John Lloyd

The opinions expressed are his own.

In France, it is les Anglais. In Germany, die Engländer. In Italy, gli Inglesi. In Russia, Anglichane.

The peoples of the United Kingdom, for most other peoples, are habitually “English.”

Not unnaturally. The English part of the UK accounts for close to 90 per cent of the country’s population; the language is English; the capital is London, long the English capital; the accents heard are overwhelmingly English; the long-held stereotype of the country is an upper-class English gent, snobbish, prudish and insular.

This suits at least some of the English, who often do the same as foreigners when referring to their nation state.  Frequently, without any malice, they have assumed that Britain is co-terminus with England (until recently, England supporters waved the Union Jack—which represents all of the British nations–at international football matches). Once, years ago, when speaking to a former senior Royal courtier, I mildly corrected his use of “England” to “Britain.” He wagged a humorous finger at me (a Scot) and said: “Now now, none of that Scots nationalism!” – which is, when you think of it as an answer to my objection, incomprehensible, except in terms of a certain English mindset. Yet, though illogical, it was also thoughtlessly generous: the English nation had dissolved itself into the state, and by waving the Union Jack, gave an implicit invitation to the other nations of the British state to do likewise – though only the Northern Irish did.

Ironically, had I held the views he ascribed to me, I would not have corrected him. From the point of view of  the nationalists of the UK – Scots and Welsh nationalists, Irish Republicans – the more that people at home and abroad think Britain is England and vice versa, the better they like it. It underscores their belief that the Union is an artificial thing–England with a few possessions historically acquired by conquest, trickery or both.

That view – that the United Kingdom really is England, and that any self-respecting people who would not call themselves English had best get out of it – is now acquiring deeper roots. The outgoing head of the Civil Service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, has expressed his worry about the possible breakup of the United Kingdom: he regards it as the most poisoned of the chalices he passes to his successor. What had been, for much of my life, the preserve of misty eccentrics (except in Ireland), has now entered the political arteries of the world’s oldest parliamentary democracy, and may cause a seizure.

The differences between the three varieties of British – or anti-British – nationalism are sharp, and important to understand (most English have not taken the trouble: but trouble will come all the same).

The Welsh variant is weakest: nationalism is not a passionate creed here. That version proposed by the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru (“the Party of Wales”) is mild and strongly culturally based – the Welsh language is still widely spoken. The integration of the nation with England has been centuries long; Wales had few of the elements of a state before it lost what nascent independence it had. Whatever happens to the United Kingdom, Wales would be the least likely among the British nations to seek an independence its people mostly do not seem to want.

Ireland is a much more modern, much more savage story. The revolution against British rule, which consumed much of  the first two decades of last century, produced a republic in most of the island – excepting the northern province of Ulster, the most industrialized, where a largely Protestant- Unionist population refused to join the largely Catholic-Nationalist south and insisted – on the threat of armed revolt – on continuing the link with the UK. The IRA’s long terrorist war, from the late sixties to the late nineties, tried and failed to frighten them into changing their minds. It ended with an uneasy agreement to share power between the republican and unionist communities – now led by the Democratic Unionists and the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein – with the Unionists retaining a slim lead. The agreement has held, in spite of sporadic terrorism on the part of the hard line IRA warriors, who refused to accept the peace, and in spite of periodic suspensions of the devolved assembly. The Unionists fear that, sooner or later, they will lose their majority; the present relative peace, welcome as it is, is precarious.

But it is Scotland which lies at the heart of the gathering crisis. The Union which created the UK is that between Scotland and England; when they came together under one government three hundred years ago, both renounced their own form of statehood to form a new one. The Union survived the Highland-based rebellion, led by Charles Edward Stuart (who had a good claim to the British throne), with the Scots in the more productive and populous Lowland belt preferring “English” rule to one led by clan chieftains. The smaller nation retained a separate Church, a separate legal system and to a large extent a different culture; but the two shared in the vast expansion of both the economy and empire which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought to the UK. And a history of warfare and border raiding receded into the past.

But something other than peace, wealth and empire came too – unbidden and unforeseen. Again with Ireland as the exception, a nation state came into being which rested on a civil, not an ethnic, base. A British citizen could be English, (Northern) Irish, Scots or Welsh; and as greater social equality and fuller civil rights were achieved, the divisions within the new nation became more those of class, less of nation. The United Kingdom, as it ceased to be an empire ruling over half the globe, could emerge as a state which was better placed than most to adapt to a world where many cultures, by choice or of necessity, live together. It could do so because it had a citizenship which was already rooted in a union of diverse nations – and which had, with difficulty and toil, learned something of the art of cultural compromise.

The success of the Scottish National Party, more than any other single fact, puts the Union, and that achievement, at risk. An object of more derision (by Scots) than support for most of its life, it broke through in the late sixties and has, bit by bit, taken over more of a country which had been, after the war, largely Conservative, then largely Labour.

