I try to see at least one film and read one book in a week. Time and ease of access usually means that the film comes from California and that the book is as likely to be the contemporary equivalent of pulp fiction as something more 'worthy'.

Not that dedication to popular culture should be confused with understanding community culture.  The vast bulk of the material provided to us is produced by creatives and accountants with one main aim - to get us to buy the product.  There are two corollaries of this.  The first is that producers have to meet us more than half way and match our prejudices, fears, moods and desires.  The second is that producers and creatives can slip in their own ideological prejudices - usually but not always to sustain the system that enables production. 

Occasionally, a truly subversive creative can slip in a message against the system if the accountants think enough profits can be made by meeting the mood of the time.  The remarkable and anarchic V for Vendetta is proof both of the freedom of Western culture and of the essential uselessness of that freedom in bridging the gap betwen thought and action to effect change.  The graffiti of Banksy is another subversive act being appropriated by the mainstream.  Thus must it be.

Real community culture is usually folkish, repetitive, traditional and often second rate in execution.  Occasionally, a substantial creative talent emerges from below - like the vigorous youth cultures of urban environments - and then gets appropriated into the market system quite quickly.  So, when a film or a book strikes a chord, it is striking that chord at the boundary between many individuals' emotional response to events and the management of that response by those cultural high priests who can get enough offerings from the money men.

This week I saw the film 300 and read the book The Execution Channel by the Scottish writer Ken Macleod.  Both were responses to the war on terror. They represented distillations of two opposite ideological positions that are emerging to replace the left/right split of the Cold War.  These two responses are expressing the break-up of traditional allegiances.  At the risk of oversimplification, it may be worth unpicking the unspoken politics to be found in these two units of creative production that have been offered to attract our bank notes.

300 is the easiest because you can see it readily enough and it is only two hours long.  Its iconography is comic book but also both fascistic and gay - not as incompatible a connection in some extreme circles - and certainly morally and sexually ambiguous.  It tells the story, known to all British schoolboys until classical education was eliminated as part of the national curriculum, of the self-sacrificing stand of 300 highly trained Spartan warriors at the pass of Thermopylae.  It was always a symbol of what well trained dedicated soldiers might do to protect their own and is poignant in the week that a senior RAF Officer is said to have asked whether his men would consider suicide defence against an incoming terror attack and British naval captives seemed to collude in an Iranian propaganda victory.

But, putting aside how our culture actually handles conflict, 300 is about how conflict should be viewed.  Liberty is made abstract as homeland (women are second class and the economy is based on slavery), war is seen as a testosterone-fuelled glorious enterprise in which fame in the future is superior to a grey life in the present and the enemy is seen as imperial, decadent, compromising, ill-trained for service and polyglot.  Ironically, the mise-en-scene could easily be reversed and the 'resistance' to Imperial America be cast in these terms but this film at this time from this place introduces a language of the West versus the Rest that makes it clear that no such interpretation is possible.

Meanwhile, Ken Macleod, hitherto known for imaginative and wry sci fi space operas that are certainly fun but cannot be called works of Dante-like status, has turned his hand to a hybrid political and espionage thriller (with sci fi characteristics and a homage to James Blish) that is on the very edge of genius.  The Execution Channel (Orbit, 2007) is a natural outgrowth of his earlier work - his readers will recognise strong female protagonists, the centrality of Scotland and a fascination with the rhetoric of hard-line Communism.  There is a new fact around page 100 that shifts it sharply back from the world of John Le Carre to the world of Philip K. Dick.  But the distancing of the reader, similar to the distancing through graphics and formal rhetoric in 300, brings into focus the core ideology that Macleod, wittingly or unwittingly, is drawing out of the early years of the war on terror.

Place these two bits of popular culture alongside each other and patterns begin to emerge.  The core of 300, if you strip away the stylistic accretions and pretend you know no history, is brutally simple - that the West exists and is under threat, that few realise the extent of the threat, that we need to be awakened and that the necessary response is to move forward, engage with the enemy and turn back the tide.  Moreover, there are enemies within.  The tone is one of heroes with a weak mass that needs leading.

The Execution Channel is very different.  More muddied, like real life.  There are no simple bad guys. If there is a villain, then it lies within that generic class of Great Powers whose less-than-competent and paranoid leaders bring us to the brink of disaster through secrecy and manipulation.  The book can be compared to that great dystopian British science fiction masterpiece of the 1970s Fugue for a Darkening Island.  It represents that sense of things being out of control because of forces we will not control.  An oddly sympathetic if fundamentally cynical attitude to Chinese communism will puzzle American readers but it represents a preference, found lurking in many places outside the US, for community order over the murderous anarchy created by competing amoral elites.

