The end of December

I'm taking down the decorations, storing the tree, removing the wreaths, getting ready to head for the Highlands with Oscar. Lin's on the phone to Jill ~ "Let's hope 2009 makes things a bit better, but I don't think it's going to somehow." Now she's said goodbye to me for a week and gone to take her dad into Stafford Hospital for a check. Karen and family stayed overnight and kept us happy company yesterday. They've headed south. I've got lots of small errands and a job-list of things to do when I'm in Scotland and books to read. * * * Just before Christmas I'd asked teacherdude's permission [he's a photographer, street journalist, blogger, teaching EFR in Thessaloniki and someone whose occasional confusions bespeak the honesty of a reporter, rather than a celebrity remora] to quote him and he replied this morning:

Thank you for mentioning me. I thought I'd add a few points concerning the tactics of the riot police here in Greece. I think that the first point that should be made is that they often have a very poor level of discipline (my note: see Kat's excellent recent interview with a MAT officer) ... they are easily provoked to violence, often at targets unconnected with the hard core of rioters they are meant to be confronting. Time and time again their wrath is directed at some hapless demonstrator who was in the vicinity rather than the guys throwing rocks etc. Apart from firing tear gas to break up large groups and the occasional baton charge I have seen no evidence of any kind of strategy. I feel most of what they do is designed for media consumption, to show that the authorities are 'doing something'. As far as escalation of violence is concerned I think both sides realise that would quickly spiral out of control as there are literally millions of guns in circulation.

It's less a shared reading of the manual on policing urban disorder - as I'd implied after asking my daughter about police methods - than shared awareness of Greek history and alertness to the awful danger of everyday hatred, the words of Yiorgos Seferis in January 1945, having observed the Δεκεμβριανά - a hideous spectacle of 'buffoons' - that 'blood brings blood and more blood'.

Empty ships in Salamis

Why am I apprehensive about the recession; about the decline of the West? Obviously it's because it's hurting people (there's no poor world-rich world disconnection) - people in Greece, people in general and people I know, friends, relatives and neighbours. If it weren't for such contradictions, I'd be rejoicing, celebrating a yovel, the hammer of justice on a bell proclaiming 'liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ... a jubilee...returning every man unto his possession, every man unto his family (Lev 25) and the cancelling, by the rich of the debts of the poor. As my friend Kim said in October "it may ruin us but it might save the world". Fewer flights, fewer big cars, less fuel burned, less demand for bio-fuel and the forest clearance it demands, (even less NASCAR), fewer miles driven in metal boxes, less noise, death and injury on the roads (tho' perhaps not in China, India or other societies for whom the car remains an uncompromised object of desire); more people willing to travel by train; more travelling slow by cycling and walking. Less tourism, less cement - one of Greece's staple industries - over remaining green spaces. Less domestic waste, less consumption, less packaging, less material to be dumped in land-fill or less fossil fuel used incinerating it. Less water extracted for hot tubs and swimming pools from the deep aquifers that once fed vibrant streams. Empty cargo ships are anchored in Salamis roads. A slumping shipping industry could mean less safety and even more pollution, but there's a chance it will mean fewer oil drenched shorelines. People might buy less meat, reducing the volume of crops grown to feed the animals we eat and the vast areas of land given over to rearing livestock; all this, plus a more politically mature environmentalism; the techniques of sustainability more widely known; of greater interest to many more in the first world. Less consumption for consumption's sake; less energy given over to finding the credit needed to console the constantly stoked anxieties of materialism; return to planet earth from planet finance; more voluntary work; greater kindness between strangers. For the first time in human history the opportunity to be frugal is not only forced on us by events, it is something many want. Given the novelty of such a convergence, is it surprising that so many are surprised and confused by contradictory impulses? Saint's traditionally wear hair shirts, but didn't Francis of Assisi offered poverty and chastity say "yes, but not yet". We speak of ordinary people - like me - willing to be freed of the avarice engendered in them since birth, inherited from their parents, conditioned in circumstances described by Elliot Currie, as ones in which market economies have become market societies, where:

Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future (1993)

Harry Tsoukalas, focus of some insular animosities, wrote to me in October: 'I tell my wife and to the Corfiots that at least when my son asks me in the years to come what I have done about our huge problems in this paradise I could look at him straight in the eye and answer. How many people can say the same? It's all has to do with the future generation I think, it's too late for us.' Or one of the last observations of Bruce Chatwin about the smile of a 'poor' old woman in the desert, that smile he lived with ‘like a message from the Golden Age' teaching him 'to reject out of hand all arguments for the nastiness of human nature. The idea of returning to an "original simplicity" was not naïve or unscientific or out of touch with reality. Renunciation, even at this late date, can work.' * * * * Karen came with her daughters to stay and she went down to Handsworth Park to look at the trees. I cycled down later to join her but she wanted the park, as much as possible to herself. It's what I like about our park - the way you can both share it - with great numbers - and the way that, at times, you can have it for yourself - the landscaping of so comparatively small a space allowing that illusion. K took a picture of me by the fence between the park and the space beyond, yet to be laid out as allotments and playing fields.I groaned inwardly at the damage caused off Holly Road where the south park gate and pillar had been wrecked by a drunkard in a metal box careering up Thornhill Road and at similar damage at the parks eastern noundary, where the Hamstead Road fence and wall had been breached by yet another driver treating our streets as their domain for playing dodgems. The sooner we can all agree that 20mph is a sensible maximum for motorised urban traffic the better. It won't stop these drivers, though both were caught. I hope they're loss of no claims bonus hurts them and the thousands charged their insurers will add to the hurt, helping us all towards a culture where a mix of internal regulation and shared respect, will allow those who walk and cycle to share city space that motorists have been encouraged to appropriate for too long. Until very recently street design has segregated other road users from cars, telling those in cars that roads, with a few exceptions, like pedestrian crossings, are theirs. Traffic lights are for the convenience of drivers - only secondarily an aid to walkers. Slowly, ever so slowly, this is changing - but there'll be many more killed and injured, park gates smashed, house walls destroyed, pavements mounted, shop windows shattered, whole streets closed off to people on foot, communities severed by free range motoring tarmac, before cars are tamed. You still buy, for yourself and your passengers, a swaith of other people's liberties when you get a car. I don't want to see this goal achieved via regulation with yet more CCTV and cluttering signage. It must come from design over time with lots of debate - hence the long wait for impatient people like me to enjoy shared space on the roads of the city.

