Big State or Big Discussion? The Fight for Turkey's Soul

I thought there was something to be hopeful about before the past weekend, but now I'm not so sure. It seemed that finally Recep Tayyip Erdogan had deigned to listen to some voice other than the one that echoes around the inside of his skull, and that a rapprochement was possible.

Then he went completely Fruit Loop.

The result? The Police re-take Gezi Park, rip it up, re-plant it with several hundred trees and thousands of flowers (in order to show that the AKP, unlike the protesters, is a truly Green party), plants that will have to be ripped up again once the shopping mall/'Ottoman-Style Barracks'/luxury flats/Spaceport for Turkey's first spaceship has been given the go-ahead, scatter protesters, arrest lawyers, doctors and the few independent journalists still working in Turkey, steal a man's piano, fire tear gas into buildings including hospitals and (allegedly) the Dutch Consulate, mix some chemical irritant with the water fired at protesters from the TOMA water cannons, and basically the whole world outside of AKP-land gets the blame.

All for the sake of a tree?

Well, that's how some would still have it. In fact, it's part of an ongoing debate that has been in Turkey for a long time, one that has two parts:
The emergence of democracy as a social construct;
and the role of government and religion in private lives.
This is nothing new. It could be argued that in the UK, much of our history since the Reformation has been about the same subject - for example, what the precise role of the monarch is, what is the relationship between Crown and commoner, what rights do we have to the enjoyment of privacy etc. The American Constitution is very much built on the notion of individual rights and the responsibility of the individual within society. Of course, whether it works in practice or not is a very different thing, but the principles are there. And again and again over the course of the last two hundred years, we have seen societies being united and/or riven by the possibilities and fragilities of democratic process.
What is fascinating is watching it happen in real time in Turkey, thanks to the heroes of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and beyond. Gezi Park itself has been an incredible melting pot of possibilities, and what has been truly notable is the fact that people of so many political and religious persuasions, people who would not normally see eye to eye on a single thing, have found a commonality and a capability to work together. It may not be easy, it may not be quick, they may not be able to agree entirely, but they have sought to compromise and to work together - the very idea of what a community and a society is.They are living refutation of Erdogan's idea that democracy comes but once every election time.
The other issue that is important here is how closely should government interfere with personal liberties, rights, and responsibilities? Turkish people are quite rightly pissed off at Erdogan's incessant micro-management - you half expect him to turn up behind your shoulder while you're having breakfast, and he starts saying 'No, eat the EGG FIRST, then have THE HONEY. Hold your tea LIKE THIS...' - but he is hardly the first Turkish Leader to do this. As I said in an earlier post, Turkish politics is pretty paternalistic, and an awful lot of politicos hear love nothing better than the sound of their own voice, dispensing wisdom: Unfortunately, there are a lot of voters out there who love this sort of thing. Interestingly, an AKP politician today said that the more educated a person is, the less likely they are to vote AKP, or indeed vote at all.
Again, this is nothing new - look at any country's history, and you will see that people have protested and rioted for similar reasons - but the protests in Turkey are important because this must be the most widely-disseminated and witnessed protest, thanks to social media platforms, in history. And looking at it, the message is clear - these people love their country deeply and care deeply about what happens to it, but they also want the right to live without the government sticking their noses in where they don't belong. If someone wants to buy a beer after 10 pm, let him. If someone wants to wear a headscarf to university, let her. If two lovers want to kiss in public, whose business is it but their own?
This, however, is a debate for everybody in Turkey, not just the elected few - how much is private conscience a matter of public concern, and to what depth sould government be involved in the affiars of the individual?
For myself, I believe that issues of conscience and faith are essentially private matters, not state ones. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk wisely decreed that the Turkish Republic was a secular state, but of course a politician's personal concerns and outlook will always colour the interpretation of the meaning of 'secular' - you just have to look at the USA for examples of that.
The question is this - what kind of state will emerge from all this? A Republic full of parks, piano recitals and discussion, or a Republic patrolled by the iron hand of a man standing behind your shoulder, telling you how exactly you should brush your hair?

Did you miss me?

OK, so I haven't been posting much recently. Well, not at all for a few months. Alright, not a blinking sausage.
I intend to rectify this.
I should say that there have been three reasons behind my extreme rectitude of the last six months:
1. I have been in the throes of a separation, and to be honest, I can think of better things to think about than blog.
2. I have been up to my eyeballs in studying.
3. I am by nature a lazy git, and I couldn't think of anything worth saying.
4. OK, no. 3 is in fact two reasons.
5. All right, I've thought of something else: I was feeling weary of being online, on places like blogger and Twitter, where it seems you're surrounded by a myriad of voices all shouting 'Me! me! MEEEE!!' all the time.

The question is, where to start again?

