‘Free’ content isn’t free

Monday 26 July 2010

More than two-fifths of people are willing to pay for access to websites they use frequently, according to a new global survey. In some parts of the world, the figure is as high as six out of ten. But – and it’s big but – the situation is very different in the UK. According to the research, which is part of KPMG’s annual ‘Consumers and Convergence’ survey, eighty-one per cent of UK web users would stop using a free site if it began to levy charges.

It’s been obvious for a while that there’s a particular problem in this country. Most British users of the web don’t care about how content gets onto sites and they don’t regard the process of putting it there as work. They have exactly the sense of entitlement that’s expressed in this survey, and some web users are quite aggressive about their ‘right’ to get what they want without paying.

There are historic reasons for this, chiefly the rush by people in the creative industries to use the web without thinking about a viable business model. Newspapers still charge for paper editions but most of them put their entire content on the web without charge, making consumers feel it’s something they have a right to in perpetuity.

This is crazy. If every reader walked into a newsagent each day and stole a copy of their favourite paper, it would go out of business. It couldn’t go on paying journalists to do their job, and that’s what is going to happen if the UK doesn’t become more grown-up about paying for access to web sites. In effect, the demand for ‘free’ content means that web users are expecting reporters to risk their lives in war zones like Afghanistan – but they’re not prepared to contribute a derisory amount towards the journalists’ wages or the cost of sending them there.

‘Free’ content may be free to web users, but it isn’t free to anyone else. That, it seems, is clearer in other parts of the world than it is in the UK. There’s an obvious need for education here, though it isn’t easy to see why so many people in this country expect journalists, authors and musicians to work for nothing.

Ed Miliband may soon be in No 10. Believe it

The instability of the governing coalition could fast-track Labour’s new leader to Downing Street

Independent on Sunday, 25 July 2010

Sixteen years ago last week, the Labour Party elected a new leader. It was a historic occasion, placing a youthful Tony Blair (he was 41) at the top of the party. Gordon Brown didn’t stand in the contest and neither did Robin Cook, giving Blair an easy victory over John Prescott and Margaret Beckett. The election was deemed a huge success, setting him on course to be the country’s next prime minister and supposedly putting an end to his power struggle with Gordon Brown.

In 2010, a very different kind of contest is taking place. The outcome isn’t obvious and the front-runner, David Miliband, could lose to his younger brother, Ed, on second preferences. For two months, all five candidates have been slogging up and down the country, speaking at hustings where they make the same arguments and answer the same questions. The hopefuls aren’t always able to turn up in person and sometimes party members get their “representatives” instead, which is a bit like going to see Abba and getting to watch a tribute band. Meanwhile emails and letters pour in from the candidates, and their campaigners are phoning members individually to ask how they intend to vote.

None of this is exactly catching fire in the media where the repetitive nature of the exercise makes it hard to report. When The Times filled its front page with pictures of David and Ed Miliband looking strained at a hustings in North London on Wednesday evening, I couldn’t help thinking that the headline – “Now it’s personal: leadership battle tests brotherly love to destruction” – was straight out of “reality” television; in a contest notably lacking in fireworks, Cain versus Abel was always going to be an easy storyline. There is concern among Labour insiders that the contest has pitched two brothers against each other, but the anxiety isn’t so much about the hustings as what might happen when the winner is announced in Manchester on 25 September.

Were Miliband D to lose to Miliband E, the former foreign secretary would have to make difficult decisions about his future. The Labour Party isn’t so awash with talent and experience that it can afford to lose such a senior figure from the front bench. But having to serve under a younger sibling is hardly a comfortable outcome for an ambitious politician. On Friday, David Miliband sensibly sought to shift the campaign from the personal to the political with an article in the Financial Times, where he accepted the necessity to cut the budget deficit but warned of the danger of “pulling stimulus” too early. It was Blairite to the core, repeating the message that business needn’t be frightened of a Labour government, and inadvertently confirmed the elder Miliband’s geekiness; if I were editing his campaign material, I’d put a red line through phrases like “maximising the multiplier effect of public services”.

My problem with the contest is that the only real choice is between four Oxbridge-educated men. (Diane Abbott is too divisive to be a serious contender.) Harriet Harman is doing a good job as acting leader. She’s the second woman to hold the post, following in the footsteps of Margaret Beckett in 1994, but Labour has yet to produce a woman candidate with sufficient status within the party to get the top job. It’s almost as if Labour regards women as mother substitutes, who are allowed to comfort the party in times of crisis but who step seamlessly into the background once the “real” leader emerges.

At least the party is finally having an election. If you cast your mind back to 1994, which is the last time Labour held a leadership contest, John Major was prime minister, the Channel tunnel opened, the Rwandan genocide began, Sweden voted to join the EU, Saddam Hussein was still in power and Take That had two No 1 hits. The world has changed a great deal since, but Labour’s managers thought they could get by perfectly well without asking members who they would like to lead the party.

