August 2005

August and what an august in England.

When the first bombs went off I had just arrived in Brazil and was woken from an early after-travel sleep by a journalist asking me what I thought of the bombing. ‘What bombing?’ I said, looking after over the empty square of Parati.

Then I found that my shop was closed, and my friends couldn’t get their kids out of their schools, which had been closed with the kids inside. Everyone I knew was walking, walking, trying to find someone, trying to get somewhere.

Then we had the incredible day of an innocent man being shot dead. The Independent, of all newspapers, the best in its anti-Iraq war stance, ran an editorial claiming that the Brazilian was ‘the author of his own misfortune.’

So if you are innocent and you get killed it’s your own fault now – unless you have been blown up by terrorists, in which case that’s murder. If the security forces kill you, it’s not murder.

Simple easy world. Simple easy logic.

It felt ironic that I had been warned about how dangerous Rio is, and how I mustn’t carry anything, mustn’t talk to anyone, mustn’t go down certain streets or into the slums. Well, I survived a walk down a street with more prostitutes than mosquitoes, and a knife shop the size of the Albert Hall that said, in Portuguese and English: WE DO NOT SELL KNIVES TO ANYONE UNDER 10 YEARS OLD.

But the Brazilian who came to London was shot dead.

So if it was his own fault – for running away, when five men in plain clothes with guns were chasing him – and what would you have done – why are Tony Blair and George Bush innocent men?

I am angry with those Muslims who live in my country and want to wreck it, but I am angry with those men in power who live in the world and are happy to wreck it, providing they get what they want. We condemn violence. We condemned Saddam Hussein for his violence, and then we used and continue to use the most violent methods to shape the world our way. This is hardly a battle of ideology – freedom versus tyranny etc, it is a question of which side will do the most damage – the religious fundamentalists of the East, or the religious fundamentalists of the West – because that is what George Bush is. Certainly Blair by temperament is more moderate, but he is stubborn and he ‘believes’ and he is so deep in his ‘special relationship’ with God and Bush’s America, that we might as well be the same country.

But as Ghandi said ‘There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.’

So I went to London and I walked. The traffic was at a standstill.

The Queen says we will carry on as usual – they all say that, which is about as stupid as you can get, because this isn’t usual. They say we will have to learn to live with fear. They say this is the ‘end’ of tolerant Britain.

On the tube the other day, a woman in full burka tried to get on and two men in the carriage stopped her. The rest of the carriage cheered and clapped.

Racists and nationalists can now become ‘heroes’ for beating up Muslims.

What would I do? Some pretty right-wing things – like deport all the hate-filled Clerics running the radical mosques. They can go to Iran, and yes I know it will make the place even worse than it is, but the US aided and abetted the Taliban in toppling the Shah, when Iran was the most forward thinking and progressive of all the middle eastern states, and we aided and abetted the USA.

So that brings us to foreign policy – either we sort it or we don’t, and if we don’t, the future for the West is terrorism, hatred, and the kind of police state ‘for our own safety’ that few of will want to live in.

I would like to be as left-wing and forward thinking in foreign policy as it is possible to be, instead of seeing the world as ‘resources’ that are up for grabs by the strongest, in the name of democracy, I would like to think that world peace is a real goal. If we made peace our priority, instead of lifestyle, oil and money, we could achieve it.

Our version of democracy and freedom is now so tied up with consumerism that the whole package is tainted, suspect, and unsustainable. We depend on the developing world and the East to support our lifestyle with raw materials, cheap, labour and oil, then we pretend that we have the superior economy, which is in effect a robber-economy. Then we pretend that we deserve all this because of God or our democratic freedoms, which we promise to export in return for all those cheap raw materials and barrels of crude oil. But if we are so superior why do we pay children a few pence to sew in our sweatshops hidden across the world? If we are so superior why do we let Africa starve while the USA is now at 65% obesity levels with Britain catching up fast at 45%.

The world as the West has swung it cannot go on. We have supported tyrannous and wicked regimes when it has suited us to do so, and toppled those regimes when times have changed. We haven’t done this out of conscience, we’ve done it for trade and for money. We’ve done it for business not politics, because politics belongs to big business.

So no, we can’t carry on as usual. But then the Queen has opted to have her portrait painted by Rolf Harris… Rolf Harris! when she could have had Lucien Freud… but that’s another story.

I have begun a fortnightly column in The Times, alternating with David Baddiel, and you’ll be able to catch up on my columns on the site from this month, with a click-through to The Times On-line.

We are giving the site a wash and brush-up from next month for our 5th anniversary, and towards the end of September I will be doing a live on-line interview just for the site – date sent out to everyone on the mailing list, and you can throw in your questions before and during the appointed hour, which will be fixed to allow as many time zones in as possible.

As for the dreaded archive question – yes we are going ahead and archiving the whole site. I think it will be an interesting experiment for a year – because the site has two sides to it – yours and mine, and that needs to be reflected in the archive. Remember that access to this material in the future will be through the British Library; it is not generally available. In fact the Message Board itself is much more generally available via the site itself than it will ever be via the archive.

August. I am working hard. Still revising TANGLEWRECK but nearly there, and planning a new novel. Play almost done. One thing we all have to do is assess and revise our priorities in this life, because our priorities point to our values. What do really want? What is really worth having? What is worth our best efforts? What is a waste of time?

As it’s my birthday month I am bound to be thinking this way, but I am thinking it too because what is happening in the world means that none of us can sit back. We need to be active and alert, and not because there are terrorists out there, but because if we let other people make our decisions for us, they are going to make some very sinister and unwelcome choices. The more we belong to ourselves, the less easy it is to be coerced into lives we never wanted.