Fact Checking ULU Vice President Daniel Cooper

It comes as little surprise to anyone who was witness to last year’s shameful show of glib and tasteless remarks made by the president and vice president of ULU as to why they would not be sending an official ULU representative to the University of London’s memorial service on remembrance Sunday that the same insult is to be repeated once again. The ULU senate, on which sits Vice President Cooper, member of a Trotskyist group which last described the 2 minutes silence as ‘an orgy of militarism’, have decided once again to spit in the face of all those members of their union who believe that it is in no way unreasonable to demand that they have an official ULU representative at the service which commemorates the millions who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the cause of liberty and freedom. Could they perhaps be as gracious to acknowledge that without these great sacrifices their right to make such absurd remarks wouldn’t now exist? Or on a more pragmatic level could they tell us why they think it such a wise strategy if they are trying to defend ULU from closure why they think infuriating so many of its members is a wise course of action? Perhaps they should take heed of comrade Lenin’s remarks that you can’t build socialism on a dead corpse because similarly you can’t defend a union by first alienating its members and giving them a potent reminder of why they really could do without you as well as your Monty Python-esque socialist values.        

However to try and use this space for other purposes than just repeating the words of the already numerous students who are quite rightly outraged at their union’s activities, I would like contest the particular point upon which this debate revolved around last year, which was the respective morality of Britain’s entry and participation in the First World War. Daniel Cooper’s infamous published explanation last year for his refusal to lay a reef, which can still be found on line and should be read by all, centres on the conflict and deserves a reply addressing several points about which Cooper flat out wrong .

Firstly the conflict is framed in his letter as one fought by the working classes of Europe on the command of their evil rulers who were little more than armchair spectators to the slaughter. Understandably this is an image one might pick up from watching Black Adder but going to historical facts this image can be quickly identified as the popularised nonsense which it is. Members of all of Britain’s social classes fought and died in the First World War in equal proportions and without any significant differentiation in the proportion of deaths sustained by each class grouping. This is historical fact. It might also be illuminating to note that one of the social groups which suffered the greatest proportionate casualty rate were Oxbridge alumni . The reality is that this was not class war but one fought and inflicted upon an entire nation. However even with this put to one side surely it is abhorrent to mourn or prioritise members of the war dead on the basis of class as it would be to do so by race or gender? But this wouldn’t be the first time that the far left has sought to disqualify suffering on its pseudo religious worship of class differences.

Secondly Cooper trots out the old and worn out argument that the war was fought for the interests of capitalism seeking colonies and markets around the world as the rich in Britain sent the poor to die to protect their interests and profit margins against the encroachment of the Kaiser’s Germany. If Mr Cooper or any of his Marxists-Leninist-Trotskyite-people’s-front-of-Judea-ist following would care to look at the academic opinion on the conflict from the last 50 years they would realise how thoroughly discredited this argument is, let alone the economics that underlies it, but then again ignorance is bliss. One doesn’t have to do too much reading to find out how horrified global capital was at the prospect of a war in Europe, even a limited one. Walter Cunliffe the then governor of the bank of England pleaded with the British government to stay out of the war along with big business which was horrified the destruction of capital and trade it would cause along with the taxes and inflation that would be required to pay for it. Big business, apart from the very small amount which is concerned with arms production, does not like war, as was manifestly shown by the forced closure of stock market exchanges all over Europe as the threat of war spread in 1914.

Equally the conflict was not caused by the scramble for Africa or a conflict for colonies. This is because despite Lenin’s theorising that new colonies were of the upmost importance to European imperialists and capitalists to exploit new sources of surplus labour, colonies were of no great importance whatsoever in the strategic decision making of 1914. In fact the economic insignificance of owning huge swathes of Africa owed to the decision that the British took to gift the Germans large African territories in the preceding decades before the war. This is because Marx was completely wrong about the tendency of profits to fall, meaning that only diminishing returns could be gained from investing in already industrialised economies, eventually leading to the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Economist Thomas Sowell has shown that despite the spurious and confused figures presented by Lenin in his book on imperialism, advanced capitalist economies invest in each other at a substantially greater rate than they do in developing ones. Because profits don’t irretrievably fall and capitalism is a fluid yet stable system, which creates great prosperity for all social classes, capitalist economics meant that in 1914 the maintenance of empires was not the cause of the war.  Such non-vital issues of national interest had always been resolved by peaceful diplomacy and had never been deemed worthy of risking a world war over.