In 2007, Brown was allowed to succeed Blair without facing a contest, despite the fact that he was manifestly unelectable – a point I made long before he got the job. It’s a worrying thing about political parties that they often can’t see what’s staring them in the face, and Labour’s unwieldy constitution gives too much power to big beasts like Brown. It’s difficult if not impossible to challenge a leader once he or she is in the job and Cabinet ministers risk losing everything if they call for change, a fact Brown understood all too well. David Miliband didn’t challenge Brown two summers ago when the then prime minister unleashed his attack dogs. Nor did he back the last-minute attempt by two former Cabinet ministers to force a leadership debate in January this year.

His supporters say that’s all in the past. They also say that the former foreign secretary is the only candidate who looks a credible leader of the country, which may or may not be true – I’m inclined to vote for Ed Miliband first, then David – but it does raise the important question of what this contest is really about. Sme commentators have already written it off, assuming that the public is so well disposed to the Lib-Con coalition that Labour is stuck in opposition; according to this analysis, the party is choosing a caretaker and it doesn’t really matter whether the outcome is Andy Burnham, Ed Balls or one of the Milibands.

They couldn’t be more wrong: the instability of the coalition is daily more apparent, with Nick Clegg’s gaffe about the Iraq war last week highlighting irreconcilable differences with his Tory partners. If I were David Cameron or George Osborne, I’d be having nightmares about the deputy prime minister’s gasp-making inability to think on his feet.

Then there is the coalition’s huge gamble on public sector cuts: if they bite too deeply, Lib Dem MPs will feel a great deal of heat from angry voters. If they work, the Tories may be tempted to break with Clegg and go for an early election, despite the promise to go on until 2015. Against this background, Labour might not have the luxury of five years to become electable again, even though the timing of the leadership contest is awful.

Political parties seldom make good decisions immediately after a defeat; the closest analogy is a woman leaving a hopeless relationship and suddenly having several plausible guys all trying to get dates. The Tories needed four attempts to get it right after 1997, but there are significant differences; Labour didn’t lose that badly in May, and a great deal of the party’s unpopularity was due to the unattractive personality of Gordon Brown.

There is always a tendency among political commentators to write Labour off, and on this occasion there’s the added spice of a subtext about sibling rivalry. But when party members start completing ballot forms early in September, the exercise will be much more significant than an episode of Big Brother. If things go badly for the coalition government, the Labour Party might well be choosing Britain’s next prime minister.

Having fun with the deputy prime minister (first in an occasional series)

Thursday 22 July 2010

Nick Clegg managed two faux-pas when he stood in for David Cameron at prime minister’s questions yesterday. First he described the Iraq war, which his Tory Coalition partners enthusiastically supported, as ‘illegal’. Then he wrongly announced the closure of Yarl’s Wood detention centre, forcing the Home Office to issue a correction. It reminded me of the following exchange in the House of Commons last month, which I can’t help feeling deserves a wider audience:

Grahame M. Morris (Easington, Lab): May I draw the Deputy Prime Minister’s attention to the “Crimewatch” most wanted list? Second on the list is one Michael Brown, wanted for defrauding £8 million from former Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards. He also donated £2 million in cash to the Lib Dems in 2005. Does the Deputy Prime Minister have any information about his whereabouts and if so will he call the City of London police or Crimestoppers in confidence on 0800 555 111?

The Deputy Prime Minister: No, interestingly enough I do not have any information on his whereabouts. If I did, I should of course be sure to pass it on. It is clear [Interruption.]

Mr Speaker: Order. This is very discourteous to the Deputy Prime Minister and I do not think that the public like it.

Sorry, Mr Bercow, but we do!

The Fight for Modernity

Literary Review, July 2010

Nomad: From Islam to America – A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilisations, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Simon & Schuster £12.99)

Family conflicts are hard to bear, especially when someone is faced with a choice between her beliefs and her parents. At the beginning of her new book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali visits her estranged father in a London hospital, where he is dying of leukaemia. He is unable to speak but clearly pleased to see her, smiling so much that ‘the warmth of his gaze’ radiates through the room. Their old arguments – about the arranged marriage she fled, and about Islam – are put to one side and the meeting provides some solace when he dies a week later.

Hirsi Ali’s attempts at reconciliation are far from over. Prompted by her cousin Magool, she gets the number of her mother’s mobile phone in Somalia. They talk about Hirsi Ali’s father and then the conversation takes just the turn she feared: ‘Do you pray and fast, and read the Quran, my daughter?’ her mother demands. Hirsi Ali tries to explain that the Quran does not appeal to her, and her mother flies into a rage: ‘Infidel! You have abandoned God and all that is good, and you have abandoned your mother. You are lost!’

Infidel is of course the title of Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, a hugely moving book in which she described growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya. Her nomadic childhood was caused by her father’s leading role in the Somali opposition, which forced him into exile and left his children in the care of their mother (the second of his three wives) and grandmother. It was the latter who, against her father’s wishes, insisted that Hirsi Ali should be subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice which she has denounced unequivocally.