... The most recognizable characteristic of shared space is the absence of conventional traffic signals, signs, road markings, humps and barriers - all the clutter essential to the highway. The driver in shared space becomes an integral part of the social and cultural context, and behaviour (such as speed) is controlled by everyday norms of behaviour.

[Back to the future to the past: 19/01/09 Richard Risemberg posted the YouTube URL for a 1950 Disney cartoon on 'the transformation of a normal fellow into a self-centered, violent slob when he gets behind the wheel of the car...pretty funny, and pretty telling. Nearly 60 years ago!'] * * * An exchange on the language of anarchy - in the statement and comments. There's a suggestion that the problem is not bad Greek or bad English but that the language is not really meant to be used for communicating outside the circle, indeed is deliberately playfully confusing adopting fantasy terms familiar to Harry Potter readers. The quoted paragraph from the Levellers stands out as a model - not widely followed though:

Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom...we do now hold our selves bound in mutual duty to each other, to take the best care we can for the future, to avoid the danger of returning into a slavish condition. Levellers, An Agreement of the People, 1647

Back to the future 02/01/09: Malcolm Brabant on the state of Greek shipping Back to the future 14/01/09: Shipping rates hit zero across the world.

Politics or therapy?

Some in the streets of Athens write or hold up banners saying 'Death to the police' spreading similar messages through the web. Are these views endorsed by many of those on the streets? Do demonstrators crying "Batsos" ("uniformed thug") want police officers to be done to death? Do those who disagree with these statements allege that they are made by agents provocateurs? International journalists are usually good at getting graphic image of injuries incurred in street riots - or passing on images gathered by others, on mobile phones for instance. I've seen more bloodshed at rugby games. My continued impression is that both police and demonstrators are being - so far - quite skilled at avoiding causing serious injury to one another - with the fatal exception of the death of Alexandros Grigoropulos - where the officers allegedly involved are in custody and the PM has expressed deep regret, personally and publicly. The other shooting, from an unknown source, a few days later seems to have caused minor injury to a student's hand. The language being used by demonstrators seems disproportionate. There have been dramatic pictures of smoke, tear gas and flames, but I'm wondering where politics - the mobilisation of power to bring or prevent change - enters this crisis. From here it looks more like therapy. Others have observed that the most dramatic and genuinely political event in the last few days has been the national strike and its offshoots across Greece - but I'm reading students being as polemical against these kinds of political expression, as they are against the police, and the media can't capture sufficiently dramatic images from peaceful industrial action. How do you film a walk-out, a slow-down, or even a peaceful march when there's noise and smoke round the corner? There is malaise across the economy. It parallels the impact of recession across the rest of Europe and the world. I look to see if new ideas will emerge from events in Greece, but I'm seeing nihilism, despair, 'rebellion against the drudgery of life', street theatre and widespread petty crime (not petty if it's your shop that's trashed). The 'uprising' may be understandable as a social phenomenon but it has, so far, little standing as an historical one. It makes no discernible contribution to political innovation - though it may be a seeding ground for the future.*

We hypothesize that the rioting in Greece is not simply an inevitable result of economic recession, but a proactive radical initiative that speaks to the general public. CrimethInc.Workers' Collective 20 December 08

Social upheavals of the past have been associated with striving for equity - in confrontations with the state involving extended and fatal brutality. Such campaigns are happening even now in other parts of the world, characterised by lengthy imprisonment, torture, suppression and pervasive state cruelty. Greece has its own history - of courage and brutality - in this respect but I can't quite see if the events of the past week have anything very much to do with that past. It's more akin to football violence. I want to be wrong in this. It is clear there is a need for social and political reform in the Hellenic Republic and beyond. Why else have I spent much of life pursuing environmental issues, joining in campaigns to press for sustainable policies and 'divorced my car'. I'm familiar with the role of 'situationism' in protest. It was part of student rebellion in the 60s in the USA where students and their supporters faced far more lethal forces than those deployed in the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki and a few other cities in recent weeks. Those student campaigns against 'Amerika' (a slurred view of misused US power that has endured), pale beside the dangers incurred in the Civil Rights movement of the same era. Some Greek students have been digesting post-modernist texts about breaking out of the matrix of a virtual society in which rebellion - or any kind of political dialectic - is absorbed, but it looks from here as if they are failing; even reproducing the processes against which they rail. With ugly undisciplined exceptions - the Greek police have digested contemporary manuals on managing urban disorder - among other things to avoid returning violence with stronger violence and to ensure escape routes from confrontation. In Greece such escapes, apart from those the police allow, are provided in the colleges where they are forbidden to go. Panos Livadas, General secretary of information at the Greek Embassy in America wrote this to the Washington Times on Boxing Day:

...The fact that a huge number of the demonstrators were teenagers expressing - peacefully - their frustration over the killing of their fellow student compelled the police to adopt defensive tactics in order not to risk further loss of life. No one would want a repetition of the tragic experience of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, with 53 deaths and more than 2,500 injuries. It is certain that the Greek government is determined to protect law and order (375 arrests have taken place), and it guarantees safety, as it did during the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. It should be noted that the police tactics will be re-evaluated when the dust settles. Since last week, tension has been de-escalating, and we are returning to complete normality. In the past five years, we have worked hard to strengthen our economy (our growth rate has been double that of the Eurozone's average, while the International Monetary Fund forecasts a 2 percent growth rate in 2009) and to implement bold reforms in order to provide answers to young people's uncertainties. These are understandable uncertainties, I might add, especially in the light of the deep global economic crisis. Finally, we will work even harder to address young people's needs, to create more opportunities for the young, and to restore our young people's trust in us.