The trick seems to have been to marry economic advantage – the nationalists claim the oil off Scotland’s coasts, in the North Sea, as the country’s property – with the contemporary desire to portray oneself or one’s cause as a victim. Since Scotland has done well out of three centuries of Union, it has been necessary to look further back: nothing has succeeded so well in this as the Mel Gibson film Braveheart, which showed the mediaeval chief William Wallace take on the English, lose, then be tried, tortured and executed. Sparing neither in sentimentality nor distortion, the film became wildly popular, was adopted by the nationalists, watched by Scottish teams before international matches and provoked a rash of anti-English rhetoric, and a few scuffles. It was a huge boost to the cause, courtesy of Hollywood.

Nationalism found in its leader, Alex Salmond, one of the subtlest politicians in the UK, one who has coaxed a population in which a majority consistently oppose independence into support for a party which was created to win it. In the last election for the Scots parliament, he won an absolute majority; and he holds out, as both a promise to the Scots and a threat to the English, the prospect of a referendum on independence whenever the sentiment of the nation favors it.

He has done something still more effective. He has nursed into existence a resurgent English nationalism – nursed it, by insisting, with as much publicity as possible, that Scotland has no use for the English any longer, and would be better on its own. The English, aware that Scotland receives a higher proportion of public spending than do the regions of England, have increasingly said: So go!  More than one poll has shown that where a majority of Scots oppose independence, a majority of the English would welcome it.

The Union Jack isn’t waved by England supporters any longer; instead, it is the cross of St. George, red on a white background. The unhappy premiership of the Scots-born Gordon Brown – who tried, in his ponderous and increasingly ill-attended way, to create a new sense of pride in the Union – instead boosted a growing distaste for Scotland among the English. The old ties – of war against a common enemy; of class solidarity across national boundaries; of a shared religion; of family links – have either weakened or seem irrelevant.

Salmond retains control of the process. As England becomes more Euroskeptic and supports Prime Minister Cameron’s lone refusal to accept the new plan to save the Euro, he emphasizes that an independent Scotland would be Euro-friendly, with a place at the top tables of the Continent. It would have nothing to do with foreign wars, in which Scots soldiers have died. It would renounce nuclear weapons. And it would lay claim to the oil which, though dwindling, will still gush up from the bed of the North Sea, off Scotland, for some years yet.

In the end, a decision to form – or re-form – a nation depends on a common view that it will be a better place to be for its people, because it will in its institutions and in its customs, in its actions and in the place it makes for itself in the world, more resemble them and how they would like to be seen. For four centuries the crowns of the two nations have been united; for three centuries, the Parliaments have been too. Now, Sir Gus O’Donnell, head of the British civil service  – no English gent: lower class born, Catholic raised, with an Irish surname – looks beyond his term of office and wonders if his successors will have a British bureaucracy to supervise. Or will a refurbished, modernized, comforting and self-flattering nationalism can be draped over enough Scots shoulders to warm them to the prospect of a separate state. And “England for the English”, until these last few years the motto of right-wing extremists, becomes an inevitability.

PHOTO: Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) Alex Salmond delivers his speech to delegates during their annual conference in Inverness, Scotland October 22, 2011. REUTERS/David Moir

The opinions expressed are his own.

There is a poem, written in 1955, by the English poet Philip Larkin, called Church Going. It tells of the poet’s solitary penchant for cycling about villages, visiting country churches, empty, sometimes ruined, each with a “tense, musty, unignorable silence.” In deft touches, he writes of taking off his bicycle clips in lieu of doffing a non-existent cap; of experiencing an inexplicable pleasure in standing in these “frowsty barns”; yet finishing his visit feeling “much at a loss.”

He ends with a reflection: that the church is “a serious house on serious earth,” and that

“… someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.”

This “hunger to be more serious” is acute now, in Christmas week, when, in the countries of long Christian tradition, the broadcast air is replete with carols, sacred music and invocations to rejoice in a miracle birth. It is a hunger which also contains something of a languorous sense of guilt – that something which should have been precious, or sacred, had been casually lost, dispensed with in the getting and spending of contemporary life. A stirring of regret that there is no solid faith beneath that yearning; and a nostalgia for a childhood acceptance of the message of Christmas, wrapped up in the pleasures of adult attention and the receiving of gifts (to be sure, reality can be quite opposite: but most of us sugar-coat such memories).

But mere keening over lost times – even when as beautifully done, as Larkin does – holds little value for us, or for the society. If we cannot have certainty of faith, we might create a space for the discussion of faithlessness. If the church is still remembered, however vestigially, as a place “proper to grow wise in,” then we should put it to that use.