Living in the US, where she moved after giving up her seat as an MP in the Dutch Parliament, she reconnects with her extended family and finds them ‘tragically unsteady on their feet. One has AIDS, another has been indicted for attempting to murder her husband, and a third sends all the money he makes back home to Somalia to feed the clan.’ Her conclusion is that while they live in the West, her relatives remain loyal to the tribe and to Islam: ‘They are permanent residents and citizens of the Western countries where they live, but their hearts and minds lie elsewhere’. This state of physical emigration while remaining emotionally elsewhere is one of the major themes of Hirsi Ali’s new book.

In particular, she identifies Islam as the brake which stops immigrants from embracing the values of the countries they have chosen to live in. Her criticisms of Islam are well-known and do not need rehearsing here, although there are insightful passages in Nomad where she describes the mental torment of pious Muslims living in secular cultures. When Hirsi Ali visits her young half-sister Sahra in London, she sees this conflict played out in front of her eyes: Sahra is deeply religious and wears the black robe called the jilbab; she wants to become a lawyer but stops going to English lessons because she would have to mix with men.

It isn’t hard to see why Islamism – the political form of Islam which combines 20^th century revolutionary politics with a literal interpretation of the Quran – appeals to Muslims who find themselves in a condition of perpetual inner turmoil. Its ideology is as repellent as fascism or communism, but like them it provides certainty and a structure which appeals to angry, self-doubting young people. Even so, I think Hirsi Ali is right to go further and challenge elements of Islam itself, notably its misogyny and its denial of individual autonomy. I’m not a cultural relativist and I don’t have any problem with her critique of the veil in its various forms, although I think her account of Western feminism veers towards caricature. It also fails to acknowledge the stand some of us have taken on the issue.

Where I part company with Hirsi Ali’s analysis is her insistence that we are witnessing a clash of civilisations. A power struggle, certainly, but the two forces opposing each other are not monolithic Islamic culture in the East versus civilised Christian culture in the West. What is being fought over is modernity, and that’s a conflict in which believers often find themselves on the same side. There are plenty of religious fanatics in the West, and some courageous secularists who would like to modernise their countries in the East.

Modernity is based on principles of secular public space and individual human rights, ideas that don’t coexist easily with the misogyny, homophobia and clerical control at the heart of monotheistic religions. Indeed one of the most bizarre elements of Hirsi Ali’s new book is her call for the Catholic church in Europe to go head to head with Islam; despite being an atheist, she wants to encourage ‘Christian schools, Christian volunteers, the Christian message’. Patriarchal control systems are the problem, not the solution, and I’m surprised she hasn’t learned as much from her painful quarrels with her family.

Hirsi Ali’s demand that Western critics of Islam form an alliance with the Vatican – currently reeling under the weight of allegations of child abuse – totally undermines her professed admiration for the values of the Enlightenment. Part memoir, part call to arms, Nomad is a confused and incoherent book which will dismay many of her admirers. Hirsi Ali is a brave woman who has given up her religion, but on this evidence she’s managed to hang on to some deeply conservative values.

Heels show the humanity burkas lack

Independent on Sunday, 18 July 2010

When a Romanian minister brought flood victims a gift of stilettos, she was giving them more than shoes

Until last week I had never even heard of Elena Udrea, but now I’d like to give her a big hug. Ms Udrea is a tourism minister in Romania, where there have been heavy rains, and she turned up in the flood-stricken town of Saucesti with 20 tonnes of aid – and boxes of high-heeled shoes. She also brought chocolate, which made me warm to her even more. I just hope I encounter someone like her if I am ever caught up in a natural disaster.

A few weeks after the earthquake in Haiti, I was looking at photographs of a family living in the most dreadful conditions and there, in the middle of their makeshift home, was a cat. You might argue that this family had enough problems without looking after a pet, but I think that such impulses show human beings at their best. We are creatures with imagination – which is what Ms Udrea’s gift of shoes was intended to stimulate – and a need to connect with other living entities, human and otherwise.

Naturally this brings me to another event which happened last week, which is the vote by French lawmakers to ban the wearing of the burqa in public places. The other day I found myself standing next to a woman wearing one of these ludicrous garments in a London supermarket. All I could see were her eyes, darting across the vegetables in front of us, and it was quite an effort not to burst out laughing. Was she anticipating an assault by rampant carrots? Did she feel threatened by the display of naked lettuce? I am not fond of Tesco, which is where I happened to be, but I’m also not aware of the staff having a reputation for rape and pillage.

I’m not surprised that there is massive public support in France for banning the burqa (and, by the way, to punish men who force women and girls to wear it). It’s expected that the ban will be approved in the upper house, the Senate, in September; only one deputy voted against it in the lower house, although most socialists and communists abstained. That doesn’t mean I think it’s the right thing to do, and my guess is that when it becomes law there will be a parade of burqa-wearing martyrs. We’ll see television footage of “modest” Muslim women being marched home by French police, and I have no doubt that Islamists around the world will love every minute of it.

