Asylum, UK

A rejigg of something I wrote for the old site on the subject of 'Turn Left', the best episode of series 4.


The alternate world that Davies conjures up in ‘Turn Left’ is not so far removed from our own. We might not (yet) see British soldiers patrolling our streets and pointing automatic weapons at unarmed women (though the recent behaviour of the police towards student protestors has been pretty savage)... but that sight would not be so unfamiliar to the people of Baghdad. Or Belfast, for that matter.

The nightmarish, decaying, dystopian Britain in this episode reflects aspects of our current social predicament… indeed, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM, the episode seems prescient of the years ahead of it, of (to put it my way) recession/cuts torn Britain.

While it doesn’t get specific, or touch economics much, ‘Turn Left’ seems like the closest thing to a direct political attack on crisis-wracked British society that any mainstream TV show could possibly get away with. Let’s just recap: in an episode of that highly commercial kid’s romp known as Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies suggested that, in a time of crisis, the British state might institute a program of racist slavery, if not extermination. At the very least, we see people herded and treated like animals while patrolled by armed guardians of the state. Moreover, the people being treated that way are the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless. Brits get the kind of treatment meted out to refugees once they too become scapegoatable dependents.

I’m not sure that Davies intended the title as direct political advice (though it wouldn’t be bad advice) but it surely can’t be entirely an accident that Donna’s apocalyptic turn is a turn to the right, a turn that results in “England for the English”.

The Donna in the car at the start of ‘Turn Left’ might vote that way. She’s the same thoughtless, selfish Donna we met at the start of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s exactly the kind of self-involved, complacent brat who hardly notices as society crashes around her… until she is touched by it. Davies pulls no punches. We see her obsessing over stationary and offices grudges as the rest of Chowdry’s staff watch the TV, horrified, for news of the hospital. We see her asking “What’s for tea?” as news of Sarah Jane Smith’s death flashes on the screen.

I know people like that. Indeed, speaking as someone who lives in southern England – surely the global epicentre of reactionary complacency - it is very hard indeed not to derive a massive and delicious jolt of schadenfreude from the way Davies manages to turn the (surviving) population of the Sun and Daily Mail reading world into despised, harangued, jobless refugees. “Who’s going to listen to us?” asks Donna’s Mum, “Refugees. We haven’t even got a vote. We’re just no-one Donna. We don’t exist.” To put it another way: seek asylum and you’ll be locked up in one.

It’s ironic that as Donna’s society disintegrates, she suddenly discovers other people. With a little help from Wilf, Donna’s experience of privation brings her closer to society, to her fellow humans. She barges in to tell Rocco to shut up, calling him Mussolini (ironic, given that it’s now her country turning fascist), but ends up singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with him. When he and his family are taken away, she needs Wilf to tell her what it really means (is Bernard Cribbins incredible in that scene or what?), but when she realises, she chases the truck and demands to know what’s happening. She has woken up from her isolation and self-involvement.

Also, there is a highly encoded but still discernible protest against Islamophobia in that scene. Rocco and his family are not Muslims or from the Middle East, but it was simply impossible (for me anyway) to watch the rounding-up scene in 2008 without thinking of Guantanamo Bay, Jean Charles de Menezes and Jack Straw’s seeming addiction to demonising Muslims. People might object that this is an arbitrary and subjective reading… but plenty of reviewers were happy to interpret this scene as referencing the holocaust, despite the fact that Rocco and his family are not identified as Jews anymore than they are as Muslims. Given that the episode as a whole seems so determinedly current, I think my reading is more apt.

As for the bug? Well, it looks (when we eventually see it) very much like a rucksack designed by David Cronenberg. But what does it mean?

I think it’s a self-doubt monster. It doesn’t really feed on the changes it causes in history, it really feeds on Donna’s lack of self-worth, on her willingness to believe that her Mother is right about her, that she’s useless and helpless, a disappointment, a failure. The right turn it convinces her to make is a capitulation to her Mum. Donna’s own goals, at this point, might still be selfish, but they are based on confidence. The right turn, the turn to the safe option, is the turn towards her Mum’s view of her, towards the easy assumption that she’s nobody and nothing, that life is an uninspiring chore. “A life never loved,” as Rose puts it. And am I reading too much into the fact that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ contains the lyrics “Nobody loves me” and “Mamma Mia, let me go”?