Protestant churches in rich lands which have not gone over to evangelical Christianity can be sad places (the Catholics usually do a bit better: faith, or fear, is more strongly inculcated, though even these are fading). Outside of the high days of Easter and, especially, Christmas, the faithful huddle at the end of pews, or dot themselves about halls built for hundreds. The elderly predominate; occasionally, a family which has retained the faith comes with young children, mutinously conscious that this is time away from this or that screen. The pastor, steeling him- (or, now, her-) self against the disappointment of ministering to the few, keeps as resolute a cheerfulness as a troupe of actors playing to a largely empty theater. S/he may be wrestling with private doubts: a popular BBC TV comedy series, Rev, stars Tom Hollander as an inner city vicar, facing, in a vast Victorian temple, a congregation so tiny and so dysfunctional that he is thrown into existential despair, shouting defiance at a God whom, he decides in bad hours, has forsaken him.

Yet Rev, blackly comic as it can be, points to something unforsaken. It points to a ground which need not be that of a dour clinging to the remnants of institutions which stubbornly decline each year – or its opposite, the terrain charted in the past decade by such as the late Christopher Hitchens and by Richard Dawkins, as an equally unyielding contempt for all manifestations of religion.

In a piece in the Guardian some five years ago, Dawkins wrote that “many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense…September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense…dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism.”

For an Oxford don, who held a chair until 2008 in the public understanding of science, this is bad reasoning. The massacres of September 11 were carried out by men who held to a particular interpretation of Islam, regarded as heretical and indefensible by many of the religion’s authorities. They live worlds away from the gently declining vicars of moderate Protestantism–and it is in the latter’s  melancholy, “frowsty barns” where some kind of rebirth is possible.

In one sense it would be a rebirth of the spirit: but not of the Holy Spirit. Too few, perhaps even too few vicars, are sure of that entity’s existence. Instead, it would serve the “hunger…to be more serious”.

Churches, mostly dating from the 19^th century, when organized religion was at its flood tide of self-confidence, are what we in the early 21^st century have as our most prominent public buildings – and often the finest. The spires strain upwards, the halls are large, the fittings down at heel but often still handsome. In these spaces, new kinds of temples of the spirit could be built: places where the urgent questions of the day and the timeless questions of eternity are set before people, and thrashed out. It would be a space for lectures; for debate and discussion at every level; for creativity and the staging of shows, performances and every kind of dramatic experiment.

They would be in part social or community centers – places whose mandate was to seek neighborhood involvement and amity. The pastors would moderate and guide and speak, but not dominate – except in the sense that s/he would be responsible for the place, and would need to set limits and have them respected. It would be a place where people, especially those who usually do not speak in public, could express their minds and ask the questions which puzzle them.

There would be recognition that for some, a faith still burns and needs to be served: and the pastors would need to do so. But otherwise, they would be liberated from the demands of ritual, free to express and argue their doubts, or their faith, able to make new connections.

Above all, the new “churches” would be  an expression of a compromise between a fading faith and a bewildered secularism. They would be there to serve human curiosity and mental restlessness; to serve the need for answers, small and large.

What would be in it for the organized churches? Ask the more urgent question: what is in it for them to remain in the status quo? Living off patrimonies squirreled away in the fat years will be possible for many years yet: but to what end? They have staffs of intelligent, highly educated men and women who have renounced wealth and what the world now defines as success, for a life of service. But the nature of service has changed: when men and women shrug off faith, they do not dispense with questioning: and if they cannot accept a truth revealed once and for all, they still need to have the old, and the new, puzzles teased out, over and over again. And that the churches could do, if they would.

Larkin’s Church Going was written over half a century ago: the yearning for a serious ground on which to stand has not diminished in that time, nor the nostalgia for the role the church once played in granting that. For many – in much of the world, for most — it does not do that any longer. But amid the ruins of a faith, the human spirit for life in the mind can still be served.

Photo: A war-ravaged Catholic Cathedral that is being used as an informal settlement for internally displaced people is seen in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu in this general view, August 31, 2011. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

By John Lloyd
The opinions expressed are his own.

MOSCOW — This weekend it was the Russians who took to the streets. Authorities claim there were no more than 25,000 protestors while organizers say there were at least 50,000. No matter the number, the protests have taken a sharp turn and seem to have depth in their anger.

Russia is far from a full democracy, but it is enough of one to prompt its electors to indignation that their presidential choices had been radically “improved”.

The current unrest on the streets and the widespread revulsion over solid-seeming evidence of ballot rigging show that many get very annoyed if their democratic choice is falsified. In conversations with students, regional journalists and a few older people in Russia last week, I was left in little doubt of the anger felt by many among them — and many among them had been Putin supporters.

The rule of Vladimir Putin — eight years as President of Russia, four behind the Presidential throne while Dmitri Medvedev sat uneasily on it, never quite looking the part — was not, after all, a defiance of the laws of political gravity.

Here was a politician who had achieved, by democratic means, the power of an authoritarian. Putin built his power during his first term as president and had it confirmed with his second term and then again in the election of his proxy, Medvedev, to serve the term which he, under the constitution, could not.

