The past few weeks have seen our prospective leaders battling it out over policy details, every last penny of their budgets, and the pressing question of political and parliamentary reform.

But there is one subject that craves immediate attention: immigration and asylum, considered by the British public to be the second most important issue, behind the economy, of this general election.

It is hardly surprising that politicians would rather be seen supporting a traditionally British (preferably fledgling) business, rather than photographed at an asylum centre, trying to find out what they can do to improve conditions, given how little effect the latter would have on their poll ratings.

They all agree, loudly and publicly, on the need to secure the economic recovery and to lower class sizes, but not one of them seems to be interested in developing a more humane asylum system.

The consensus among the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative Parties is that the immigration system needs to change, but by change they don’t mean that it should be made fairer — by, for instance instituting a fairer weekly allowance for single women and their children, or a better standard of living — they mean that fewer immigrants should be allowed into Britain, and those who are here should have a less obvious presence in cities and towns across the country.

The tragic reality of our asylum system made itself abundantly clear when, in March of this year, a Russian family committed suicide — jumping from the fifteenth floor of their Red Road flat in Glasgow. Having already had their benefits removed, Serge Serykh, along with his wife and child, died on the day they were told they must vacate their flat.

It was convenient for the media that, days after the suicide, it emerged that Serge had suffered from mental health problems. As the case faded away, the papers all came to the conclusion that asylum policy wasn’t to blame after all because Serge was given indefinite leave to remain in Canada, but, after accusing the authorities there of various subversive plots, left in 2007.

On reaching Britain, the family were placed in the Red Road estate. The family found themselves amongst hundreds of asylum seekers left in the flats; a sort of purgatory for those awaiting government ruling on their futures. It is no wonder that the area has been nicknamed The United Nations of Hell. And in fact the flats, synonymous with urban destitution, are now facing demolition.

On March 14, a demonstration was held in Glasgow in support of asylum seekers’ rights, with the Serykh family tragedy acting as a catalyst for this event. Over two hundred people marched from the Red Road estate to George Square with banners and placards.

One young woman from Gambia attended the protest with her children. She explained to me what problems she faced living in the flats. She said that she often spent nights piled into other friend’s apartments because the area is so unsafe. As a result of a government funding cut for asylum seeker support, she and her family have to survive on less than £50 a week. She described her struggle to maintain even a bare minimum standard of living on this amount. Her case has been rejected by the appeals tribunal and she is now simply waiting for the knock on the door from the deportation officials.

It has been all too easy for our political leaders to draw a cast-iron curtain of indifference over the immigration debate. And it is, therefore, just as easy for the general public to buy into the stereotypes that immigrants and asylum seekers want to avoid working, or can’t speak English, or are showered with cash, or all of the above.

A government survey in February showed that 77% of British people want to see immigration reduced, and 50% of men and 52% of women want to see it reduced by “a lot”. The recent influx of Eastern European labourers has increased fears that immigration threatens British jobs and wages. This fear — which disregards that fact that more than one million Britons live and work in other EU countries — further intensifies hostility towards those most in need of fair and compassionate treatment, especially in a time of rising unemployment.

The uniformity of opinion within the three main Westminster parties has given credence to the claims of the far-right. The British National Party unveiled its manifesto last week with a pledge to halt any further immigration from Muslim countries, and developed this policy on the preposterous assertion that indigenous British people will be in a minority by 2050. The sound and the fury of the ultra-right began to dominate the immigration debate some years ago and those who have had the opportunity to stem the tide of anti-immigrant rhetoric have failed to do so.

Last week, the BBC’s flagship news programme Panorama addressed the possibility that the United Kingdom is becoming overcrowded and, despite its bleak predictions, managed to remain relatively free of hyperbole. Nonetheless, it added strings to the bows of those who wish to take aim at vulnerable new residents in Britain.
Tales of wrongly detained torture victims, humiliating procedural checks and general neglect slide under the radar in favour of  more crowd-pleasing talk about points systems and population caps.

After the Red Road march, the Glasgow Campaign to Welcome Refugees stated that “the economic situation, the closeness of the general election, and the increasing threat from the BNP can only increase the temptation for politicians to ratchet up the scape-goating of asylum seekers.” This prediction has been proven correct, as the leaders’ debates have been characterised by rampant populism — the operative words have unquestionably been “cutting” and “decreasing”.

The dark side of this debate has been in the spotlight for too long. It shouldn’t be about how many people are here and what they cost. We are not talking about the national deficit. Immigrants and asylum seekers are not abstract numbers. There needs to be a calm and rational debate about what the best model for an ethical immigration system is. That will begin when public opinion is no longer dictated by a tiny, hate-filled minority, which knows only how to spread distrust and disorder.

Propped against the glossy white wall of the Mitchell Library’s top floor corridor, Don Paterson looks to me every bit the stray musician and vagabond poet. Having discarded his scratched and battered guitar case in the green room, and wrapped in a ragged navy blue winter coat complemented by a silk cravat, he could comfortably pass for a busker or rambling street performer.

But his unkempt appearance disguises his towering professional profile and strict artistic discipline. For the past ten to fifteen years, Paterson has been quietly establishing himself as one of the leading British writers and poets of his generation. Since the publication of his first collection, Nil Nil, in 1993, he has produced three further works of poetry, two books of aphorisms, two plays, and a translation of Rilke’s sonnets. He has also edited a Burns anthology and a selection of poems of the twentieth century greats.

His high standing among critics and peers has been repeatedly confirmed by the slew of awards he has received, and he has enjoyed a degree of commercial success few other contemporary poets could dream of. Still, for all his accomplishments, he retains throughout our conversation — conducted just prior to the 47-year-old’s appearance at the Aye Write! festival — an unpretentious and modest air: an inheritance, perhaps, of his working-class Dundonian upbringing and deep-bred, though long-resisted, Calvinist tendencies.

Paterson moved to London in his early twenties to pursue a career as a jazz guitarist — another ambition he has realised; he still tours intermittently with three-piece outfit The Lammas — but re-directed his creative energies toward poetry when he decided it provided a more effective mechanism for getting laid. In the past, when confronted with his youthful admission that he first starting writing poems “to impress women,” he has seemed chastened, saying, “It sounds like something I would have said at the time. Yes, that fits, actually — given the male insecurities. These things are complicated. You do different things for every conceivable motive that you possess.”

Resisting the temptation to embarrass him again, I opt for a less mischievous line of questioning. I ask first about the relationship between his music and his poetry: to what extent do they infiltrate and influence one another?

“I used to think that it was just the fact that you did the two things, that it wouldn’t matter if you laid floors and you did poetry, you’d see connections between the two,” he says, “but I think now there are strong connections between music and poetry, partly because form and content are the same thing. In music and in poetry the form generates the content and the content generates the form, so you’re not going to be aware of any meaningful distinction between the two. So in that analogy they work very closely together.”

Paterson speaks quickly and assuredly, his sentences often framed by sly grins, as though he is trying to suppress some secret or exclusive joke. His accent, with its subtly elongated vowels, still displays hints of a childhood spent in the north-east of Scotland.

He continues, “but also poetry is very close to song. There is no getting away from it. People like it when it is close to song, in fact they prefer it, and that has some consequences for the way that you write. In fact, there are all sorts of ways in which they map onto each other. They are sister arts.”

Paterson has written that he thinks “poetry works on the heretical principle that sound and sense are the same thing,” indicating a further affinity between the two expressive forms.

“Poets find that when they get the sound the right, the meaning tends to follow. These days it has proper explanation in linguistic terms as well, with some thing called ‘iconicity’ and the way sounds sound like the things they mean. Not in an onomatopoeic sense, but rather that all sorts of sounds affect the senses in ways we don’t understand.

“Poets have had this intuition for a very long time and have always worked on that principle. They know that if they get the sound of a line right, then it gets closer to the truth of the thing they are trying to invoke.”

Paterson’s own intuitions have served him well. His latest collection, Rain, was met with near uniform critical approval on its release last autumn. The Independent gushed that it “gleams with authenticity” and urged people to “read it now, before it becomes famous,” while The Times enthused over the titular poem’s “wonderful lyric force”. The Scotsman, perhaps drifting a little into hyperbole, described it as “superlative and moving… a contemporary classic.”

It has earned its author a plethora of accolades (yet more to add to his groaning trophy cabinet), not least among them the coveted Forward Poetry Prize and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, an award bestowed by the Poet Laureate, currently Carol Ann Duffy, who remarked of the work, “It is formally very accomplished, and technically brilliant; but it also taps into deep, timeless human experiences.”

