger for oil that led to supporting dictators and invading Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein.

Whether its backing dictatorships and selling arms to them or promoting "regime change" through imposing democracy, the endgame has continually been the race to control oil reserves when faced with accelerating global demand ( esp from China ) and the need for diversification of supplies.

The British establishment never ceased regarding Gaddafi's Libya as a "vicious state": it was prepared to ignore it as the need for Libyan oil, an important source of supply needed for Britain's high octane consumer car and supermarket economy to continue. That had been spelt out by the impact of the Road hauliers strike in 2000.

Ironically, George Galloway stated on Sky News that the current intervention in Libya is about BP's profits and not about the fact many global and regional powers-including Iran- are competing to control oil and gas and using it as a tool of geopolitical influence. Controlling oil is not about price and profit but national power and prosperity.

The fact is that people do not want to hear that war, destruction, anarchy and dictatorship are the necessary consequence of the pathological struggle to control oil and nothing to do with corporate profiteering, a sentiment common amongst anti-capitalists despite the fact living standards in the West depend upon it.

Yet the Stop the War Coalition leaders and those like Milne and Pilger never mention that because they want to profit from the cheap outrage that comes with directing ire at the political classes, as if they alone profited from a car economy, cheap EasyJet flights, and exotic supermarket products.

Cohen too wants to suggest that when BP supports regimes with dictatorships, it is about profits but when the USA and UK invade Iraq it is not about control of oil supplies, something mechanically written off some as a "conspiracy theory" because they portray those emphasising the oil factor as being concerned with oil prices.

Cohen ignores the continuities in British foreign policy to maintain the idea that there is an easy distinction between rationalising the existence of dictatorships and the creed of the "pro-liberationist" left that wants to remove 'rogue regimes' by military force and fight a' war on terror'.

The reality is different: over dependence upon oil necessarily undercuts the promotion of democracy in Arab nations where "the curse of oil" ensures Orwellian doublethink from states wanting access to abundant and cheap oil. As well as to benefit from the inflow of Arab petrol money.

Mark Almond on Libya.

Mark Almond on RT commenting on the confused strategy of the Western powers as regards Libya.

Almond has also put the dangers of the Western powers bombing strategy into historical perspective ( Libya - 100 Years of Bombing, or Is Fascism the Forgotten Root of Humanitarian Intervention?Friday, 1 April 2011 ).

The celebrations of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification in March, 2011, were overshadowed by the crisis in Libya. Coinciding with Italy’s birthday, Silvio Berlusconi’s government decided to make seven air bases available to NATO allies for the bombing of Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.

By coincidence, this was one hundred years since the Italians invented aerial bombardment and initiated its practice precisely over Libya. A century later, the bomber returns to the scene of its bloody birth. Clio seems to take a perverse enjoyment in ensuring that history repeats itself, first acting as imperialism then as humanitarian intervention, without even needing to change the stage-set.

On 1^st November, 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti dropped the first bomb from an aeroplane. According to the Ottoman authorities it hit the military hospital in Ayn Zara in the Libyan desert. The Italians strongly denied targeting an installation protected by the Geneva Convention. Modern aerial warfare and the propaganda battle which has accompanied it ever since was underway from the start.

Lt. Gavotti’s four bombs were modified hand grenades, but soon the Italians had learned how to drop incendiary bomb and shrapnel bombs – what we would now call cluster munitions.

The initial impact of aircraft overhead was alarming and disorientating to the forces below. Panic spread as an airplane engine was heard approaching. But soon enough the Turks and Arabs below learned the limitations of aerial bombardment and their terror subsided. The Italians decided that they had to increase the terrorising effect of their bombing and strafing to keep the enemy on the run. The Italian pilots also realised that fixed targets like villages or oases were easier to find and strike than mobile guerrillas.

The British Arabist, G.F. Abbott who was with the mixed Turkish-Arab forces resisting the invasion noted that they soon recovered from their fear partly because bombs which fell into the sand tended to explode harmlessly. But he added, “The women and children in the villages are practically the only victims, and this fact excited the anger of the Arabs.”

Antagonising the civilian population was an unfortunate side-effect of the bombing which became a major factor in turning the Italian invasion into a protracted counter-insurgency.

