The Good Gamergater

Gamergate, depending on who you listen to, is either a rabidly misogynistic terror disorganisation, or a glorious revolutionary movement, the last bastion of sanity and fairness in a fundamentally corrupt industry. Of course, neither of these is completely true, and in fact I don’t think it’s really possible to make a similar statement which holds true about the whole of Gamergate. There are some absolutely despicable people claiming to be part of Gamergate, and using it to further their absolutely despicable objectives. But there are also, and I truly believe this, Gaters who genuinely want to effect change and make gaming better for everyone.

To be clear, though, I don’t think GG is a force for good, and I don’t think the ‘good’ objectives espoused by some of its members can realistically be achieved alongside the harassment, misogyny, transphobia, and everything else that most people have seen time and time again when they read about Gamergate. I don’t want to use this as a space to debate whether people doing ‘bad’ stuff are real Gamergaters, and thus whether or not those ‘bad’ objectives are true components of Gamergate. The important point is that almost everyone outside of Gamergate *thinks* they are representative of GG aims – that’s why we’re outside Gamergate!

Really, this is the fundamental problem of a movement with anonymous membership and no official spokesperson. GG became famous when it went after Zoe Quinn for allegedly sleeping with journalists to obtain a good review for her game. What I imagine is that the supporters this attracted ranged from those genuinely concerned about a possible ethical breach, through those angry at women, feminism and social justice in the gaming industry, up to those who just enjoy a fight and are willing to say anything to provoke a response. Each of these saw GG as a way of achieving their own personal objective(s), and as a nebulous organisation there’s nobody to stop them. There’s nobody official to say “This isn’t what we stand for”, and so while individuals do say that, there’s no way for those external to GG to decide who to listen to.

Now I realise that being leaderless and anonymous does have it’s own advantages and I’m not necessarily saying GG should start holding elections or whatever. What I *am* saying is that I really don’t think any ‘good’ objectives can be achieved while attached to the bad ones. I do think there are Gaters who take a similar political position to me: women in games is good, harassment and misogyny and racism and homophobia are bad. What has happened is that those pro-GG who only want ethical journalism look at the movement and say “Yes, there are bad gamergaters, but we can still be a force for good”. I look at it and say “Yes, there are good gamergaters, but it’s primarily a force for bad”.

And that’s really the crux of it. Whether or not you support GG largely comes down to whether you think journalistic integrity is sufficient reward to counterbalance all the terrible stuff done in the name of GG, and also whether you think anything good can be achieved while the harassers and misogynists and exploitationary right-wingers are still doing harassment and misogyny and exploitation in GG’s name. I honestly don’t.

The additional, more complex problem is that the Gaters who tirelessly repeat the mantra “it’s about ethics in gaming journalism” are enabling the insalubrious aspects of GG, whether they believe what they’re saying or not. By defending Gamergate, they are defending those who use it to do bad stuff as well as good. To my mind the most important thing for those with good intentions to do is distance themselves from the others. I mean, most of us who are pro-ethics already have! Argue on the actual issues rather than using a disparate mob who provide strength in numbers at the cost of any kind of unified direction. Make a hashtag #ethicsinjournalism or something, instead of one coined by a famous misogynist to attack a specific individual.

The bottom line is this: pretty much everyone hates Gamergate, whether you think that’s fair or not. I don’t expect Gaters to listen to me or use my advice – I’m just another nobody gamer. But this is why I don’t and cannot support Gamergate, despite supporting their loftiest ideals. It’s just too tainted.

On Political Correctness and Farting in Lifts

Way back in the apocalyptic turmoil we refer to now only as “2012”, I wrote about Four Good Things the tabloid media has persuaded people are Four Bad Things. One of those Four Good Things was ‘political correctness’, but if I’m totally honest, political correctness has been seen as a Bad Thing for a lot longer than the tabloid media has proclaimed it so. There are large swathes of the population for whom Fox News and the Daily Mail are simply confirming existing biases rather than creating new ones; those biases being that political correctness is an insidious lawbook imposed on sensible people by the PC Brigade or the Thought Police or the Feminist Cabal or the Homosexual Lobby or whatever other mythical organisation the right is blaming today.

But I digress! You clicked for farting and all you got was serious words about boring stuff, so let me get to the hook a professional writer would probably have put in the first line: Proclaiming Yourself to be Politically Incorrect is like being Proud that you FART in Lifts! See, I did ‘fart’ in capitals, just for you. And What Happens Next Will Blow Your Mind*, as they say.

So what made me come back to political correctness after a two year hiatus? In short: my masochistic obsession with reading the comments section. In roughly equal length: this article on not using the word ‘retarded’ as an insult. I was, coincidentally, thinking just yesterday about how being PC is really just a broader version of saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and so seeing the comments under that piece was a Sign from the e-God (thanks, Al) that I should finally sit down and explain a metaphor** which has been rattling round in my head for ages.

The top-rated comments (excluding those which say “What about mechanical devices? LOL im so lonely) include a range of anti-PC statements, including:

I do not support enforced political correctness regardless of how distasteful the words are

Is there anything that doesn’t offend Americans?

People need to lighten the heck up and stop being so easily offended by WORDS. Seriously. If your panties get all in a bunch over a WORD… your priorities are way effed up.

Only weak-minded people who value what others think over their own self opinion are hurt by being called any name

And so on. The article basically just says “It’s not good to call people retarded”, and yet it attracts vast numbers of people who consider this to be a ban on words, knee-jerk offence-taking, or a symptom of a wider rot in modern society. Ignoring the ridiculous leap which translates “please be aware that using this word is hurtful” into “you are no longer permitted to use this word”, the basic sentiment of the comments is that PC has gone ‘mad’, and that there is no need to discuss these things and that the authors are proud to be politically incorrect.  Well, they’re wrong.

Let’s revisit what the activities disparagingly referred to as ‘political correctness’ are actually trying to achieve. The intention is, primarily through language, to reduce the mainly unintentional harm we do to others on a daily basis. Despite what the commenters above think, words do harm people, especially when they’re used multiple times a day from all directions. The concept of micro-aggressions has been around for about 40 years, and can be summarised as:

social exchanges in which a member of a dominant culture says or does something, often accidentally, and without intended malice, that belittles and alienates a member of a marginalized group (wikipedia)

Notice, particularly, “accidentally” and “without intended malice”. The thing is, those of us in the West*** all grew up in a racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic society, albeit with varying levels of exposure, and ridding ourselves of the ways of thinking that society has programmed into our brains takes some effort. You can’t eliminate your prejudices by just not trying to be prejudiced; you need to specifically work at it.