Rain contains some of Paterson’s most profound and unsettling pieces. The Error, for instance, perfectly articulates an apparently permanent sense of pointlessness or insignificance: “As the bird is to the air/ and the whale is to the sea/ so man is to his dream. His world is just the glare/ of the world’s utility/ returned by his eye-beam”.

In Correctives, he explores themes of loss and loneliness. Referring to the natural shudder in his young son’s left hand, he writes, “He understands the whole man must be his own brother/ for no man is himself alone;/ though some of us have never known/ the one hand’s kindness to the other.”

Many of the poems in Rain have an elegiac quality and Paterson frequently revises the discomforting prospect and impending reality of death — that of his own and that of those close to him. The centre-piece in this respect is Phantom, composed in memory of his friend and fellow poet Michael Donaghy, which treads tentatively toward the existential abyss (“We are ourselves the void in contemplation./ We are its only nerve and hand and eye./ There is something vast and distant and enthroned/ with which you are one and continuous”) only to pull back, eventually, into the material world (“I closed my mouth and put out its dark light./ I put down Michael’s skull and held my own”).

“Rain is a book that has a lot of death and sadness in it,” he explains, “and you draw from your immediate biographical circumstances to a certain extent. Bad things had happened to me over the last few years,” he says with a slightly morbid laugh. “It wasn’t so much a bad case of life as just life happening and, you know, you’ve just got to take it on the chin.”

Do the darker moments of life filter disproportionately into the poetry? “No, there is no guarantee that they are going to do that at all. Poems are only useful, I think, when you need something assuaged, when you have to explain something to yourself — at least that’s how I use them. I use the composition of poems as a way to interrogate things I don’t understand, of trying to work out what’s true, when I don’t know what’s true.”

The idea of composition as interrogation reflects Paterson’s belief that poetry should be a “moral project”, a belief, he claims, that shocked guests at a dinner party in London when he first announced it.

“It is what people expect from poetry. It should not exactly be a moral excitation of guidance, but it should allow for the serious questions to be raised and discussed to the best of your ability and expressed as best you can, and I think when you stray from that project it becomes trivial.”

One of the serious questions Paterson raises and discusses in Rain is that of how to reconcile the elemental and physical aspects of human experience — the immense indifference of the rationalist world-view — with the sensual ones; with the actuality of emotions like love and affection. Paterson has spoken of his recent “painful conversion to hardcore scientific materialism” and I wonder if the tensions in Rain echo the obvious unease he felt throughout that process.

“Well,” he pauses a moment to consider his response. “Yeah, probably actually. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I mean that is not a bad way of putting it at all. Yeah, uhm. Will yes do?” he smiles, “I think you’re on the money with that.”

This is typical Paterson; just when things look like they are going to get too heavy, too intense, he deftly shifts the tone of discourse. Presumably this is what one reviewer meant when he described Paterson as a “master of shadow play”.

I am reminded of The Hunt, a poem from his 2003 collection Landing Light, which draws the reader into a sinister, disorienting narrative while deliberately projecting the impression that the protagonist is being watched or pursued, but then ends abruptly with the lines, “so I put my hand out hoping this/ might break our dead impasse/ and he had made to tender his/ when my hand hit the glass”.

Further, in Rain, Paterson makes a point of adopting and adapting the voices of other poets and the structures of other’s poems, particularly those originally written in languages with which he is unfamiliar. Is this a further attempt at disguise; an effort to distance himself from the moral and emotional depth of his own statements?

“It’s just because of art I suppose. I’m a lousy linguist but I read a lot of stuff in translation. It’s that thing where you identify certain trends in Anglophone poetry and you think what can other people, other languages, offer by way of a corrective or to move that on in some way? But mainly it’s just selfish. I get sick of my own voice and I figure if I steal one for a while it might lend me some bravery to do things I wouldn’t have had the voice to do otherwise.”

Paterson has often advised interviewers and audiences that they “should never trust a poet,” and playful deceit is, evidently, a motif of his work. It occurs to me that he may just be a uniquely talented storyteller and dissembler, stringing me along as an unwitting questioner with some flashy but insubstantial insights into life, death and hardcore scientific materialism. Why should I believe anything he says?

“Oh, you can trust me,” he grins again, eyes glittering, “you can perfectly trust me.”

Rain is published by Faber in hardback, RRP £12.99 and will be out in paperback in August.

Dramatically speaking, successful conspiracy theories — those that linger in the public consciousness long after the event that inspired them has actually occurred — are composed, in roughly equal measure, of the absurd and the sinister.

Take, for instance, the common belief that Diana, Princess of Wales was assassinated. “Classic example,” explains Times columnist and author David Aaronovitch. “We got to the stage where there was an ITV documentary saying there were murky questions here and 35 per cent of the British population were saying, ‘yes, there is a murder plot involving the Duke of Edinburgh’. But look at the actual circumstances of her death. There isn’t a plot in the world that could have killed her.

“Nobody knew where she was going that night, nobody knew what car they were taking, nobody knew who was driving it, and nobody knew what route they were going, but somehow or other, the wicked powers-that-be planned it all. And, if that wasn’t enough, she would have survived if she had been wearing her seat belt. Not promising.”

For Aaronovitch, conspiracy theories possess an almost limitless source of comic potential, as well as paranoia, farce and danger. In his new book, Voodoo Histories — a witty, irreverent, yet systematic assault on the conspiricist tradition — he takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the twentieth century’s most eccentric and pernicious theories, from Stalin’s campaign against acts of so-called counter-revolutionary industrial sabotage to the widespread perception that September 11 was planned and executed by the Bush administration.

Along the way, he provides a catalogue of intriguing, if frequently overlooked, historical facts: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were manufactured by an intelligence agent working for Tsar Nicholas II in pre-Bolshevik Russia; Frank Capell — the first historian to argue that Marilyn Monroe had been murdered — authored a crack-pot polemic called Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent; Norman Baker, a sitting Liberal Democrat MP, is convinced that Tony Blair had Dr. David Kelly whacked by MI5 while still resident at 10 Downing Street.

Aaronovitch says he felt compelled to write a book debunking conspiracy theories after a conversation with a colleague on a BBC assignment in Tunisia in 2002.

“I was filming with a young guy called Kevin — who doesn’t mind being named, by the way — who was great, really bright. But all of a sudden, during a drive, he laid on me the moon landing theory. And I just thought it is kind of amazing that someone would want to believe this stuff.

“It seemed so clear to me that it would be much harder to organise a hoaxed moon landing than a real one. With a real moon landing, all you’d need is ten years research, trained astronauts, rockets and so on. Where as for a hoaxed moon landing you’d need thousands and thousands of people to fool their families and the rest of the world for decades. And that is really hard to do. Life just doesn’t tend to work like that.”

The discovery of Kevin’s subscription to this theory was a turning point for Aaronovitch because it revealed a fascinating truth about the phenomenon: “Conspiracy theories are, essentially, if you really want to categorise them, dumb things believed by clever people They are certainly invented by clever people. The people behind, say, the 9/11 theories tend to be students, academics and professionals.”

On the whole, though, Aaronovitch is reluctant to sketch out a conspiracist personality type — despite their being generally intelligent and well educated, they don’t share any further emotional or psychological characteristics.

“There are some who are, if you like, serial conspiracists, where there is not a conspiracy theory ever invented that they won’t grab on to. And, yes, I think for some there is a sort of semi-religious urge to grasp on to the notion that there is a big plan behind everything.

“But most people just become convinced at particular times and at particular moments. The obvious example is [the murder of] John F. Kennedy; a popular president shot down by this kind of absurd assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, purely because the motorcade was routed passed the place where this guy — who had already tried to shoot someone a few months earlier — was working. It’s no more sensible than that.”

Aaronovitch tempers his robust skepticism with bursts of good natured humour, approaching his targets with, for the most part, a measured jocularity, sometimes even with a degree of warmth — or at least pity. He is, however, keen to stress that while there is an obvious distinction between those conspiracy theories that peddle relatively harmless nonsense and those that develop into monstrous popular myths and inflict intense suffering, they both stem from the same conceptual root.

“The Templar bollocks, for example, which was put out on BBC Chronicle in the 1970s and fronted by this incredibly knowledgeable looking guy who told this story which then ended up on the front of Dan Brown’s book, nobody gets killed for that; the Catholic Church maybe gets mildly annoyed, but nobody dies.

“Whereas the Protocols of the Elder of Zion and the notion of Jewish conspiracy has been fabulously damaging. But although they are not at all the same, they are very, very distant cousins. If you can be induced to believe one, you can be induced to believe the other.”