In fact, Macleod is far from anti-American.  All Westerners are much of a muchness - confused and blundering and a bit dim about the big picture.  The Europeans and British officials are not much better and no-one seems to be particularly sadistic though sadistic things happen.  The clue to the anger not only in the book, but also outside America about America, lies in an almost throwaway comment from Roisin, the woman it will be hard not to identify as the voice we are supposed to identify with.  One of the contemporary themes in the book is the world of extraordinary rendition and of Guantanamo Bay that disturb Europeans far more than most Americans may understand:-

"Tears sprang to her eyes, as they always did when the thought struck her that particular prerogative was back: the right of the sovereign to condemn, to put to the question, without due process and for reasons of state; that on that sore point all the Revolutions in Britain and America had been for nothing,  That America had been for nothing: that dismayed her."

Dismay - what a British understatement!  So this film and this book, appearing at the same time, express, in popular cultural terms, the great split that is taking place within the Western Enlightenment.  On the one side there is a new defensive aggression, the fear that the Enlightenment is under siege from dark forces and that the forces of Light must learn to be hard and do what is necessary against the forces of Darkness.  On the other side is a deep sadness and 'ressentiment' that the Enlightenment is going into reverse and that the little people are becoming pawns once again in the battles between self-seeking and self-interested elites.

It might be interesting to speculate on how these two attitudes will develop as political movements within the West in the coming decades - we have our theories and our suspicions - but Zaadz is not a place for politics.  My interest here was only in the place where cinema and popular literature are expressing deeper shifts in culture.  These two trends - of defensive aggression ['Festung West'] and of individual and community resistance ['neo-socialism', if you like] - are becoming established across Europe, and even within US domestic politics, as alternative reactions to the stresses of the post-Soviet era.  It is well worth keeping an eye on the balance of power within the networks that will decide what we watch and what we read.

*****

300 is on general release and is strongly recommended.  The trailer gives a flavour of the film and can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDiUG52ZyHQ but the film is only for those with a strong stomach.

Ken Macleod has a blogspot at http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/ that contains items that make the content of his books clearer.  His understanding of international affairs is remarkable in someone who is primarily a creative writer.  Although fantasy, The Execution Channel contains elements that are only too real and whose significance is clearly passing by many of those 'literary giants' who lurch from party to party down in London and who are still trying to reproduce the taste and smell of a Proustian teacake.

Having indirectly covered two subjects that you are not supposed to discuss at polite dinner parties, politics on April 6th and religion on March 16th, I had thought that it might be good to go for the big one - sex.  But something more important turned up last night.

Well, let's get the sex out of the way.  I was going to recommend a book: Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies, and Domestic Bliss, published by Hodder as a paperback in the UK but available in the US.  In barest summary, it is by far the most intelligent account of what is wrong with attitudes to sex in Anglo-Saxon culture and it should be read before you go into a long term relationship, within five years of the first kid coming and then, once again, when the last kid is becoming a teenager.  Above all, it oozes with positive energy but make sure that, if you read it, your partner reads it too or the point will be lost.  Sorry to be mysterious.  I would love to give you a short review but there is a more important story to be told.  I can come back to Perel some other day.

Last night, I was invited to the Karim Rida Said Foundation Dinner in London.  I know a couple of the Trustees but I generally get overwhelmed by the NGO and charitable circuit in London. A certain compassion-lag can set in.  Sometimes NGO people think that they can get away with sloppy thinking and incompetence just because they are 'doing good'.  This irritates not only me but others from a business background.  One of our own companies does what it can to support International Health Partners (UK) precisely because it is so well run and disciplined - http://www.ihpuk.org

But last night was an inspiration.  The Foundation arose from the reaction of two parents to the death of their son many years ago.  The Chairman is Wafic Said, a European-based businessman of Syrian origin, who has had his moments of controversy in the UK Press but, in my view, is a perfect example of how a business mind of undoubted intelligence can effectively contribute to the resolution of social issues through charitable works - and let me make it clear that neither I nor my businesses have knowingly taken one penny from this gentleman.

