Social Democracy, Indeed

I have never met Milo Yiannopoulos, and I hope never to do so. But although James Delingpole and I have rarely met, when we have, then we gave got on. Yet while I almost never think about my brief and long-ago stint on Telegraph Blogs, it is worth mentioning, every once in a while, that Yiannopoulos and this were kept on when I was let go. On this of all days, James seems determined to make the case for Anthony Albanese’s war on social media. It is almost a relief that no one under the age of 16 could legally have read his tweet in Australia.

Almost. But not quite. The restriction of adolescents’ access to social media would intentionally deprive them of any political perspective beyond the ideology purveyed by the schools and by the official media. In Australia, it is therefore being watched closely by those in Britain who, having raised the school-leaving age to 18, which was not in itself a bad idea, now wanted to lower the voting age to 16, which in that context would be literally preposterous. Moreover, young Australians often study or work abroad, where they will no longer have shared a key formative experience of their peers. In any case, for this to work, then we would all have to prove that we were over 16.

The threats to youth include economic inequality, that capitalist system’s politically chosen “free” market in drugs and pornography with their attendant street and sexual violence, that system’s wars of choice, and the assaults on civil liberties in order to enforce austerity and war, increasingly to include conscription. Social media are part of the global corporate order with its Big Tech projects such as digital ID and facial recognition. Yet they have the potential to be fundamental, not only to the oppression, but also to the resistance.

There is going to be plenty to resist. For example, one among horribly many, this ban is also being considered Denmark, while Tony Blair’s anointed Shabana Mahmood is seeking to introduce Denmark’s “parallel societies”, until 2021 officially called “ghettos”. Race is not the primary indicator in an industrial or postindustrial country such as Britain or Denmark, so Britain is to copy Denmark’s “parallel societies”, and Denmark will return the compliment once we had expanded the scheme. The whole thing will then be adopted in Australia, among a frightening array of other places.

The first criterion for a “parallel society” is that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants originated or “descended” from “non-Western countries", defined as everywhere apart from “all 27 EU countries, the United Kingdom, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand”. But the other four are socioeconomic. Once it had met the racist first one, then a community has to meet only two of those four to have all of its children from the age of one upwards required to undergo 25 hours per week of instruction in “Danish culture”, and to be declared liable to mass eviction and demolition in the manner of Sharpeville, District Six, or the West Bank. After a few years, Britain would drop the whitelist and just ghettoise everywhere with two or more of unemployment at 40 per cent or above, criminal convictions more than three times the national average (as if the criminal justice system were class-neutral), 50 per cent or more of over-30s without tertiary qualifications, and an average gross income below 55 per cent of the national average. Adjusting for different education systems, Denmark and elsewhere would follow suit.

Not that the change would be that enormous. It was Durham County Council, then the jewel in the right-wing Labour crown, that imposed Category D status. Even if not in detail, everyone in these parts has always known about Medomsley Detention Centre; we are shocked but not surprised. Parallel societies are nothing new to us. The British State inflicts sexual violence on working-class, predominantly white males as the American State inflicts sexual violence on African-American and Hispanic males, as the Australian State inflicts sexual violence on Aboriginal males, as the Israeli State inflicts sexual violence on Palestinian males, and so on. That, and false allegations of sexual violence. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.