Why Tories should actually watch The Wire
I want to focus on something specific about what The Wire achieves amidst those more general assesments. Namely, a sublime exposition of the importance of uncontrolled arbitrariness in life. The Tories would do well to pay attention.
The Wire is unambiguously engaged in the same exploration of issues of arbitrariness and luck in determining socioeconomic distributions, and the attitudes we attach to them. In particular, it brings out beautifully the way in which one’s birth – over which one has no control – determines so much.
Take, for example, the character of D’Angelo in Series 1 and 2. Most viewers probably start out disliking D’Angelo: he is a murder, a drug dealer, and a man who conducts a long-running affair behind the back of the mother of his child. As clear a cut case of a conventional “bad guy” as you could ask for? Not at all. For one of the best aspects of the first two series of The Wire is the manner in which the D’Angelo is gradually humanised to the audience: he turns out to be a man of great integrity, loyalty, intelligence and honour.
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Brian Coleman poster banned as ‘offensive’
According to Adam Bienkov at Tory Troll:
The above poster of Brian Coleman has been banned from all London fire stations after it was deemed “offensive”, “inappropriate” and a safety risk.
The image (click for full size) was torn down from union notice boards across London after a direct order from management.
Read about the full controversy on Tory Troll.
The story has also been picked up by the Barnet Times:
“OFFENSIVE” cartoon posters critical of London Fire Authority chairman Brian Coleman have been ripped down from fire stations across London.
The poster, devised by London Fire Brigades’ Union (FBU) to encourage members to vote for industrial action, shows the Mayor of Barnet wearing a large gold medallion and dropping money down the drain.
It was banned from all London fire stations last Friday after London Fire Brigade (LFB) managers deemed it to be “offensive”, “inappropriate” and a safety risk.
Libdems fight against TV licensing for refuges
The Liberal Democrats have a launched a campaign for women’s refuges to get a discount on their TV licenses from the BBC.
While luxury hotels and others get a TV licence discount for multiple sets on their premises, refuges providing shelter and support for victims of domestic abuse are charged the full price for each of their licences.
Individual refuges are reportedly spending hundreds or even thousands of pounds on TV licences that should be spent on essential services for abused women.
The campaign page states:
For victims of abuse, television is not merely a luxury. It can have an important role to play, offering comfort and a welcome distraction, especially for children caught in the middle of abusive relationships. The last thing a woman arriving at a refuge needs is to face demands for payment of a TV licence.
Furthermore, the activities of enforcement officers can put women at risk. It is a known tactic of violent ex-partners to pose as officials in order to gain access to refuges. For women to be put in a position in which they are answering the door to someone who may be an enforcement officer, but could equally be a violent man seeking his ex-partner, is totally unacceptable.
To support the scheme you can sign the petition on this website. (via The F Word)
The campaign stems from the recent paper (Real Women) published by the Libdems focusing on issues affect women in society.
We know Grayling’s Wire argument is ‘piffle’
Since Chris Grayling’s agenda is to get the Tory ‘broken society’ argument back up, somebody might tell David Simon (who wrote The Wire) that the correct British expression for Grayling’s speech is the rather politer piffle, as Boris Johnson previously said of his party’s broken society argument.
So it is certainly to be hoped that the Mayor of London will be pointing out why Grayling’s inaccurate stigmatising of “many parts of Britain’s cities’ is dangerous too.
Grayling’s pose is progressive – “when the Wire comes to Britain, it is the poor who suffer” – but the analysis is not: he has little to say about the causes of social breakdown.
Why are these problems greater in the United States of America? Why, in his view, are we witnesssing “cultural changes going back a generation or more”? David Willetts tells us the Conservatives are now convinced by Richard Wilkinson’s evidence about the importance of inequality in explaining the scale of social problems. There is no sense that Grayling has read it: there is not even a nod in the direction.
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Linehan: I don’t care ‘about Tories vs Labour’
The comedy writer Graham Linehan has rejected suggestions that he started the #welovetheNHS to help the Labour Party.
In a tweet message he said today:
In the Guardian today, John Prescott appears to suggest I started #welovethenhs to attack the Tories. I didn’t.
That suggestion came from this profile of Prescott by Michael White today in the Guardian where he says:
The Prescotts credit Graham Linehan, writer of the Father Ted sitcom, for spotting the potential for spinning a British dimension off the US healthcare debate. “Let’s turn a rightwing US controversy into a rightwing British one,” said Prescott senior. Within an hour, it rapidly started trending on Twitter.
In an interview with PR Weekly, David Prescott even claimed that his father’s promotion of the “welovethenhs” hashtag via Twitter amounts to “the first successful domestic Twitter campaign to push an issue into the mainstream” in Britain after Sky TV and other media picked it up.
Graham Linhan later clarified his position again to say:
Just to be clear, I started #welovethenhs simply to counteract lies from Fox news and the like. Couldn’t care less about Tories vs Labour.
But while Labour MPs have been criticised for jumping on the bandwagon, others have pointed out that they have good reason to.
Citizen Andreas:
Why the hell shouldn’t Labour be jumping on this particular bandwagon? We only created it in the first place and have commited ourselves to improving it. There are plenty of reasons to winge, but it would be nice if for once, people could take a look at the NHS and give Labour a little credit where it’s due.