The charity can be viewed at http://www.krsf.org and the facts are there.  I am used to 'big men' from the Arab world employing charity to enhance reputation and I am aware of the role of 'zakat' (charitable giving) in Muslim culture - a tradition that often produces social welfare results closer to the European Social Democrat tradition than the free-booting charitable ways of North America.  But, listening to Wafic Said speak last night, I was convinced that I was observing something more strategic in play that might offer us Westerners a lesson in avoiding the utter silliness of a 'clash of cultures'.

The bulk of the charity's work is directed at support for disadvantaged children in the Middle East, but a scholars programme brings around 30 middle class post-graduates to the West for further education.  And this is where it gets interesting.  I met an environmental designer, a performance artist, a media and communications specialist and an IT consultant - all skill sets associated with the more advanced components of Western service culture.  This was not a set of mechanics and managers being set up to handle the outsourcing of Western industry while the West got on with the interesting bits of the global economy.  These students were at the cutting edge of key creative sectors.

Each of these students easily matched the abilities of any American or European counterpart and, frankly, they had levels of personal motivation far higher than those counterparts.  This 'will to do' is a phenomenon I have seen in South Asian students.  I think we can assume that Chinese students in the West are not much different.

Wafic Said, as he gave awards of seed corn money to the top three scholars of the year (one of whom, a woman, wore full Islamic dress), made the telling point that the Foundation wanted students to get involved in Western culture not in order to lose their own culture but to understand the West better and then take from it what might enhance the prosperity and self-respect of their own world.  It was a moment of revelation. These are only 30 or so students a year but there are other such Foundations and a whole new cadre of bright youngsters in the emerging world may be emerging.  It was once reckoned that a revolution can be effected if there are just 500 people with a common ideology prepared to make change happen.  

Such students are not the same as the rich kids who get an MBA from the West, live in London and Dubai, rely on Daddy's friends for contacts and just make the Western system work better.  Getting a woman or an Asian into the top job at some private equity house may seem like progress (certainly to the sad old '68 generation), but it is mere tokenism if the global balance of power remains as it is.  Instead, bright working and middle class young people should be learning new skill sets from the West and re-applying them to their own communities from within.  In short, after learning, they must go home and practice and not simply be employed pawns in the great game of international capitalism. If they get it right at home, then they can export their creativity but as principals and entrepreneurs and not as agents and managers.

This is what the Foundation appears to be encouraging.  Other aspects of the Foundation's work concentrate on practical help for the weakest in society and in raising awareness of social issues such as, say, child abuse.  This is the other side of the coin - social welfare and cohesion alongside wealth creation.  This is a balance that the West never seems to get right, lurching back and forth from the worst sort of military-industrial or socialist planning to a libertarian anarchy that leaves thousands scared, homeless, obese, sick and exhausted.

It would be sad if the wealthy founders of these and other projects were left alone to pursue their dreams.  They have set up the seed corn funds, often substantial, to fund a corner of a better society but their programmes still need other donors and the co-operation of Governments.  But does the West really want a stable Middle East?  If so, then it will stop prescribing universal solutions imposed from outside and it will certainly stop instant moralising about those private individuals who are trying to move things forward.  Above all, it will encourage reformers and philantropists from the emerging world to 'do it their way'. 

You can perhaps understand now why dinner last night seemed more important than sex. (well, on that Saturday night in London, anyway).  Good things were being done, unknown to much of the wider world.  It seemed the least that I could do would be to draw Zaadsters attention to a small bright star peeking through the fog that is the Middle East.

I have an interest in the 'new religions' - not as a practitioner but as a sympathetic observer.  These faiths are growing quite fast amongst teenagers and socially marginalised groups but also amongst solid stable ordinary folk  who find they say something important about how life might be lived.  Fear of ridicule and a certain paranoia about public reaction means that the extent of pagan belief in Western society is probably significantly underestimated because people are still reluctant to 'come out' about an often misunderstood set of views about the world.

One starting point for anyone who might share this interest is Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999).  It cannot be recommended enough.

A surprising result of the book - which made it clear that claims of an ancient origin to the new religions (with the exception of course of induction by consent into traditional shamanism) were just so much bunkum - is the degree to which Wiccans in particular have taken Hutton to their heart.  The 'newness' of these faiths, including the consciously reconstructed Heathenism of Asatruar, is fully accepted as a fact in terms of form and origin in order to preserve a 'timeless' content in terms of belief.   Wiccan and pagan forum members on the internet will often be highly critical of attempts to over-estimate the deaths in the 'burning times' (the European witch hunts), the unwarranted feminist claims of historians like Gimbutas and, above all, the ridiculous claims of continuity between modern reconstructions and the ancient religions from which they are being reconstructed.