Ok, sorry, I know there’ve been no mentions of farting for a while now and I apologise, but I promise I’m getting there. Maybe even in this paragraph, if you’re lucky. Basically, what the right pejoratively refers to as ‘political correctness’ is really just an effort to make people think about what they’re saying and doing, and how it might affect other people. That article isn’t banning you from calling people ‘retarded’; it’s saying that if you *choose* to use the word, you are probably going to hurt people. Just the same as there’s no law (to my knowledge) against farting in lifts. Guff away, windy patriot, but be aware that a). other people in the lift will find it unpleasant, and b). if they figure out it was you, they’ll think less of you. No-one is going to die, there are plenty of worse things in the world than smelling a nasty smell, and yet I’d like to think that most people *don’t* fart in lifts. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to hold in, but because we recognise points a and b and want to avoid one or both, we do so. So why is it such a leap to apply the same logic to the language we use? No, using the word ‘retarded’ isn’t going to kill anyone, but why would you do it, knowing that it’s making people’s lives very slightly worse for no good reason?

We already voluntarily make tiny compromises (microcompromises?) on a day-to-day basis to avoid making other people’s lives less pleasant. We let the car in front of us pull out, we avoid barging to the front of queues, we say please and thank you. Articles like the HuffPo one above aren’t forcing you to do anything; they’re just pointing out that hey, that’s a harmful word, if you could try to use a different one that would be great. And if you don’t give a shit about making the lives of those around you slightly less pleasant, or if thinking about the words you use is a bit too much effort for you, then by all means, keep farting in lifts.

*I use “what happens next will blow your mind” in the modern sense, which, like “literally”, has come to mean the opposite of its original intent – i.e. “what happens next will most definitely not blow your mind”.

**Yeah it’s actually a simile but I hate that word, it’s a twisted smilie.

***I’m not saying other societies aren’t racist, sexist, etc, I’m just not going to presume to talk about cultures I haven’t experienced personally.

Four Good Things that the tabloid media has convinced people are Four Bad Things

Oh tabloid media, where would I be without you? Probably living in a utopia, surrounded by giggling children and smiling adults of all races and creeds, revelling in the infinite physical, mental and spiritual well-being afforded to us by universal equality, freedom and mutual respect. And you would be too, dear reader! You would be there with me, frolicking through streams and sleeping out under the stars in a world without war, famine or disease, where our dreams came true.

Unfortunately, though: tabloid media. Their mission is to turn our prejudices and insecurities into cold, hard cash, and they’re not going to stop any time soon. Damn you, tabloid media. *shakes fist at sky* DAMN YOU!

On the other hand, while the despicable hellbeasts who control editorial policy in ‘news’papers and other sources of soul-decomposing inforwanktion are collectively preventing us from transcending the physical nature of reality, they do also provide me with stuff to write about. So here, if you like, are Four Good Things that the evil bellends at TABLOID MEDIA have convinced everyone are Four Bad Things. But they’re not: theyre Good Things with Downsides, like pretty much every Good Thing which has ever existed. Anyway, Thing number one:

Health and Safety

What the tabloid media has convinced people it is:

An oppressive regime enforced by sour-faced government drones specifically to stop anyone from enjoying anything ever. A liberal conspiracy to make us all as miserable as they are. Er…yeah. The motive behind it has never really been made clear, but apparently Blair hated us having fun and..banned it? Or something? Whatever, it should be repealed and people at work should look after themselves. HEY STUPID, IF YOU CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW NOT TO INHALE TOXIC FUMES ON YOUR OWN YOU SHOULDN’T BE WORKING IN A REFINERY!

What it actually is:

The legal and administrative framework put in place with the specific aim of reducing workplace injury, illness and death. It has *no* control (or even opinion, really) over what happens outside of employment, so any story about someone who isn’t at work being told they can’t do something because of health and safety is INCORRECT. So incorrect it has to be in capitals. INCORRECT, MOFO. In fact what this means is that practically every story about ‘health and safety’ is INCORRECT. What they’re actually about is (sometimes overzealous) officials attempting to minimise the chance they’ll be sued. Yeah, maybe there is a story in there, maybe overzealous officials is important enough to report on, but health and safety it is not.

Why do they want you us think that?

I don’t really know. It’s probably just a way of selling papers; people love battling against an oppressive force, thinking they’re in a minority and the only support they have in the world is this one brave newspaper, swimming against the tide, and they can be part of the elite gang who know what’s really going on for just 50p a day. Or perhaps there is something else for big business to gain from getting rid of (or even just reducing) health and safety legislation. People who own newspapers own other stuff too; could it be that they are trying to reduce those pesky overheads which do nothing but reduce workplace injury? It’s a possibility, but who knows. Surely no-one could be so callous, you say? Well, read on.

Multicultural

What the tabloid media has convinced people it is:

An oppressive ideology committed to crushing Real Britishness and replacing it with labour-voting immigrants, leading to absurd situations where most kids in some schools don’t speak English proper, and True Brits are encouraged to marry animals sorry, black people (incidentally, anyone claiming racism has been eliminated in this country needs to take a long, hard look at that cartoon).  The claimed motivation? An extra few million grateful left-leaning voters and, no word of a lie, the ability to say Tories are racist. As if they weren’t obviously racist before.

What it actually is:

The idea that multiple cultures can live together in harmony; that immigrants do not need to give up their culture and heritage just because they moved to the UK. Standard left-wing utopian idea, then, and one which I personally ascribe to. Apart from anything else, I don’t think the government really has much control over how rapidly people from other cultures integrate into ours. Secondly, I don’t see how TRUE BRITISH CULTURE is necessarily the best anyway. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the ‘indigenous’ (which, as I may have mentioned before, is a rather obvious code-word for ‘white’) culture of the UK hasn’t been homogeneous..well, ever. Whenever I see a story about people in London not speaking English any more, I think, “You should visit North Wales mate, nobody speaks English up there if they can help it”. Living in Newcastle was completely different to living in Oxford. Living in Cardiff is completely different to living in Leominster. ‘White’ British culture varies massively, but apparently that’s OK; Tabloids only have a problem with it when it’s culture from outside the UK – i.e. culture that isn’t ‘white’. So yeah, basically, it’s covert racism. I know that saying something is racist is subject to a sort of right-wing version of Godwin’s Law in that as soon as you use that word, right-wingers will claim to have won the argument. But yeah: opposition to multiculturalism is like opposition to immigration. Not necessarily motivated by racism, but almost always motivated by racism.

Why do they want us to think that?

Again, there’s the whole selling-newspapers-by-being-an-ally-to-middle-class-bigots angle. People love a scapegoat, and FOREIGNERS is a perfect one. I can’t really think of a way in which tabloids or their owners would benefit from the reduction of immigration and multiculturalism, so I’m going to chalk it up to the same ideology which saw the Mail a staunch supporter of fascism (until war broke out, presumably).