I keep hoping that lively debates are being held in these safe houses and that, from a population skilled in using the social web, novel ideas will spread. If there's a more positive way of understanding what is happening I long to know it. For me the lesson is to spend more time seeking out those figures in Greek society who are campaigning and, in a variety of ways that don't hit the headlines, working for change. I know these people exist and that they have been working for many years to develop new ideas, to spread them and to influence reformation of the Greek polity. My relative ignorance of such people is a reproach to me and, since my ideas are of minimal significance, a much more serious reproach to those in the media who follow only smoke and the flames. BTF - From Kathimerini's 29 December 2008 Editorial:

...There are many police officers, judges, academics and politicians who are quietly doing their jobs, honoring the institutions they are meant to serve. We have an obligation to discover these low-key figures and appoint them to key posts. There is no need for sweeping changes. We just have to be more eclectic and make sure we pick the right people for the right jobs.

*I remain intrigued with the possibilities that I am observing this crisis through the distorting lens of the present. Throughout my career the ideas of Fred Emery, my boss at the Tavistock Institute, for a few years after I left university, have periodically recurred - especially his thoughts on understanding future possibilities in a paper he wrote for the ESRC in 1967:

From Section III Methodologies for predicting the future: …It is not simply foolhardy to think that we may enable ourselves more readily to recognize the future in its embryonic form. There are almost certain regularities about these emergent phases. Social processes which, in their maturity, are going to consume significant portions of men’s energies most likely have a lusty growth. They do not, by definition, command human resources at this stage , and hence their energy requirements must be met parasitically, i.e. they must in this phase appear to be something else (my italics). This is the major reason, we think, why the key emergents are typically unrecognized for what they are while other less demanding novel processes are quickly seen. A social process which passes for what it is not should theoretically be distinguishable both in its energy and informational aspects. Because it is a growing process, its energy requirements will be substantially greater (relative to what it appears to do) than the energy requirements of the maturer process which it apes. Because it is not what it appears to be, the process will stretch or distort the meanings and usage of the vocabulary which it has appropriated. F. E. Emery (1967) 'The Next Thirty Years: Concepts, Methods and Anticipations' (excluding FEM’s 1997 postscript – in the year of his death), Human Relations, 1967, 20, 199-237. p.15

This suggests we should assume that what is really happening lacks, for the moment, the characteristics of a whole or a gestalt, that can be named and analysed. What may be emerging may have a 'lusty growth' - but currently exists as a diversity of disconnected trends and events - unjoined dots - which may, with the benefit of hindsight, be seen as converging. Though this is the result of human actions, inevitably imperfect awareness of these possibilities can induce the false causality of millenarianism, cargo cults and conspiracism - paranoia made confusing for occasionally being nearly correct, as with astrology. Fred would suggest looking out for the debilitation that caused by parasitic action on familiar institutions. From where is energy being sucked? Where is it going? Is language being stretched, distorted, 'appropriated'?

[John Psaropoulos of Athens News gives a quite detailed account of events in Athens in the immediate aftermath of the death of Alexandros Grigoropulos - one that captures the confusions and contradictions that befog my understanding of what's going on] [...and see this piece in the blog Diatribe called Phoenix by Dean Kalimniou in Melbourne, dated 22 December '08:

...The Greek revolution was underlain by an ideology of liberal enlightenment developed by profound thinkers and underwritten by powerful financiers. It was a co-operative effort of all sections of society aimed at re-building a viable, cohesive state in accordance with western values. Modern Greece is a member of NATO and the European Union. As such, it purports to espouse the values guiding these entities and aspires to take its place among the great nations of the world. Yet it cannot hold itself out to be a proponent of the rule of law and democracy when it allows its citizens to run amok and cause harm to each other. For this reason, and in the face of the howls and curses of the ashen lunatic fringe, the perpetrators of these disgusting crimes against Greek citizens must be brought to account and be punished. A properly functioning democracy has no need of a violent steam valve. In that way, citizens will all be made to feel responsible towards each other and can set upon the task of making themselves and the State more accountable. Abigail van Buren may have quipped that: "People who fight with fire usually end up with ashes," but I prefer this, by Miguel Cervantes, if only the Greeks could take a good, long, hard look at themselves: "The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies and still defying fortune's spite, revive from the ashes and rise." It is time we reject ashes for good, and embrace the regenerative qualities of our immortal bird.]

