Syriza, the left-wing alliance, have won the Greek elections. This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to anyone who has been following the situation - all the pre-election polls pointed towards this result. Nevertheless, this is a pivotal moment in not just Greek but European politics: The first time since the financial crash that any Eurozone country has had a government opposed to ruthless austerity.
The votes at the time of writing have not all been counted, but Syriza looks set to win 149 seats in the Greek parliament - just two short of an absolute majority. In order to form a majority government, therefore, they need a coalition partner willing to work with them against EU austerity. That partner is the right-wing Independent Greeks party, led by Panos Kamnenos, a splinter from the centre-right New Democracy. Both parties are fiercely opposed to austerity and to EU interference in Greece.
Independent Greeks have 13 seats in the new parliament, giving the coalition a majority of 11 - not ideal, but still a massive achievement for Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras. At the age of 40, he is the youngest Prime Minister Greece has had for 150 years, and he has transformed Syriza from a fringe party of the left into the largest in Greece.
Syriza's victory changes everything. Tsipras has stated that he does not intend to leave the Eurozone, but has made it perfectly clear that he is no Europhile either. Syriza's partnership with the Independent Greeks will also bring a more Eurosceptic bent to the new coalition government. The policy clash between the two partners on non-economic issues, such as immigration and the position of the Greek Orthodox Church, may also cause problems down the line. However, for now Greece appears to have a dynamic, anti-neoliberal government capable perhaps of overturning the austerity measures imposed by the Eurozone's central command.
Make no mistake, the election of Syriza is not a panacea. Greece's Eurozone partners, particularly Germany, will be as determined to preserve the status quo as Syriza is to overturn it. Centre-left figures such as France's Francois Hollande and Italy's Matteo Renzi have failed to overturn the austerity consensus at the EU level, and Syriza will have to work with others across Europe if they intend to succeed.
But Syriza, unlike the previous New Democracy government, offer the Greeks hope. The economy of Greece buckled under austerity, contracting by 25% under the ministrations of the so-called 'troika' (the ECB, IMF and European Commission). Austerity has failed in Greece as it has across Europe. The Syriza victory will spur the anti-austerity movement across the continent. With general elections set to take place in the UK, Denmark, Estonia, Finland and Spain (where the left-wing Podemos is vying with the governing People's Party for first place), 2015 may well be the year in which the ideology of European austerity crumbles.
We can but hope. And vote.
Unless you have been absent from the planet Earth for the last week or so, you will know that Islamist terrorists killed 17 people in Paris and the surrounding area over the three days from the 7th to the 9th of January 2015. This was the most deadly act of terror in France since 1961.
The attack on the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) was carried out by Islamists apparently connected to al-Qaeda's Yemeni branch, while the gunman who struck the kosher supermarket Hypercasher near the Port de Vincennes self-declared his membership of ISIS.
On the 11th of January, 3.7 million people marched in Paris and other cities throughout France to show their unity in the face of these terrorist networks' actions. The march was led by the families of the victims and more than 40 world leaders, including the French President, the British Prime Minister and German Chancellor.
These were the largest rallies in France since the liberation of Paris from Nazi German occupation in 1944. They were also a moving demonstration of the unity of not just the French people but also of the global community in the face of the despicable, murderous actions of Islamist extremists. The fact that the rally was attended by both the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of Palestine underscores just how important a show of unity this march was.
And then, on the 12th of January, France announced it would deploy 10,000 soldiers and armed police onto its streets.
The political necessity for such a show of strength, I understand. Hollande, France's embattled President, needs to salvage some credibility from the disaster that this attack has been. It may also be that there is a valid strategic and security reason for this massive mobilisation, which has already begun. But the deployment has been accompanied by such violent, warmongering rhetoric that I fear the consequences.
In less than a week since the shootings, more than 50 anti-Muslim hate crime incidents have been registered across France. That is a worrying trend. The presence of ten thousand armed men on the streets will not calm this - it will fuel the fires. What is suspiciously close to a declaration of martial law is a move which will cause further polarisation, in France and across Europe.
And that's what they want. The Porte de Vincennes gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, said in his ISIS propaganda video that his actions were in defence of the Palestinian people and in protest of the Coalition actions in Syria, Afghanistan, Mali and Iraq. Make no mistake, in his mind his murders were an act of war. Responding to rhetoric of war in kind will only worsen the situation. And the more Muslims in European countries suffer as a result of the backlash against these incidents, the easier it will be for Islamists to radicalise young Muslims in future.
The ideology of these people - Salafi-Jihadism (ultraconservative Wahhabist Islam mixed with a quasi-fascistic personality cult and the willingness to undertake violent jihad) - is vile, make no mistake. It should be eradicated. But we must remember firstly that the ideology is our enemy first and foremost, and that the young men brainwashed by its demagogic leaders are victims of the virus.
That does not mean we should not defend ourselves against them. I am no pacifist. But we also cannot afford to become locked into an exchange of violent and ever-ratcheting rhetoric with the adherents of Salafi-Jihadism. That will only play into the hands of warmongers like Marine le Pen in France and Britain First here in Britain. And we especially must not allow our justified anger to spill over into attacks on moderate, law-abiding Muslims in our own countries or overseas.
We may be Charlie. But we are all humans first.
Something's killing the music industry. That's just a fact. How else do we explain the presence of One Direction, Taylor Swift and Meghan Trainor at the apex of the UK music charts. In the US, the Billboard 200 is topped by Swift, Nicki Minaj and Ed Sheeran as I write. Someone save us.