Political Correctness

What the tabloid media has convinced people it is:

An oppressive brigade of overly-officious liberal morons who spend all their time complaining that stuff is sexist or racist or homophobic. Another left-wing attempt to extract all the freedom and variety out of life, but GONE MAD. The reason you can’t even write racial abuse in excrement on someone’s car (yes obviously that’s a straw man, but I think Lee is so absolutely on-point in that bit that I’m even going to quote him again in a minute).

What it actually is:

In fact, I’ll quote him again now: Political Correctness is an often clumsy negotiation towards a kind of formally inclusive language. That’s it. Literally. The thing about political correctness, is that what it’s trying to do is unarguably a Good Thing. It’s an attempt to minimise the offence caused and received during everyday life. It’s based on the idea that people shouldn’t be allowed to take the piss out of you for being black, or a woman, or gay, or old, or disabled, or anything like that, and furthermore that by reducing the piss-taking, we can reduce the actual prejudice and stop people from being attacked or even killed for being black or a woman or gay or old or disabled. And yet we’re told constantly by the tabloids that political correctness has GONE MAD. In what ways? Well, perhaps some examples are in order:

School ‘bans’ baa baa black sheep; BBC has all-female audience; Loving England isn’t allowed any more ; Nurse suspended for offering to pray for patient; kissing gates under threat; Tory councillor takes a stand against PC by refusing to take down nudie ladies

And so on and so forth. Obviously these stories vary in their, shall we say, validity (i.e. many are utter shite), but my central point is: are they really that bad? Is the occasional over-zealousness really such a price to pay in exchange for the (potential) elimination of prejudice? Oh snap, they banned kissing gates? I’m all for not being allowed to call people ‘queer’ or ‘cripple’ or ‘dyke’ or ‘chink’ but this has gone too far. ITS GONE MAD. TAKE ME BACK TO THE HALCYON BRITAIN WHERE I WAS ALLOWED TO LOOK AT PORN IN PUBLIC.

Why do they want us to think that?

Well, it’s not hard to see how political correctness could influence what papers are and are not allowed to print. It certainly represents a sort of institutionalised pressure against stories demonising minorites; it also probably introduces additional overheads to the running of a business just like health and safety. On the whole though, this is another case where it’s probably just to sell more newspapers by reinforcing the opinions of twats. Yes, anyone who reads a tabloid in seriousness: you are a twat.

Human Rights

What the tabloid media has convinced people it is:

An oppressive regime which punishes good-hearted British folk by allowing criminals to get reduced or cancelled sentences, illegal immigrants and terrorists get to live in the UK on benefits, and making religions illegal. Opposition to human rights (and remember, that’s opposition to the idea that people have a right not to be tortured or imprisoned without trial or executed or kept from their families or discriminated against based on race or sex or sexuality), opposition is so politically acceptable that the Dark Lords who have somehow been elected to run our country are comfortable openly stating that they want to repeal it. The thing is, the majority of stories run by the press about Yooman Rights (as Littlejohn inexplicably insists on referring to them) are complete nonsense. Even the stories parroted by politicians are complete nonsense. And even even if they *weren’t* nonsense, is it really justifiable to cancel our fundamental human rights just because a few bad guys benefit from it too? That’s like changing ‘innocent until proven guilty’ because some criminals get let off.

What it actually is:

The European Convention on Human Rights lists a bunch of things which are the right of every human being, including the right to liberty, the right to a fair trial, the right to an education and family life, freedom of thought and religion, not to be executed or tortured, and the right to vote. As a lefty I naturally agree with all of these, although perhaps if your political views are more bastardly you do not. The Human Rights Act 1998 is the UK law which ‘enforces’ the Convention in the UK (I’m not a lawyer so it’s entirely possible my phrasing is wrong, but I’m pretty certain of the gist). And it’s the Human Rights Act that the tabloid media hates, for reasons I’ll explore below.

Why do they want us to think that?

This one is relatively simple. In 2008 Paul Dacre (editor of the Daily Mail), as part of the whole Max Mosely sex scandal thing, publicly accused a high court judge of using the Human Rights Act to bring in a privacy law by the back door. Cards on the table then: the tabloid media hate the Human Rights Acts because in some instances it can be used to limit how much shit they are permitted to shovel on famous (or not so famous) people. Sometimes the media publish lies or exaggerations just to sell papers, but in this instance it is a concerted campaign to raise support against legislation which potentially (for better or worse) limits the freedom of the media. Now, whatever you think about how free the media should be to, for example, destroy the lives of innocent men, you must surely agree that this propaganda campaign is pretty grim.

 

So that’s it. I don’t really know what we can conclude from all this. Tabloids lie? Obviously, few people trust tabloids (admittedly that link does not include the Mail as a tabloid, but I certainly do). Tabloids lie to manipulate public opinion to their benefit? I think we probably mostly knew that too. The thing that really smarts is that tabloids really don’t care who they hurt by manipulating public opinion to their benefit. Sod human rights, we want to be free to report on Wayne Rooney’s baldness. Sod equality and fairness, we want to sell more newspapers. And that’s why I feel comfortable in referring to the tabloid press as despicable hell-beasts. Fuck them.

Fuck all of them.

Why you should be furious at people who refuse to vaccinate their kids.

A comparatively quick one today, spurred into existence by this BBC article about an anti-vaccine website which has been forced to take down misleading claims about the MMR jab. When I think about how defensive people are of their kids (which is something I understand, of course – I’m old enough now to have seen several friends snap into nothing-in-the-universe-is-more-important-than-this-screaming-bundle-of-sleep-deprivation-mode), when I think about that, it astonishes me that there isn’t more of a push back against the ‘anti-vaxxers’. If I had kids I’d be absolutely fucking livid about the morons who were directly putting their lives at risk – and if you think those are strong words, then you are why I’m writing this.

The thing about vaccines is: they’re not 100% effective. In any vaccinated population there are individuals who are not immune, and there are several possible reasons for this. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, the very young. There are very good, medical reasons why we don’t just jab every newborn with everything, and so there are usually between 2 and 12 months (depending on the disease) between birth and vaccination during which your child is entirely susceptible to infection.

Second reason: even after a jab and a booster jab, some people just don’t develop immunity. Might be bad luck, might be underlying medical reasons. The point is: these people stay susceptible forever.

Third reason: some people cannot be vaccinated, for example if they have very weak immune systems. Yes: exactly the people who really, really *need* protection against infectious disease.