This maturity - far from the caricature of outsiders - positions these religions as intimately linked to modernity.  They look less and less like reversions to the traditional as time and study progresses.  Even their interest in folk tradition centres on their being grounded in the contemporary community as local healers or earth magicians.  This flexibility of practice is in marked contrast to what happens when authority gets its grubby little paws on paganism to bend it to its own purpose.  The fate of Shinto under the Meiji restoration is an object lesson in cynical inauthenticity for the purpose of nation-building with tragic consequences.

These thoughts were occasioned by another contribution in the Hutton tradition of critical analysis of belief - Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Esotericism by Hugh Urban of Ohio State University (University of California Press, 2006).  I do not intend a book review.  Suffice it to say that Urban takes the key points in the history of 'sex magick' as separate and successive components of alternative cultural practice.  In my view, he demonstrates how what was highly transgressive at each stage of its existence, fully in defiance of conventional mores, eventually became pulled into the prurient and commercialised mainstream.  A culture of individual resistance to community culture came to shadow each stage of the development of consumer capitalism. With no intention to do so on either side, radical individual liberation and the market converged, becoming the Western society that we live in today.

This is, of course, my  over simplification - read the book.  But the seven case-types he introduces: the sexual magic of the mixed race American Paschley  Randolph in the Post-Bellum era; the discovery of Tantra; the influence of Crowley; the Nietzchean impulse of Julius Evola; the arrival of Wiccan ideas and its links to feminism; the Satanic 'christian heresy' of La Vey; Chaos Magic with its shattering of all points of reference: all these lead (in Urban's analysis) to the 'magical logic of late capitalism'.

But what next - with all barriers down and nowhere further to go.  Any belief, any practice seems to be permitted.  Authoritarian personalities are anxious. This is not good, they say.  The British military is worried, no kidding! 

'An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2053021,00.html

It is almost as if they are willing order to return and, fearing Mussolini and Stalin, want us all to accept their order in its place. Well, British intelligence has not had the best of records lately.  On this matter, its position on the future may be no different from its position on yellowcake from Niger or the presence of weapons of mass destruction in faraway countries.  Authority may be very worried about its loss of authority but there is no reason why we should be.  In fact, so long as authority does not intefere, observation of what is actually happening on the internet seems to indicate that a degree of self-correction within society is already taking place.

There is certainly now no turning back from the ideology of personal liberation that is dominant in the West, unless it be through the executive imposition of social conservatism.  Such a 'cure' would be far worse than the disease unless society were to break down altogether under pressure of war, disease or famine.  Indeed, some radical liberation activists (notably the gay and feminist elements) may even be becoming the New Right in the context of the alleged clash of cultures.  Many liberal Europeans are coming to define themselves as Western against (say) Islamism simply on the basis of a radicalised view of freedom that has no place at all for custom or tradition.  This is the mentality that underpins the world-view that I reviewed in the posting on 300 below.

No, the self correction is taking place from below and is based on two concerns - an awareness of predators in the system and of exploitation as intrinsic to the market system.  It is no accident that, while the founders of the alternative religions tended to be from the libertarian individualist right, their latter-day followers have tended to be liberal and to the left.  Once removed from being a rich man's hobby or from the pleasures of the Hellfire Club, alternative lifestyles and transgression are about resistance to, and the freedom of persons and communities from, oppressive authority.  Some tasks still need doing that good government does well but our current governments do not do very much of at all - such as protecting the public.  The infrastructure of religion in such times of instinctively authoritarian but limited government builds up community for protection.  The new religions are no exception. 

As time goes by, these new religions - which emphasise individualism, ritual and tolerance rather than dogma and organisation - are creating a social morality involving prison visits, mutual aid and assistance and self-policing against predatory persons that mimics early Christianity.  Just as Christianity was the religion of slaves and women - much to the later disgust of the Nietzcheans - some paganisms are the natural religion of many sex workers (the exploited of our time) and of those under greatest personal pressure from modernity.

Of course, these new religions may be growing fast but they are still small.  The religions of the book are also growing massively in the emerging world on the basis of their role as bulwarks that protect many from the full force of modernity.  But, in the West, traditional authority cannot be squared very easily with the facts of personal liberation.  These new religions, when you look into them more deeply, with their eclectism, tolerance and playfulness, are quietly combining the widespread acceptance of liberty as a precondition for being 'in and of the West' with a framework for making the world more comprehensible and for developing an ethical stance that actually works for its practitioners and for society.