Yes, something's killing it alright. The question is, what? Well, on the 8th of January Korn drummer Ray Luzier became the latest artist to declare the culprit online music piracy. This, in and of itself, has a fine petingdigree, going all the way back to Beethoven. More recently, Metallica have faced down LimeWire and - at the last gig I went to - Skindred singer Benji Webbe accused all the members of the audience who admitted to pirating his music of 'stealing from my fucking children's mouths!!!'. Which, hilarious as it was at the time, slicked in sweat and a dash of spilled blood, is kind of true.
Declaration of interests: I have, in the past, downloaded music illegally. Shock, horror, all my metal friends leave me. Yeeeaaahhhh... No. All of them have too. So have all of you. Crucially, though, I stopped doing so before the age of 15. Why? Quite simple, really: I had a little bit of disposable income by that point, and wanted to support the artists I like(d). So, now I buy CDs or (if the CD is hard to come by) download albums legally. A reformed man.
Here's the issue: I don't have THAT much disposable income, even now. So, while I buy as much music as I can afford, that's not too much. So, being a music-loving sort of chap, I use services such as YouTube, Spotify, and even occasionally Last.fm. The thing is, whilst these services are legal, they are't particularly lucrative for the artists either. They only receive an estimated $0.005 per play, which is pretty poor by anyone's standards. Although the disparity between this figure and the revenue from music sales has been subject to debate, everyone agrees the former is a fraction of the latter.
And therein, dear reader, lies the issue. Illegally downloading music is bad. You shouldn't do it. We know these things. But the thing which will replace piracy will not be increased album sales; it will be increased use of streaming services. This is because the average UK household income is between £44,000 and £51,000 for a two-adult, two-child family. Take the mean of £47,500 - that's just under £12,000 per person. Before tax. And bills. And rent/mortgage. And clothes. And food.
Are you getting the idea? People don't have the cash on the hip necessary to indulge what for many of us is a deep passion for music. Which means that people will continue to use streaming services, which pay artists a tiny amount of money over often extremely long periods of time. Granted, this is better than nothing, but not by very much. While we're on the subject, even album sales aren't making musicians that much - about 13% of the total album cost for a physical copy, and less for iTunes downloads and their ilk. This has always been the case - and in fact some artists who have been in the business a while, such as Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, say things have actually improved quite considerably in recent years. Which is to be welcomed, but 13% still seems pathetically small.
The thing is, there's always something 'killing' the music industry - recorded music itself was attacked as damaging when it first emerged. Piracy is the current bugbear, and I will admit it's a problem, but the prevalence of streaming services at the expense of album sales is - to my mind - a greater long-term threat. But artists have to adapt. And there is hope for the future in the internet as well as fear, by making it easier for artists to access their audiences without the middleman of a record label taking a hefty cut (about 30%). Independent labels and artists should of course be encouraged, and we should support the musicians whose music we enjoy where we can. But let's not get too het up about the death of the music industry because the charts may be flooded with utter dreck, but in fairness they have been for years, and we will preserve this industry we love best by determining to ourselves that we will never let it die.
In his 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a dystopian, totalitarian state ruled by an inner core of detached elites who manipulate the lower orders with deft use of a pet media machine; conduct endless foreign campaigns in order to drain resources and keep average quality of life at a level which prevents resistance; and use a secretive security organisation to pluck suspected enemies of the state from the streets and torture them into submitting to the guiding ideology of the day. Oceania is a place where surveillance is everywhere, poverty and hunger are widespread, and foreigners are senselessly demonised as scapegoats for all the ills plaguing society.
Sound familiar?
One could be forgiven for thinking that political leaders both here in Britain and in other western democracies have been reading Orwell's magnum opus a little too much like a blueprint, rather than a warning. We have seen, for example, that David Cameron and George Osborne have been accused of being too closely involved with BBC appointments; that the organisation has faced numerous claims of bias against anti-establishment parties such as the Greens - over 85,000 people have supported a petition declaring they believe this to be the case; and that other media organisations, such as the Murdoch group, are just a little too friendly with certain politicians.
We have six million CCTV cameras in this country - roughly one for every eleven people - which is one and a half times as many as in China and nearly a quarter of the world total. Security services are able to access our every online and telephone communication, and all three establishment parties in Parliament collaborated back in July 2014 to force through a bill overturning EU regulations which would have banned this practice in just eight days. The Home Office has the power to tag, relocate and restrict the movements of terror suspects without any judicial oversight and for an essentially indefinite period, even if they don't have enough evidence to make a criminal charge.
Over 900,000 people rely on food banks to live, as a direct result of the Coalition's welfare 'reforms' and ideologically-driven, economically-illiterate spending cuts. The UK has not had a single year of peacetime since 1935. Nigel Farage and David Cameron are engaged in a seemingly desperate race to pile as much of the blame for our economic woes on immigrants, rather than attack the reckless finance capitalists and ineffective regulation by establishment politicians which caused the problem in the first place. Quality of life has stagnated for years; income inequality has been growing since the 1980s and wealth inequality is at its highest point since the late nineteenth century. Politicians are aloof, disconnected and seemingly deliberately unengaging, resulting in voter turnouts lower than at any point since the Second World War.
Our country has yet to plumb the depths of Orwell's fictional super-states - luckily for me, or it would be off to the Ministry of Love for a little stay in Room 101 just for thinking this, let alone writing it - but the direction of travel is clear. The CIA's use of despicable torture against untried foreign nationals, the growing instability in North Africa and the Middle East and the disturbing actions of Russian President-stroke-Mafia-boss Vladimir Putin show that the UK - or should I say Airstrip One? - isn't the only part of the world seemingly falling in with the writer's dark predictions.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Welcome to 2015, boys and girls.