Political Islam is always on the lookout for opportunities to present Muslims as victims of evil Western governments, despite its own failure to develop a consistent critique of human rights abuses; Islamists will campaign for the right of women to wear burqas, but not for their right to wear Western clothes or for the abolition of barbaric punishments such as stoning. That’s why I think the French vote is a political mistake, even though I sympathise with some – not all – of the impulses behind it. The chief problem with the burqa isn’t that it’s unFrench or unBritish; the most cogent objection is that it’s inhuman, no matter where it’s worn in the world.

At the same time, the debate about it tends to be curiously ahistorical and divorced from class. When I arrived at a Muslim wedding in a palace in Beirut a few years ago I was momentarily taken aback, but that was because my outfit came from Portobello market in west London and all the other women were wearing Valentino or Prada. These women were Shia Muslims but they would no more think about covering their faces with black cloth than I would, and I expect they’d have been absolutely thrilled if someone turned up with gifts of high heels in the darkest days of the Lebanese civil war.

It is predominantly Muslim women from poor backgrounds who wear the burqa or the niqab, just as poor Catholic women in Ireland used to dress head-to-toe in black. The natural sequence of events is that the custom begins to wane with the emergence of a prosperous middle class, but political Islam is a conscious attempt to halt that process.

It moved up a gear with the Iranian revolution, which forced women into chadors against their will and ignited a contest with some Sunni Muslims to see who could produce the most pleasure-hating form of Islam. So far it’s been a close call as Shia Iran competes with Sunni Saudi Arabia – don’t even get me started on the Afghan Taliban – to exercise the most paranoid forms of control over women’s bodies.

In Western countries, Muslim women often say they have chosen to wear the niqab or burqa of their own free will. That’s true in some cases, but I’m not convinced that they’re being completely frank about the reasons behind the choice. Face-covering isn’t prescribed by mainstream Islam, and I have been to plenty of Muslim countries where women cover just their hair or don’t cover their heads and faces at all; interpretations of Islam which demand face-veils are linked either to tribal customs which pre-date Islam or puritan sects such as Wahabism, which are a fairly late invention.

There is nothing new about the conflict between puritanism and the desire to celebrate the human body – it has gone on throughout history – but in the case of the burqa we should be clear that the motivation for wearing it is almost wholly political.

A woman who walks down a street in Paris or Nice or London in a burqa is signalling several things, none of them life-affirming or friendly. She is expressing suspicion of people she doesn’t know, perhaps even hostility, and a rejection of the relaxed attitudes to the body which characterise modern secular culture. She’s also embodying a series of paradoxes, including the fact that in western Europe the supposedly “modest” burqa is as eye-catching as a bikini, and perhaps more likely to draw “unwanted” attention. Here’s another: a British Muslim who wears the niqab once boasted to me that she kept it on while giving birth, conjuring up a hilarious scenario in which she was more worried about NHS doctors catching sight of her nose than her vagina.

This is preposterous – so preposterous that it isn’t worth legislating against. Frankly, I’d much rather live in a modern country where flood victims are offered stilettos than one where they’re expected to scuttle about in grim black cloaks. In the historic struggle between burqas and high heels, I’m firmly on the side of the shoes.

We are a Muslim, Please

by Zaiba Malik

Independent, Friday 16 July 2010

Zaiba Malik grew up in Bradford, in the heart of the Pakistani community which gave the city one of its nicknames, Bradistan. Her father prayed five times a day and she stayed up with him throughout the night during Ramadan, reading the Koran. At school, she was the only girl in her class from a Pakistani family. She left home, went to university and became a journalist.

Her memoir describes a world already disappearing into social histories. The Pakistani migrants of the 1960s were far from well-off and Malik’s father worked ten-hour shifts at a textile mill. Malik lists the narrow confines of a home life she felt unable to talk about at school: there were no holidays, with the exception of her father’s annual pilgrimage to Mecca; an elderly, disabled uncle lived with the family; and the only time Malik went out at weekends was to visit WH Smith with her father.

Growing up involved a struggle between irreconcilable identities, a process she describes with humour and insight. “I knew I was a Muslim long before I knew I was British,” she writes. “And I knew I was Pakistani long before I knew I was English.”

The family spoke Punjabi at home, shopped at halal butchers and treated authority figures with exaggerated respect. The only visitors to the house were “men with baggy white trousers and little caps and women with baggy white trousers and headscarves”. Older women known as “the Aunties” policed the community, expressing disapproval if they spotted someone’s son or daughter adopting non-Pakistani habits.

Since 7/7, there has been a spate of memoirs about growing up in Muslim communities. This is one of the better examples, and it vividly conveys the secure but stifling atmosphere Malik left behind when she went to college. Her re-assessment of her faith predates 7/7 – it was inspired by her arrest and brutal interrogation when making a documentary in Bangladesh – but she is also motivated by anger towards the four young men who killed 52 strangers in London five years ago. The book includes a letter to the suicide-bomber Shehzad Tanweer, born in the same area of Bradford as Malik.