His power controls the government, the Duma (parliament), the regional governors, the military, the police, the secret services and most of the media, or certainly the most important part of it, television: in a country of 140 million, no daily newspaper has a circulation of over a 100,000.

The judiciary can also usually be relied on to bring in the “right” sentence when it is important to the state to do so. Businesses, even very large ones, also toe the Kremlin line: those who think of defiance need only reflect on Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the greatest among them, now serving out a second sentence in Siberia.

Putin had high popularity and complete control: what could go wrong?

Here’s what the experts think could:

The economy, which has been the basis of Putin’s popularity, has been stagnant since the financial crash of 2008, scorning his assurance that Russia is immune from such Western diseases. But just the opposite is true: Russia’s economic woes run deep. In a recent paper, “The Russian economy to 2020″, Brookings Fellows Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes demolish the claim that the economy is modernizing. They write that Russia “is not a young, dynamic emerging economy. It is an old economy still burdened by a legacy of 60 years of misallocation and faulty development”. The Soviet Union is not a legacy easily sloughed off.

Earlier this month, a Pew Global Attitudes survey showed that Russians (as well as Ukrainians and Lithuanians) “are unhappy with the direction of their countries and disillusioned with the state of their politics…most believe that the changes that have taken place since 1991 have had a negative impact on public morality, law and order and standards of living”.

And in a lengthy report, “Dealing with a post-BRIC Russia”, the European Council for Foreign Relations writes, “the economic crisis has laid bare Russia’s governance crisis. Growth is also constrained as a consequence of weak institutions, the personalization of power and fusion of property and power that defines Russian politics”.

There are other, more vivid signs, like the booing that greeted Putin when he attended a martial arts demonstration a few weeks back. His popularity, which is somewhere between 35 and 40 percent, is still relatively high for a leader in financially troubled times, but it is quite far down from the sixtieth percentile, where it had resided for some time.

Russia has stopped being a success. It is “more sick than BRIC” as economist Nouriel Roubini puts it. Indeed, there is much doubt as to whether it should have been put in a group with Brazil, India and China in the first place.

Russians, however, are not opposed to a strong ruling hand. In fact, a Pew survey shows they prize a strong hand more than democracy. To be sure, that sentiment plays into Putin’s favor.

But many, especially students, after years of what observers describe as remarkable passivity, now show a rebelliousness more often associated with their stage in life. One reason: the prevailing corruption in universities, where entrances and degrees are routinely bought by rich parents, and where the richer students flaunt their wealth. A visit to the elite Moscow State University, Mikhail Gorbachev’s alma mater, revealed many expensive German cars in the student parking lots.

Moscow, where I lived at the end of Soviet times and in the poor, turbulent years of Boris Yeltsin’s rule, has become a consumers’ wonder (and a poor person’s despair). It’s now surrounded by malls, vast IKEA depots, gleaming car sales palaces and every sort of fast food concession. Restaurants in inner Moscow are now among the most expensive in the world, and the cafe next to the Moscow Conservatory, where you could get tea for a few roubles, now charges $10 for a cappuccino and a piece of pie. The next generation of musicians — the Conservatory produces many of the greatest string and piano players of the 20th century – continue to converse merrily enough outside in the cold. But in the provinces, especially in the villages, much is still the same.

Russia’s population, however, is shrinking fast. Men tend to die in their fifties, and the drafted armed forces are a byword for cruelty … to their own recruits. These recruits still serve in the Northern Caucasus, where Chechnya is pacified but mini conflicts constantly break out. The rich, the clever, and the criminals make their wealth in Russia, but then stream abroad and spend it in London and Paris, like the Tsarist era aristos. A huge gulf separates the winners from the losers — and the winners rub it in.

Even normally level headed Russian analysts sound apocalyptic: political scientist and head of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, Sergei Karaganov, a keen tracker of trends for twenty years, recently remarked that if the country’s Far East continues to depopulate, “it is very likely that Russia, east of the Urals, and later the whole country, will turn into an appendage of China — first as a warehouse of resources, and then economically and politically”.

The former British ambassador to Moscow, Andrew Wood, in a recent book-length conversation with Russian liberal analyst Liliya Shevtsova, said “Russia (has) a kind of bureaucratic-authoritarian regime in quasi democratic disguise”.

If — it is no longer a question of when — Vladimir Putin, a chauffeur’s son turned KGB Lieutenant Colonel turned leader of all Russia, receives his third mandate from the Russian people to be their President next March, little will change, say most experts, both Russian and foreign. Putin rules, as he often says, through a “vertical of power” — that is, with power concentrated at the center and with all other institutions subordinate to him, either de facto or de jure.

No fool, and perhaps no natural tyrant, Putin may seek to shift to a greater liberalism to contain and address the rising discontent. But because he is no fool, he will know Machiavelli’s warning that this is the most dangerous maneuver for a leader, even more so when attempted in a stalled economy.