Surprisingly, Aaronovitch himself admits to having fallen prey to at least two conspiracy theories over the years, both of considerable historical significance.

“For a large part of my life I was convinced about the JFK theory. I mean, I didn’t think it very hard and I didn’t have any evidence. The ‘magic bullet’ persuaded me. We were always told about this bullet that couldn’t possibly have been fired, but now we can do really first-class computer reconstructions of where people were sitting in the car and so on, and its now clear that there’s nothing left to explain here.

“And I’ve always thought that Hitler set fire to the Reichstag. But when reading Fritz Tobias’ really excellent book about the Reichstag fire, and looking at other sources, I discovered that he almost certainly didn’t. But we teach that in schools here, though, we actually teach it in schools!”

As is the tendency with conspiracy theories, the absurd meets the sinister. In Voodoo Histories, Aaronovitch dismantles many of the modern era’s most devastating untruths, without forgetting to draw heavily on the funny side of the unfunny.

Voodoo Histories is out now in hardback, published by Jonathan Cape, RRP £17.99.

Photo: Ruby Wight

James Maxwell talks to Patrick Harvie MSP, co-convenor of the Scottish Green party, about the state of cross-party environmental politics Greenhouse gassing

Prior to the implosion of the international banking system, Britain’s largest parties poured their efforts into trying to demonstrate the purity of their environmental credentials.

David Cameron shamelessly staged an Arctic escapade, complete with huskies, sled and whip; Gordon Brown called for a clean-tech revolution in the energy industry; the SNP promised to slash Scotland’s carbon footprint. Images of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and drowning continents formed the visuals of a popular apocalyptic narrative.

Today, though, it is a collapsed global economy, rather than a collapsing ecosystem, that occupies the minds of our parliamentarians and political leaders — green politics, it seems, has been reduced to a minority pursuit.

Patrick Harvie knows all about being in a minority. As co-convenor of the Scottish Green Party — and fifty percent of Holyrood’s green contingent — he has battled against the intransigence of opposition groups, the cynicism of a powerful business lobby, and the indifference of public opinion for the best part of a decade. Who better placed, then, to assess the health of the contemporary environmental movement?

I meet Harvie at his one-room box-shaped office in St. Enoch Square, from which he operates when he isn’t in Edinburgh. The MSP is surprisingly small — I dwarf him as he stands to shake my hand — and despite his 37 years he could be mistaken for a teenager; earnest, with intellectual pretensions.

He is, nonetheless, impressively succinct and articulate. He begins by drawing a distinction between the idea of green politics and the issue of climate change: “For well over a decade now, climate change has been moving up the agenda of politicians from right across the spectrum, from left to right, libertarian to authoritarian.

“[Everyone has] a response to climate change that is consistent with their own politics. So very often you’ll get a market based solution … in other places you’ll get a regulated approach to trying to reduce emissions.”

“Green politics,” he says, establishing the conceptual split, “is a response that insists that there are fundamentally limits to the extent to which we can depend on everlasting economic growth. It is the idea that everlasting economic growth on a planet of finite resources simply can’t happen without causing a huge amount of destruction.”

Harvie goes on to elaborate a further distinction which he views as being central to the shaping of public and political attitudes to green politics: that between the scientific debate and the media debate.

“Scientific debate [will] always continue. Science can give us degrees of doubt and certainty; it can give us confidence on things that we have known for a very long time.

“For instance, that the green house effect is taking place — we’ve known that for 150 years or more — like the fact that carbon dioxide [levels] in the atmosphere have risen dramatically and are dramatically out of kilter with the natural balance … there’s a degree of certainty there, but there will continue to be debate about the details.

“On the other side you’ve got a media debate, and that is not driven by the same imperatives as the scientific debate … it is not driven by evidence; it’s driven by dominant narratives — like every media debate. So even if in the many, many thousands of pages in the IPCC’s assessment [there are] minor errors … that dominates the media debate … Then you get the likes of Melanie Phillips, James Delingpole, Ian Plimmer, and Nigel Lawson seeking to influence the media debate.”

And which of these debates is winning the battle for legitimacy with the one constituency — the parliamentary political class — that can effect immediate change?

“At the moment,” he tells me, tentatively, “we’re seeing, for the most part, politicians continu[ing] to respond to the scientific arguments. Most politicians, again from left to right, have not started to come out and say that we should question the whole basis of action on climate change.”

Harvie concedes, however, that there is a crack-pot fringe of climate change deniers scratching at the door of political acceptability.

“Well, you’ll get a few of those voices in the likes of UKIP, the BNP. You’ll get a handful of the voices starting to emerge in the Conservative Party, and the new intake of Conservative MPs — if they do well at this general election — will be important: what will their attitude be?”

He leaves the question hanging in the air. I point out that recent surveys of grassroots Conservative opinion — reliable registers of the issues that prospective Tory candidates think are most important — make for grim reading from a green perspective. They indicate that, despite David Cameron’s attempts to dilute the Tory blue, new generation Conservatives are generally sceptical about the assertion that global warming is a man-made phenomenon.

“Well it’s possible,” he replies, before striking an unexpectedly optimistic note, “but it’s also possible that people, once they get into [parliament], figure out that they have to start making sense in a way that they don’t when they are just fantasising about it, and it may be that a brash twenty-something candidate will think again once they get elected.”

“But if we do see some of those attitudes becoming prevalent in UK politics, then we’re in danger … it would be easy for me to say vote Green because we’re the only party who take climate change seriously. I don’t want to say that.

“I want every political party to take climate change seriously because there will be changes in government. I hope that my party has an opportunity to play a part in government in Scotland in the future. But there will be changes of government, and we are not going to achieve the targets if only half the political spectrum is signed up.”

I conclude by asking how Harvie hopes to convince voters who are naturally hostile to the green agenda — given it advances radical proposals for re-organising the economic order in favour of a sustainable environmental settlement — to switch to his party at the election?

He hesitates a little before responding. “There’s a fair proportion of Daily Mail readers who are never going to vote green, and, you know, I’m kind of … fine with that,” he says, laughing.

“I think though, whether people have been previous Labour voters, Liberal Democrat voters, SNP or Conservative voters, there is a recognition that there are some deep fundamental questions about how we run society, how we run our economy, what our values are, that have been ignored by the other parties for decades, and I think there are people who are willing to be offered a different set of answers.”

It is reassuring to know that regardless of how the fortunes of the green movement ebb and flow, there will remain a small and dedicated core of campaigners, like Patrick Harvie, ready and waiting to offer those answers to anyone who asks for them.

Photo: Ruby Wight

James Maxwell meets one of the world’s most influential and controversial intellectuals to discuss extremism, reform and ‘The New We’

To many of his most belligerent critics, Tariq Ramadan — probably the world’s foremost Muslim intellectual — is a pathological manipulator of the truth.

If confronted directly with a query concerning the real nature of his beliefs, he will relentlessly dissemble, defer, conceal and deny until he has exhausted the interest and patience of his questioner.

Why? Because he is, allegedly, a “stealth jihadist”; a “soft-spoken fanatic” who employs methods of “doublespeak” to lull Western audiences into a false sense of security. His aim: to covertly influence mainstream political discourse to the advantage of a fundamentalist agenda. Famously, during the days following the July 7 attacks, The Sun, in a front-page exposé, labelled him “the acceptable face of terror” and insinuated that he was one of the most dangerous men in Britain.

Of course, Ramadan firmly refutes all charges. Born and educated in Switzerland, he insists that his project is one of reconciliation and his role that of a “mediator between different universes of reference, cultures and religions”. Politically, he locates himself on the liberal left (although, curiously, he wrote both his masters dissertation and his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of nineteenth-century ultra-conservative Friedrich Nietzsche).

I am scheduled to meet the 47-year-old at the Mitchell Library, where he is discussing and promoting his latest publication, What I Believe, “a work,” he writes in the introductory passage, “of clarification; a deliberately accessible presentation of the basic ideas I have been defending for more than twenty years.”

Still undecided as to which version of Ramadan — the Islamic European or the European Islamist — is genuine, I wait, somewhat apprehensively, for his arrival.

He strolls in and takes a seat. In a smart dark suit — and in the increasing heat of a packed, cramped room on a sun-drenched spring evening — Ramadan exhibits the kind of casual glamour one might expect of a modern, cosmopolitan academic. He is also conspicuously sleek and good-looking, with high-arched cheek-bones and intense light-brown eyes.

I’m ushered over. Impressively — even placidly — composed, he greets me and introduces himself. This unshakable poise, I soon realise, is a definitive feature of his character.