Obviously the book is about Islam and its role in the lives of 1960s immigrants and their children. Yet there is another dimension to Malik’s experience she barely touches upon, and that is class. My northern working-class family did not have holidays, regarded authority figures with awe and assumed the right to direct children’s lives. Conservative social values are not exclusive to Muslim families. Immigrants have always struggled to make sense of the competing claims of different cultures until the emergence of a successful new middle-class resolves the conflict. British-born Islamists, such as the 7/7 bombers, have consciously tried to halt that process, but it is to thoughtful people like Malik that the future belongs.  

(Heinemann £12.99)

Don’t ban the burka. Laugh at it

Thursday 15 July 2010

When the French Parliament voted to ban the burka in public places earlier this week, a great many people in this country will have wondered why we can’t do the same. It’s an inherently ludicrous garment, sending out a series of messages about the wearer: that she’s an extremist, attention-seeking, suspicious of strangers and hostile to the outside world.

One of the paradoxes of the burka (and the niqab) is that the wearer claims to be modest, but is actually drawing maximum attention to herself. The burka looks horrible and it denies the shared humanity that’s so important among strangers. I often smile at and strike up conversations with people I don’t know, but a woman in a burka sends out a message saying ‘keep away’.

There’s a lie at the heart of the burka. The woman standing next to me in the supermarket the other day knew she wouldn’t be any more at risk if she wore normal clothes, but she chose to pretend that her ‘modesty’ needed all those layers of extra protection. Her religion doesn’t require it and the society she chooses to live in is bewildered by it, so it’s perfectly reasonable to regard wearing the burka as a rather childish provocation.   

That’s precisely why, I think, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be provoked into an over-reaction. I’m sure that Islamists are secretly delighted by the French ban, which gives them another opportunity to present themselves as victims. It’s fine to say that the burka can’t be worn in specific circumstances – in jobs such as teaching, say, or when a woman is giving evidence in court – but a total ban takes it too seriously.

The burka is ridiculous. In the modern world, we don’t ban things that are ridiculous. But we can and should laugh at them.

In the face of narcissism, the police should stick to policing

Independent on Sunday, 11 July 2010

Since I was neither in Northumberland last week nor planning to visit the area, I’m not sure why I needed minute-by-minute updates on the hunt for Raoul Moat. In the week between his first shootings and the moment he killed himself in the early hours of yesterday morning, Moat gave every appearance of revelling in the huge manhunt he’d sparked off. For several days, ever-more dramatic pictures emerged from Rothbury, the village in Northumberland where the former nightclub bouncer was last seen, as armed police in helmets patrolled the streets and helicopters circled above the surrounding district.

The authorities have to respond to threats to the public, especially after Derrick Bird’s rampage in Cumbria last month, but the response of Northumbria police was puzzling from the outset. Why did they apparently fail to act on a warning from Durham Prison, from which Moat was released 10 days ago, that he might pose a danger to his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart? What ended in a six-hour stand-off and Moat’s suicide in fields outside Rothbury began as a classic incident of domestic violence, in which an angry man first made threats to an ex-partner and then carried them out: Ms Stobbart was shot and wounded in Gateshead and her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, was shot dead.

The police’s handling of the warning is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, but the following day Moat shot a traffic policeman, PC David Rathband, in Newcastle. As the manhunt got under way, Northumbria Police issued a curious statement, assuring the public that Moat posed a danger mainly to police officers. This seems to have been based on a rambling letter from Moat, who said he was declaring war on the police and boasted about kidnapping two men after the first shootings in Gateshead. Why the police placed so much faith in a suspect’s boastful claims is another question that needs to be addressed, especially as the two “kidnapped” men were later arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder. And why didn’t officers monitor his associates more closely, including a friend he returned to see after earlier using him to deliver a letter?

By Thursday, Moat was being treated, rightly, as a danger to the public. But suspects who bombard the authorities with messages generally have attention-seeking personalities, and it’s not hard to imagine the effect on such people of endless press statements and mawkish public appeals. ‘Do not leave your children with distressing memories of their father. You still have a future’, Detective Chief Superintendent Neil Adamson declared in one of his appeals to Moat. I’m afraid you wouldn’t have had to be the most cerebral of fugitives to work out that that future was likely to involve a long stretch at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but worse was to come.

In a horribly misplaced attempt at empathy, Northumbria police circulated a note among Moat’s friends which contained the following gem: ‘You told us how angry you were and you also told us that you were sorry that Sam had been so seriously hurt. We understand how personal and important these things are to you’. Are Northumbria police moonlighting as counsellors? Would they like suspects to come in and ‘work on their issues’? By the end of last week, what had begun as tragedy – one person dead, two wounded – had descended into gruesome farce. And a weak but narcissistic criminal had been afforded the brief satisfaction of spending his final days as public enemy number one.