So fine, everyone goes through a year or so where they aren’t vaccinated and some people stay susceptible their entire lives. Why is it so bad if other people *choose* to remain unvaccinated? The answer is herd immunity. There’s some fairly complex maths involved, but what it boils down to is this: Diseases can only usually spread through people who are not immune to them. The ‘carriers’ you see in movies like 28 Weeks Later don’t usually exist, because people who are immune to a disease fight it off before it can reproduce inside them enough to spread to other people. Additionally, each infected person will only infect a limited number of others before they recover or die – when that number is above 1, the disease spreads through the vulnerable population like…well, like an infectious disease. By vaccinating people and reducing the probability that an infected person will come into contact with someone who isn’t immune, you can pull that number *below*1, causing the disease to effectively die out (amongst the vaccinated population, at least). The vulnerable people described above *could* still catch the disease, but because most other people are immune they have no-one to catch it *from*.

If that’s too complicated, the most important thing to remember is this: some members of our population are protected from diseases only by the rest of the population being vaccinated. And that’s not just the ill or the unlucky: every single child has a period immediately after birth where their only protection against many potentially fatal or permanently disabling diseases is other people being vaccinated. I almost feel like taking out the other uses of ‘bold’ because this next statement is so important: IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO VACCINATE YOUR CHILD YOU ARE NOT ONLY PUTTING HER AT RISK BUT OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN TOO. And yes, that includes opting for the individual jabs instead of MMR: by spreading out the injections over time you are increasing the total number of susceptible individuals in the population and decreasing herd immunity.

And then you get stuff like this. It’s fine for you to go and get vaccinated only when an outbreak scares you, but what about the “70…babies and toddlers under the age of one who were too young to be vaccinated and therefore vulnerable to infection from older contacts.” They didn’t choose to be vulnerable: they got infected because other members of the population got infected. Most cases were amongst children who had not been given the MMR vaccine. Fortunately measles only has a 1 in 5,000 fatality rate, and as far as I can tell no-one died in this outbreak. But they easily could have, and if they had, guess what? IT WOULD HAVE BEEN BECAUSE OF THE UNVACCINATED KIDS.

I understand how difficult it can be to make the right decision for your children. I understand that when a scientist is printed in all the papers as saying “MMR gives you autism” that you have to stop and take notice. I understand that all the evidence in the world is never going to remove that nagging doubt from the back of your mind. But think of it this way: you do stuff every day to protect your child based on our best but partial understanding of the human body. Whether you know it or not, you trust medical statistics and medical professionals all the time in ways which only really affect your family. All I’m saying is: trust them in this case too, when they affect other people’s families.

There’s no conspiracy to make money by giving people autism. There’s no conspiracy to deny your children good medical care. There’s scientific fact, and scientific fiction, and if you start believing the fiction in ways which endanger other people’s kids you may as well steal your neighbour’s baby and sacrifice it to the Sun God to make sure little Jimmy doesn’t get appendicitis.

In summary: you should be mad as hell when anyone says they don’t vaccinate. They are literally risking your child’s life. Tell them where to stick it.

5 twattish Olympic-related things you might not know about

As a misanthropic and cynical person I don’t really find the Olympics to be particularly interesting. I’m going to spend the next month or so feeling slightly guilty about that, hiding away in my room with the curtains drawn, repeatedly telling myself I’m sticking to my principals and that no-one can force me to join in, intermittently punctuated by guilt-induced displays of false joy intended to minimise the likelihood of my looking back in ten years time and regretting being such a mope.

That said, I do understand why other people get excited. It’s an international sporting event where the World’s very best athletes get to compete on a level playing field. It’s a tradition with roots somewhere near the start of civilisation. It brings us together and reminds us we’re not so different. It shows us that determination and hard work can pay off. This year it’s an opportunity to show the world that the UK is an interesting, successful, diverse nation which still has something to offer. And so on. The problem is that there is a certain type of person to whom all this goodwill and anticipation and global engagement looks like something else: potential profit.

That’s not a uniquely Olympic phenomenon; the same thing occurs at Christmas, other sporting events, tourist attractions, and in fact arguably wherever more than a handful of people with disposable income congregate. In many ways, though, the cynical exploitation of Olympic goodwill has already exceeded anything I’ve ever seen in this country before, and so along with about 50% of everyone who has ever written anything on the internet, I’ve decided to blog about it. TAKE THAT, CORPORATE SCOUNDRELS!

If you care at all (and given that this is paragraph 4 I think it’s safe for me to assume that you do), you’ll probably have already read about the ban on sales of non-sponsor food and drink in the Olympic park; the ruthless hounding of anyone using the words ‘Olympics’ or the five rings without permission; the terrible security cock-ups; the poorly-implemented and unfair ‘Olympic Lanes’. However, during my relentless trawling of the internet for reasons to be angry, I have come across many additional, minor examples of Olympic-related twattery. It’s some of these which I would like to share with you now.

Example 1: Police urged to rid Cardiff’s streets of homeless in time for Olympics

I’m not entirely certain of the logic here but apparently someone with more of a mind for money than me has decided that the homeless are not good for business, and is demanding that the South Wales Police make use of the 1824 Vagrancy Act. Yes, the spokesman for the Cardiff Retail Partnership, noted bellend David Hughes-Lewis, has determined that the best use of police and legal resources at this hugely busy time would be to arrest anyone living rough and lock them away for up to 3 months. Who cares what’s best for them in the long (or even short) run, we need to concentrate on squeezing as much money out of Olympic tourists as possible.

Oh hang on, I’ve just found out – it’s nothing to do with business. Hughes-Lewis says “I’m Cardiff born and bred and I don’t want people to go away with that as their impression of the city“. It’s nothing to do with profits, he’s just looking out for Cardiff! What a stand-up chap!

Example 2: Olympic VIPs take fast lane leaving patients at risk

What’s the best way to deal with the huge amount of additional traffic generated by the Olympics? Reduce the number of lanes available to ordinary people! That’s Olympic logic for you. Then again, there are at least some good arguments for the ‘Games Lanes’ too; officials and athletes need to move around and a fleet of helicopters would be a bit much. What I don’t understand is why ambulances are not allowed to use the lanes unless they have their blue lights on. Putting the people running the games before the general public is one thing, but putting them before people who are ill? We’re already seeing games-lane-related delays; how bad are things going to get once all the extra people get here? I posted this on facebook and after some limited criticism (“Why don’t they just put their lights on all the time?”) I responded with this:

There are many situations where people will suffer because of the additional traffic generated by the Olympics, but not all these situations will justify the use of blue lights. I think the seriousness of this has been exaggerated by the Guardian (I doubt anyone will actually die), but at what point did we turn into a society where *taxpayer funded* infrastructure considers rich businessmen and athletes a higher priority than the sick and elderly?