[Back to the future 5 January 2009: Dimanadis Matzounis, a 21 year old police officer on duty outside the Culture Ministry, was shot and wounded in Exarchia by two men with Kalashnikov automatic weapons] * * * * Harold Pinter died. Ann Wright is a US Army veteran who retired as a Colonel. A former US diplomat, she resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the invasion of Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book "Dissent: Voices of Conscience. Her tribute to Pinter speaks of her pleasure that he had chosen, on being awarded the Nobel prize, to make a speech excoriating George Bush for his failure as a self-declared leader of the free-world, and Tony Blair for sullying us with his support for US foreign policy, for suspending the rule of law at Guantanamo, for legalising torture, for their suave moral incompetence. I envy him for the eloquence with which he could express his rage at US foreign policy. These gangsters and their followers - claiming to put my safety and my family's safety - ahead of the principles in which I'd been brought up, put those principles in harm's way. Principles for which one should be prepared to face injury and death. In my name these ghastly people with their pally ways found legal justifications, playing on artfully sustained ignorance and terror, for unravelling Lincoln's resounding proposition. That their governments have made the world more dangerous rather than less is beside the point (since our danger is nothing to that faced by the wretched of the earth), though it compounds the shame that will mark their place in history. Ann Wright's words about Pinter console me, especially as she's a citizen of that Manichean world where the devil has learned not to waste good working time in the company of those already his own. Back to the future 1 January 2009 - Harold Pinter's funeral on 30 December 2008 at Kensal Green Cemetery where Dad and Maria are interred:

Michael Gambon at Pinter's request read this from Pinter's No Man's Land (1.11.42-1.12.36)

I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it that might remind you of your own of what you once were. You might see faces of others in shadow or cheeks of others turning or jaws or backs of necks or eyes, dark under hat, which might remind you of others whom you once knew, whom you thought long dead but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them but who knows what relief it may give to them

[Back to the future 23 March 09: I found these words of Pinter, when he was accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize, below the profile of an exceptional photostream on Flickr:

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

* * * * Obama and Biden will travel south by rail from Philadelphia's 30th Street (where I arrived for my first job from New York) via Wilmington to Washington Union for the Inauguration on 20 January - a fillip for America's long blighted railways and a celebration of good architecture. [Back to the future 16/01/09: NY Times photo album of Obama's government] * * * My family bought me some well judged presents - deep dark chocolate, the first Swedish police procedural (even before Mankell), a Richard Wilson thriller, some pudding wine, a Macallan single malt, a wind up LED torch, a monocular and DVDs of BBC dramatised versions of Vanity Fair and North and South. Richard also told me about using Handbrake to convert films I made into DVDs some years ago to MP4 so's I can edit them - a present in itself.

Christmas lunch

500 years ago Jan De Beer had a studio in the Netherlands that turned out nativity scenes on a kind of early production line - much of the work done by his apprentices. My friend Dhiaa, as we paused at this picture last Christmas, said he felt he knew where De Beer had painted and not one of his students, making this picture more special among his many nativities. I too had seen what he'd seen - the closed eyes and streaming hair of the angel closest to the child as though light were coming out of stillness with the force of fire. * * * *
Nine sat down for our Christmas lunch. I was in a sort of daze having had a painful tooth extracted the night before by the 24/7 dentist at Perry Barr, so I was forbidden to drink more than water, and remained in bed until noon, called down to lunch by Amy with a paracetamol. We were wondering amid our happy chat how things will seem in another year. The £ is sinking fast against the € - already €1-£1.05 which, after commissions, is one-to-one. When we bought our house in Greece in 2006 it was more like £1-€1.50. Liz's boyfriend has lost a house - mortgage foreclosed. Another's in the car selling business - very slow. Dot and Arthur live frugally on their pensions and savings. Lin as thrifty as they come guards my income from my extravagance and the tax office. We own no shares. Richard's been given a Zavvi gift certificate he can't use as the company's in administration. Lin's good friend's daughter has recently lost her job in Corus. Amy patrolling FI - Birmingham's town centre - when I've strolled with her, greets quite a few of those habitually sleeping out, knowing them by name. Vagrancy more than shoplifting, pickpocketing and breaches of the peace presents her chief challenge.

'Projects axed as planning deals blocked'

Headline in the Birmingham Post this morning, with an editorial comment that suggests Section 106 Agreements are a 'burden' on developers - an editorial aimed at taking the sting out of the front-page story which tells of developers, in the words of Clive Dutton, Birmingham's director of regeneration and planning "who were given planning permission through a 106 agreement but are coming back to renegotiate these agreements":

Birmingham Post 24/12/08 - Jane Tyler, Business Staff: Leisure, transport and community projects worth millions of pounds could be scrapped because recession-hit developers are refusing to hand over the money they promised Birmingham City Council in return for being granted planning permission. At least £13million is at risk of being withheld as property developers begin to break Section 106 agreements – legally binding contracts requiring builders to pay cash sums to fund projects which are of benefit to the community.

My letter to post.letters@birminghampost.net - published 30 December 08

Dear Editor THREATENED RENEGOTIATION OF S106As In 2004, having fought for ten years to prevent losing more green space in Handsworth, campaigners were forced to accept the decision - by a very small margin of votes among councillors on Birmingham's Planning Committee - to negotiate a Section 106 Agreement to permit new homes to be built on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments (VJA) - a private site neglected by its owners'. Can it be that having taken a profit from the houses they and their predecessors, Westbury Homes, have built and sold on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments, the current developer, Charles Church, is seeking permission to renegotiate the agreement made with the Council and - implicitly - with a most active community? (Jane Tyler, Birmingham Post 24 December 2008). We, with many others, anticipating trends now acknowledged by Government, (e.g. Baroness Kay Andrews' Introduction to 'Growing in the Community' 2nd ed.2008) argued convincingly that there was enough demand for allotments for the whole VJA site to be afforded the protection allotments are allowed by statute and Planning Guidance (PPG17). The city planner's lower estimate of that demand was used to sway the Committee to approve the application to build houses on the allotments. In May 2007 we were assured by Alan Orr, Perry Barr Community Planning Officer, that new houses had been sold in sufficient numbers to trigger the next stage of the S106A - three playing fields, including a cricket pitch, and eighty allotments. How brash if now, having taken their profit, Charles Church claim themselves 'burdened' by the terms on which they made it. With best wishes for New Year 2009. Yours etc,. Simon Baddeley, Handsworth Allotments Information Group