My first instinct is to test him. How does he respond to the charge that behind all the glossy rhetoric of moderation and reform lies an unreconstructed reactionary ideologue?

In fragmented English, with a thick continental inflection, he says, “I am always saying to the people ‘come with the evidence that at some time, somewhere, I influence radical or violent extremists’. In fact it is quite the opposite. So, for example, the British Government asked me to be in a taskforce to help them to tackle the question of extremism. How can they ask me to do that when at the same time other people are saying, you know, he is just nurturing [radicalism]?

“And what I got from the United States Government for six years was, ‘oh, he is connected to the terrorists,’ but with no explanation. And then Hilary Clinton last month said that the reasons for me not being able to enter the States were [not valid] … so for me this is a clear message: after six years of looking at my record, there is nothing, nothing, to connect me to terrorism.”

Ramadan is referring to the (now rescinded) visa prohibition imposed on him in 2004 by the Bush administration which stopped him from taking up a teaching post at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. The justification for the ban offered by American officials was that he had donated money to an organisation that in turn supplied the funds to Hamas. Ramadan contends that it was a nakedly political manoeuvre; punishment for his opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

“This was a game under the Bush administration … I was against America’s policy in Iraq and in Israel. I was saying, ‘your unilateral support for Israel is not helping the peace process and what you are doing in Iraq is unlawful, it is just wrong’ … so in order to put me in a situation where my voice would be removed from the picture, I was accused of having links with terrorists.”

Why, though, if his record is, ideologically speaking, entirely unblemished, has he found it so hard to shake off this shadow of moral ambiguity? “Why am I controversial now? It’s because Islam per se is a controversial topic. To be a Muslim intellectual speaking about Islam is to be controversial in two ways. First, because, in the West, you are talking about a sensitive issue.

“But also in the Muslim majority countries, because sometimes I am very critical. You know I couldn’t go to the United States, but I cannot go now to Saudi Arabia, I cannot go to Tunisia, I cannot go to Egypt … but I accept this, because as a bridge between two universes of reference this is what I have to do.”

He makes a strong case. Ramadan has as many opponents in the Middle East — principally among its myriad authoritarian regimes and the countless sectarian factions they shelter — as he does in the West (where, it should be noted, his enemies come almost exclusively from the hawkish right). It is also unquestionably true that, in the current atmosphere of insecurity and distrust, a charismatic Islamic theologian with a penchant for criticism and robust debate is inevitably going to upset people.

It doesn’t help, either, that Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna — the founder of militant Egyptian organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, Ramadan’s heritage partially explains why there are two such powerfully competing impressions of him.

We have, on the one hand, his grandfather: an anti-colonial activist in Cairo in the 1930s and ’40s who raged against the morally deleterious effects of modernity and secularism and was eventually executed by the state for subversion. And on the other, his great uncle, Gamal al-Banna: a progressive scholar who has spent much of his life trying to draw attention to a strong culture of tolerance within the Quranic tradition.

Listening to Ramadan speak — conversing with him in person, with his sincere, animated, yet ice-cool delivery — I become convinced that it is in the footsteps of the latter that he follows. Like Gamal, Tariq sees himself as a democratic socialist: “I am always saying I am of the Left. This is known for twenty years. This is my political family.” Like Gamal, Tariq pits himself against religious literalists: “Muslims must not allow the most radical voices to monopolise the media and public attention.” Like Gamal, Tariq insists that Islam is perfectly compatible with liberal democracy: “Muslims share the essence of the values on which Europe and the West are based. Indeed, their own religion has contributed to the promotion and emergence of those values”.

It is on the issue of how Europe reconciles itself — politically and emotionally — with the growing presence and visibility of its substantial Muslim population that Ramadan’s contribution has been most sought after and most profound. In What I Believe, he states: “Western societies in general and European societies in particular are experiencing a very deep, multidimensional identity crisis.” What, I ask, is the nature of this crisis and what precipitated it?

“Fear,” he responds reflexively, before explaining, “what is important is the new visibility [of Muslim immigrants] … this threatens the homogeneity of ‘our’ culture; you know, people coming with Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds — with a new religion.

“So the question is now ‘who are we going to be?’ I would say that instead of nurturing a state of fear and victim-hood, we have to change to acknowledge the fact that the future is for pluralism. Instead of creating spaces of mistrust, we have to go toward a revolution of trust. This is what I call ‘The New We’. ‘The New We’ is you and me,” he gestures first in my direction and then in his, “we don’t have the same background, we don’t have the same memory, but we have the same future.”

But this common future — this “revolution of trust” — is far from certain. Extreme nationalist and chauvinist parties are on the march in Europe. In the Netherlands, for instance (where until very recently Ramadan lived and worked), Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party looks set to win a majority at the next general election. Is this not an indication that the European identity crisis is worsening?

“Perhaps. Wilders is a populist. He is nurturing fear. He is talking about differences and Islam as a threat. He is powerful because the other political parties are weak.”
Ramadan’s voice drops as he emphasises this last word.

“They don’t know how to deal with the issues so they are following in the footsteps of his statements. He is Islamising everything. ‘What about the job-market? What about discrimination? What about education?’ He makes it all about religion. This is wrong. This is the politics of fear. This is emotional politics. I would say that we have to reconcile ourselves with true politics.”

Does Ramadan blame the ‘politics of fear and emotion’ for getting him sacked from his position as professor and integration adviser at Erasmus University in Rotterdam last August? The formal explanation for his dismissal was that the content of a talk-show he hosts on Iranian state television was “not compatible” with his duties in the Netherlands.

“This is quite clear. It’s a further symptom of the crisis. I was working on diversity and citizenship. I got the support of 1,200 students who said, ‘we want him back.’ But politics was playing here. The University took the decision in one and a half days, when I was on holiday.” He grins, reflecting on the sheer old-fashioned indecency of the incident.

“And now I am going to sue them, oh yes, because this is a lesson for you [his former employers] not to treat your fellow citizens — and a guest — in the way you have. So I was a guest, now I want you to apologise: not for money, not for me, but for your citizens. It is a lesson.”

The Dutch, though, aren’t the only people capitulating to the pressures and paranoia of the far right. The construction of new minarets and mosques has been banned in Switzerland and the French are proposing a prohibition of the full veil on public transport. Should we anticipate further acts of anti-Muslim hostility across the continent in the coming months and years?

“Yes, I think that it is going to carry on. We have a controversy every six months in Europe. I just was in Norway and they were talking about how Muslims were exercising ‘moral policy’ on woman and so on. It’s going to go on for years, I think. But we have to understand that these are national issues that disguise what is happening at the grassroots level.

“This is what I am saying in What I Believe. Things are going much better at the local level than they are at the national level.

“At the national level, the parties don’t have social policies, so they are playing with symbols because they don’t have concrete politics. I am asking many parties ‘What is your social vision? What are you going to do about racism? How are you going to deal with the job-market?’”

Ramadan and I are having to almost shout at each other now. The room has swelled with people — the early background chatter has risen to a shrill pitch — and the air has grown thick and heavy. Nonetheless, he maintains his dispassionate bearing.

“We need time. I think two generations,” he says when I ask if he sees Europe’s identity crisis being resolved any time soon. “We have to be committed to create together this ‘New We’, which at the local level will need a new creative vision … a new understanding of our self. Not easy at all, not easy at all,” he repeats, in a tone that suggests the task is not easy, but possible — and necessary.

Ramadan seems almost endearingly earnest and optimistic about the future; about the relationship between Muslims and the secular West; and about the prospects of developing a dialogue built on the principles of mutual respect and tolerance. Over the course of our conversation, nothing in his manner, or in the substance of his responses, suggests to me that this is a man who harbours undisclosed sympathies for absolutist trends in Islam.

As the noise and the heat intensify, I notice our allotted time has run out. Ramadan has flight to catch — off to a court case in Amsterdam, or a lecture in North America, or home to Geneva.

But when I stand to leave, I feel a sudden slight rush of frustration and disappointment: wherever Ramadan goes, he will inevitably be chased by the pernicious, baseless myth of his sub-rosa extremism.

Photo: Gabriella DiTano

Stuart Neville, author of critically acclaimed new crime novel The Twelve, talks to James Maxwell

“I just woke up one morning with the image of a man, sitting in a bar, surrounded by all the people that he had killed,” Stuart Neville responds when I ask what inspired him to write The Twelve, his critically acclaimed debut novel.