It may well be true that Putin’s occasional warning to Western leaders – that Russia needs a strong hand to guard against other reactionary forces – has some validity. People want their voting to be clean, but the rest of what democracy and capitalism has brought to their country has little support. This disillusion has been long growing. In her conversation with Wood, Shevtsova remarks, “it was during Yeltsin’s time that democratic values were discredited in people’s eyes, because they were used as slogans to disguise the emergence of oligarchical capitalism and a corrupt state”. Putin was set to change all that, but has not.

The stability of Russia, on which much more than Russia’s fate depends, is no longer assured. The carapace of the USSR drags on the economy, and on the politics and the society, too. Getting rid of it, becoming “normal”, is a long work in progress. And, most likely, a turbulent one. Much trouble still lies ahead.

By John Lloyd
The opinions expressed are his own.

The Arab Spring’s effects continue to ripple outward. As Tahrir Square fills once more, it gains new momentum. For months now, the autocrats of Africa have feared it would move south, infecting their youth in often-unemployed, restless areas.

That fear has come to the ancient civilization of Ethiopia, the second-most populous state (after Nigeria) in Africa. There, since June, the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has cracked down hard on dissidents, opposition groups and, above all, journalists, imprisoning some and forcing others into exile.

The latest refugee is Dawit Kebede, managing editor of one of the few remaining independent papers, the Awramba Times. Kebede, who won an award for freedom from the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists last year, fled to the U.S. last month after he received a tip off that he was about to be arrested.

Also in the past month, apparently reliable reports have circulated of a teacher in his late twenties, Yenesew Gebre, who burnt himself alive in protest against political repression in his home town of Dawra, in the south of the country. It has also been reported, by sources who spoke to the opposition satellite station, ESAT, based in the US, that Gebre had been dismissed from his teaching post because of his political views.

The move recalls the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi – another young man in his twenties – in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia in January this year, a catalyst for the protests there and elsewhere in the spring. The parallel is being widely made in oppositionist sites and media.

One of the oppositionists in exile is a journalist who, with others, founded a newspaper in October 2007, named Addis Neger. It was tolerated for two years, then closed down in December 2009. The founders, fearing arrest, left the country: Abiye Teklemariam came to the UK, where I spoke with him.

“The self immolation of Yenesew Gebre is an extraordinary thing,” he said. “The more so since it’s absolutely not in the tradition of Ethiopia to take one’s own life like this. It is an expression of how far people are prepared to go, how frustrated they are. Part of the problem is that the foreign states who give aid – like the United States and the United Kingdom – don’t seem to care. The government now says that because it has strong growth, civil rights must suffer. And the foreign donors have accepted that: so there is no pressure on the regime.”

Ethiopia isn’t, for the most part, like the Arab states who rose in different kind of revolts this past year. It’s bigger than most – with a population of some 82 million it’s slightly bigger than Egypt – and though still poor, it’s been growing strongly in the past decade. It also has a parliament with elections and opposition parties, which have had seats in the parliament.

In the 2005 elections, the opposition groups won about one third of the parliament’s 546 seats. After that, however, oppositionists say there was a massive crackdown on the opposition, who engaged in widespread protests against what they saw as rigged elections. Some 200 people died in these protests, mostly at the hands of the security forces.

Among the biggest political victims of the crackdown was Dr. Berhanu Nega, an academic and businessman, who was elected mayor of the capital, Addis Ababa, and whose party, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy, achieved just under 20 percent of the vote in the national election. With other leaders of his party, he was imprisoned, released in 2007 and fled to the US. There he has created an opposition party in exile, Ginbot 7, which calls for a revolutionary overthrow of the government of Prime Minister Zenawi, who has led the country since August 1995.

In the last elections, in May 2010, the government claimed over 99 percent of the parliamentary seats for its main party, the Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front, and its allies. Zenawi, in a public address after the poll, said any repeat of the 2005 protests would not be tolerated. Ginbot 7, and other oppositionist groups, have been labeled as terrorists: Nega has been sentenced to death in absentia.

The Ethiopian government was asked, through its embassy in London, for a response to charges of repression, but they declined to comment.

I called Ephraim Madebo, spokesman for Ginbot 7, who is based in New York, to ask him if there was any possibility of a rapprochement between the many oppositionist groups and the government, so that open elections might take place. He said that “there is no chance whatsoever. They are using laws, especially the media law and the anti-terrorist law introduced after 2005 to put their enemies in jail or drive them to exile. You cannot win democratically against the government. People must rise against it. And the government knows something is coming. They just don’t know when”.

One of the outstanding opponents of the regime is Eskinder Nega (no relation to Dr. Nega), a US-educated journalist and newspaper publisher, who was imprisoned with his wife after the 2005 elections. His wife gave birth to his son in prison, though she and the child were later released. Eskinder, however, remains in prison. According to Madebo in New York, he has issued calls for Ethiopians to “fight like the people have done in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Libya”.