Holding the centre

Obeying our government's urging to spur liquidity, Amy and I spent most of Monday Christmas shopping - in Hockley around the Jewellery Quarter, then on to the teeming centre of Birmingham amid the milling crowds of New Street enjoying the Frankfurt Christmas Market, in the Bullring at Selfridges, and down tothe rag market, then back to Amy's car, out to the big-box CostCo Warehouse in dual carriageway-land near the gasometers at Saltley, piling our trolley with wine and gifts.Meantime Lin was out at the new 'big' Tesco's at Witton getting a turkey and more wine. She will collect Dorothy and Arthur from Cannock this evening and bring them here. My mother has gone to London to be with my sister and her family. Adamos and Malvina are off to Paris to spend Christmas with her parents. Today I'll tidy the house with Lin and get our tree up and decorated, presents wrapped and placed around it. * * * * Discussing with Cllr Mahmood Hussain, who lives just down the road, over the phone, the silence from Alan Orr at Planning in the city on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments, and our concerns about job losses at Persimmon Homes who own Charles Church - the VJA developer who's supposed to implement the S106A on the VJA, Mahmood said we - he and fellow ward councillors, Kim Brom and Don Brown - will "write to Alan again" ("will you draft a letter, Simon?") after the holiday with the possibility "after all avenues have been explored" of using the new power of a 'Community Call for Action' directed to the City Council leadership. [News constantly intrudes about recession's impact - in this case its differential toll on jobs in America] * * * Yeats - rational turning oracular eschewing prediction - keeps reminding me to question not predict. I've been wondering less whether the centre can hold in Greece than where that centre lies. How will Greeks spend Christmas? * * * E-mail from an academic acquaintance:

The riots are the least important thing about the situation there. The strikes and recent general strike are far more important and utterly ignored by the British media for obvious reasons. I think there is a powerful, if somewhat institutionalized/ritualized, counter-hegemonic bloc there based on the trade unions. I visit the country regularly and attended the European Social Forum in Athens in 2006 - my first experience of car bombs and tear gas!

From me:

Sorry to sound naïve - is the British media ignoring the strike because strikes don't make as good pictures as riots? Where can I learn more?

Reply:

Perhaps I'm cynical rather than you being naive! I reckon it's partly good media, partly because riots can easily be depicted as irresponsible and futile and in the end trivial, and partly because the dominant political narrative in this country is that class is dead. Hence, any sign that class is not dead, here or anywhere else, must be studiously ignored if at all possible. Anyway on that note I have to go and do some Xmas shopping. Have a great break.

On the subject of trade union politics - an incident of real violence - acid thrown in the face of a woman trade unionist, Kostadinka Kuneva, as she entered her home in central Athens on 22 December. She is a train cleaner and organiser of a cleaners' union, a Bulgarian legally working in Greece. * * * See the multi-authored pan-european webzine A fistful of euros - a piece by Douglas Muir plus comment, groping for meaning, wondering whether PASOK can lead: "Greece - what if nothing happens?"

"Violence cannot be fought with violence"

The dog Λουκάνικος, Bangers, successor to Κανέλλος, Cinnamon

Adam Schatz London Review 19 December 2008:

The police, curiously, have retreated from confrontation with the street-fighting anarchists, preferring to chase down protesters at the tense but mostly peaceful daytime rallies. Amnesty International has reported that two of its Greek members were beaten with batons, and accused the police of engaging in ‘punitive violence against peaceful demonstrators, rather than targeting those who were inciting violence and destroying property’. (Riot police emptied 4600 tear gas canisters, and had to make an emergency request to Germany and Israel to replenish their reserves.) But when the cities were burning at night, the cops were scarcer than firefighters during the great forest blaze: after midnight the cities belonged to anarchists, arsonists, looters – and, it seems, to hooded agents provocateurs with iron clubs. The stated objective behind this ‘defensive posture’ was to avoid further casualties, but many Greeks wonder whether the government had struck a tacit deal with the rioters. ‘We let you torch and plunder to your hearts’ content, and you let us continue pretending that we are in charge’ was the wording suggested by Michas Takis, a journalist at the liberal newspaper Eleftherotypia. [quote ~ Panagiotis Stathis, spokesman for the national police "Violence cannot be fought with violence."]

In one film, from a fixed camera above Syntagma Square, I viewed a road nearly empty of vehicles, campaigners standing in separate clusters on the broad pavements, and near the top of the square a pair of evzones in brown winter uniforms doing their traditional march at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in front of Parliament. On one forum a visitor to Athens leaving his hostel to visit the Acropolis writes that:

...we hit up the shopping area and people watched. then i saw a tv reporter setting up and asked if i could get a photo of her pretending to interview me. well, me and my big mouth, b/c she asked if she could interview for me, about the presence of police in large numbers around the christmas tree and pedestrian mall. so at least my photo is now genuine. look for me on the AP greek story regarding athens resembling a police state now. i didn't say that i had just come from israel and am used to it, but 'twas fun all the same. tomorrow will be ancient sites day, and at night olympiacos versus some team that will lose badly. fingers crossed for no rain. nap time now.