“I tend to get ideas like that, they tend to be still images,” he adds. This, surely, is neither normal nor healthy. But given the context of the story that those images evolved into — present-day Belfast, still painfully straining to divorce itself from four decades of sectarian violence — it isn’t entirely surprising either.

The Twelve charts the journey of Gerry Fegan — a psychotic, whiskey-soaked, ex-IRA assassin — as, one by one, he tracks down his former Republican employers and exacts revenge on them at the behest of the ghosts of the dozen innocent civilians he was ordered to murder during the Troubles.

Fegan confronts old friends, menacingly corrupt public figures, cowardly priests, and rural thugs in a bloody quest for redemption, all the while tipping the delicate equilibrium of Northern Irish politics closer to the point of collapse.

He appears to me like an uncounted refugee of Ireland’s civil war — a natural born killer drifting pointlessly in peacetime among the spent cartridges, discarded ammo dumps, and derelict houses of a country still trying to come to terms with its destructive history.

Neville, however, is keen to stress that the dark world of post-conflict republicanism constitutes the backdrop, rather than the focus, of his book.

“It’s just a setting really. It’s about the character himself. You could take the story and transplant it to the mafia in New York if you wanted to. The story is about Fegan’s own struggle with what he has done — the political environment is really secondary to that.”

“And from a commercial point of view,” he continues, “I could have made it easier for myself by setting it in a London gangland or something. So politics is an offshoot of the story, rather than its root.”

I read The Twelve as offering a pretty emphatic condemnation of all the major players in the nationalist movement, from the dissidents who are still armed and active to members of the Stormont assembly currently working the levers of power.

“Simply by virtue of being set in Northern Ireland it’s going to be political, because everything about the place is political — from education to music, there’s politics behind everything — but politics is not the spine of it.”

“What really interests me is the difference between the surface appearance of prosperity and wealth (and its opposite). You could stand in the middle of Belfast, where you have all your high street stores, but you walk a mile and a half in any direction and you’ll come to some pretty impoverished areas.”

Fegan is appalled by a similar hypocrisy; that of his ex-comrades’ claims to have reconciled themselves with the peace process in spite of their apparently unshakable addiction to violence. Neville echoes his character’s frustration: “There is a very strong nod and wink culture in Northern Ireland. There is a tendency to just gloss over things or ignore things. No one wants to face up to their very suspect histories, and not just Republicans but a lot of Unionists too. Everyone knows ‘it’s’ there but nobody wants to talk about ‘it’. A lot of people have been involved with some really dodgy things.”

Is this not a rather cynical attitude to take? The Northern Ireland that Fegan stalked as a hit-man in his youth is surely not the same one that exists today?

“I have been accused of being overly cynical, but the reality of Northern Ireland is that it is very hard to pick out good guys and bad guys — there are really just degrees of bad. There’s nobody who can claim the moral high ground.”

Indeed, Neville illustrates this brilliantly in The Twelve. Fegan himself is a grotesque and ruthless figure, responsible for countless broken bones, split lips, and emptied chambers (not to mention, of course, dropped bodies). Yet you recognise as a reader the validity of what motivates him. To some extent, you even come to accept that he has a right to do what he does.

Plunging readers into the same moral no-mans-land as a murderous protagonist is no easy trick, but Neville performs it well. He attributes his fascination with the idea of ethical ambiguity to his principal influence — master of the moral gray area — James Ellroy.

“[Ellroy’s] American Tabloid was a novel that was particularly influential in exploring that ambiguity. He can write about really, really despicable people and he doesn’t judge them, he just lets them get on with how they are behaving. I mean they can be racist, misogynist, homophobic — I mean really horrible people — but, because he just lets them behave as they will in their world, you can’t help but be on their side.”

Despite his borderline sadism, predatory instincts and near-chronic inability to stop killing people, I found myself, toward the end of The Twelve, almost coming to admire Fegan — I couldn’t help but be on his side. I suspect that for Neville that is the highest compliment that he could possibly be paid.

The Twelve is out now, published by Harvill Secker, RRP £12.99.

Hazmat suits, scones and a journey to Royston: Tom Bonnick joins the Glasgow University Amnesty society for a week of protest

I am sitting on a train headed to Buchanan Street, where I will meet members of the Glasgow University branch of the human rights charity Amnesty International, who are going to a Shell petrol station to protest against the multinational’s activities in the Niger Delta. In front of me are lots of adverts. Most of them seem to be for shampoo, and one boasts “a unique cassia complex,” which sounds vaguely Freudian. How many of these products would Amnesty object to, I wonder?

When I reach Buchanan Street I meet Ruth Hickin, the chair of the Amnesty society. Ruth is in her final year of an English degree and not at all like how I imagine serious student activists who are willing to give up their weekends standing outside a Shell station to be — she is very funny, unintimidating, and doesn’t appear to make her own clothes out of hemp or light incense candles wherever she goes.

Gradually more and more people arrive until eventually there are around twenty of us. Those who have gathered are made up of a coalition between Amnesty supporters and members of the Climate Action group in Glasgow whose interests — for obvious reasons — align with those of Amnesty in this instance. Ruth and Cameron Dron, who is in charge of the Climate Action team, both seem happy with the turn-out. “It is a Saturday morning,” Ruth reminds me. Apparently she can predict how many people will come based on a formula of the number who say they will take part on Facebook, divided by three. A few people seem a bit suspicious of my presence. “What angle are you going to take?” someone asks. “I don’t have an angle!” I protest, and think to myself, “yet.”

We have to walk to Alexandra Parade to get to the nearest Shell franchise — a few weeks previously, everyone tried doing this protest at a Shell garage that was thought to exist on Woodlands Road, but when they arrived they found that it had been bought out by Sainsbury’s, who evidently are not an emblem of corporate malfeasance in the same way. At this point I have the feeling that the activities of the Amnesty group are endearingly reminiscent of Dad’s Army. During the walk I try and get the environmentalists to like me by proudly proclaiming my unbroken three-year stretch of not flying anywhere. They congratulate me in the encouraging manner an adult might adopt when talking to a child with a drawing.

I have decided to follow the Amnesty society around because I have no idea what they get up to, or whether whatever that might be takes place to any effect. Although I have only ever noticed them on campus when they are symbolically imprisoning themselves in chalk squares on the hill approaching the library, I have recently learnt — via the student newspaper of another university, much to my chagrin — that the Glasgow body is one of the most active in the UK.

Ruth is emphatic that what they do matters. “We try really hard to raise awareness around campus … in Burma, they have no access to free press, so we went into the library and put these flyers into newspapers [she shows me a flyer with the words ‘You could be in prison for reading this’]. We try and get signatures on a petition or letters signed to a particular politician. And in our meetings, we’ll educate ourselves and then try and do something constructive and get the public to do the same.”

When I talk to Niall Couper, from Amnesty headquarters in London, he is also very enthusiastic: “Student branches are an integral part of how Amnesty operates … I’m always amazed by both their enthusiasm and creativity. It is such dynamism that helps keep the organisation alive and buzzing.” I try speaking to a representative of Shell to find out if the campaigns against their operations affect how they do business, but they don’t return any of my calls.

As we get closer to the supposed Alexandra Parade location I spot what looks like a BP garage in the distance. Ruth appears horrified. “You all hold back; I’ll see,” she instructs. A few minutes later she comes running towards us, slightly out of breath but smiling. “I think I would have built a Shell station if there wasn’t one there!”

Suddenly bags are produced containing the props necessary for the protest: everyone has a white boiler suit to put on, as if they were at the site of a toxic spill, and the plan is to descend upon the garage and stage a clean-up. The boiler suits have a Shell logo on the back with the word “GUILTY” written underneath. The same people who want to know my agenda ask if I will put one on, but I have the unimpeachable excuse of journalistic integrity demanding that I not become part of my own story. I’m also slightly worried that we might all be mistaken for nu-ravers.

All of a sudden things become a lot more disciplined and efficient-looking. Ruth has gone from seeming like Captain Mainwaring to a teacher on a school trip: “If Cameron or I blow the whistle it’s time to leave.” Directions are given for where everyone should stand, what to do if the police arrive and how to treat members of the public: “Just be nice. Let’s be positive whatever happens, and be polite. We’re not doing anything wrong.” Everything is very democratic. Cameron asks if everyone wants to vote on whether or not they should end the protest by stretching the banner across the drive-in to prevent cars from entering, but the group defers this decision until later.

When we reach the Shell station everyone spreads out, walking around the forecourt with mops and brooms, while two people stand at the front holding a large banner with ‘Make Shell clean up their act’ written across it. It is all very professional looking, if somewhat juvenile in spirit. One or two people seem to get a little carried away and actually start cleaning the fixtures.