In London, Teklemariam has also been labeled as a terrorist – though unlike Ginbot 7, he opposes any use of violence against the regime – and he has been told that Ethiopia will ask the UK to extradite him (the two countries have no extradition treaty, so that is unlikely to happen). He’s less optimistic than Madebo: he says that “the space for collective action is very limited – even though it is growing, if slowly.”

Teklemariam thinks that, as in the Arab states, the internet and the social media networks are crucial to the development of a widespread movement – but Ethiopia lacks both. The net is largely confined to the capital, and social media users are few: in large part, he says, because the government ensures that connections are very slow and often dysfunctional.

The Ethiopian elite is small and badly served by communication, but Teklemariam says that “it really matters in Ethiopia. So the government has to make it hard for them to communicate. There was very little access to news about the Arab Spring.”

You can see why some African governments want to suppress news of the revolts in the north. Their transplantation south, and their even partial success, means loss of power, loss of wealth – or even, if it comes to outright conflict, loss of life (the jerky videos of the last minutes of Gadaffi’s life are a hideous toxin for all autocrats). Ethiopia’s rulers have sought a prophylactic against such radicalism in preventative arrests, seeking to neutralize all those who might lead or give shape to dissent.

But Gaddaffi’s end spells a lesson other than suppression. It is to allow and encourage the growth of democratic habits and freer speech. For one of the few hopeful signs in this doom-laden world is that suppression now works badly, for shorter periods, and that a democratic opening may find men and women willing to make it work. As we enter winter, spring may come again.

Photo: The shadow of a supporter of Ethiopia’s Unity for Democracy and Justice party (UDJ) is seen through an Ethiopian flag during a demonstration in the capital Addis Ababa, April 16, 2009. REUTERS/Irada Humbatova

By John Lloyd
The opinions expressed are his own.

My Reuters colleague Jack Shafer wrote a powerful piece, giving two cheers for the tabloids. He took his text, as I did in a quite contrary piece, from the current Leveson Inquiry into British tabloid journalism, which has its roots in the uncovering of the massive interception of phone messages – “phone hacking” – at the News of the World, part of Rupert Murdoch’s British stable, now closed.

Columnists working on the same patch usually pass by on the other side of an argument with each other. But this argument is important to the profession of journalism, now in several sorts of trouble, and it is important to the public which journalism claims to inform. So I want to take public issue.

Jack quotes the legal writer Stephen Bates in the Journal of Media Law & Ethics as arguing that the “freedom of the press in Britain has been constricted” by judgments made in the past few years in favor of observing the privacy of those about whom journalists have written. Shafer and Bates agree that such judgments will deprive the British working class of its favored reading material, and will delight the elite, whose sins, of whatever kind, will be safe from the public scrutiny they should have. These assertions need examples, which Jack doesn’t give. Here are two:

In 2008, the then head of the association which controlled Formula 1 racing, Max Mosley, was outed in the News of the World as having enjoyed a sadomasochistic orgy with a number of women paid for their services. So shocked was the newspaper that they used several pages and many photographs (taken by a woman who took part in the orgy and was paid to give the News of the World the story) to display Mosley’s degradation. The story gained extra traction because the women were dressed in what the paper described as Nazi uniforms – and Mosley is the son of the former leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Much to the disgust of tabloid editors, Mosley took the paper to court – and won, and was paid substantial damages.

More recently, in October, the wheel turned the other way. Rio Ferdinand, a Manchester United star and England’s soccer team’s captain, sued the Sunday Mirror after the paper revealed a string of affairs. The case was dismissed. The judge accepted that he was a public figure, who had recently given interviews with his heavily pregnant wife, saying his wild days were over. His hypocrisy was thus a matter of legitimate public interest.

Privacy cases are now taken under the Human Rights legislation, which balances two clauses — one in favor of freedom of expression, the other in favor of the right to privacy. Judgment must always balance the two rights. Yet it is practically inconceivable that any judge would allow a privacy suit to succeed if there were any element of public interest – defined as something which the public should know – in the published story. In the case of Max Mosley, who did not proclaim the joys of straight sex (nor, for that matter, of sadomasochism), he was no hypocrite, and thus  it was found he had a right to keep his sexual activities private. Rio Ferdinand was judged a hypocrite – and since , at least for some, he is assumed to be a role model, the newspaper exposure was unpunished. Any politician would have been treated similarly.

Indeed, in the most famous exposure of recent years – that of Westminster MPs’ expenses – the Daily Telegraph, which reproduced at length the details of MPs’ use of taxpayers’ money, paid for the disks containing the information, which were stolen. There has been no hint of any action against the Telegraph for trafficking in stolen goods, normally a serious offense — nor could one succeed.

To argue that the tabloids are the preserve of the working class and thus give a sort of implicit pass from questions of ethics is a very bad argument. In fact, it was the revelation that the News of the World journalists had hacked into the cellphone of Milly Dowler, a teenager who had disappeared and was subsequently discovered murdered, which sparked an explosion of distaste which had no class preference.

