Green Euroelections - Peter Cranie, Lead candidate for the North West Region

With the polls showing the Greens' support rising, including several now putting them ahead of the junior government party, the Lib Dems, here is Peter Cranie, the lead Green for the North West. Last time round, he lost by barely 0.3% to the BNP leader Nick Griffin. This time...

Will No One Rid Us of These Meddlesome Messiahs?

Henry Plantagenet, King of England and Normandy in the tumultuous second half of the 12^th century, brooked little dissent. Imprisoning even his own sons and his wife when he suspected them of plotting against him, the only real opposition he faced came from his former friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket.  He had originally appointed him as his placeman, but Becket soon proved far from compliant and Henry was infamously heard to mutter "Is there no one who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"

Taking him at his word, four knights rode to Canterbury and dramatically slaughtered the Archbishop at the altar of his cathedral . Henry duly professed his horror and did his penance, even submitting to being scourged by the Pope’s representatives. How could they possibly have thought he meant what he said?

Echoing down through the centuries, the story of Henry and Becket seems very relevant to the last fortnight with first the assassination of Pakistani politician Salman Taseer and then the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, which claimed the lives of six bystanders. Although thousands of miles apart, the two stories have many similarities, not least the atmosphere of fear and loathing in contemporary politics in both increasingly religiously fundamentalist countries.

In Pakistan, Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab province was shot dead by one of his bodyguards who had taken umbrage at his campaign to repeal Pakistan's blasphemy laws. These make any criticism of the Prophet Mohamed an offence punishable by death - leading to a number of exceedingly spurious cases where people have been accused of blasphemy for totally unrelated reasons. In one recent case, a low caste Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who offered water to  higher caste Muslim women was charged with insulting the Prophet and is currently under sentence of death. Taseer took up her case, among others, and has paid for it with his life.

Salman Taseer

His opponents have equivocated - not endorsing the gunman, but not exactly condemning him either. Taseer should have been more careful about what he said, should have considered people's feelings, they suggest. It might be terrible that he had been shot, but, the implication is, perhaps he really brought it on himself. Indeed, the assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, has been lauded by many as a hero, standing up for traditional values and Taseer's friends have been warned not to mourn him.

Thousands of miles away in Arizona, a lone gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, loaded himself up with ammo and strolled down to a local "open day" for the public to meet their elected representatives. Targeting Democrat Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, he shot her in the head and sprayed his bullets into the crowd. He killed six people, including a 9 year old girl, and wounded 14 more before being overpowered. Remarkably, although a bullet traversed the length of her brain, surgeons hold out the prospect of a good recovery for Gabrielle Giffords. But the health of American politics is another matter entirely.

Angry America: Tea Party protesting for traditional values

The would-be assassin has turned out to be a loner, but one steeped in the Internet rage of the US Rightwing. Recently coalesced around the informal (but well funded) Tea Party movement headed by former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the far Right in the States has a large and growing coalition of the angry. Since the laws on bias in news reporting were removed by the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, the sensationalist rightwing "shock jocks" of American radio and cable TV, like Glenn Beck, have surged both in popularity and in brazen lies. They have, among other tactics, demonised swathes of the population - Hispanics, blacks and Muslims especially to tarnish them somehow as un-American fifth columnists. They have insinuated that both Bill and Hilary Clinton were involved in murder and extortion on their rise to the Whitehouse. Apoplexy reigned when Obama won the Presidency in spite of their best efforts to throw everything at him from not being a true American citizen (giving rise to the Birther Movement), to being a secret Muslim and organising concentration camps for imprisoning conservatives.

The bankrupt ignorance of their cause peaked during the health debate with ludicrous monikers used to describe Obama such as "Communist Nazi". Sadly, their strategy worked and in November last year the Republicans won a significant victory in the House of Representatives, though not the landslide some had anticipated.