This brings me to an early suspicion I have about student activism of the sort practised by Amnesty: that it doesn’t really achieve anything, but is still a convenient means for privileged young adults to massage their liberal consciences. Ruth is adamant that this is not the case. “I can’t speak for everyone, but the amount of time and effort that people put in Amnesty put towards doing campaigns — and often not getting a very positive response from the public — I can’t imagine anyone would be doing that to feel good about themselves.”

After half an hour two police cars show up and I hear a whistle blowing. Everyone congregates around the banner and Ruth speaks to two officers. They start writing lots down in a notebook, which makes me feel inadequate. Five minutes later they walk back to their squad car. Ruth tells everyone they’ll be allowed to stand in front of the garage with the banner for the rest of the hour, but that they have to stop the cleaning shenanigans. The police are friendly and eminently reasonable. The forecourt, they explain, is private property, which is why that part of the protest has to stop. They want everyone to leave within the hour because this is near Royston, and do I know what kind of people come here? Local gangs, they claim, choose the surrounding area as the place to settle whatever disputes may have arisen, and we all seem terribly well brought-up and not the kind of people who should stick around. My hands are getting quite cold, so after another ten minutes I leave.

The next time I see members of Amnesty is the following Wednesday. Ruth is selling scones on University Gardens. I ask how many have been bought. “Six so far,” she answers, with the same, there-is-a-Shell-station-there-after-all grin, “but we’re expecting a rush between lectures.”

If external perception of Glasgow’s branch of Amnesty is very positive, I am curious as to how things look from the inside. Is student activism on the wane? On this point, Niall is indefatigably optimistic. “Completely not. For Amnesty, the opposite is true. We’ve seen a growth in student members … and we’ve seen a surge in activism. In a shrinking world, global issues are becoming more and more relevent and students have grasped this new reality better than most.”

On the evening of Scone Day there is a fundraising gig being held at 13th Note. My musical tastes do not extend far beyond Miles Davis or Pixies, so I drag along our Music Editor with the inducement of alcohol. The bands playing are certainly very enthusiastic, although I find it distracting that the lead guitarist of one seems to have walked off the set of Starsky and Hutch, down to velour waistcoat and afro.

Still, there are a lot of people in the audience, and when I ask Ruth how many of her baked goods she managed to offload she answers casually; “Oh, all of them,” as if this was always going to be the case.

I am surprised at how mild the sentiments of a lot of the Amnesty members are — contrary to my initial expectations, it is not the hotbed of irrational and sporadic radicalism or headine-grabbing antics for which its parent organisation has a reputation. In fact, it all seems very harmless, well-intentioned and — to a point — effective. As long as they’re satisfied with spreading the word and keep the chalk-prisons to a minimum, Amnesty’s presence on campus may well grow and grow.

Amnesty hold meetings every Tuesday at 5 pm in the QMU, and on March 21 are holding a gig at Stereo. Doors open at 7.30 pm.

Tom Bonnick

I have come to meet Mark Kermode prepared with a story of strange coincidence which I hope is enough to make him like me. Now, normally this isn’t a concern when I interview people — I have enough trouble getting my family to like me, without having to worry about complete strangers as well — but when Kermode doesn’t like something, he really doesn’t like it, and of this possibility I am nervous. On his BBC Radio Five Live show with Simon Mayo, he calls Keira Knightley “IKEA Knightley” because her acting is so wooden (although he insists to me that this is not his gag, but one submitted by a caller to the show), and he has been ejected from screenings at Cannes for booing too loudly (so I hear). Anyway, onto my story.

It is Tuesday, February 9, and I am in Glasgow. However, I could be in London. Obviously, that’s true a lot of the time — I could be in London tomorrow if I really wanted to be! — but on Tuesday, February 9, I could be in London for a very specific reason. After having arranged my interview with Kermode for the 9th, I am invited by a PR company to a screening of a new film, Green Zone, and then to a press conference with the film’s stars, chief amongst them one Matt Damon. I can’t go to the event because I would miss a whole week of classes, which I did too much last term, and because it’s on the 9th as well and I’ve already arranged to meet Kermode. What’s odd — fantastic, even — is that, as well as Matt Damon, a British actor called Jason Isaacs (you will know him as Lucius Malfoy, unless you watched a lot of television in the ’80s) will also be there for me to ask questions of, and Jason Isaacs, I have recently learnt, is not only Kermode’s favourite ever actor, but also the man he would like to play him in the film of his life. So, Kermode, what do you think of that?

Immediately, he launches into an animated set of questions directed at me about the film I’m missing. “For Green Zone? Oh, it’s great, have you seen it?” No, I tell him, unfortunately I have not. “Oh, it’s great. [Paul, the film’s director, who also made the Bourne trilogy with Damon] Greengrass has kind of cornered that particular way of making things that are fictional look completely non-fictional.”

Mark Kermode in person bears little resemblance to the Mark Kermode we see and hear on television and radio. He has crafted a very distinctive on-air persona for himself; a man of scathing put-downs, inflexible opinion and what occasionally feel like sentiments so unfathomable and seemingly arbitrary that they must surely have been picked out of a hat at random (this week I’ll like… Robert Pattinson, and pick a fight with… Helen Mirren).

In the flesh, however, little of the iconoclastic bravado for which he has become — perhaps unfairly — famous is on display. Maybe it helps that he has fewer microphones pointed at him than usual, or maybe that he is not in one of his characteristic Reservoir Dogs suits — he is dressed, disarmingly casually, in jeans and a pullover (although I am pleased to report that the trademark quiff remains in tact).

In any case, he is charming and eminently reasonable at every turn, although this latter quality seems to take some measure of restraint to achieve. At one point in our conversation together, which takes place in a dimly lit, underground room at Malmaison, I ask about Kermode provoking other critics, and whether he has ever been convinced by the persuasiveness of one of their arguments about, how, say, High School Musical 3 or Basic Instinct 2 really aren’t is good as he says they are.

“It’s not really a matter of that [being persuaded],” he begins, leaping upon the question with customary vigour. “It’s more a matter of responding honestly to what you think about a film. Clearly there is no right or wrong answer to any of this.” This feels like quite a significant admission to come from a man with such self-belief. Kermode ignores my startled expression and continues.

“I think historical context is important — understanding what a film is, where it comes from, what it’s trying to do is important, but beyond that your response to it is all there is. People say, ‘Oh, you’re very subjective in your reviews.’ Well, everyone’s subjective! The question is whether or not you’re upfront about it, whether you pretend that what you’re doing is providing some sort of everyman service, which is baloney.” This sounds to me a little like a case of the critic doth protest too much, but Kermode is adamant and unflappable, rather than defensive.

“The idea of objective criticism is fundamentally flawed — for a start, the way people react to movies is so strange and so personal. You have to understand that people will disagree with what you think, and that’s fine. It’s surprising when people don’t understand that ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ is a joke — everyone thinks they’re right, but on some level they understand that’s a ridiculous position to hold, and the reason I say it is it’s funny; it’s patently absurd. Most of the people I annoy, which is clearly a healthy amount — and if you’re not annoying at least half your audience, at least half the time, then really you’re not trying — most of them don’t get that it’s a joke. I do believe these things, and passionately, but I also understand how ridiculous it is to say ‘I’m right, you’re wrong.’”

Part of the reason for Kermode’s departure from the received critical wisdom on various films is his love of genre cinema. For years he has been an advocate of overlooked and under-appreciated films of all kinds: where his fellow critics have seen tawdry video-nasties or silly horror pastiche, Kermode sees brilliance. But, I want to know, how does he view the current cinematic landscape?

“The most encouraging thing is that international boundaries seem to be breaking down more and more, and what used to be a necessarily slightly limited international film market is now flourishing, although they have a fight to hold their own against the big Hollywood blockbusters. That’s not to say there won’t always continue to be interesting Hollywood movies, but right now these are the movies that I’m most excited by.

“I see more movies now than I ever did before — every week, rather than there being five or six movies released there are ten or twelve, and in amongst all that stuff there are just as many gems as there always used to be. It is true there are distribution problems — that’s why arthouse independent cinemas are so important. But also, audiences have to vote with their feet — the way things change is by people turning out to see foreign language or arthouse films.

“I mean, it is a problem if you have a multiplex cinema in which Avatar is showing on three screens. That’s the funny thing — the rise of multiplex culture didn’t really give us more choice, it gave us the same, if not less, choice. But the stuff is out there if you’re looking for it.”