The phone hacking in this case raised hopes that Milly was still alive — the hacker had deleted messages, which gave the Dowlers and others, who called the phone in desperate efforts to get an answer, false hopes that she was still alive. Even without such an egregious intervention, the case that the working class needs a diet of tawdry revelations in order to satisfy them recalls the dystopias both of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, where those conditioned to be mere automatons had a debased media diet; and of George Orwell’s  “1984″, where the proles were fed a similar doctored brew of mindless rubbish. When people of any position in society realize the way in which tabloids get stories, they tend to be shocked.

Jack writes from a journalistic culture in the United States, where, as in many other countries, a sharp if informal break is made between tabloid journalism and journalism that seeks both to observe certain ethical rules and to give a view of the world which is based on evidence, investigation, and fidelity to the observable truth.

When the former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan, of whom Jack seems to approve, told the Leveson Inquiry that he was proud that the paper’s campaign against pedophiles, in which he had assisted, had resulted in an irate mob beating up a pediatrician, one got a glimpse into the depths to which the tabloids could sink, and the state of mind they engendered in their staff.

The fact that, in the UK, the tabloids like the late News of the World, The Sun, the Daily Star, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror together with the more upmarket Daily Mail and their Sunday sister papers, command a circulation of some 8 million (even with the closure of the News of the World) and a readership of at least double that, meant that their political heft was large. Politicians believed that Rupert Murdoch had great power, both to reveal their private indiscretions and to give or withhold support from their parties (they were not wrong in this, even if they may have exaggerated it.

They courted him, flattered him, did the minimum possible to annoy him. That is bad for any democracy. Many of the politicians, including the Prime Minister, have put ashes on their head, confessed they were too pliable and swore to withstand media pressure in the future. It will be good for democracy if they remain faithful to that pledge.

Tabloid journalism can be excellent – sharper, more vivid, more polemically passionate than the upmarket press. It is fighting for survival, like every other form of newspaper journalism – long may it live. On trial in London is not a journalism of that sort. It is the journalism which can ruin lives. Soon may it die.

Photos, top to bottom: A journalist reads a tabloid newspaper that claims to have details from the leaked Hutton report prior to its publication, in Downing Street in London, January 28, 2004. REUTERS/Russell Boyce RUS/ASA; A young mother reads the British Sunday tabloid newspaper News of the World July 23. The paper has come under criticism on Sunday after it printed the names and photographs of 49 convicted paedophiles following the murder of a young girl three weeks ago. The paper says it will publish the names and addresses of all known paedophiles in Britain over the coming weeks. REUTERS/Kieran Doherty

By John Lloyd
The opinions expressed are his own.

An inquiry under way in the Royal Courts of Justice London, just a few hundred yards from Fleet Street, once the heart of the British newspaper industry, is becoming — in the low key way in which the British like to think they always do things (but often don’t) — a global event. It is the consequence of a crisis, as inquiries frequently are. But it will have consequences of its own: one of these may be to redefine journalism for the 21st century.

In July, the forward march of Rupert Murdoch and his son James through the British media and political establishment was halted — cruelly, abruptly, with every sign of the chaos and clamor which his tabloids usually love, indeed often create. The efforts by his British newspaper subsidiary, News International, to lock in the narrative that phone hacking at the Sunday tabloid News of the World was the preserve of one “rogue” reporter in 2006 — Clive Goodman, the Royal Correspondent, who had paid for his sins with a short sharp prison sentence — fell apart. Like Marley’s ghost from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, the awful truth came through the door, dragging a clanking chain made up of mobile phones, mementos of the hackings into the private lives of this celebrity and that politician and, most horrible, of ordinary people, caught in some media storm, for a few days the biggest story in town, and thus regarded as fair game.

No escaping that. Politicians, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, beat their breasts and said they had been too servile to the man who had four of the most important newspapers in the land and controlled the largest share of the only major satellite broadcaster, now rivaling the BBC. No more kow-towing to the Murdochs. The Press Complaints Commission, which handles complaints against the press and had foolishly said that nothing was amiss at the News of the World, was for the chop. A Commission, with full powers to examine and propose, was set up, under the chairmanship of Lord Justice Leveson, a judge with a reputation for probity and profundity.

That Commission has been under way for more than a month now, and it has made for good copy. For days, big names — actor Hugh Grant, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, comedian Steve Coogan, and the former head of Formula One racing, Max Mosley — sat in a kind of witness box and told of harassment, threats, and gross intrusions. Mosley, whom the News of the World had caught in a sado-masochistic orgy with girls dressed in Wehrmacht “uniforms” and was so shocked that it put photographs of it across six pages. Mosley refused to be shamed into silence and said his tastes, however eccentric, were nobody’s business but his own.