When first reviewing ‘Turn Left’ I made some connections between Donna’s self-doubt and the state of the society depicted. Those connections now seem rather tenuous to me. I don’t nowadays feel comfortable asserting that societies round up minorities because they suffer from free-floating neurosis. However, Donna’s fateful moment of self-doubt can be read as a capitulation to power, to the judgements of another who has power over her, as well as to a feeling that her horizons are bound by her background… even, with a little extrapolation, her class.

All in all, I adore this episode. If ‘Midnight’ is the anti-‘Gridlock’, this is ‘Midnight’s redeeming coda. Perhaps just as bleak in its way, but with hope lying in social solidarity and resistance to power.

The sci-fi elements might power the story, but the story is about human choices, personal and political. The kind of enjoyable sledgehammer metaphor underwriting, say, ‘Aliens of London’ can work as critique and/or satire but also, if taken literally, can create a distancing effect. The aliens or the mad computer get the blame for our social failures. This is undermined in ‘Turn Left’. The “Emergency Government” might exist because a Titanic-shaped spaceship fell on London, but there’s no hint that their policy of “England for the English” (and labour camps for the rest) is actually being fed to them by the evil, mind-controlling Zargoids. Moreover, they’re the sort of policies that might yet take hold on British soil in years to come, especially if the current government is allowed to push through its radical programme of neoliberal class-war shock therapy, which is amounting to a wanton and wholesale demolition of much-needed social safety nets.

You can't extrapolate every detail of this into a coherent political thesis (thank goodness) and so it can be subjected to multiple interpretations (much more interesting). The jist is pretty clear though.

Shame about the orientalism on display in the ‘bookend’ sequences, which use ethnic diversity and Eastern ethnicity as semiotic vehicles for the uncanny, the threatening and the predatory. On the whole, though, with its depiction of racial inequality (not least in the sequence where Donna and family are served by a hotel maid who is clearly implied to be a migrant worker) this episode is clearly on the side of the angels, without also indulging in too much liberal sanctimony.

This is Doctor Who's version of The Children of Men (the film).  It's atonement for 'The Unquiet Dead'.  Borderline miraculous.

Send More Beams That Kill

Hey guys... you know how, in my last post, I was connecting 'Mindwarp' (in which the slimey Mentors of Thoros Beta are selling hideous weapons to Thordon) to the matter of British weapons sales to savage dictatorships like Suharto's Indonesia, etc?

Well, have a look at this delightful report from Al Jazeera about what riot police have been up to in Bahrain (I warn you: the report linked to features images of wounded people and others in great distress).

Bahrain was memorably described by David Mellor on the Today Programme (shouldn't it be anagrammatically renamed the Toady Programme when he's on it?) as a "quasi-democracy".

It would appear that five people have been killed in this last attack.  (Before we get too locally self-righteous, we should remember what Alfie Meadows went through at the hands of the British police recently.)  The attack on the protestors in Bahrain was launched using weapons of exactly the types sold to the Bahraini authorities by British, i.e. guns, rubber bullets, teargas and grenades.  Apparently we also sell Bahrain machine guns and ammunition.  Everything, in other words, that a "quasi-democracy" needs for quasi-violent quasi-suppression of protestors exercising their quasi-democratic quasi-freedom.

This morning, the Guardian has this and this to say about British Government policy in the wake of the savage attack on protestors.  A sample:

Britain announced a review of licences granted for arms exports to Bahrain which it would "urgently revoke" if the sales criteria had been breached in their use, after it emerged that types of crowd-control weapons similar to those used in the crackdown were supplied by British companies. Despite concerns among activists over Bahrain's rights record, British firms were last year granted licences, entirely unopposed, to export crowd-control weapons that can lead to fatalities in use.

Oh, thank God!  A "review" (that's all right then!) after it "emerged" that Bahrain's government have been using weapons to attack and hurt and kill people!  One wonders what we imagine they were going to use these weapons for... decorating their office walls?

The Guardian also says:

According to the Foreign Office's own records and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, the UK has also supplied Libya – which has warned in an SMS message that it will use live ammunition against protesters – with similar weapons and ammunition. Sales to both Bahrain and Libya were actively promoted by the UK government's arms promotion unit, the UK Trade & Investment Defence & Security Organisation.

Despite the widespread unrest throughout the Middle East and North Africa, British arms manufacturers this weekend will be attending IDEX, a major arms fair in Abu Dhabi, to promote sales throughout the Middle East region.