Kermode is in Glasgow because he has just written a book, It’s Only a Movie, which is made up of an intriguing mixture of autobiography and film criticism. I think it’s fair to say that the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts: the book is a fascinating collection of stories, but sometimes it reads like little more than a list of its author’s foibles and pet peeves (in this respect it is sort of like any novel by Stephen Fry, each of which, without exception, contain at least a page devoted entirely to pieces of trivia of which Fry is obviously particularly proud). In the case of Kermode, I swiftly learn that his favourite piece of dialogue in any film comes from Flesh for Frankenstein and takes place as one character is being disembowelled (“To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life… in ze gall bladder!”), and that one of his “favourite works of literature of all time” is the BBFC’s report on The Evil Dead, which includes such immortal lines as “Remove entirely the second shot of headless torso spurting blood on man’s face as he lies on top of it.”

If anything, Kermode comes across in the book not as a man of uncompromising conviction but rather, as slightly sophomoric in nature; perhaps too idiosyncratic in his opinions — a man whose tastes seem more like those of a character from Juno. This is not to say that It’s Only a Movie is anything less than entirely enjoyable — on the contrary, it feels remarkably uninhibited. Kermode employs an interesting conceit of approaching the story of his life as if he is casting it for a movie, in which he is played by Jason Isaacs (of course), Helen Mirren is played by the Queen, and the various peripheral figures in his life are filled by such luminaries as Julianne Moore and, less glamorously, Ian Hislop. The effect is one of meta-biography: as a narrator, Kermode comes in and out of his story, editing at will. Was this always the way he knew he would write the story?

“What I was trying to do was see whether I could write the way I talk, because in many ways the thing I’ve enjoyed about film criticism is being able to talk about movies in the way I think people genuinely do talk about them — passionately and without moderation; anecdotally. It became an autobiography that was remembered almost entirely through the films that I watch, because that is pretty much how I remember things.”

In the book and in person, Kermode’s unabashed, infectious cinephilia is wholly transparent, and the longer we are together, the more I realise quite how accurately he has captured that conversational, anecdotal tone he was aiming for in the book, if only because he is equally prone to digression both on the page and off it. Practically out of nowhere, he announces to me how ludicrous he finds the declarations of authenticity that serious drama and horror films are wont to introduce themselves with.

“I love that phrase — inspired by real events. As opposed to what, exactly? Nowadays it’s a kind of movie shorthand for ‘you need to take this seriously because it’s true!’ The classic example of that is the thing at the beginning of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: “The events you are about to see are real”. Well, they didn’t happen in Texas, they didn’t happen with a chainsaw, and there wasn’t a massacre, but other than that…”

He is also far more interested in talking about his favourite movies than about himself. Eventually — perhaps inevitably — our conversation devolves into an argument about vampire films. Horror films are a particular passion for Kermode (he has a PhD in English and American horror fiction) and his favourite film of last year was Let the Right One In; a strange, beautiful vampire film made in Sweden about a lonely boy who fantasises about escaping his life and then meets a young girl who seems able to offer him some solace (needless to say, she has a thirst for blood).

“The interesting thing is that there really isn’t a tradition of Swedish vampire films — it sort of came out of nowhere. And of course, although on one level it is a genre film in that it’s a vampire movie at a time when there happens to be a load of vampire films, just how connected to them it is I think is a moot point.

“Suddenly everyone’s saying, why is there a resurgence in vampire films now? One of the arguments is, if you look at the classic vampire movies, they flourished in a period of economic depression and somehow there is an economic underpinning to all this.

“What’s really interesting about Let the Right One In is how little it owes anything to these stories. For a start, as opposed to most vampire movies, it really isn’t to do with sex at all, and in fact they’ve gone to some trouble to take the sexual element that’s in the novel out of the film. To me, Let the Right One In is a story about anger at being bullied. It’s about childish rage, and that sort of impotent feeling you have when you’re a kid who’s not in control of their surroundings.

“The recent vampire thing is very interesting — it’s peculiar that it’s happened when it has. Now, everyone thinks Vampires are saleable. And during the last big wave of these movies, there was that great boring cliché that vampire movies are all about AIDS, and the idea of that dates back to Dracula and Bram Stoker, who it was held for a long time had died of syphilis.”

The irony that now, the current biggest vampire craze is all about abstinence, rather than AIDS, is not lost on Kermode.

“I really like the Twilight movies! They’re in that wave of classic gothic romance, they’re all to do with desire and repression and the forbidden. I actually think when all the dust has settled people will see the Twilight books and movies as significant—” At this point I interrupt. I am an unreconstructed fan of the Twilight films, but surely, not the books? He sticks to his guns. “Look, they’re not awful. I think they’re perfectly fine.”

He is smiling earnestly at this, practically inviting me to disagree with him whilst simultaneously assuming a look which says ‘What? I haven’t said anything unreasonable, have I?’

“Not awful” is, I suspect, the closest I will ever come to getting Mark Kermode to concede on anything. I have time for one more question, and the one I ask is sort of a cheat. You’re a film journalist, I tell Kermode — you do this kind of thing for a living. What would you ask Mark Kermode if you were sitting where I am? There is a slightly awkward silence.

“I don’t…” he begins, unsurely, and then recovers almost instantly, the note of confidence back in his voice: “If I was in your position, I’d ask why I wasn’t interviewing Jason Isaacs.”

It’s Only a Movie is out now in paperback, RRP £11.99

James Maxwell talks Marx and alienation with professional philosopher and documentary-maker Alain de Botton

A lot of people don’t like Alain de Botton, the professional philosopher, author and documentary-maker. Or, at least, a lot of people I know don’t like Alain de Botton. He is viewed, by a select-cut of my most cerebral and scholarly friends, as a pseudo-intellectual, a hack, and a charlatan.

He is guilty, they claim, of popularising and, as such, debasing or corrupting the purity of the ‘philosophical method’.

Being neither cerebral nor scholarly (and having less than no interest in the purity of anything), I don’t approach him with the same prejudices.

In fact, I find the soft-tone delivery he employs in his broadcasts on The Art of Travel and The Architecture of Happiness almost soothing, and his lucid expositions of Schopenhauer and Socrates refreshingly accessible.

And I’m not alone. De Botton’s books have sold in their millions — becoming best-sellers in more than thirty countries — and he has won the praise of major literary figures like John Updike and John Gray.

So how does the man himself interpret the simmering hostility he attracts, even if it is only from the fringes of academic discourse?

“It is deeply, deeply unfortunate,” he tells me, over the phone from his home in West London. “I think it’s not productive for anyone that this argument goes on really,” he continues, in an accent that is unmistakeably southern and distinctly effete.

“You know, we’re living in a world where most culture is so dumbed down. It’s beyond belief that people have never read a book; that people leave school and abandon intellectual life entirely. So to be having a debate about whether my books are or are not too high or too low is really whistling in the wind while Rome burns.”

Perhaps de Botton’s detractors have his luxury-soaked upbringing in mind when they level their criticisms. He was born, in 1969, to an absurdly wealthy Swiss family. His father, Gilbert, was a friend and business associate of the Rothschilds and bequeathed to his son a trust fund account of more than £200 million (although de Botton insists he only lives off the income generated by his own work). He was schooled at an elite French speaking institution in Oxford and subsequently graduated from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, with a double starred first in history. At twenty-three he wrote his first novel, Essays in Love, and hasn’t looked back since.

“Well [academics] have at some level a guilty conscience, a sort of inner anxiety about what they are doing” he says.

“They are taking tax-payers money to do really quite an odd-job, which is to sit around and rehearse the thoughts of past-thinkers to a very small audience while life for most people goes on untouched. That’s where the guilty conscience comes from — a feeling of ‘what’s the point of this’? They have to convince themselves that it is very important.”

And philosophy at the professional level is, at the best of times, a peripheral enterprise that has a negligible influence on mainstream debate — even for those few who do it well. De Botton, on the other hand, has established himself, almost effortlessly, as a distinguished presence in our book shops and on our television screens. Does this make him an easy target for disgruntled rivals?

De Botton seems reluctant to attribute their animosity to jealousy: “It’s a system. It’s a kind of caste system, and I take a lot of flack for being outside of that. I’m a lightning conductor for a certain kind of feeling that academics might have. It’s sad, I mean… what a stupid sort of thing to be wasting one’s time on. Philosophy should be a big tent. Let whoever pitch up.”

De Botton’s most recent book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is an investigation of contemporary alienation. Modern labour, he argues, whether in an office, on a cargo ship, at an assembly line, or at the peak of a corporate hierarchy, leaves us feeling distinctly unfulfilled, principally because it doesn’t allow us to invest anything of ourselves in the things we produce. Work, de Botton says, is not a means to an end; it is a means to a means to an end.