Yeah I just quoted myself, what are you going to do about it? The volume of ambulance traffic on the roads is absolutely minimal compared to private cars and commercial vehicles. Allowing emergency vehicles to use the lanes would have increased their value to the city without serious risk of delay to any other users. Plus of course it would have been an act of goodwill from an organisation in dire need of some positive publicity. But, you know, who has time to think about the most vulnerable members of our society when you’re worrying about making sure the CEO of MacDonalds gets to the 100m final on time.

Example 3 – Box Hill News Snubbed by Olympic Organisers

The Box Hill News is a newsletter you’ve probably never heard of published in a village you’ve probably never heard of in Surrey (which you probably should have heard of). It costs 40p and was going to run an Olympics Special Edition to celebrate Box Hill playing host to an Olympic cycling race. But oh no hang on! For the duration of the event the area is owned by LOCOG, so no selling of anything unless you’re a sponsor. Feel free to show up and exhibit your community spirit for the world though!

Now, obviously this is a tiny example of the kind of corporate bullying being conducted at all the Olympic venues, and no doubt there are many who would say “It’s the principal! If you let these people get away with it then everyone will want to!”. But for Christ’s sake, this is one step up from kids selling lemonade. And which of the massive multi-national corporations sponsoring the event is going to be damaged by the sale of a probably photocopied village newsletter? It’s this automated, no-leeway attitude which has done so much damage to the spirit of the Games, the very goodwill that enables LOCOG to raise so much sponsorship money in the first place. I’m not naive enough to imagine that this sort of thing will do any permanent damage to the reputation of the Olympics, but for fuck’s sake. Doesn’t it make you really, really sad? And all it would take is a bit of common sense from the organisers, a tiny bit of giving-a-shit-about-the-people-who-didn’t-have-a-choice-but-to-help-pay-for-the-event. Is that so much to ask?

Example 4 – Police Given Powers to Enter Homes and Tear Down Anti-Olympics Posters During 2012 Games

Ok, so this link is from the Daily Mail – not the most reliable of sources and one which I usually avoid linking to out of principal. But in addition to being covered by the ideological opposite of the Mail, the Guardian, this is an almost-ignored part of the “London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006” which you can actually check on a Government website. Nobody seems to have reported on this since 2009, and it’s entirely possible that nothing will come of it. However, the police have a duty to enforce the law, and so it’s also entirely possible that we will eventually see examples of this being carried out. The point is that to defend the rights of sponsors the government of 2006 completely ignored the rights of private citizens. YOU WILL NOT DISSENT, EVEN IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME.

Example 5 – Spice Girls to Reunite for London 2012 Olympic Closing Ceremony

You evil bastards, haven’t we suffered enough?

An outright ban on discards would be emotionally-charged madness

(Before I start: I’m a lefty. I’m an environmentalist. I work in the fishery management industry. I say these things to clarify that my opinions below are not political, and they’re not based on some inherent distrust of anything ‘leftist’ or ‘environmental’. My opinions below are based on a solid belief that whatever the weaknesses of the environmental sciences, they are the best tool we have for managing our exploitation of natural resources. Fishery management has a range of aims, but personally I put ecological sustainability first. Read on, then, knowing that I’m not a right-wing or fishing industry stooge, but that I actually want the same thing that Hugh and his supporters claim to want – a better future for European fish populations)

Back in March I wrote a rather negative piece about Hugh’s Fish Fight, and how disappointed I was to see liberal emotions manipulated with evidence-free propaganda. At the time I barely touched upon the possible problems a ban on discards could cause, essentially sitting on the fence by saying:

Now, I’m not trying to argue here against a discards ban in principal. Norway banned discards in 1987 and it seems to be working quite well – although it also seems to take considerably more micro-management of fishing vessels. No, what I’m trying to say is that the situation is far more complicated than Hugh, and the Guardian, are making out. Banning discards isn’t something which can, or should, happen overnight – it needs to be introduced, if at all, alongside a complete overhaul of the European fisheries management system.

The FishFight website includes a page titled ‘solutions‘, which states:

Hugh’s fish fight is not trying to dictate the exact solutions politicians should choose – simply to ensure that whatever their choice for 2012, the prevention of discarding should be a top priority.

The thing is, there’s no evidence presented anywhere that a ban on discards would achieve anything other than reducing waste. The website, at least, makes no argument that such a ban would improve sustainability – and although I believe there *is* and argument to be made, it’s certainly not clear-cut. The FishFight campaign is based on an assumption that banning discards would be beneficial for (or at least have no impact on) fish stocks. THIS IS NOT NECESSARILY TRUE.

In large part, it depends on what the alternative is. Clearly, comparing the current system to one where fishermen catch and land whatever they want would see the current system come out on top in terms of sustainability. Conversely, it’s entirely possible that there could be a management system involving a discard ban which would lead to more sustainably exploited stocks than at present. My point is that we just don’t know. Banning discards outright just doesn’t make sense unless you have a detailed, viable alternative management system in mind. In my opinion, the best system would be one where discards are more thoroughly monitored, factored into stock assessment science, and vessels who discard more than is deemed acceptable are fined. Whether this is possible given the additional manpower requirements I don’t know, but it’s a potentially far more sustainable model than at present and it retains discarding. Note too that this is my opinion; I don’t know for sure whether this would be the best approach, so it would be crazy for me to demand it be adopted without study.

To ban discards without first developing an alternative management plan would be to pander to environmentalist sensibilities without considering the actual long-term goals of fishery management. Badly implemented, a discard ban could be catastrophic for EU fish stocks, and there is no guarantee that it will be better for stocks even if it’s well-implemented. A recent Guardian article quotes from a proposed EU declaration:

The declaration’s signatories “restate their commitment to an ambitious reform of the common fisheries policy, [and] reiterate their view that the wasteful practice of discarding fish, that is tolerated and in some cases even promoted by the current management system, constitutes a considerable obstacle on the road to a sustainable fisheries policy”.

But it adds: “[We] consider a discard ban as proposed in the draft basic regulation of the future common fisheries policy … is unrealistic and too prescriptive, and a pragmatic approach is needed especially in the context of mixed fisheries, particularly in the Mediterranean [and] support instead the inclusion of a significant reduction of discards … on a fisheries-based approach.”

Now, I’m not so naive that I think the proposing nations’ fishing industries have nothing to do with this. I know there are a lot of people who want to maintain the status quo so that they can discard lower-value catch and improve profits. But taken at face value, the declaration has a point: an outright ban is  too prescriptive. It’s taking a powerful management option off the table for emotional reasons. Working towards a management system which minimises or even eliminates discarding is a fine aim, but only as part of a suite of objectives which include stock, ecological and economic sustainability.

