I can make you hate (35 page)

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I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.

Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won’t identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like ‘madman’, ‘monster’, or ‘maniac’ won’t do, either. There’s a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media’s going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic: a nothing.

On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to al-Qaida. Countless security experts queued up to tell me so. This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn’t add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they’re the experts. They’re sitting there behind a caption with the word ‘
EXPERT
’ on it. Every few minutes the anchor would ask, ‘What kind of picture is emerging?’ or ‘What sense are you getting of who might be responsible?’ and every few minutes they explained this was ‘almost certainly’ the work of a highly organised Islamist cell.

In the aftermath of the initial bombing, they proceeded to wrestle with the one key question: why do Muslims hate Norway? Luckily, the experts were on hand to expertly share their expert solutions to plug this apparent plot hole in the ongoing news narrative.

Why do Muslims hate Norway? There had to be a reason.

Norway was targeted because of its role in Afghanistan. Norway was targeted because Norwegian authorities had recently charged
an extremist Muslim cleric. Norway was targeted because one of its newspapers had reprinted the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Norway was targeted because, compared to the US and UK, it is a ‘soft target’ – in other words, they targeted it because no one expected them to.

When it became apparent that a shooting was under way on Utoya island, the security experts upgraded their appraisal. This was no longer a Bali-style al-Qaida bombing, but a Mumbai-style al-Qaida massacre. On and on went the conjecture, on television, and in online newspapers, including this one. Meanwhile, on Twitter, word was quickly spreading that, according to
eyewitnesses
, the shooter on the island was a blond man who spoke Norwegian. At this point I decided my initial gut reservations about al-Qaida had probably been well founded. But who was I to contradict the security experts? A blond Norwegian gunman doesn’t fit the traditional profile, they said, so maybe we’ll need to reassess … but let’s not forget that al-Qaida have been making efforts to actively recruit ‘native’ extremists: white folk who don’t arouse suspicion. So it’s probably still the Muslims.

Soon, the front page of Saturday’s
Sun
was rolling off the presses. ‘“Al-Qaeda” Massacre: Norway’s 9/11’ – the weasel quotes around the name ‘Al-Qaeda’ deemed sufficient to protect the paper from charges of jumping to conclusions.

By the time I went to bed, it had become clear to anyone within glancing distance of the internet that this had more in common with the 1995 Oklahoma bombing or the 1999 London
nail-bombing
campaign than the more recent horrors of al-Qaida.

While I slept, the bodycount continued to rise, reaching catastrophic proportions by the morning. The next morning I switched on the news and the al-Qaida talk had been largely dispensed with, and the pundits were now experts on far-right extremism, as though they’d been on a course and qualified for a diploma overnight.

Some remained scarily defiant in the face of the new unfolding reality. On Saturday morning I saw a Fox News anchor tell former US diplomat John Bolton that Norwegian police were saying this appeared to be an Oklahoma-style attack, then ask him how that squared with his earlier assessment that al-Qaida were involved. He was sceptical. It was still too early to leap to conclusions, he said. We should wait for all the facts before rushing to judgment. In other words: assume it’s the Muslims until it starts to look like it isn’t – at which point, continue to assume it’s them anyway.

If anyone reading this runs a news channel, please, don’t clog the airwaves with fact-free conjecture unless you’re going to replace the word ‘expert’ with ‘guesser’ and the word ‘speculate’ with ‘guess’, so it’ll be absolutely clear that when the anchor asks the expert to speculate, they’re actually just asking a guesser to guess. Also, choose better guessers. Your guessers were terrible, like toddlers hypothesising how a helicopter works. I don’t know anything about international terrorism, but even I outguessed them.