One final thought.  Urban in his Preface refers to the prejudice and fear surounding his taking up (even in an academic and objective way) the subject of 'sex magick' as a topic for serious study.  He points out the odd combination in our culture of prurience and sniggering and a massive availability of sexual imagery in almost every context.  I would call Western culture adolescent if it was not an insult to teenagers.  If the new religions unravel attitudes more suitable to a peasant society before birth control and bring maturity to our civilisation, then this may be no bad thing.  It would not be the first time (we think of Jesus) that the margins of an empire have proved its salvation.

****

For evidence of the construction of a social presence for paganism in a UK context, with specific reference to prison visits - http://www.paganfed.org/

In my fifty or so years on this planet, I have had very little to do with the British police.  I once enjoyed lunch at the house of mutual friend with the head of Scotland Yard's Serious Murder Squad, a delightful and intelligent man.  On another occasion, I found myself chatting amicably to two past heads of SIS [MI6] while defending the reputation elsewhere of an Arab gentleman wrongly accused of being complicit in terrorism.  They both knew the accusations were baseless, smiled at the absurdity of the political class and our conversation moved on to the more interesting business at hand.

Otherwise, the police and the security services have been on the fringes of my existence. They pop up at the house every few years to deal with the aftermath of some local incident and then they depart. I rather like it that way.  As no doubt do they.

Last Monday night, we had the novel experience of being drawn into the brave new world of intelligence policing.  This is the theory that takes the police out of the community, except as narks reporting on the coming and going of a mobile, probably unmanageable, population.  Day to day, we hardly ever see a copper, despite a police station being within walking distance of our house.  We certainly never see them appear as the drunks go singing merrily down our street at two in the morning.   Yet here were four of our local finest flagging down cars on a Tunbridge Wells back street and asking a lot of questions.

Coming back from some schlock horror film about Satanists in the Deep South, eager to get home, there we were, free-born Britons, held up with a number of others, to be asked questions about our vehicle, ordered to present documents within seven days and getting the obligatory damn fool question about ethnicity.  This, we were told, was, indeed,  'intelligence-based policing' and was apparently related to car theft in the area.  My wife's suspicion was that this sort of exercise was really about getting us used to having to produce some sort of identity card.  The Government dearly wants to introduce such a card and knows that most of us inwardly can only see the point of them for the criminals and not for us.

In fact, the police were, to remind ourselves of an ancient excuse, only obeying orders in inconveniencing both us and our fellow motorists.  Most coppers are probably getting fairly world-weary about the continual state of panic in the Home Office (our Interior Ministry) and its madcap schemes for trying to bring order to a collapsing social infrastructure. Generally, they do their job, we accept that they do it in good faith and we middle classes then try to get on with our lives.

But my wife's instinctive comment is interesting, especially as, within the following week, the Head of UK Counter-Terrorism lost his temper in public with the manipulation of the news agenda by unnamed persons widely assumed to be from within the Government.  He appeared to suggest that the spin doctors and policy wonks at the centre of government were undermining public trust in legitimate authority internally, much as they had done in the good faith of Government foreign policy.

The issue of trust is important because, without trust ,authority soon loses legitimacy.  Paranoia about the state and its intentions is growing and it is hard to know whether it is justified or not.  Unlike the US, the UK has a political structure that permits a strong Leader with a complete hold over the legislature through the party machine not only to command and control a highly centralised executive but to pass laws that would bind the judiciary.  The Crown has limited means of resisting such a determined leader and the British public has no access to the weaponry and skills that would permit the sort of insurgency against tyranny that we might expect in the US Mid-West or Switzerland in the event of an attempted 'fascist' takeover. 

In practice, only tradition and custom stop tyranny in the UK so the intentions of politicians become of vital importance in a way that would not apply in the US.  President Bush might be regarded by some as intending bad things but, in fact, Congress, the Supreme Court and the right to bear arms are all material limits on his domestic power.

So should we Brits be alarmed?  Well, it seems that, despite these constitutional truths, some Americans are more alarmed than we are.  The radical chic Naomi Wolf produced an extensive article in the Guardian on April 24th in which she outlined 'ten steps to a fascist America' - http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2063979,00.html  I will not outline the ten steps, which were academically sound enough if somewhat alarmist, because you now have the reference to the article and you can read it yourself. 