To re-iterate what I said in my previous post: I’m not pro-discards. I’m not against public pressure to minimise discards. I am simply arguing that making fishery management decisions based on public emotions is madness. I can’t say enough that banning discards will not necessarily be better for fish stocks. The system needs overhauling, yes, and ideally the new approach would not allow any discarding. But surely if there is a more reliable, sustainable, workable approach which does allow discards we should be aiming for that?

I honestly think it would be crazy to ban discarding outright. The FishFight petition has 800,000 signatories so far, including many celebrities, but if they get their way they might well regret it in ten years time. If only they were campaigning for the mandatory adoption of scientific advice in fishery management – that’s something I could get behind. Exploiting liberal anger to the possible detriment of fish stocks (and therefore also the entire fishing industry) is something I can’t.

Environmentalism should really be about people, not nature.

As a thought experiment, what’s the worst we, as a species, could do to the planet right now? Well, nukes obviously spring to mind as the most destructive option. Allow me to indulge my apocalypse fetish and imagine that every nuclear-armed country shoots everything they have at everyone else. It’s entirely possible that such a rudimentary diplomatic gesture would not only lead to several world leaders losing 1-6 points of charisma, but there’s also a fair chance we could wipe out the whole human race. Even Sean Bean. People who don’t die in the initial explosions would probably die from radiation poisoning soon after, and if not that then starvation as a result of good old Nuclear Winter. A similar fate would face pretty much every other surface-dwelling multicellular organism.

The most serious, long-term damage would actually be done by the blocking-out of the sun, preventing primary producers (for non-biologists, functionally equivalent to ‘plants’) from capturing the energy that pretty much the entire ecosystem needs to survive. The thing is, though, that although there’d be a huge drop in the amount of light available for plants, it would have to be global, total and long-lasting to eliminate all multicellular life. Even if things got that serious, you have to turn up the dial by another factor of ten to have any hope of eliminating single-celled life, and even then you’ve still got loads of species surviving deep underwater, around undersea vents.

What I’m trying to get at here is that even if we collectively went completely barmy and actively tried to destroy the world, we probably wouldn’t be able to kill everything. And the interesting thing about life, as we all know, is that it will always find a way. We already know that there have been several major global extinction events in Earth’s history, and without them we probably wouldn’t be here today. Sometimes a chunk of rock the size of Texas is exactly the kick up the arse DNA needs to try something new, although I’m not sure which part of DNA is its arse – possibly the telomeres? I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent, but Armageddon would have been ten times better if the meteor had kicked Bruce Willis in the telomeres. Just saying.

I know I say ‘my point is’ far too often, but it’s mainly to remind myself that I do actually have a point. My point is, the most devastating thing we could intentionally do will not kill all life on Earth. 100 million years after the end of humanity, there’d probably be bugger-all sign that we were ever there. New species would have evolved, radiation would be back to ‘normal’, Earth and the life on it would be fine. Humans, on the other hand, would very obviously be screwed; intelligent life would be gone, perhaps from the entire universe, and if you subscribe to the idea that intelligence is something special (and I do), then you probably don’t think it’s a great idea to do anything which will wipe it out. There’s no guarantee anything as mentally capable as us would ever evolve again, anywhere, so we should probably do our best not to all die.

Killing everyone isn’t the only thing I think we should avoid though. I’m a humanist, and perhaps an idealist, and certainly an optimist. I would very much like to live in a world with as little human suffering as possible. Exploiting the environment is a short-term way to achieve this, at least for some of us, but if it’s done unsustainably then you start to face problems. It might surprise some of you to read this, even though I’ve alluded to it above, but I actually don’t really care about any species except humans. Or rather, I don’t care about any species as much as I care about humans. I don’t think we should go out and unnecessarily shoot animals and raze forests and cause suffering, but I also think there are times when such activity is beneficial enough to mankind to be justifiable. Animal testing is a perfect example. If one of my brothers was terminally ill, but I knew that killing 1,000 rats would cure him, I’d go out and kill them myself. If I had a child, and murdering every rabbit on Earth was the only way to save her life, you guys would just have to manage without Easter eggs. I know some people don’t agree with me, but I consider a human life to be worth more than any number of animal or plant lives. As far as I’m concerned it’s a logical continuation of liberal ideals, that all humans are not only equal, but also special. We literally cheer about wiping out smallpox to prevent human suffering, and yet kill something fluffy to save lives and suddenly you’re the bad guy. Well, I’m unrepentant.

Boy, this got dark all of a sudden! Anyone who hasn’t thrown their sandals at the screen in anger might be wondering why, if I don’t care about other species, am I so keen on sustainability and preventing extinction wherever possible and maintaining the Earth’s current climate. Well I’ll tell you: ecology. When you start messing with components of a system as complex as Earth, you literally have no way of knowing for certain what will happen. We can guess what effect the extinction of cod would have, we can attempt to predict how a 2°C temperature rise will change things, but we don’t know. I want to try to keep things the same because we’ve got extensive experience to suggest that the Earth as it is now can support us. This temperature, this level of biodiversity, this atmosphere, we can survive, pretty much. Start changing stuff and your guess is as good as mine of how many people might suffer and die.

So yeah: anthropocentric. It’s not really about “Save the Planet” per se, it’s about “Save the Humans by Saving the Planet”. When I bang on about climate change, I’m not worried about life ending or the Earth burning to an uninhabitable crisp. I’m worried that our kids, and their kids, and their kids will have to fight to survive, fight to find food, fight to find water. Every day we increase the probability that our progeny’s lives will be brutal and short – surely that’s a much better reason to find another way to live than “We’ll never see another wild dolphin”. Conservationists, for want of a better term, frequently have the criticism levied at them that they put nature before people. Well not me: as far as I’m concerned, caring about people is the only objective reason to care about nature.

It worries me that the environmental movement always seems to focus on people’s emotional attachments to nature. That works fine for some people, but people like me need concrete, logical explanations for things, and I think there’s a lot of headway which could be made with the ‘save the humans’ angle. Or perhaps I’m just a robot.

Videogames, racism, and the ‘Oppression Olympians’

As a videogame fan I’m well aware of the inequalities which pervade the medium like crates in a first-person shooter. Perhaps because of the comparatively young age of both the form and the fans, many games (and many public discussions about games) are chock-full of racism, misogyny, overtly violent threats and references, and worse. Of course this is a generalisation: there are gamers covering the entire political spectrum and representing every age; gaming isn’t the niche hobby it used to be. Games themselves range from (arguably) overtly misogynistic to utterly neutral to (occasionally) featuring strong, non-caricatured female characters, with most tending to be somewhere in the middle. But as a creative medium, games are still massively unbalanced in many, many ways.