Rapist regime threatens woman with death by stoning

Wednesday 7 July 2010

The adult children of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman who has been sentenced to death by stoning, have drawn attention to this barbaric execution method which is still in use in the Islamic Republic of Iran. If the sentence is carried out, Ms Ashtiani will be wrapped in a white shroud, buried up to her chest and pelted with stones chosen to cause severe injury, not to kill outright.

‘It can be more than 30 minutes before she is dead or unconscious’, according to Ahmad Fatemi of the International Committee Against Stoing and the Death Penalty. Ms Ahstiani, 43, was arrested five years ago and has already been given 99 lashes after being convicted of having an ‘illicit’ relationship with two men. Her son Sajad, who is now 22, was forced to watch as the sentence was carried out.

Two other women in the same prison as Ms Ashtiani have been sentenced to death by stoning. They are victims of a regime which manages to be simultaneously absurd – last week the Ministry of Culture published illustrations of acceptable hair styles for men to help them avoid ‘decadent’ Western styles – and savagely intolerant of minor transgressions of its puritanical interpretation of Islam. It also uses rape as a means of terrorising the democratic opposition, as victims of the wave of repression which followed last year’s Presidential election have begun to attest.

Anyone who feels inclined to give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the benefit of the doubt should read Death to the Dictator! Witnessing Iran’s Election and the Crippling of the Islamic Republic by Afsaneh Moqadam (Bodley Head). This book, which has had to be written under a pseudonym, tells the harrowing story of a young man who was imprisoned after the 2009 protests. Almost unbearable to read at some points, it recounts how he was subjected to brutal multiple rapes before he was dumped from a car in Tehran, almost psychologically destroyed and barely able to walk.

These are the victims we hear about. Thousands of others never come to our attention. Five people were stoned to death in Iran between 2006 and 2008, according to Amnesty International, despite a supposed moratorium imposed in 2002. In Ms Ashtiani’s case, her sentence is due to be reviewed in four days’ time and her family are pleading for a reprieve. ‘Is the world so cruel that it can watch this catastrophe and do nothing about it?’ her children have asked in an open letter.

Human rights organisations have called on the Iranian government not to carry out the sentence, and activists are using the internet to create an international campaign on Ms Ashtiani’s behalf. But no one should be in any doubt that Iran is one of the world’s worst human rights abusers: a brutal theocracy whose leaders are prepared to use any means at all to maintain their grip on power.

Armchair politics – as good as a seat in the House

Independent on Sunday, 4 July 2010

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer Liberal Democrat. The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, last week launched an experiment in democracy, aimed at creating a “more open and less intrusive” society. He inveighed against laws that “interfere in everyday life” and asked you (I use the word loosely) to help him by posting ideas on a “Your Freedom” website. He invited “you” not just to identify laws that need changing or abolishing, but to get involved in making actual government policy. “You” certainly made the most of it.

Restoring the death penalty was popular, especially for drug dealers. “Third time cought [sic] dealing compolsary [sic] hanging’, as one concerned citizen phrased it. So was beating up and even executing burglars, with one correspondent noting that “if you hadn’t attacked me you wouldn’t have gotten hurt”. Immigration was another popular subject, although the individual who wanted to “stop immigration from Muslim countries” ran into a bit of trouble with the site’s moderator. “Stop deleting my post and allow people to comment and vote on it,” he (or she) remarked crossly.

One of the earliest posts wrote lyrically about “life as it was”, fulminating against the Human Rights Act and “the ridiculous idea that we pay prisoners companstion [sic] in jail”. Sadly, a number of individuals failed to take the Deputy Prime Minister seriously, demanding such things as the right to marry a horse and an end to the ban on slaughtering domestic livestock at home. One correspondent called for a ban on necro-bestiality because “I don’t want to have to worry about what some pervert might do to my cat when it dies”.

This is e-democracy in all its glory, a Lib Dem variation on the e-petitions people were encouraged to post on the Downing Street website (only to be totally ignored) under Labour. It’s a species of populism that was roadtested – to destruction, some of us believed – in 2003, when the Labour MP Stephen Pound offered to sponsor a Bill based on a vote among listeners to Radio 4’s Today programme. A Bill allowing people to use any means to fight off burglars won. That was before e-democracy really took off, offering an irresistible forum to spout all sorts of rubbish without the bother of going down to the local pub.

To be fair, not every idea posted is reactionary, satirical or illiterate – just quite a few. As an experiment, I posted one myself, suggesting that civil partnerships should be open to heterosexuals, but I couldn’t get back on the site to find out how it popular it was. I’d actually rather write to my MP, but then I’m one of the people – there are more of us than Clegg thinks – who still believes in representative democracy. It’s fashionable to hate MPs, but few people get into Parliament without a coherent political philosophy, amended over time, and some notion of how legislation works.