For a thinker who has been accused, as John Gray puts it, of “dispensing morsels of platitudinous philosophy to readers anxious for re-assurance,” this is a strikingly radical analysis, drawing on one of the defining insights of Marxist theory. Was Marx the inspiration behind this study?

“To anyone who is thinking about work, he’s fascinating and remains absolutely relevant. The cliché about Marx is true: as long as he is proposing new solutions to economic life, he doesn’t have any answers, but he’s got a very, very good grasp of the problem … The fact is, what he called ‘alienation’ hasn’t developed all that much. His is a very relevant way of looking at it.”

Is it possible to extract meaning from work under the conditions of the market, or, in twenty-first century Britain, is alienation just an occupational hazard?

“Well it demands, in the broadest sense, political organisation … Whatever industry you are in, there are always factors that will make it more fulfilling or less fulfilling. There are always forces — whether you are in the fishing industry, the book industry, the construction industry — that will make that job more miserable. You need to organise with your colleagues.”

“There is also a certain amount of psychology to be done by individuals to try and understand yourself, and understand your talents but also your limitations, and to explore both of those quite vigorously in a way that the average career counsellor or work-place psychotherapist might not allow you to do. Many of us just don’t know ourselves well enough as workers.”

Despite its obvious pleasures, I wonder if de Botton himself ever feels alienated from his own work as a full-time writer. It can, of course, be a hugely frustrating and lonely endeavour.

“Well, a lot of the writing that comes out of writer’s studies is concerned with a very narrow band of experience. The working world does not enter into it simply because most writers are horrified by it.”

He goes on, “It is very isolated. There are moments of joy but I think it is a very unnatural occupation; to sit for hours on end and kind of tease sentences out of your mind and arrange them in a row.

“It’s prone to put you in grumpy mood. I much prefer most other things. Most writers are sort of semi-depressed … Forcing sentences out of your brain, it’s a very unnatural way of living.”

The question of whether to resent or admire, like or dislike, Alain de Botton suddenly seems totally inappropriate. At the very least, we should all agree that he should be congratulated for his honesty.

James Maxwell asks Murdo Fraser MSP, Deputy Leader of the Scottish Tories, about his party’s awkward relationship with Scotland

As the Labour government continues to crumble and decay, David Cameron’s Conservatives look set to sweep into office this summer.

For more than two years now, they have registered a healthy 8 — 12% poll lead over their incumbent rivals and nothing — bar, perhaps, another slump into recession — seems likely to changing that.

But when the wave of blue surges across the country on election day, it will come to a crashing halt as it hits the Scottish border. With just a single MP, the Conservatives sit fourth — behind Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats — in Scotland’s electoral rankings, and there is no indication that they are heading for a tartan revival any time soon.

In fact, their popularity seems to have decreased as a correlative effect of the growth of Scottish nationalism. Since devolution they have been shunted out to the margins of Scottish politics; a peripheral force at best, a skulking irrelevance at worst.

So what explains Scotland’s anti-Tory antipathy? Why do Scots remain immune to the so-called ‘Cameron effect’? Crucially, how will Cameron’s administration rule an already hostile constituency with no popular mandate?

In the sleek metallic and polished glass surroundings of his office in the Holyrood Parliament building, I question Murdo Fraser MSP, the Deputy Leader of the Scottish Conservatives, about his party’s awkward relationship with Scotland.

Fraser possesses the solemn air and unflinching conviction of a career politician. He speaks firmly and lucidly, like a teacher straining to explain the intricacies of a complex argument to a struggling pupil. Sitting in a neatly trimmed blue suit, on a thick foam padded chair, he dismisses my suggestion that with only four or five Scottish seats, a Conservative administration will have no moral legitimacy to govern Scotland.

“I don’t accept that because that is a nationalist argument,” he says emphatically. “You could only argue that the Conservative Party would have no mandate in Scotland if you are a nationalist and believe that Scotland should become independent because the United Kingdom is a single political entity and we elect people to the House of Commons.

“We don’t say because the majority of people in Surrey have never voted Labour that Gordon Brown as Prime Minister has no mandate to govern Surrey … We accept that we are part of the United Kingdom and therefore bound by the result.”

Well, first of all, as I understand it, there is no Surrey separatist movement in control of the Council trying to wrench the county out from under the yoke of Westminster. And secondly, surely it is a democratic, rather than a nationalist, argument? How can Cameron justify imposing a policy — the renewal of the Trident nuclear missile system, for instance — on a public who have unequivocally rejected it?

With equal emphasis Fraser repeats his previous response: “Defence is a reserved matter. Therefore, unless you are nationalist who believes that Scotland should become independent, you have to support the current arrangement whereby defence is reserved to Westminster and it’s the Westminster government that decides on defence matters. Whether that’s the location of bases, whether that’s having Trident based in the Clyde … these are matters for a UK government, and people engage in the general election for a UK parliament to take these decisions.”

Sensing an impasse, I move on. Would it be fair to say that if the Tories fail to win more than four or five seats in May they are effectively a busted flush in Scottish politics?
“Well, I don’t accept the premise of your question. We’ve got eleven target seats in Scotland and we’re fighting them all very hard.”

It is extremely unlikely that the Tories will take anywhere near eleven seats, I counter, and even if they did, they would still only be the third party in Scotland — perhaps even the fourth, depending on the SNP’s showing.

“If we went up from one seat — which is where we are — even to five or six seats, that would be a dramatic recovery of our position and would demonstrate that the Conservatives in Scotland are very much back in the mainstream.”

Back in the mainstream? Scotland has fifty-nine Westminster parliamentarians. I would have thought that to be swimming in the mainstream of Scottish politics — to even be paddling in it — a party might need at least eight or nine or ten of those.

But Fraser looks resolute; convinced that a grand Scotland-Conservative reconciliation is in the offing. I can only conclude that either he possesses a massive reserve of natural optimism, or he is just being a good professional; hyping his party’s prospects as the election edges ever closer. Again, I elect to move on.

What does Fraser consider to be the origins of the Scottish electorate’s uncomfortable tribal stand-off with the Tories?

Conventional wisdom has it that Scots divorced themselves politically from the Conservatives during the long stretch of Tory rule in the 1980s and 90s, because they felt that Thatcher had ruthlessly trampled on their aspirations for devolved government. Does he agree that Thatcher is to blame for the collapse of Conservative support in the North?
“There is no doubt that the Conservative governments of those periods were unpopular in Scotland and we are still living with that legacy. But the only way that is going to be resolved, from our point of view, is if we have a Conservative government elected which actually demonstrates to Scotland that it is taking Scotland’s concerns seriously.”

Then, somewhat cryptically, he adds,“I think there’s a lot of misinformation that goes around about what the Conservatives did in government for Scotland, but it has now become part of the folk memory and you’re always fighting an uphill battle trying to win people over when they fundamentally believe something which may or may not be true.”

This strikes me as a strange thing to say. It sounds like Fraser is indirectly admitting that senior Tories — even senior Scottish Tories — haven’t yet grasped how deeply loathed, from Edinburgh to Orkney, the Iron Lady herself remains; that they still haven’t realised just how deep the animosity runs. If this is the case, then I suspect the Tories are never going to fully heal the wounds of Thatcherism in Scotland.

But, resolute as ever, Fraser insists that nothing more than administrative competence is needed to charm Scots back into the Tory fold. “I think the best way we are going to win people over to conservatism is if we can demonstrate in government that we are much more attuned to Scottish concerns and interests than they would expect us to be.”

If the Tories intend to demonstrate that they are genuinely “attuned to Scottish concerns and interests”, perhaps they should start by dropping their opposition to Alex Salmond’s referendum proposals, I suggest, given that polls consistently show up to two thirds of Scots favour of a vote on their constitutional future?

“Our view is this … at a time when the real pressures facing the country [are] how we deal with Labour’s recession and how we get the country back to work, it would be a huge distraction to have all the energies of Scottish politicians taken up with fighting a referendum on independence when there is very, very little prospect of that being successful.”
What about a post-recession referendum, then? Surely once the economy has recovered and stabilised there will be no legitimate reason to deny Scottish voters a chance to express themselves, democratically, at the ballot box?

No dice; Fraser appears unmoved by my proposition: “We don’t see an argument for an independence referendum,” he says resolutely. And I’m left convinced that, faced with a Tory electoral tidal wave, Scotland’s floodgates will hold.