In plenty of instances, developers are still chasing the traditional primary source of income for videogame companies: young white males. Hence why so many videogame leads are gun-toting white men, or sword-wielding white men, or gun-chainsaw wielding white men, or some other variety of white man. Non-white, non-male videogame leads are even rarer than non-white, non-male movie leads*, and so I’m particularly interested to play the next instalment of the Assassin’s Creed franchise and see how well it lives up to my lefty expectations (leftspectations).

For those of you who don’t know, assassin’s creed is a series of games where you play a modern-day (you guessed it) white male, except you’re plugged into a device which allows you to experience your past lives as assassins in various time periods. The majority of the game is spent as these historical figures, and so while the storyline means you’re technically playing a bartender called ‘Desmond Miles’, the actual experience is that of being an assassin called Altaïr ibn-La’Ahad (a Syrian), or Ezio Auditore (Florentine nobleman). For the next game in the series, developers are putting Desmond (and therefore you) into the shoes of Connor Kenway, a half-Mohawk half-English mercenary operating in revolutionary America.

Penny Arcade has a very interesting interview with the developers on the challenge they faced to portray a minority lead without stereotyping. Remember, they have to design the character from the ground up: appearance, voice, movement, and that’s before you get into the storyline and decide what the guy is actually going to do with his life. From what the game’s creative director says, they’re trying their best not to stereotype or belittle, presumably with the intention that this will avoid generating offence but probably more importantly because this will result in a well-rounded, believable, interesting character for players. And to those of you who don’t play games: yes, that’s what we’re aiming for these days.

Of course, I usually only write a blog post if something has made me angry, so anyone who has been here before will know what’s coming. There are several dubious comments underneath the article, but one in particular made me sit bolt upright in bed several hours later screaming “NURSE!”. Here it is, in full:

Of course, what Alex Hutchinson failed to consider was that having a Native American character voiced as a Caucasian brings its own volleys of accusations of racism, of “white-washing” the Native character and so forth.

You can wring your hands all you want but it boils down to a simple truth: it’s no more racist to portray a Native American with a Native American accent than it is to portray an Italian with an Italian accent, no matter how much the professionally offended and the Oppression Olympians wish it were otherwise.

What we have here is an extremely common misunderstanding of what racism actually is. Many, many people seem to be under the impression that racism is simply ‘treating people differently because of their race’. Obviously that’s part of it, but the full truth is more complicated. Portraying an Italian with a put-on Italian accent is fundamentally different to portraying a Native American with a put-on Native American accent, because the history of the two groups is different. Italians have never (to my knowledge) been subjected to genocide, or made to live in reservations as second-class citizens. Italian-Americans (as a group) are in positions of relative power, or at least are part of the mainstream culture, whereas Native Americans are marginalised. Yes, in an ideal world we would treat everyone identically regardless of race, but we don’t live in an ideal world: we live in a world with a history (and present) of oppression of non-white people by white people. Calling a black person a nig nog is absolutely different to calling a white person a cracker – again, in an ideal world it wouldn’t be but we don’t live in an ideal world, and anti-black slurs are a fundamental part of hundreds of years of institutionalised racism, and came into existence to help keep black people oppressed. Anti-white slurs are the result of people fighting back against that oppression. It’s not hard to see that. In a similar way, doing a half-arsed impression of a Native American attaches all the baggage of 500 years of racism and stereotyping. I’m not saying that giving the lead Italian character a ridiculous Mario-esque accent would be ok; I’m just saying it’d be a different level of not-ok.

The broader underlying problem illustrated by the commenter is this idea of ‘professionally offended Oppression Olympians’. You see this a huge amount online: people either utterly convinced or dishonestly insisting that any and every attempt to not be racist (or sexist or homophobic) is just pandering to a vocal minority of insane liberals with too much time on their hands. In the UK it’s often called ‘Political Correctness Gone Mad’ – except that instead of being used only where political correctness has actually been applied far too strictly, it has a tendency to pop up wherever efforts are made to act like a decent human being. Stewart Lee, of course, has an excellent bit on political correctness (and yes, I know, linking to Lee is like tattooing ‘LIBERAL’ on my forehead, but if you don’t think he has a point then you probably disagree with everything I’ve written past ‘minority lead’), where he reminds us that “there are things wrong with it, but it’s better than what we had before”.

Yes, attempts to avoid offending people do sometimes go overboard to the point of ridiculousness, but it’s almost always a misguided individual misinterpreting his or her mandate. Attempts to avoid being racist aren’t driven by a desire to avoid offending the Oppression Olympians (who, if I really need to say it, OBVIOUSLY DON’T ACTUALLY EXIST, any more than the PC Brigade do). No, when a company like Ubisoft try to create a three-dimensional non-white character, it is generally, as I noted above, out of a combination of wanting to produce a high-quality game, and basic human decency.

Stereotypes are lazy and overused, and it really makes my mind boggle that anyone could object to having more complex, interesting characters in videogames – and in all the other forms of creative media which are so often accused of ‘pandering to the liberals’ when all they’re actually doing is including a black person who doesn’t run around screaming “GOOD GOOGLY MOOGLY!” But then, mind-bogglingly prejudiced ignorance is pretty much what the internet is made of (and porn, obviously).

 

*This is, of course, partly because so many videogame leads aren’t even human, but even if you discount those the point still stands.

High fuel prices should be an incentive to change something, but not fuel duty.

Oh God, petrol prices! WAAAAAAH! How am I supposed to be able to afford to drive all the miles I usually drive! When I moved into a house miles away from my work and the shops and where my kids go to school I never imagined that the price of a non-renewable resource could increase as reserves diminished! Why won’t the Government think about those of us who structured our lives around the assumption of everlasting super-cheap fuel! And so on.

It seems as though there’s no price increase which gets people’s ire up like a petrol price increase. We all know that the prices of things in numbers of pounds goes up over time, but for most goods and services we just accept it. Yes, food costs more now than it did 20 years ago, but we’re also earning more (in numbers of pounds, at least), and so when people go to the shop to buy bread they don’t usually have a hissy fit if it’s a couple of pence more expensive than last time.

Petrol is different though. The big news a couple of days ago was that the price of fuel had hit £1.40 for the FIRST TIME EVER. Despite the ‘fury’ from ‘hard-pressed motorists’, hitting the highest price ever is something which happens to everything we buy all the time. A far more relevant thing to look at when comparing present-day prices to historical prices is the cost in real terms. Back in the 80’s, when a pint of beer cost 35p and petrol was around 28p a litre, the average wage was only £6,000 (compared to more like £20,000 now). Obviously the number of pounds something costs isn’t it’s real price.