What I am interested in is whether her ten steps can be used as a guide in assessing not only whether the US but also other Western liberal countries are slowly sliding down the road to dictatorship.  After all, before we get complacent, we should remind ourselves that in 1928 Germany was a liberal democracy and only six years later it was a dictatorship in which all the dissenting leadership were either murdered or in concentration camps.

So, I looked at her ten steps and counted each as ten points of 'tyranny value' in a wholly unscientific way in order that I might get to a 'percentage of tyranny' figure.  I also made the calculation situational - that is, how do things stack up in April 2007 in the UK, with a Government smashed to a bedrock of popular support but still with complete executive control of the State machinery (and indeed of its own Party machine).

Well, there were a full nine points out of ten on 'invoking a terrifying and external enemy". Fortunately, the British public do not believe a word of Government propaganda on this score but the administration clearly believes the nonsense that it spouts so a high score is in order.

As for the creation of a gulag, the British are merely complicit in the world of extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay.  Although liberal public opinion has forced it to back track somewhat, this did not come from the heart - so, call it five points.

But despite some nasty bits of work lurking inside our Special Branch (our proto-political police), we cannot be said to have a 'thug caste' (so just two points to cover the Specials).  On the other hand, intelligence policing, alongside the massive introduction of CCTV, ASBOs and the planned introduction of identity cards, is clearly a move towards an internal surveillance system - five points at this point in history and rising.

Are UK citizen's groups harassed in the UK?  In general, no.  The anti-war movement is broadly left free to protest so we suggest one point to cover the occasional attempts to ban the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir and to open up unnecessary populist debates about the hijab.

And what of arbitrary detention and release?  No, the rule of law seems to still stand but dissident Islamists are being returned to regimes with a poor record on torture and the Blairite eagerness to please the Americans on extradition is sending free-born Englishmen across the water to suffer serious incarceration in the sink-pit of the US prison system - three points.

Are key individuals being targeted?  Well, yes, they are although still at a low level.  There was an attempt to take out George Galloway politically and there has been a truly vengeful approach to dissident opinion within both the Labour Party and the State - two points.

Is the Press controlled?  Well, of course it is not controlled.  But the attempted manipulation of the news agenda is clearly intended and extensive - so we suggest a significant four points (although two of these points are down to the weakness of an editorial class whose inability to see what might come matches that of German trades unionists and churchmen in the late-1920s).

But there is no evidence that dissent in the UK (except at the very margin) is in any way credibly regarded as treason and the rule of law is not suspended (on the contrary, the judges are proving important checks on executive ambition)  - no points for tyranny here.

So, on our assessment of Naomi Wolf's ten points, we came up with 31 points out of our hundred for the UK in April 2007.  We are nearly one third of the way to dictatorship compared to the situation before 9/11 and certainly before Tony Blair came to power but we are not in a worse position than that.

Fortunately, the second two thirds are going to be a tough game for any proto-Mosleys to drive forward.  The British do not panic under attack, racism is never going to go mainstream, the argument against migration is rationally conducted and British bloody-mindedness may not extend to insurgency but it does extend to a libertarian preparedness to ignore authority when it is inconvenient.

This is why the next few months are rather critical.  A discredited administration is about to see a major change in leadership.  The situation is likely to be fixed at a 'one third tyranny' so long as New Labour retains power.  The worry must be that we will go all French on ourselves and accept a degree of tyranny as normal.  Perhaps this is what it means to become European - to permit the State a role in our lives far in excess of what we would accept customarily.

But wiser, perhaps more conservative, counsel (and bear in mind that I write from the centre-left) will have worked out that dealing with organised crime and terrorism requires public trust and that trust never comes from fear.  The success of intelligence-based policing depends on our rolling back the tyranny quotient to at least half its current level - and you can pick any fifteen out of the thirty one points to do this!

Given the profile of tyranny that we have identified, much of the problem would be solved simply by removing the panicky belief that we are engaged in a war on terror instead of a global police action and reasserting the rule of law in international affairs (where the Europeans are way ahead of the Anglo-Saxons.)  An editorial class that started asking more questions about how it is being manipulated would be helpful too.

When policemen stop you in the middle of the night nowadays, the natural instinct is to see them ambiguously - half our ally in the fight against crime and half the arm of the state in keeping us under control.  So, if they want us to trust them fully again, let us both see which way the political wind blows in the months to come.