J.K. Rowling spoke of being trapped in her house by squads of paparazzi and reporters seeking anything for a story: one had got into her five-year-old daughter’s school and put a note in her schoolbag for her mother, begging for an interview. One day, she said, when she thought they had gone because there was no story about her anywhere, she came out to find that two more were still lying in wait. When her PR assistant asked them why they were there, they told her that they were bored in the office.

Above all others were the McCanns, Kate and Gerry, whose daughter Madeleine went missing in May 2007 from their rented flat in Portugal – and who were at the center of  a media maelstrom for two years. The News of the World editor Colin Myler had, they said, called and shouted at them for giving an interview to Hello magazine, bullying them into giving an interview to his paper. Four months later, the paper acquired a private diary written by Kate McCann and published excerpts – making her feel, she said, “violated” and “worthless”.

The story of the first weeks has been, in the main, the story of the tabloids. Even with the disappearance of the News of the World — closed in a vain attempt to put an end to the damage the Murdochs, father and son, were suffering — has a varied tabloid culture. Apart from the market-leading Sun, there are the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People, with the Daily Star, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail (though its editor, Paul Dacre, is quick to claim that it has as much of the up-market paper about it as the tabloid), now the most distinctive voice of the right in the country. They vary, but less than they used to: for long, the mainstay of their business model has been celebrity, sex scandals and TV in various guises, as well as extensive coverage of sports, especially football (what Americans call soccer).

They assume that if their readers want the news, they can (and do) get it from TV: their job is, largely, to entertain, to distract. Dacre, invited to give a speech to the Inquiry, mocked the elitist liberals for mocking the tabloids, saying that by doing so, they were scorning the choice of the call center worker in Sunderland, who lived for football, and had a right to know who his football heroes were sleeping with since he looked up to them and they tried to sell him things through appearing in advertisements.

Dacre is the leader of the tabloid pack; though he sometimes manifests something of a distaste himself — he said he would not have the News of the World in the house — he is the foremost in arguing that their stories of sex scandals, which interest the public, are also in the public interest. He, and Trevor Kavanagh, a Sun veteran political writer, and Kelvin MacKenzie, a former Sun editor, claim to see the Inquiry not as a purgative of toxins in the press but as a liberal-elite plot, run by their political enemies, staffed by those who despise them, advised by journalists from the Establishment who know nothing of popular taste and wish to know less.

Asked Dacre, rhetorically: “Am I alone in detecting the rank smells of hypocrisy and revenge in the political class’s current moral indignation over a British press that dared to expose their greed and corruption – the same political class, incidentally, that, until a few weeks ago, had spent years indulging in sickening genuflection to the Murdoch press?”

At stake in the courtroom – “the right to publish private lives; to judge the famous as hypocrites” for being “role models” and committing adultery, or indulging in kinky sex, or – like the McCanns – just being fodder for a ravenous appetite for detail on a mystery, and a suffering. The tabloid defense: people want it (they do); it can upset the powerful (it can); it sells newspapers (it does). And if, by some monstrous stroke of a censorious pen, the tabloids were prohibited from printing such stuff, it would migrate anyway to the web, to Facebook pages, to Twitter (it would).

This story has a way to run. Still to be exposed – the power the newspapers have exercised over politicians; and the nature of their relationship with the police – the evidence already seems to say they paid, at times lavishly, for information. At the end of it, we will have a portrait of how papers, many of them the most popular in Britain, operate: and not just the British press, but papers in many countries, where the craving for living vicariously through the private lives of strangers and the famous can make a market.

Just this month, in Oxford, a world away from the tabloids, a philosopher named Onora O’Neill gave the annual Reuters Institute lecture, and in a grave and deliberate way, pointed out that the freedom of expression which the newspapers proclaim as their own is not theirs to own. That freedom to express is an individual right: but these papers are parts of large – in the Murdochs’ case, huge – corporations with global reach, with a consuming need to persuade or bully politicians into licensing their purchases and mergers, and with the daily imperative to make a profit. Their “freedom of expression” is not just the necessary condition of democracy: the untrammeled freedom they demand can be oppressive, mendacious, brutal in its operation.

The grand dilemma which has landed on Lord Justice Leveson’s plate is how to define freedom, and how to ensure it works not just for the hard-eyed men and women who pound the facts and fantasies into a daily paper, but also how it works for those who are the object of their attention. Whatever solution he reaches, Lord Leveson said, “it must have an ethical basis to which all adhere”. Now, there’s a phrase that might be heard round the world. And if the judge can produce such an outcome, he’ll be a Daniel come to judgment, indeed.

Photos: The procession carrying Queen Elizabeth in a gilded carriage makes its way down Fleet Street towards St. Paul’s Cathedral June 4, 2002. REUTERS/Chris Helgren; A demonstrator wearing a mask depicting BSkyB Chairman James Murdoch poses for photographers outside the Houses of Parliament in London November 10, 2011. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett; Dickens’ Story on Screen and Television,” published earlier this year by McFarland & Company, Inc. RCS/HB