I was talking, this evening, to Amy who'd dropped in with Liz. She looked at some of the street action on the many videos of events in Athens, and referred me to current thinking in her work books on policing public disorder. I've started looking again at the way the Athens police are deploying, grouping and regrouping and begun to notice patterns in the fog. Having already had intuitions about symmetry in the dynamics of these dramatic scenes - not quite velvet, more like dralon. Amy's pointed me to a missing part of this puzzle. Of course it's been mentioned by others - the limited number of injuries among rioters and police, the minimal use of guns (none authorised) or even baton rounds, the shock aroused by the 'second shooting' - a spent bullet striking a young man's hand rendering it numb; the absence indeed of blood letting except that of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, whose death is unreservedly deplored by the government. These guys (and some women) have been on workshops and courses, taken notes from slide presentations, discussed scenarios introduced by senior officers who've attended international conferences on the management of urban riots. I know the police have training - of varying quality - but I hadn't realised how far practice had advanced informed by global experience. The Wikipedia entry on riot control is solely about weaponry - and daunting though that is - omits the volume of knowledge accumulated and diffused about crowd behaviour and its implications for policing. The arts of reaction and counter-reaction have been refined and must have spread - notwithstanding the low wages and lack of training that Greek police complain about - to the uniformed men I'm seeing in the gassy flaming streets of Athens. Riots judged as 'failures' by professionals, are those where violence is escalated or even provoked by police action; especially when police attack violent demonstrators - either because provoked, or because officers who enjoy violence are given rein, or because violent men have been planted in the crowd to provoke ill-trained and undisciplined police and/or because one or more politicians sees advantage in escalation. e.g. Berlusconi in Genoa. These acts of violence against violent mobs have either played into the hands of those who desire violence - on either side - and have diverted the police from directing their control measures against the violent, so that they end up playing into the hands of the violent, either by attacking peaceful elements in the crowd or killing or injuring aggressive demonstrators who's fate wins the sympathy of moderates, increasing animosity towards the police. I think Machiavelli would have at least reviewed some of his thoughts on the proper application of ruthlessness in the light of research on crowds since Le Bon's pioneering work in the 1890s. According to the text books on this subject, the worst thing the police can do is to return violence with commensurate violence. Blimey! For a testosterone charged male kitted up in riot gear that's counter-intuitive. The police have to avoid being drawn into violence without appearing to appease or permit violence. Those who seek confrontation among the rioters understand this, as do those who wish the same among the police, in collaboration with those in government or with aspirations to government, who seek confrontation to achieve their ambitions. The police have to be wise, as do those who give them orders - if peace is to be waged. So all those millions going into the Bloody Sunday Enquiry are, as well as being a search for truth, an investment in the competence of those handling mass disorder. The situation is complicated by the likelihood that many rioters, some with parental connections in government, including those who steer the police, are reading (a variety of social web links to virtual environments) the same manuals. Given that proportionality has been normal in cold war manoeuvring most of my life, how unsurprising that similar dynamics apply to conflict in civvy street - tailored to the circumstances of Greece. * * * *

A man cries "shame"; a woman claps

[photo: Teacher Dude's Grill and BBQ, in some of the most intimate records of these weeks, captures mixed reactions]

Observations by the citizen-journalist Teacher Dude who's been posting images and comments from Greece on Flickr: There were times over the last two weeks when what I witnessed seemed taken from the script of an outlandish movie, the kind where everyone tuts and says, "That is just so Hollywood. That would never happen in real life". William Goldman, the writer of movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once said that there were things taken from real life he couldn't put in his scripts as nobody would believe them. Here is a selection of the few I remember from the riots and protests that I covered over the last two weeks. The two guys wearing masks are ready to charge the bank, all set on smashing the security camera and disabling the ATM. However, there is a young woman there, oblivious to the mayhem around her who is taking out her money. The masked men wait, politely ask her if she has finished, then set about the cash machine with hammers. A march goes past a van, inside two tiny Shetland ponies stuck in a space not much bigger than they are. The protesters, enraged by this discuss what to do. In the end they take down the number plates as to....report the owners to the authorities. Just a few metres behind them riot police approach menacingly. 50 kids, one no more than 10 years old pelting the central police station with rocks as bewildered shoppers seemingly unable to grasp what is happening gawp while pieces of paving stone clatter around them. The quasi - military riot police up against tweenies Walking along Egnatia Boulevard lit up by at least a dozen fires, acrid smell of tear gas and burning plastic everywhere. Two middle aged bystanders argue over whether the anarchists about to firebomb a bank are doing the right thing. The older, white haired guy, says, "What do you care? It's not your money". An old woman buttoning holing a passing masked teen, scolding him about what has been happening. Others join in a passionately debate what has been happening over the last few days. A smartly dressed woman, shopping bags around her, waiting at the bus stop claps and cheers masked protesters marching by. The man next to her shouts out "Shame, shame on you" [Teacher Dude, citizen journalist, originally from England, living in Northern Greece, teaches English as a Foreign Language (EFL)...writes of loving photography...cpwefl2003@hotmail.com. His comment below - following a request from me for permission to use his words and this photo - refutes my remote observation but confirms some shared awareness of history among potential assailants 'As far as escalation of violence is concerned I think both sides realise that would quickly spiral out of control as there are literally millions of guns in circulation.'] [Big Fat Greek Summer - 13/12/08 - eye witnessing the ordinary and the dramatic were mingling in central Athens]

* * * * The Tango Team: Tango stands for Tactically Aggressive and Necessary Gambit of Options. This team goes forward and 'dances' with the crowd. The Tango Team can bring to bear the entire spectrum of use-of-force options-from command presence through deadly force-in a controlled, self-contained package. * * * * Last night - Saturday - Lin beckoned me round the other side of the kitchen table from where I was street watching Athens to see the last dance on BBC iPlayer of the Strictly Come Dancing final - between Tom and Camilla (see 32.50 on) - who she knew, though she'd missed the live show, had won. They were good - even I could see.

I entered the home of a woman...