The argument rumbles on.
Chris Grayling ‘hopelessly full of shit’
In a speech in London today, shadow home secretary Chris Grayling will compare parts of Britain to the US television show The Wire.
The Wire used to be just a work of fiction for British viewers. But under this government, in many parts of British cities, The Wire has become a part of real life in this country too. Far too many of those features of what we have always seen as a US phenomenon are now to be found on the streets of Britain as well.
So how well versed with The Wire was Mr Grayling?
When asked on BBC News this morning it seemed Mr Grayling was trying to wing it.
Interviewer: Have you really seen any more than that first episode?
Grayling: Yes I’ve seen a number of … I’ve seen most of the first series. I have seen a number of the other episodes yes. I have.
Oh dear.
Perhaps he should heed the call of the show’s writer himself, who once said it would was dangerous to create policy based on the show.
It is possible that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: “You are hopelessly full of shit.”
Why, he may be talking directly about Chris Grayling himself.
And what about the stats themselves then? Michael White writes:
Now down to the stats. The city of Baltimore, where The Wire was set by local reporter David Simon, has a population of around 640,000 and a murder rate – falling, I am happy to note – of 234 in 2008, down from 282 in 2007 after rows about fiddled figures – a detail which echoes the TV series.
Is that around 40 murders per 100,000? That’s around six times the New York rate of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2008 (523 murders, slightly up on 2007) and a lot, lot higher than the UK – where the murder rate per 100,000 is around 1.4, slightly higher than France, lower than Scotland (2.56), a lot lower than South Africa (49.6). The overall US murder rate is 5.5 – a quarter of post-Soviet Russia’s.
…
In fact, the common thread linking murder rates in every country appears to be extremes of wealth and poverty, despair, plus the easy jump that makes to drug-related crime.
…
PS Context: of the 1,574 youngsters who died between 10 and 19 in 2008 half did so because of illness, 546 in accidents, and 84 in suicides – slightly more than those murdered.
But when you’ve got a ‘Broken Society’ narrative to sell, who cares about the stats or thoughts of whether it’s wise to make judgements after watching a couple of episodes of a TV series?
The BNP vs Human Rights Commission
Notwithstanding stupidity, or that their full-timers are embroiled in power struggles when not suffering ‘depressive illness’, the BNP are still a threat.
This will not be helped by the announcement that the BNP are to face court over their non-compliance with the 1976 Race Relations Act.
I have no doubt that the EHRC doesn’t see it like this: they have a duty under the law etc etc, it’s not a choice, it’s built into their mandate etc etc. But I suspect that go-to excuse of the BNP is at least partially correct – that the Labour government have a hand in this somewhere. At the very least, it is endorsed by the upper echelons of Labour, as Harriet Harman made clear today.
A great number of people in this country feel alienated from the institutions of power and the ‘respectable’ faces of democracy and civil society. Pitting these ‘respectable’ faces against the BNP will not warn people off the BNP, it will solidify their reputation as anti-establishment.
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What’s missing in talk of the Libyan debacle
I haven’t seen any leftist comment on the topic yet that hasn’t welcomed the Scottish Executive’s decision to free Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi.
Many of them were explicitly premised on the idea that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was innocent. Megrahi’s defenders – not least my journalistic hero Paul Foot – have always maintained that the crime was actually the work of Syria-based terrorists acting as proxies for Iran. The argument is long and involved, and in so far as I have studied it, I find it convincing.
There is also an impeccable liberal case that the move is accordant with Scottish law as it stands; compassionate release is available to prisoners within three months of death, irrespective of the offences they are said to have committed, and irrespective of guilt. Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill was undoubtedly right to come to the conclusion to which he came.
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Free Dana Ali from Home Office blunders
contribution by Salman Shaheen
Iraqi immigrant, Dana Ali, faces deportation after an alleged Home Office blunder failed to recognise his marriage to a British citizen.
One day, Dana Ali didn’t come home. When he turned up at the police station on July 31st, they took him into custody without warning. “I asked them why and they told me they had papers to remove me from the United Kingdom,” Dana says.
“I haven’t been home since that day.” Dana has barely seen his wife since they took him to Oakington, the Cambridgeshire immigrant detention centre exposed by a 2005 BBC documentary for the violence and racist abuse carried out by some of its staff.
“He’s had to see a doctor and a psychiatrist since he’s been there. On one of his arms, he started scratching his skin to bits. He doesn’t realise he’s doing it, he’s so stressed. They’ve put him on anti-depressants, which took over a week for him to get. Even the doctor said she’s disgusted at how he’s being treated,” says Taina.
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Tories ‘not of seniority and wisdom’
An extraordinary judgement was passed on the incoming Tory administration today.
In an article on the front page of the Guardian newspaper today, titled ‘Mandarins launch attack on Labour‘, Lord Turnbull, cabinet secretary from 2002 – 2005, complained of the increading centralisation of power at the centre of government.
But right at the end of the article is this little-noticed gem:
Turnbull who famously accused Brown of acting with “Stalinist ruthlessness, said that Brown, Cameron and Osborne had entered parliament too young. “They are not people of seniority and wisdom.“
Wonder why no one chose to highlight that and probe him further.
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