As more information regarding the identity of the terrorist responsible for the massacre comes to light, articles attempting to explain his motives are starting to appear online. And beneath them are comments from readers, largely expressing outrage and horror. But there are a disturbing number that start, ‘What this lunatic did was awful, but …’

These ‘but’ commenters then go on to discuss immigration, often with reference to a shaky Muslim-baiting story they’ve half-remembered from the press. So despite this being a story about an anti-Muslim extremist killing Norwegians who weren’t Muslim, they’ve managed to find a way to keep the finger of blame pointing at the Muslims, thereby following a narrative lead they’ve been fed for years, from the overall depiction of terrorism as an almost exclusively Islamic pursuit, outlined by ‘security experts’ quick to see al-Qaida tentacles everywhere, to the fabricated tabloid fairytales about ‘Muslim-only loos’ or local councils ‘banning Christmas’.

We’re in a frightening place. Guesswork won’t lead us to safety.

If you can judge a man by the company he keeps, David Cameron is a pinball machine. Look at the random bunch of advisers he hangs – or in one case hung – around with. Just look at them.

First, Andy Coulson, the Essex-boy ‘man of the people’ who rose to become editor of the nation’s foremost grieving-relative surveillance unit. At the other end of the spectrum, George Gideon Oliver King Rameses Osborne, fourteen-year-old novelty Chancellor and future baronet of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon – a man so posh he probably weeps champagne. And finally, at the opposing end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum – thereby hopelessly triangulating the spectrum – we have ‘
blue-sky
’ policy guru Steve Hilton, who apparently wanders around Downing Street barefoot, ‘thinking outside the box’ like some groovy CEO.

Imagine sitting in a meeting room trying to make sense of that lot. Imagine them collectively giving you policy advice over a tea urn and a platter of sandwiches. Andy darkly gruffing and grumping and breaking off every few minutes to check the
Guardian
homepage on his iPhone. Gideon wondering how many coins there are in a pound then snorting through his nose as he draws a penis murdering a tramp on his satchel. Steve idly tossing a Hacky Sack around and suggesting the next Cabinet meeting should be held in a birthing pool. Talk about conflicting approaches. The cognitive dissonance would grow so loud you’d turn olive and giddy. And then you wouldn’t know which one to vomit over first. (Although since you’re David Cameron, the correct answer is ‘yourself’.)

Andy and Gideon we’re familiar with, of course. Andy is the sinister man in the slow-mo shots on the news, and Gideon is the
naughty boy who’s broken the economy. But Steve is more of a mystery. I’ve only ever glimpsed him in still photographs and a bit of news archive of him sitting on a bench somewhere.

Last week, the aura of mystery was punctured somewhat after the
Financial Times
printed a leaked list of some of his bluer ‘blue-sky’ ideas, such as the abolition of maternity leave and the closure of Job Centres. Ministers were quick to point out none of this was going to become official policy – rather, this was all a bit of amusing crazy talk designed to kick-start internal discussions. You know, an icebreaker – like opening a meeting by suggesting everyone follows you down to the local duck pond to watch you chop the head off a swan with some shears. It gets people talking. The swan’s head stays on – the swan was never in danger – but some truly ground-breaking concepts might spin out of the ensuing debate. Only by thinking the unthinkable can we define what’s thinkable. The swan has to die in our heads to survive in our hearts. Or something.

Previously, such out-there thought-riffing led Hilton to suggest the use of nascent ‘cloudbusting’ technology to create longer summers – no, really – and more famously, to dream up the ‘big society’. Frustratingly for Hilton’s critics, who like to paint him as a sort of misguided guff engine, the big society has been a resounding, concrete success. From the weeniest village to the hugest metropolis, there’s a solar-powered big society community hugspace on every corner, staffed by volunteers in unicorn costumes. I can’t recall the last time an authentic
grass-roots
movement captured the public imagination on such a grand scale, apart perhaps from T-Mobile’s 2009 ‘Josh’s band’ advertising campaign, which culminated in a feelgood hit single that stayed at number one for seventy-nine consecutive weeks,
IN T-MOBILE’S MAD MIND
.

Anyway, most of the focus thus far has been on Hilton’s
laid-back
dress sense and the Professor Branestawm wackiness of his ideas, which started out funny but seem less tittersome the more
extreme they become. But what sticks in my craw is the sheer stinking, blunted crapness of them.