From: Iason Athanasiadis Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:58:27 +0330 To: Simon Baddeley Subject: The tragedy of Greek apathy Dear Simon. In the end, I gave the piece to Guardian Comment and, as you can see, it's attracting a fairly lively debate! Thanks so much for the fascinating insight and historical background I couldn't hope to be able to provide on my own. Looking forward to hearing your comments. Warmly, Iason Guardian.co.uk 18/12/08: Moving back to Athens in 2003, I found a society living in denial. Greeks were skimming the cream off the last rounds of EU subsidies oblivious to the tidal wave of globalisation looming over them. I had been living in Qatar, the very definition of a globalised city-state. The return home was a welcome respite from the Arab peninsula's identikit steel-and-glass cities, where city centres had been abolished in favour of income-appropriate super-malls and the pursuit of business was supreme. On my first night in Athens, I sat in a leafy square and watched young couples enjoy ouzo and mezze as children played under the lemon trees. Some of those same children may have been torching the municipality's Christmas tree last week or chucking petrol bombs at its parliament. Greece's student intifada erupted over the shooting by a policeman of a 15-year-old student, but the anger and lasting power of the riots imply a deeper malaise. The violence and nihilism with which banks, government buildings and private cars were burned down wrong-footed the older generation. But after the smoke cleared, there was a self-conscious pause as both sides waited for lucid demands to be made. "Who if anyone is emerging?" asked Simon Baddeley, an honorary lecturer at Birmingham University's School of Government and Society in the UK, who offers coverage of the crisis through his Democracy Street blog. "The ideological stuff I've heard so far seems juvenile. Any new ideas would have surely to come linked to a set of workable economic and social ideas that don't look like the ones I'm hearing,"....

Dear Iason. You quote me correctly. My thoughts were shared with a Greek citizen I admire, about a land that has furnished my life. Omit that and my interrogatives make me sound like yet another keyboard colonel aching for tanks on the streets - something that anyone but a dunce can see is not going to happen. Indeed your piece in the Toronto Star, on 16 December, quotes columnist Alexandros Papahellas writing that 'Our problem today is not whether tanks might roll in the streets, but that even if they did they would likely collide into each other.' I'm very grateful for your thoughts, for the comments it's encouraged, and especially for MilesSmiles' reflections on a 'Western condition' - reminding me that this crisis in Greece is only momentarily Greek:

We now have pretty good reason to think that neoliberal capitalist democracy is a failed ideology, incapable of dealing with the real problems societies face. Part of the problem is that neoliberalism is a bit like Ingsoc – an ideology that is paradoxically set up to destroy the possibility of ideology. Neoliberalism atomizes social discourse so that talk of a common good becomes almost incomprehensible, since nobody is supposed to criticize anyone else's values and all that rubbish.

I hope to be saying I was wrong to comment on lack of leadership in Greece, because I was unable to recognise original thought - because I'm locked, with the rest of us (including most of the rioters, with their multilingual posters), into looking at the present in the mirror of history. It's an old forgivable error. The future may be being worked on in a beer cellar; inhabiting some 'rough beast'; a sapling indistinguishable from surrounding annuals. What may be unfold may be good and bad and will have been developing in ways that are initially parasitic, sucking meaning and agency from familiar events and institutions. I'm more puzzled about what is happening than I ought to be. I am also rather excited and optimistic. I do not feel apathetic - a Greek invention describing stoic withdrawal from the affairs of the world - and I do not think what is happening will lead to the inevitable disaster that is the essence of that misused term tragedy. I wait on the moment, embracing conversation.

* * * * This situation posted to YouTube on 16 December has had nearly 57000 hits - the banner held up so awkwardly - well, a bit 'shuffly' after a while - invites viewers to stop watching television and go on the streets. The rather longer statement by the manager of the TV station deploring the invasion - not, he insists, a 'take-over' - has had less than a 1000 hits so far - not least I suspect because he's less aware that for those for and against a cause, situationism is, outside the psychotic obscenities of Mumbai, the only game in town. Even Dubya had the wit to make a point about the size of the shoe thrown at him by a Iraqi TV journalist last Sunday. I'm reading of Robert Shoemaker on The London Mob and George Rudé on The Crowd in History.[Ref: Adam Shatz in London Review] And this piece posted 17 December by Andrew Lamm plus the conversation/comments that follow illuminates changing perspectives in the hall of mirrors within which news is created

Editor’s Note: While nearly 500 journalists and media developers met in a five-star hotel in Athens to discuss the state of the media, the city smoldered from riots organized by young people using new forms of communication. [Reminder:"Karamanlis or tanks" - the choice that Konstantinos Karamanlis, uncle of the present PM, posed to Greeks in 1974]

* * * On Thursday I took the ferry from Portsmouth Harbour Station across the estuary to Gosport - about 8 minutes - to run a workshop on Questioning, passing through London via Waterloo Bridge, dropping off for an hour with Richard Wiltshire, co-author with Deborah Burn, of Growing in the Community, published by the Local Government Association with a foreward by Baroness Andrews - "Everyone benefits from allotments and we are conscious that there is rising demand..." This is the first time government has gone beyond saying allotments are good and acknowledged that more people want them. Richard gave me an overview of his current reading of the prospects for allotments and food growing in cities which I'll summarise shortly. I wasn't home until just after one on Friday morning but was immersed in reading Obama's memoir Dreams from my Father. I watch this man with such hope and interest as he assembles his cabinet. It was fascinating to follow his mind at work, parsing his growing up and emerging identity, as the offspring of black and white - the relief of encountering a mind that can struggle with and navigate dilemmas and contradictions is almost palpable. I see my face in the window of the train, hurrying through the dark, smiling at his prose. * * * *

A political-management disconnect

Councillor Margaret Eaton (video ~ October 2008), Chair of the Local Government Association and Paul Coen, its Chief Executive who, on 12 December, via the LGA website, wrote:

Since September it has become increasingly difficult to have confidence that the political leadership and the managerial leadership of the LGA are at one on both the direction of travel and the day-to-day leadership of the Association. On Wednesday I was asked to take leave, which I have done. The LGA and I will now seek to agree a way forward. We do not believe that this will be aided by further publicity and speculation. Therefore we shall be making no further comment or answering questions until it becomes necessary.