When the idea of occupying Libya as a fiftieth birthday present to themselves was turned into practice in September, 1911, Italians were assured of a quick victory there. They were told that the Ottoman Turkish regime was thoroughly hated by the Arabs living there and that a warm welcome could be expected for the soldiers bringing civilization and liberation from the Sultan’s tyranny. To use modern parlance, Italians were encouraged to expect a cakewalk. The media assured the soldiers, “Arab hostility is nothing but a Turkish fable.”

The Arab Uprisings: 'Interesting Times' Ahead.

Compared to the impact of the 1973 oil crisis, the potential for one in 2011 or 2012 grows more ominous. Marks Almond has written ( Middle East uprising will put oil giant Saudi Arabia in peril The Daily Mail 20th February 2011 )

The oil-rich autocracies on which we depend are now facing full-throated revolution....it is the rising tide of violence around Saudi Arabia which could ignite a political blow-out of terrifying proportions in the world’s biggest oil producing country.

Even people who hope to see the end of the Saudis’ hand-chopping, wife-beating Wahhabi fundamentalist regime must realise that its downfall will create a global economic earthquake.

The situation in neighbouring Bahrain is a microcosm of what might happen in Saudi Arabia.

Don’t let Bahrain’s tiny size mislead you.This island kingdom sits on the fault-line separating the tectonic plates of the Muslim world and is the fulcrum of American power in the Middle East.

The U.S. Fifth Fleet is based on the island –which is attached to Saudi by a causeway – and pro-Iranian Shi’ites who make up 70 per cent of the population are seething with rage against the pro-Western king.

The remaining 30 per cent of Bahrain’s population are Sunni Muslims, and the bitter Sunni-Shi’ite infighting there could spark a religious civil war which could quickly spread to Saudi Arabia.Outsiders would pour in. Not just jihadi fanatics. Iran would support the ‘oppressed’ Shi’ites of Bahrain and Saudi.

What would America do? Could Obama abandon the pro-Western rulers of Bahrain and Saudi if Iran got involved?And how then would people in other Arab states such as Egypt react if the West put stopping Iran ahead of People Power? And how might Israel react?

In the long term, democratising the Middle East must be a good thing – that is, if we can get to the long term. In the short term, the world is in for its bumpiest ride for decades.

Set against the background of the global crash of 2008 and the recession, the consequences could be global instability and within Europe the potential for social conflict as the faltering economy crumbles further and consumer comforts that have been taken for granted give way to an era of privation and hardship.

US and UK Strategy and the Oil Stakes in Libya.

Michael Boyle wrote in The Guardian today about President Barack Obama's confused strategy in dealing with the Libyan civil war, ( Obama doctrine? If only. Saturday 2 April 2011 )

In his speech on Monday night, President Obama articulated his rationale for the ongoing military campaign in Libya, claiming that a failure to act would have permitted humanitarian catastrophe that would have "would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world".

But as recent events have demonstrated, a compelling moral case does not equate to a coherent strategy. Indeed, it is charitable to call this strategy muddled. Initially committed to only to defensive operations to stop the advance of the Libyan military into cities like Benghazi, the Obama administration quickly began working with the rebels to coordinate air strikes to push back Gaddafi's forces.

This turned the US, Britain and France into combatants in a civil war; no matter how much they claim only to be engaged in "kinetic military action" or some other Orwellian euphemism, the facts are plain.

There are now CIA officers present in Libya to coordinate air strikes with rebels, and the US has flown over 1,600 sorties. While the American public may be fooled by the dissembling language, Gaddafi and his regime will have no illusions about who is bombing them.Now, if only to underscore this point that this is a real war, the US and its allies are considering sending weapons to the Libyan rebels.

The reason for this is that the Libyan civil war and the intervention of the Western powers is crucially concerned with the future of Libya's large oil reserves, the largest in Africa, and the fact that Gaddafi lo longer had de facto control over the nation.

That Britain and the US have gone beyond the UN mandate to protect civilians and have aimed at "regime alteration" by proposing to supply arms to the rebels is now obvious and the endgame has cleared mutated into getting rid of Gaddafi.

The reality is that where oil is concerned, the strategic over dependence upon oil and the continued longer term failure of Western nations to wean themselves off having oil fuel their high octane consumer economies necessarily and inevitably is drawing them further into the war going on in Libya.

When oil is at stake, it is clear that morality is subordinated to realpolitik in a way that becomes dangerous. The need is to broker a negotiated peace that will partition Libya and not for Britain and the USA to push the endgame towards propelling the civil war further by backing the rebels to push west.