So what is the price of petrol today in real terms? This document, a parliamentary briefing paper updated earlier this month, contains a wealth of interesting information. For example, people often blame high fuel duty for the cost of petrol – and yes, it is high compared to some countries – but in fact fuel duty today is lower, in real terms, than at any time between about 1998-2006.

The real question, though, is whether petrol at the pump costs more now than historically, and the graph on page 16 provides the answer. The most expensive petrol in history (in real terms!) was on sale in 1920 – although we can probably count this as an anomaly caused by low usage. Assuming £1.40 is worth about the same now as it was last year, it looks like we actually are at or approaching a historical high for petrol prices, but the situation isn’t as ridiculous as the frenzy-whippers want you to think. That said, oil isn’t going to last forever. The steady increase in petrol price over the last decade or so might just be a continuation of the large fluctuations you can see stretching back to before WW2; but on the other hand, it might be the start of something more significant.

The society we’ve built for ourselves, where people think nothing of driving for an hour or more every day just to get to work and back, where shops are too far out of town to reach on foot, where public transport is a scorned and hated occasional last resort, and where food flown halfway round the world can be cheaper than food grown here, this society is based almost entirely on super-cheap energy, largely in the form of vehicle fuels. If you pay 60p for a can of coke, that’s about £1.80 per litre. An expensive bottle of mineral water can be as much as £1.00/litre. Unleaded petrol, at it’s current ‘historically high’ price, is more expensive than water but less expensive than coke.

There’s a lot of disagreement about when fossil fuels are going to run out, but the one thing practically everyone agrees on is that we’re using them faster than they’re being replaced. A lot faster. In addition to this, global oil consumption has increased steadily for most of the last 30 years (and longer), and is likely to continue to increase. Now, I’m not an economist, but my rudimentary understanding is that as supply goes down and demand goes up, prices increase. You don’t need to be a rabid environmentalist to see that the way our country functions today can’t continue indefinitely – whether it’s in 5 years or 20 years, eventually oil-based fuel will become prohibitively expensive. That’s not ‘greenwash’, that’s just logic.

So what’s my point here? Well, rather than all standing around shaking our fists at the Government, we should be using the increasing fuel prices as an economic lever to start the transition towards a nation which can function without super-cheap oil-powered transportation. We need better public transport, we need more sensibly managed property development, we need locally-grown produce, we need better cycling facilities, and high fuel prices will naturally encourage all these things, with a few nudges in the right direction. It’s not going to be an easy task – most people can’t just stop using their cars overnight, I accept that. But by dragging our heels, attempting to maintain low fuel prices by reducing taxes or subsidising drivers or whatever else people think the government should do, we are attempting to indefinitely maintain a status quo which cannot be indefinitely maintained.

Oil is going to run out, and long before it runs out it’s going to get much more expensive. Let’s follow the gradual slope rather than stay at ground level until we’re suddenly faced with a cliff to climb.

Fishing policies need to be driven by scientists and coastal managers, not celebrity chefs and angry liberals

I must admit, as a self-confessed muesli-recycling solar-panel-wearing soft wet liberal type, I rarely get too worked up by the Guardian. Usually, because I am very much part of their target audience, any spin they put on stories just makes me feel like part of a secret minority who actually understand what’s going on in the world, and I spend the rest of the day sniggering at how stupid all those idiots are who believe what they read in other papers. You know, the ones which don’t reinforce my pre-existing views and inflate my smug-gland.

Today, though, I stumbled across an article from last week titled “Plans to ban fishing discards threatened by EU member states“, in which the Guardian very clearly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, backs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ill-informed EU fishing coup. For anyone who missed it, the Fish Fight website provides a decent overview, but in essence: Hugh is massively and short-sightedly pissed off about a specific aspect of a fishing management regime which, while not perfect, has stabilised many stocks in EU waters, and arguably saved some species from localised extinction.

At this point I should make a confession: I actually had to turn off the Fish Fight TV show half way through because it was so hideously biased. Hugh spent the first half an hour or so interviewing people who stood to gain financially from a discard ban, then spent about 30 seconds talking to a fishery scientist (about nothing particularly relevant) and then back to the propaganda. He provided almost no information about the system which manages EU fishing and went straight for the emotional heartstrings – OMG THEY’RE THROWING FISH AWAY THIS MUST STOP!!!

The simplified version of what Hugh omitted is this. Most commercially important stocks in EU waters are subject to a quota called a TAC. This TAC is set every year, and is based initially on scientific advice but subsequently on political negotiation, both within the EU and sometimes with non-EU countries like Iceland and Norway. Sometimes the TAC ends up being a good reflection of the scientific advice and sometimes the political aspects of the process leads the TAC to be set above what scientists think is sensible. Once agreed, the TAC is split up in an arcane but legally-mandated process, and allocated to the countries which want to catch that type of fish. There is some added complication as TACs can be bought and sold, but the end result is that fishing cooperatives, or even individual boats, get set a certain weight of fish they are allowed to catch in any given year.

So far so sensible. The theory is that scientists determine how much fish it’s OK to catch, then the management system makes sure that the total amount of fish caught doesn’t exceed that. The problem is, although technological advances have improved the ability of skippers to target specific species, it’s still difficult for some types of fishing to catch only one species of fish. Under the current rules, if a boat catches fish for which it has no quota, it is illegal to land it – i.e. take it to shore and sell it. The massive fines in place illustrate just how important this aspect of the quota system is, and the fundamental reason is this: when a skipper lands catch, there is no way to know whether he caught that species on purpose or by accident. It should be clear that this means that a system with a discard ban makes it far more difficult to enforce quotas, as skippers can catch, for example, cod ‘by accident’ (i.e. as bycatch) and land it even if it means more cod is caught than should be.

Now, I’m not trying to argue here against a discards ban in principal. Norway banned discards in 1987 and it seems to be working quite well – although it also seems to take considerably more micro-management of fishing vessels. No, what I’m trying to say is that the situation is far more complicated than Hugh, and the Guardian, are making out. Banning discards isn’t something which can, or should, happen overnight – it needs to be introduced, if at all, alongside a complete overhaul of the European fisheries management system. There just so happens to be a complete overhaul being negotiated now, but rather than tacking ‘ban discards’ on at the end, such a decision needs to be the core of an entirely new management system.

The current practice of throwing away perfectly edible food is emotive and on face value very troubling, but Hugh’s Fish Fight and the associated political movement demands the current system be dropped without suggesting a viable alternative. It’s policy change by incitement of popular anger, and it irritates me to see the left-wing so blatantly manipulated in a way I usually like to imagine is reserved for the frothing-mouthed middle-class xenophobes who read the Mail. There are people who have spent their lives studying and managing fish stocks, and it would be great if we lived in a world where their views counted for as much as a celebrity chef who apparently has no understanding of the way European fisheries are managed.