Instead the British war effort in 1914 was one reluctantly conducted against the militarism of the German monarchy which had, despite the peaceful desires of the German people, launched an aggressive war against France and Belgium in order to gain military mastery over the continent. To not enter the conflict would have been to see the destruction of the French and Belgian democracies at the hands of such a reactionary force which in the words of one of its own commanders was prepared to risk the destruction of the whole of European civilisation to achieve its own dominance and ascendancy because even if Germany went down in flames it would still be a beautiful accomplishment. The Kaiser’s Germany might not have been as archetypally menacing as Hitler’s nor the political institutions of Britain and the other allied powers of 1914 as liberal and progressive as the ones we enjoy today but the success of the allies in this horrific and tragic conflict is something that we should be proud of. Although the peace was definitely bungled, it was fought to protect the core principles which have helped the long arch of history continue to progress towards justice instead of suffering a dramatic reverse and I see no shame in affirming that belief.

So in conclusion unless the leaders of ULU can provide credible historical arguments to back their objections then they should be silent about which they cannot speak and about which we are all too tired of hearing them do so. 

                

      

     

The road to serfdom along blurred lines

The recent decision to ban the song ‘blurred lines’ by the University of London Union and the debate surrounding the decision hinges on one important word, increasingly in vogue as the justification for such bans, namely ‘normalisation’. Seemingly unbeknown to those who wield the word to silence anything they consider undesirable or unpleasant, the word ‘normalisation’ makes those who have any knowledge of the history of totalitarian socialism in Eastern Europe shudder as they see the slogan branded by those who mercilessly crushed the Prague spring in 1968 being used by their own student union. Perhaps its not as bad as having a barbeque to burn copies of the song or calling the policy ‘musical re-education’ but none the less this should hopefully be a disturbing choice of words chosen to label an already worrying policy. Even if this the farce that follows the tragedy under the leadership of Michael Chessum and Daniel Cooper ULU has strived in its commitment to be part of the farcical afterglow which has followed the death of socialism the world over. Decisions like these are increasingly making more students look forward to the end of this year when the union that Chessum and his comrades run is finally closed down and their oh so noble insurgency and twilight resistance against the Clegg and Cameron coalition of doom is finally put out to pasture.

 

To return to the issue at hand, need the argument be restated again as to why some students find the idea of simply banning and outlawing not only a dangerous policy which is a slap in the face of the liberal educational values a university is supposed to uphold and embody  but also one that is exceptionally insulting. Call it radical but perhaps it should be questioned whether clumsily banning such songs is a more dangerous normalisation of a culture of censorship and suppression of freedom of speech than Robin Thicke’s atrocious song which supposedly normalises a culture of rape by simply including the words ‘I know you want it/ You’re a good girl’?

 

Call us old fashioned but some of the subjects of ULU, the author of this piece included, believe that we are grown up and adult enough to listen to such lyrics without them altering our views and beliefs on the gravity of the crime of rape. In the same way feel ourselves being perfectly capable of having a responsible and healthy relationship with the alcohol the union so generously allows us to drink in the ULU bar. An important point does here arise out of that which might seem trivial as to concede the principle that the student union, or any governmental authority, knows best and thus must limit our freedom in order to secure our safety and to act for our own good, is to place ourselves squarely on Mr Hayek’s road to serfdom. To concede that governing bodies are knowledgeable enough as to make such micro managements of society and thus hand themselves the responsibility as well as the authority to do so then there is no limit to the extent to which it can pass arbitrary ruling after arbitrary ruling. Such haphazard attempts to centrally engineer society gain their own momentum as their inevitable creation of more problems requires more disastrous and increasingly indiscriminate measures to salvage the last salvo of blunders. The only thing proved by such irresponsible policy making is the sheer ignorance of government which it was arrogant enough to first presume it possessed.

 

The only way to cover and deny such ignorance is to resort to the bazar and the mystical which brings us back to absurd terms such as ‘the normalisation of cultures of rape or misogyny’.  These terms have no definable or specific meanings and to look for one is to try to nail the proverbial jelly to a wall. However they are terms used to justify the very specific interventions under discussion, because not being able to justify these interventions on the basis of evidence, such as how many rapes are going to be prevented by removing the lyrics ‘I know you want it’ from the union bar, the only defence is to revert into the pseudo religious by indignantly employing such vacant terms, the penalty for challenging which is too often social crucifixion.

 

Its easy to wonder if all this would be 100% clearer if the politically active students on campus spent less time attempting and pretending to read the 1000 stale and incoherent pages of Marx’s Das Kapital and instead diverted their attention to the remarkably slim and easy to read volume which is The Road to Serfdom, authored by that now sadly all too obscure Austrian economist Friedrich Von Hayek. Perhaps injecting a more liberal streak into the body politic of ULU would teach students that their university experience is an invaluable opportunity to realise that if they support or detest different points of view then open debate or learning the art of peaceful co-existence is superior in the long run to forging rods that might someday bind their backs by banning the opposition or creating ‘cultures of prohibition’.