Palin's cross hairs target map

But worst of all has been Palin and her acolytes - like many on the radical right using a collection of pseudo-religious and military rhetoric to describe the alleged threats to their country and the response they desire. While often not indulging herslef, she has done nothing to temper or rein in her acolytes and associaes as they rail on about "Armageddon America", the End of Days, 30,000 guillotines purchased to behead Obama's opponents, the New World Order Conspiracy, the sinister Black Helicopters, all of course underpinned by Islam's alleged desire to destroy the USA. Breathtakingly, Trent Humphries, one of the Arizona Tea Party's founders, has even described their movement as a co-victim of the shootings, shamefully disrespecting the deaths and injuries of the real victims.

And the response they prescribe? Time to go on crusade; time to fight; time to target opponents, as in the now infamous cross-hair campaign map published by Palin with Giffords' name shown as a through a rifle-sight. And Giffords own local opponent had encouraged voters to join him in firing machine guns to show their determination to "take back" their state:  "Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly”.

"Satan" Obama

The BBC in is quaintly impartial way has struggled to emphasise that both sides of the political debate in America are increasingly divided from each other and strident in their rhetoric. Maybe; but there is no doubt that it is the radical right wingers who are taking this to the extreme, cranking up rhetoric and undermining both rational debate and encouraging violence. Again and again, it is the radical Right who are found with people in their ranks with obsessions with guns and a propensity to violence. Even in the UK, while hundreds of thousands of pounds of police money are wasted funding agents provocateurs to spy on climate demonstrators and students, it is extreme right wing BNP members and sympathisers who are letting off nail bombs to kill blacks and gay people, or pouring petrol through letter boxes to burn out asylum seekers. I can't recall the last time a liberal was convicted for shooting an opponent, burning property or planning explosions in public places. 

The Arizona gunman almost certainly worked alone and may indeed have mental health problems - but can his ramblings about the American Government and his violence really be divorced from a political atmosphere where it is acceptable to denigrate the President as a traitor because he wants to extend healthcare to poor people? Was he somehow immune to a culture which stigmatises those who do not agree with Palin and her acolytes as conspirators against the Nation under God? Not only Communist - but blasphemers and heretics to boot?

Henry may have genuinely regretted Becket's death, but it was the atmosphere of violence around his Court, created by him, that made it happen. Similarly, Palin and the Tea Party may equally regret the Arizona massacre, but they too need to reflect on their words and actions, and how these have fostered a bellicose zeitgeist where the bullet is as valid as the ballot. They aspire to lead a movement, and consequently they must shoulder responsibility for it too. Likewise, the leaders of Pakistan's teetering democracy need to make clear that violence has no place in their politics. Clauswitz described war as "the continuation of politics by other means". In the hysterical, conflict-charged culture of contemporary politics, we must not allow those with sinister agendas to turn politics into war by other means.

So how far have we come since Henry's knights rode like Sauron's Orcs to do their Master's dirty deed for him in Canterbury Cathedral that dark evening in 1170?  And in such an atmosphere where well-funded, well-organised populists see democracy as just one of several tools to gain and keep power, how long will it be before they saddle up and once again ride out to do their Masters' (or Mistresses') unholy bidding?

Tea Party serves a Bitter Brew

It has been easy to laugh in recent weeks as Christine O'Donnell has risen to international prominence as the Tea Party-sponsored Republican candidate for Senator for Delaware in this week's mid-term elections for the US Congress. This tub-thumping evangelical  has propounded rather bizarre views on masturbation and genetics; and in seeking to impose her religious values in the name of traditional America, revealed her ignorance of the US Constitution in a toe-curling embarrassing episode. Perhaps needless to say, she is set to be decisively defeated - although current polls do show her standing improving in the closing days.

Yet even if the Tea Party doesn't make all the gains it has hoped for, there is little doubt it has led the debate throughout this campaign. Headed up by former Veep candidate Sarah Palin, it has put the Obama Presidency on the defensive with a head-on charge feeding off every conceivable source of bigotry, division and loathing. It has nourished Americans' worries about threats from inside and outside. Although for some of their leaders the focus has been on cutting tax and government, for others political debate has been eschewed in favour of an apocalyptic battle of Good versus Evil in the run up to the End Times. A fervent of fear - of Muslims, of socialism, of "Big Government" - has been whipped up in a well-funded attempt to galvanise a vote for a rather nasty, corporate-friendly right wing coup d'etat. Even the hated BP, culprit of the Gulf oil spill disaster, has got in on the act.