York - my first train

My mother says I was hardly two years old. How I could remember? This is a recent picture, I think, on sale in the shop at the National Railway Museum, but it's my first memory - from a pushchair on the platform in early 1944, gazing up at a great dark sloping shape, steam rising to the curving roof of York station. My dad was stationed at Helmsley with the Guards Armoured Division in training on the Yorkshire moors for the opening of a second front in June '44. This Tuesday, sixty four years later, I went to York for a meeting with Jan D, and dropped into the Museum next to the station. I'd never been there. The first engine I saw was this one. I roamed around it, touching its polished streamlined valances and massive drive shafts; climbed onto the footplate amid the copper brightwork, steam gauges and red painted valves, where with three others, all railway men, we chatted - about the Mallard, about Dr Beeching - "only obeying orders", about the railways and hope for their future. And so south again, via Doncaster, Sheffield and Derby, to Birmingham on a X-Country train. Is it possible that in some way my feeling for trains partakes of the phenomenon of imprinting - so that I treat them instinctively as though they were family, and tubby Richard Beeching, for the sundering axe he used in the early 60s on 5000 of Britain's 18000 miles of railways during a formative period of my growing up, is the object of irrational loathing far beyond my dislike for the policies of the government he served? [See overview of the Tornado - first new steam train in Britain to be working from 2009] * * * *
Back from York at 8.30pm I cycled down to the Warehouse at Digbeth for the Friends of the Earth Christmas party and had some mulled wine while I talked to Karen Leach and Ben Mabbett about how FoE might support our group over the delayed S106A on the VJA. Joe Holyoak spoke to me the other day about a piece he was preparing on the place of growing space in the urban land-use mix. On Tuesday I'm seeing Paul Peacock and Paul Aitken who are visiting us in Handsworth and on Wednesday I'm seeing Richard Wiltshire - at our back, concerns about food supplies in cities. * * * *

Questioning for Overview and Scrutiny

I have come near to refining, not perfecting, a training session on Questioning for Overview and Scrutiny that fits busy councillors' diaries. I tutor this, but it could, as easily, be included in a briefing for new councillors by a scrutiny support officer. People who cross-examine - barristers - or interrogate - police, can spend a career refining their skills. They get lengthy apprenticeships. Councillors appointed to overview and scrutiny committees have little time to learn what may be involved. Even if some local politicians have professional backgrounds that make them familiar with questioning, the powers of scrutiny and its resources are limited compared to those on which a court can rely. Parliamentary Select Committees, upon which scrutiny is partly modelled, have far more generous staff support than their local government equivalent. I've suggested four questions: closed, open, probing and reflective, to which I've added two more; rhetorical questions that get people settled in, "May I say how pleased we are that...May I introduce you to an expert witness who...." (Hansard omits a '?' on these); and second, comes silence, a non-verbal interrogative, possibly with raised eyebrows and pursed lips, supplementing a verbal - tricky because a group can find holding silence for more than a few seconds uncomfortable. The characteristic of each question is explained. Closed seeks 'yes' or 'no' answers. it is similar to a leading question, which is useful if it's to save time while getting to the point where evidence is needed (e.g. a judge may permit counsel to lead a witness to the point where their evidence needs to be brought out by open questions). A closed question also provides brief confirmation of the answer to an open that has drawn out the witness's understanding, but can also lead to drawing out more than needed, unless there's guidance on what's wanted by way of depth and range of answer. Probing is when, having worked gracefully through a preliminary mix of open and closed questions, you start pursuing detail. How well these probing questions are phrased depends on how well the ground has been prepared - especially how well members have refined and shared their terms of reference. From time to time, a reflective question summarises what has been understood so far, allowing a witness to agree or correct. It also helps clarify everyone else's understanding of where the questioning has taken things so far; "So what we've learned is....? You've described how, this, this and this happened...Have I got that right?" I take people through transcripts from Select Committees - asking them what seems to be happening in the exchanges transcribed and whether particular questions or combinations of questions have been effective in throwing light on areas of doubt, and where more probing is needed. I explain that scrutiny should avoid getting a reputation for wrong-footing witnesses; that whoever is chairing the scrutiny should give witnesses notice of lines of questioning and the committee's areas of interest. A follow-up letter asking if being a witness has been positive or not, and whether there were relevant matters the questioning had missed. I also share this assessment, by a group of members, in one council where I was working, of where they were falling short on questioning:

1. Members make comments rather than ask direct questions 2. Members will often ask an irrelevant question or one that is not directly connected with the issue under discussion 3. When members do ask questions the questioning does not get to the heart of the matter 4. Members don’t pursue a line of questioning with supplementary questions 5. The way that the Chair allows each member to ask a question makes supplementary questions difficult as the discussion becomes disjointed. 6.Members may pursue a line of questioning but abandon it if the officer appears defensive or gives vague answers – they get thrown off course easily 7. In the past we have had planning meetings for all members prior to the meeting taking place to agree lines of questioning but this is often ignored in the meeting itself.

We explore these, recalling examples from direct experience. Then we practise questioning that will make the best use of everyone's time, finding out things, avoiding ill-manners, balancing courtesy and inquisitiveness, being a 'critical friend'.