Both BP and Exxon Mobil have huge oil concessions in the Ghadamis region in the west of Libya and it is interesting to speculate whether they will for an all out attempt to remove Gaddafi or advocate the partition the nation between the eastern region of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania in the west.
A strategy that minimises the bloodshed and returns Libya to some form of stability in the right one. The question is whether the rebel leadership in the east is prepared to accept a partition any more than Gaddafi's clan and supporters could be induced to.

Proponents of "humanitarian intervention" have as yet often failed to demonstrate coherent strategy no less than reflexive "anti-war" agitators who, in reality, are opposed to what they consider another attempt to impose Western clients on an Arab state.

Noam Chomsky, the veteran critic of US Foreign policy, has not denied the fact that had Gaddafi gone on to attempt retaking Benghazi that a bloodbath would have ensued, ( On Libya and the Unfolding Crises March 30, 2011 )

Libya is rich in oil, and though the US and UK have often given quite remarkable support to its cruel dictator, right to the present, he is not reliable. They would much prefer a more obedient client. Furthermore, the vast territory of Libya is mostly unexplored, and oil specialists believe it may have rich untapped resources, which a more dependable government might open to Western exploitation.

When a non-violent uprising began, Qaddafi crushed it violently, and a rebellion broke out that liberated Benghazi, Libya's second largest city, and seemed about to move on to Qaddafi's stronghold in the West. His forces, however, reversed the course of the conflict and were at the gates of Benghazi.

A slaughter in Benghazi was likely, and as Obama's Middle East adviser Dennis Ross pointed out, "everyone would blame us for it." That would be unacceptable, as would a Qaddafi military victory enhancing his power and independence. The US then joined in UN Security Council resolution 1973 calling for a no-fly zone, to be implemented by France, the UK, and the US, with the US supposed to move to a supporting role.

There was no effort to limit action to instituting a no-fly zone, or even to keep within the broader mandate of resolution 1973.

The triumvirate at once interpreted the resolution as authorizing direct participation on the side of the rebels. A ceasefire was imposed by force on Qaddafi's forces, but not on the rebels. On the contrary, they were given military support as they advanced to the West, soon securing the major sources of Libya's oil production, and poised to move on.( my italic-K.N )

A ceasefire was intended to be "imposed" on Gaddafi's forces but clearly bombing from the air cannot achieve that. It is as if Chomsky thinks that the Western powers have more influence over events in Libya than they actually do.

But Chomsky is correct that the military intervention went further than the mandate allowed, one reason that Russia and China then stated they disagreed with the bombing of Gaddafi's ground forces, after having abstained rather than vetoed the UN mandate.

China and Russia's criticism most likely as they do not want the West to control Libya or install clients who will give the oil concessions to Western companies The CNPC had in 2005, one year after Blair's rapprochement with Gaddafi, won the right to a major exploration block.

All the large powers have a stake in the oil in Libya and clearly the failure of Iraq, no less than the fact the invasions aftermath, the severe impact upon the US economy caused by this expensive conflict and the global crash of 2008, led to a weakening of the dollar, allowing the CNPC to gain control of oilfields.

Libya is interconnected to Iraq in that it was in the year of this catastrophic invasion (2003) that the USA lifted sanctions on Libya and them, when Iraq started to go badly wrong, to negotiate American participation in Libya's energy sector and why Blair opened up relations with him again.

Saddam's removal also led Gaddafi into terminating his nuclear weapons programme and adhere to the terms on the non-proliferation treaty and for the US to become involved with signing new contracts with the Libyan regime to develop drilling rights in large areas of unexplored territory.

It is hard to avoid the fact that the intervention, though partly about avoiding a protraction of the civil war that would have gone on if Benghazi had been entered by Gaddafi's forces, has been concerned about control over the oil, as a longer civil war would have knocked out production of high quality crude oil.

Yet critics such as Chomsky ignore their own criteria for what a "humanitarian intervention" by default could look like, as when he wrote in 1994, ( Humanitarian Intervention, Boston Review ),

.....intervention undertaken on the normal grounds of power interests might, by accident, be helpful to the targeted population. Such examples exist. The most obvious recent one is Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 after years of murderous Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnamese border areas...the Vietnamese invasion removed Pol Pot, terminating major atrocities, though that was not the motivating factor.

Whether that could apply to the intervention of the Western powers will be seen only if they are prepared to move towards negotiating a settlement that could require them to be prepared to sacrifice their oil interests in the west of Libya or one that leaves the Gaddafi clan in control of major oil blocks.