And:

Despite the warnings from HRW and other organisations of a worsening rights situation in Bahrain, the Foreign Office's own statistics reveal that the number of arms exports licences continued to increase in 2010 from 34 to 42 with no licences being refused. Arms exports to Libya, where lethal force has already been used against demonstrators, appear to have followed a similar pattern with exports last year including tear gas, and £3.2 million worth of ammunition including for crowd control..

The Guardian then quotes a Labour ex-minister being all righteous about it.  But Labour's ethical foreign policy amounted to taking down some photos of General Suharto in the Foreign Office. 

In truth, the current government is no better than the last one on this issue, and that one was probably a bit worse even than the one before it... the one that had David Mellor in it.  On the Today Programme, when he defended Bahrain as a "stalwart friend" of the UK, Mellor was described as having "strong links" with the country.  The BBC announcer didn't go into this further... apparently thinking that it wasn't necessary for us licence payers to know about the interests of someone who was about to offer us his opinion... but Mellor was a senior adviser for Ernst & Young (one of the biggest international accountancy firms, with an extensive British arm) and apparently still "consults" them (I dread to think what that means).  Ernst & Young do big business in Bahrain, even running something from there which they call their "Global Islamic Financial Services Group".  (So much for the clash of civilisations.)

So, none of this is very hard to parse, is it?  The British government and British business (both in sales of things like riot control tools and in financial services) has extensive links with the Bahraini regime, which is a brutal monarchical dictatorship with the flimsiest pretence of democracy; a wealthy Sunni minority regime that squashes the rights of its shia majority (Mellor, by the way, was eager to play up the usual scaremongering fears about Shia extremism... despite the fact that the protestors who were attacked have been demanding secular democracy).

America (our great ally) also has extensive links of all kinds.  For instance, in 2008, KBR - an American construction firm based in Houston, formerly part of Halliburton and one of the vultures that fed on Iraq after the invasion... and the biggest non-unionised construction firm in the U.S. as it happens - won the contract "to provide design management, project management, and construction management services" for the planned Qatar-Bahrain Causeway.

Moreover, as a Gulf state, Bahrain is an important link in the chain of bases, intallations and local allies that make up the ringfence of American imperialism in the energy rich region, to which successive British post-imperial governments (going back to Atlee) have passionately wedded themselves.  America's Fifth Fleet is the naval wing of their Central Command: it is located on the island of NSA Bahrain, within the Kingdom of Bahrain.  It is at the epicentre of the Middle East, not far (relatively speaking) from either Bagdad or Riyadh.

I suppose what I'm getting at can be boiled down to something very simple.  The protestors in Bahrain are protesting against a regime that the West supports, trades with, supplies with lucrative financial services and uses as a vital naval base.  Our politicos act all shocked and our pundits defend them from opprobrium when they attack, beat, torture and murder people (using weapons that our governments and weapons firms have sold them) who just want some of the democracy (not quasi-democracy, thanks) that our leaders constantly use in their rhetoric.

This must stop.  We must campaign against the arms trade.  We need to reject the notion that people in the Middle East aren't ready for democracy, that they need our help and paternalistic guidance... or our bombs and armies of occupation dumped on them.  If anything, what they need is less of our help - if, by help, we mean our "humanitarian intervention" or our evangelical promotion of free trade, or our penetration and cooptation of their economies.  We (and here I use "we" in the unironical sense, to mean "we, the people") need to support the protestors all across the newly-insurgent Middle East as they fight (and they are, quite literally, having to fight) the regimes that our Western leaders have so long, so profitably and so hypocritically supported and dealt with.  Even as we fight the neoliberal evisceration of our own economy, we need to support them in their struggle against the tyranny of their neoliberal-friendly local dictators.  It's all one struggle because it's all one problem.

We have to do it.  After all... who else is there?



ADDENDUM:  I've just seen this post at Richard Seymour's blog, which mentions further British links with Bahrain.

ADDENDUM #2:  Since I posted the above, Bahraini police and/or army have opened fire (with live ammo according to some reports) on protestors who were conducting the funerals of those killed in the earlier protests.  There are reports of helicopters spraying bullets into the crowd.  Meanwhile, in Libya, Gaddafi has been desperately trying to stem the growing revolt by launching brutal attacks on protestors, killing many.  (However, he seems to have lost control of large sections of the country - and has had to draft in mercenaries to do the slaughter for him because the army is reluctant).