“What I find especially exciting is that, now we have got the ball rolling, the debate is totally out of the Government control”, Clegg declared. So what was the point of electing a new one to run the country only two months ago? The Deputy Prime Minister has even promised that the “best suggestions” will be put into practice, although he didn’t explain who’d have the final say. Either he’ll have to ignore thousands of posts, infuriating people who believed his promise that they are now in charge, or we will find ourselves living in a very peculiar type of society: like Saudi Arabia, with public executions and convicted drug dealers being birched on roundabouts. Nothing very liberal or democratic about that.

Crime novels roundup

Sunday Times, 4 July 2010

A distinct sense of paranoia runs through the novels in Joan Smith’s selection of the best recent crime writing

There are some moments in history when being a detective isn’t the wisest career choice. Stalin’s Russia is a case in point, especially in 1936 when purges are everyday events and another world war is on the horizon. Ordinary police officers live in fear of cases that might be “political” and attract the attention of Stalin’s feared secret police, but the mutilated corpse of a woman in a disused church doesn’t obviously fall into that category. Captain Alexei Dmitriyevich Korolev, veteran of the Polish front and protagonist of William Ryan’s The Holy Thief, is horrified by the woman’s injuries but has no idea how much trouble the murder is about to cause him.

Ryan’s first detective novel confidently re-creates a paranoid society where mutual suspicion is the norm. Korolev’s colleague, “Knuckles” Mendeleyev, has disappeared after being denounced by a traffic cop for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda, and his accuser now sits at his desk. When Korolev arrives after an early-morning meeting with a colonel in the secret police, the new man immediately accuses him of being late: “It’s not what the party expects. It’s my duty to raise it at the Works Council.”

Such exchanges powerfully convey the atmosphere of Moscow in the 1930s, and the plot focuses on a murky aspect of state policy: the government’s willingness to sell icons and other artefacts from disused churches to wealthy overseas buyers. Korolev gets his first inkling of trouble when he discovers that the dead woman is foreign, and seems to have been involved in a struggle for possession of one of the Orthodox church’s most treasured icons. Some readers may find the violence hard to stomach, but The Holy Thief is an absorbing and assured debut.

A different kind of paranoia suffuses Argentina in Guillermo Orsi’s No-One Loves a Policeman, translated by Nick Caistor. Dazzling and bewildering, the novel is set in 2001 as the country heads for bankruptcy. Pablo Martelli stopped being a policeman a long time ago, leaving a force nicknamed the “National Shame” for a lonely life selling bathroom fittings. “Five years ago, when I lost the last person I cared about, I vowed never again to answer the telephone after midnight,” he declares. But he breaks his own rule, taking a late-night call from a friend in a village six hours south of Buenos Aires.

The friend needs help, but by the time Martelli finishes the long drive, it’s too late. Corpses pile up, apparently the work of a serial killer, and Martelli is trapped in a byzantine plot involving corrupt cops, 1970s revolutionaries and an enigmatic woman who dances the tango. Orsi’s mordant, reluctant detective is definitely a one-off.

The highly regarded Peter James tries something unusual in Dead Like You, in which Detective Superintendent Roy Grace searches for a brutal rapist. The novel is set in Brighton but based on a real case, the “Rotherham Shoe Man” who raped more than 20 women (and stole their shoes) in the 1980s. When two women are assaulted in the same week, Grace realises that the cases are similar to an unsolved series of rapes that ended with a murder in 1997. One of the best things about this novel is its acknowledgment of the impact of rape on victims and the changing attitudes of the cops who have to investigate it. James is to be commended for producing an insider’s view of a rape investigation. This is a gripping novel about a desperately serious subject.

 
Karin Fossum has been described as “the most important female writer of foreign crime fiction at work today”. The Norwegian novelist writes spare prose with elliptical dialogue, and her latest novel is no exception. Bad Intentions, translated by Charlotte Barslund, has an edgy opening scene in which three young men inexplicably row out into the middle of a lake on a cold September night. Only two return and they agree not to report the “disappearance” of their friend — who was being treated in a mental hospital following a nervous breakdown — until the next morning.

Fossum’s Inspector Sejer doesn’t believe the official explanation that the missing man committed suicide, and he proceeds to place the friends under subtle psychological pressure. This is a battle of wits, conducted with chilly intensity and an unsettling sense of menace.

The Swedish novelist Hakan Nesser has created a very different kind of detective: Inspector Van Veeteren is eccentric, impulsive and unable to distance himself from the crimes he has to investigate. In The Inspector and Silence, translated by Laurie Thompson, Van Veeteren takes on a religious sect led by a charismatic charlatan, Oscar Yellinek. A girl has gone missing from the organisation’s summer camp, and neither Yellinek nor any of his creepy female acolytes has any intention of co-operating with the police. The sect preys on damaged people, and Van Veeteren’s humanity is severely tested by the case, but he remains grimly determined to discover who is targeting girls at the spooky camp.