Oil multinational BP sponsors
the TP


It is not new. Nor, for all that we may sneer on this side of the Pond, is it peculiar to America. It is merely the latest of a range of populist phenomena that have risen in the era known, if not quite as the end of days, then as the "End of History" - the supposed final triumph of market capitalism with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Two years later, Italy saw the rise of Berlusconi's Forza Italia movement to win power barely four months after its formation, and Canada saw the Reform Party of Preston Manning wipe out the Conservative Government in a single election. So now in turn the Tea Party harvests the disaffected as capitalism's victory turns sour.

It is a tactic as old as politics itself. Just as ancient Athenian demagogues found individual scapegoats to blame for their policy failures through the ritual of ostracism, now the right wing seeks to shift blame for unemployment, inequality and social disorder onto carefully selected, vulnerable targets. In France, Sarkozy's fumbling regime recently turned its ire on Romanian gypsies, deporting them en masse. In Britain, street movements like the English Defence League, who have made common cause with the Tea Party, drunkenly demonstrate in Muslim areas. Across Europe, a dark stain of xenophobia and Islamophobia is spreading, with the far right rising in elections in Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and throughout eastern Europe.

Underpinning the thump and thud of their jackbooted march on both sides of the Atlantic is the endlessly repeated accusation that any who are not with them are against them. Obama is castigated not merely as being in political error or misguided on the economy. Rather, he is a traitor, a fifth columnist Communist-Nazi,  a secret Muslim, or even some biblical beast heralding the Apocalypse.

Satanic Obama from inquisitr.com

America's last brush with mass populism was the Perot insurgency in the 1992 election. The economic boom subsequently dissipated much of this, but the in the new recession, populism is breeding again, far nastier, far more vicious than Perot's quixotic adventure. The injection of an increasingly hysterical evangelical fundamentalism, with tens of millions of its followers earnestly believing that the world will end in their lifetimes, makes this movement dangerous beyond belief in a nuclear weapons state.

O'Donnell may go down in defeat tomorrow, but the diet of lies that has nurtured an atmosphere of fear will go unabated. The fact is that, just as extremists in the UK like the British National Party have leeched on the genuine grievances of poorer sections of society, mainstream politicians have abandoned them. The Soviet collapse saw politicians across the world rush to not merely expunge "Communism" from their lexicons, but "socialism" and even "social democracy" too.

The old centre-left has failed because of an unholy combination of political cowardice, lack of imagination and rank careerism. A political class quite dislocated from ordinary life has emerged as never before as corporate power has taken over more and more control of western governments, many of which now resemble little other than subsidiaries of multinationals, at the beck and call of unelected businessmen.

Consequently, taken for granted by the parties that once represented them, alienated and devalued by an exploitative system with ever increasing inequality, it is little wonder that many people are angry and looking for an alternative. The mainstream no longer works for ordinary people struggling to make their way in a world where decisions are increasingly taken by remote, faceless and unaccountable bodies and people. Politicians are pastiches of what they claim to be, arrogantly deriding and squeezing out any alternative viewpoints with the once ridiculous claim that there is only one possible poltical system. It is fertile ground for populists and the biggest mistake would be to assume that the grievances the Tea Party and its ilk speak to and exploit are not perfectly genuine, valid ones.
More than ever, the Left, in the USA, in Europe and elsewhere, needs to rise to the challenge - to show that there is a better economics, a sustainable and fairer one. We need to argue that the "free market" has failed comprehensively and won't ever work properly again. We can no longer collude with the status quo. If we don't provide that alternative, the Tea Party and its friends will do so instead, and the future they have in store for us is not a pleasant one. Not pleasant at all.

The last tea party to make any sense...