‘Nudge unit’. ‘Big society’. ‘Hug a hoodie’. They sound like the titles of nauseating business-psychobabble books: the sort of timewasting
Who Moved My Cheese?
groovy CEO bullshit routinely found cluttering the shelves of every airport bookshop in the world. As well as being a pallid substitute for actual creativity – a device for making grey business wonks mistake themselves for David Bowie at his experimental peak – these books are the direct suit-and-tie office-dick equivalent of those embarrassing motivational self-help tomes that prey on the insecure, promising to turn their life around before dissolving into a blancmange of ‘strategies’ and ‘systems’ and above all excruciating metaphors.

Be honest. We’ve all read at least one of these personal empowerment classics. Or at least riffled through it in a bookshop. Any idiot could churn one out. In fact, let’s write one now.

We’ll call it
Break in Your Lifehorse.
Chapter 1: imagine your hopes and dreams are a galloping stallion, wild and untamed. Chapter 2: now picture yourself throwing a glowing lasso of light around its neck. Chapter 3: the dream stallion tries to jerk away from you, but if you dig in your heels and whisper at it, it will eventually calm down. Chapter 4: while it grazes, unsuspecting – leap on and saddle up! Chapter 5: ride it through the canyons of doubt and over the horizon of fear. Congratulations! You’re achieve-anating! That’ll be £10.99 thanks. Don’t forget to visit our website to buy the official Lifehorse Grooming Kit containing exclusive workcharts and a guide to customising your saddle. Coming soon:
Break in Your Lovehorse
(relationship healage for the recently bewildered), and
Break in Your Lifepony
(successanising strategies for the under-twelves.)

There you go. Beam an e-copy of that to Hilton’s Kindle, and I guarantee there’ll be a Lifehorse in every nudge unit by 2013. Unless he’s imagineered his way to having us all diced up and fed to the swans by big society shock troopers as part of
some Rainbownomics initiative by then. Which is inevitable. Inevitable.

The death penalty debate refuses to die – a bit like
seventeen-year
-old Willie Francis, who in 1946 was strapped into a chair at Louisiana State Penitentiary and electrocuted, only to wind up screaming for mercy from within his leather hood, selfishly upsetting several onlookers in the process.

The United Kingdom hasn’t hanged anyone since 1964, when Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were simultaneously sent to the gallows, in an audacious end-of-season finale. In the intervening years, the capital punishment argument has resurfaced now and then, usually in the wake of an especially harrowing murder trial, when the mob’s a bit twitchy. But it has always been a bit of a non-debate.

Proponents of the death penalty – ‘nooselovers’ or ‘danglefans’, as they like to be known – often come across as a bit
old-fashioned
, as though they’re opposed to progress in all its forms, and might as well be arguing in favour of fewer crisp flavours and slower Wi-Fi. This fusty impression isn’t helped when every news article about hanging is illustrated with vintage black and white photographs of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, as if tying a rope around someone’s neck and dropping them through a trapdoor in the hope of causing a fatal bilateral fracture of the C2 vertebra is the kind of behaviour that belongs in the past.

But now the debate has returned with an exciting new technological twist: thanks to the government’s exciting e-petition initiative in which any motion attracting over 100,000 signatories becomes eligible for debate in the House of Commons, the danglefans are suddenly on the cutting edge of populist online activism. Or rather they would be, if they
were proposing a suitably cutting-edge method of execution. Instead, it’s just a load of vague blah about reinstating ‘the death penalty’.

What sort of death penalty? The gallows? The chair? The gas chamber? Come on, this is the internet. The least you could do is rustle up a Flash animation depicting precisely how you want these people to be killed. You could even make it interactive: maybe have a fun preamble in which we shake the prisoner’s hand in order to guess his weight and adjust the length of the rope accordingly. Or a bit where we get to pull a leather hood over the screaming head of a petrified teenager with learning difficulties, then pull the switch and hear his kidneys boil.