Nicola Upson’s Two for Sorrow is the third in a series of novels built around the Golden Age crime writer Josephine Tey. As the book opens, Tey is writing about two women hanged in Holloway prison 30 years earlier for killing babies. But her research is interrupted by the horrific murder of a seamstress who turns out to have a connection with one of the hanged women. Leaving behind the hectic rural setting of the second novel in the series, Two for Sorrow is curiously touching and psychologically compelling.

Sofi Oksanen lifts the lid on Soviet imperialism

The Times, 26 June 2010

It is a chapter of history that’s little known in the West: how the tiny Baltic states found themselves, at the end of the Second World War, under a brutal Soviet occupation. Now a novel about the Russian occupation of Estonia has taken the country by storm, threatening to bring into the open secrets that have been undisturbed for half a century.

So sensitive is this subject that it comes as no surprise to discover that the author, Sofi Oksanen, lives in Finland and is Finnish-Estonian; she is a playwright as well as a novelist, and Purge had its first outing as a play that was produced at the National Theatre in Helsinki.

At 33, Oksanen is a literary phenomenon; she has won every main literary award in Finland, has been translated into 28 languages and was named Estonian “Person of the Year” in 2009. As if the Soviet occupation of Estonia were not sufficiently explosive material for a novel, Oksanen has linked it to a shameful feature of contemporary history; while her mid-20th-century characters endure political re-education and deportation to camps in Russia, their grandchildren are vulnerable (literally, in one case) to the pimps and gangsters who have made fortunes selling women’s bodies since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

If the connection initially seems tenuous, perhaps even sensational, Oksanen writes with such force that it’s possible to give her the benefit of the doubt until her purpose becomes clear. Ideologies come and go but Oksanen sees them as excuses, political cover for material greed and lust for power that inflict terrible wounds on human beings. This is an unusually tough novel, and Oksanen’s handling of rape scenes almost 50 years apart reflects the very different sensibilities — a shamed silence in one case, an almost pornographic openness in the other — of the two periods.

The novel’s main characters are an elderly Estonian woman named Aliide Truu and a young woman called Zara who turns up unexpectedly on her doorstep, speaking Estonian with a Russian accent. The year is 1992: Estonia is free again and Aliide is living alone in the village house where she was born. Constantly at work in her kitchen, where she bottles and cans produce from her own garden, she is a parody of a rural housewife. But this is no Baltic garden of Eden; Aliide is plagued by a blowfly that repeatedly tries to get into the house.

The symbolism may be a little heavy-handed but Aliide is under siege from Nature and local tearaways alike; her first reaction on seeing Zara collapsed in a heap in the garden is to leave her there. Even when she realises that the girl has been badly beaten, Aliide allows her into the house only reluctantly, plotting all the time to send her on her way. There is no meeting of minds and little sympathy from the older woman, whose slight thaw towards her unwanted guest is expressed not in words but in traditional offerings from her store cupboard. Zara is just as wary, claiming to have run away from a violent husband while she is actually trying to escape from Russian sex-traffickers.

But Zara knows something that Aliide doesn’t: the two women are related and Zara has the evidence, an old photograph of Aliide with her sister, Zara’s grandmother, who was deported to Russia in 1949. On being shown the photograph, Aliide tells a practised lie: “I don’t have a sister”.

When that story collapses, something just as ugly emerges; Aliide tells Zara that her grandmother was a thief, a traitor and an enemy of the State. No longer obliged to parrot Soviet propaganda, Aliide still has so much invested in her version of the past that she cannot get out of the habit: “I was good, and so was my husband, Martin. He was a Party organiser. From an old Estonian Communist family, not like those opportunists that came later.”

The truth behind this façade is a story of jealousy, thwarted love and multiple betrayals, in which the paranoid political atmosphere of the 1940s came close to destroying Aliide. She survived, but it emerges that even she does not appreciate the full cost or extent to which she was betrayed by those closest to her. Her unrequited passion for her brother-in-law, an Estonian nationalist wanted by the Russians, has been the driving force of her life; it is also the cause of the terrible suffering endured in Estonia and Russia by Zara’s grandmother and mother, creating the conditions that lead to her own exploitation by Russian gangsters.

This is a heavy responsibility for a single character to bear and it sometimes feels as though Oksanen’s imagination cannot quite face the consequences, leaving key moments in the relationship between Aliide and Zara undescribed. The novel’s short, intense scenes hint at its origins in the theatre, and a startling series of revelations — some of them contained in secret- police files that appear near the end — veers occasionally towards melodrama.

That said, it is clear that Oksanen’s chief characters have gone far beyond guilt and shame, leaving behind troubling questions about the long-term impact of occupation, torture and deliberate cruelty. This is not a book about redemption and after such a long silence it may be that the history of the period, during which the Nazis were driven out of the Baltic states and the Communists instituted a savage purge of collaborators, requires frank and unsentimental treatment.

Purge is a flawed, brilliant piece of work that does not easily relinquish its grip on the reader’s imagination.

Purge, by Sofi Oksanen, trans Lola Rogers (Atlantic, £12.99; 400pp)

New rights for rapists, but not for women