Oh alright then, politics.
There have been, to put it mildly, what might might be classified as Interesting Times in the rarifed realms of politics, law, media and finance. Put simply, it would appear that we are witnessing a rather black farce, with the ruling elite's trousers falling down at an alarming rate.
 Unfortunately, there's no-one making a 'POOooo-oooOOP!' noise on a flute, or someone pretending to be a lampshade.
What we are witnessing is just how far the politicians in Westminster, of all political pursuasions, have been in thrall to the media and the banks, and just how scared of them they are. The Leveson inquiry has unveiled all sorts of shenanigans, chicanery and other words suggesting farcical black deeds in the press and its relationship to those nominally in charge; The utterly disgusting behaviour by Barclays and other banks is now the possible subject of another inquiry.
The problem is this: the people who have set up Leveson and are pushing for the banking inquiry are to some degree culpable. It's a bit like a witness for the defence in a murder trial being asked to set up the case. Why on earth is there not more anger about this issue? For the past four years now, we have increasingly seen the ways in which politicians, media figures and bankers have actively colluded to deceive, cheat, swindle and threaten. If these were people in your neighbourhood doing this, they would quite rightly be the subject of prosecution - but because these are the lawmakers, the purseholders, the newscarriers, they can make a law, keep hold of our money and tell us all that it is, somehow, all our fault.
Or worse, That We Are All In This Together.

Bloody Elections... and cycling

I've avoided posting anything for the past week simply because so many other would be posting on the subject of the General Election results. By and large, it's been rather depressing - actually, seeing David Cameron's posho smug face outside no.10 tonight, very depressing. As an aside, will it be a requirement of all future PMs to have a sprog born in the Prime Ministerial residence from now on? First Blair, then Brown, now Cameron; it's like the British version of porphyrogenita.
 I don't know about you, but there is something utterly maddening about the current batch of Tories. The fact that three of them - Cameron, George Osborne (the newly-incumbent Chancellor), and Boris Johnson (Mayor of London)- were all in the Bullingdon Club at the same time seems suspect, but more irritatingly is their smug belief in their innate, almost god-given, right to govern others. Says bloody who? Cameron had only one or two short-term jobs prior to becoming a politician, selling advertising, and George has never held down a proper job in his whole life. What the hell makes them think they're bloody qualified to do a damn thing?
As for Nick Clegg - well, I think he was given a terrible choice, and he (and the Lib Dem leadership) chose terribly. Once the spending cuts and tax hikes that are inevitable are announced, they are hardly going to be popular. However, trying to be positive, if they are seen as full coalition members of goverment, they may provide a decent check on Tory policies.

Sorry, I thought I just saw a flying pig there.


OK, enough about politics for now. In other news, I cycled from Reading to Oxford via NCN route 5 (approx 40 miles) on sunday, doing it in three and a half hours. Far more enjoyable than trying to strangle a TV because David Cameron's face is on it. I will be atempting a 90-miler to Bath in June - I'll be whacking the link to a justgiving page on here soon.

It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.

You may be wondering,perhaps, why I haven't commented much on the General Election, considering that politics is a frequent subject of this blog. It's a combination of exhaustion, lethargy, geberally avoiding Doing Things and a degree of puzzlement. By nature, I'm more of a Labour supporter than anything else, but this election has thrown everything up in the air. I have the feeling that whoever gets into government come next thursday will decide the way this country is going for many, many years to come, far beyond the lifetime of a single Parliamentary cycle. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, may well be right when he says 'whoever is the government this time around will be out of power for a generation after'. He says this because whoever gets in will have to make cuts and tax increases of such severity that they will not exactly be Mr. Popular with the electorate.

 Perhaps it's precisely this issue that is haunting all the three main parties to the extent that not a single one has a Big Idea - a single, defining thought for change. By and large, they come out almost sounding the same, bar one or two bits here and there. Having listened to and watched the Prime Ministerial debates over the last three weeks, I can't say that anyone come out on top - certainly not David Cameron. I really don't understand why opinion polls put him consistently ahead. He didn't say anything of substance, just anecdotes of dubious provenance and the phrase 'We've got to...' repeatedly. It's all very well saying that something has to be done, but how? that's the real question, and Cameron didn;t answer it. Gordon Brown was much better on facts, substance and method, but he has all the charisma of a sock full of thistles. Clegg was a revelation, only because he hadn't made any impression whatsoever beforehand. Some of his ideas were, I felt, on the naieve side, and he would certainly get a shock if he tried to implement them in the febrile, jumpy atmosphere of government.
There's only one idea worth going for that two parties have suggested - electoral reform. Both Labour and the Lib Dems have it in their manifestoes. Whether it would ever be put into law within a parliamentary cycle is debatable, to put it mildly, and it certainlt won't cure the economic woes of the country. What it may do, however, is open governement to a new democratic paradigm within the UK. It would also force the Big Three to alter, in some cases radically, and open them up to new ideas and policies, rather than have the Same Old Politics again and again, and which seem to end up getting all of us into the Same Old Mess eventually.
And as for the person who said to me that they wouldn't vote because it was against their beliefs, I say that making no choice is still a choice and often the worst one. When faced with a decision, avoiding it does not equate to a good thing. Vote, and vote according to what you have read, understood, want and need. Don't vote in a particular way just because you've always voted for this or that party, or your parents have, or someone's told you to. Vote and know you've done it for the right reasons.