Until they become part of the view

Armin offers one of those self-advertising questionnaire things - 'me-mes', I think they're called - on the subject of music:

1. A track from your early childhood
2. A track that you associate with your first love
3. A track that reminds you of a holiday trip
4. A track that you like but wouldn’t want to be associated with in public
5. A track that accompanied you when you were lovesick
6. A track that you have probably listened to most often
7. A track that is your favourite instrumental
8. A track that represents one of your favourite bands
9. A track which represents yourself best
10. A track that reminds you of a special occasion (which one?)
11. A track that you can relax to
12. A track that stands for a really good time in your life
13. A track that is currently your favourite
14. A track that you’d dedicate to your best friend
15. A track that you think nobody but you likes
16. A track that you like especially for its lyrics
17. A track that you like that’s neither English nor German
18. A track that lets you release tension best
19. A track that you want to be played on your funeral
20. A track that you’d nominate for the ‘best of all times’ category

I love the idea, but - like Armin - I've got mixed feelings about the actual meme. Twenty's a nice round number, but it's rather a big number. So this isn't quite the same questionnaire Armin struggled with, but it does start with

1. A song from my early childhood
I remember Freddie and the Dreamers and Gerry and the Pacemakers, but most of all I remember "Have I the right" by the Honeycombs. It's a Joe Meek production, and somehow combines a mood of cartoonishly brash exuberance with decorous observance of pop song formalities. It doesn't sound like a novelty record, in other words (which is more than you can say of most chart singles these days). It sounds like a pop song, but one that's been beamed back from the future of pop music.

2. Three songs that have been associated with loss
Jethro Tull, "Requiem"
The Verve, "The drugs don't work"
Nick Drake, "Place to be"

3. A song that reminds me of a holiday trip
On my first trip to Spain, lying slightly ill in a cheap hotel room, I heard the inimitable Euro-disco sound of "Chiquitita" drifting over the rooftops. The lyrics were, of course, in Spanish -
Chiquitita, sabes muy bien
Que las penas vienen y van
Y desaparecen...
and I had a momentary vision of the continent of Europe united in song, oompah-ing in multilingual unison (Chiquitita, je sais trop bien...)

4. Three instrumentals that move me
François Couperin, "Les barricades mystérieuses"
The Tornadoes, "Telstar"
Air, "Mike Mills"

5. A song that reminds me of a special occasion
After our wedding we stayed one night at a hotel called The Pines, before going on to our honeymoon. Ever since then I've been particularly fond of the Triffids' song "In the pines", both because of the title and because of the lyrics.

6. Three songs that cannot be played too loud
Fatima Mansions, "Blues for Ceausescu"
Flying Saucer Attack, "At night"
Hüsker Dü, "Eight miles high"

7. An unforgettable live performance
I saw 10,000 Maniacs in 1987. "My Mother the War", which they saved for the last song of the night, was one of the heaviest things I've ever heard: Robert Buck's guitar alternated between piercing seagull screams and walls of power-chord noise. It was different from the album, and much better. The band left the stage while the last chord was fading, except for Natalie, who sang two verses of "He's 1-A in the Army (But He's A-1 In My Heart)" unaccompanied. After a couple of lines, people spontaneously started clapping along - on the off-beat. (On 4, 6 and 10 (over two bars of 6:8), to be precise.) Magical.

8. Three political songs
Gang of Four, "Return the gift"
the Jam, "Eton Rifles"
Robert Wyatt, "the British Road"

9. One single that changed my life
I had friends at school who got into punk early - they started with Patti Smith's Horses in 1975 and went straight on through Richard Hell, the Ramones, the Damned, the Pistols... I was a prog holdout for a long time, mainly for reasons of intellectual snobbery; bands like Chelsea did the loud-guitar thing well enough, but they didn't seem to have a lot to say.

I don't even know what tomorrow will bring
Having no future's a terrible thing

That's enough of that. The single that did it for me came out in the summer of 1977. "The medium was tedium" was the Desperate Bicycles' second single. There were no guitars - just organ, bass and drums, all of them played with more enthusiasm than skill. The words were barked out urgently, and there were a lot of them:

Your brain is in a better condition than mine
I heard about your feelings on the old grapevine
You can eat industrial waste
If you can stand the taste

Not so much Richard Hell, more Stackridge. And that was punk too. That was where punk started for me (even the Pistols sounded different after that). What's more, this was a different side of punk. The song is mostly stream-of-consciousness, but it comes back again and again to the glorious discovery that you can make music: the chorus is one line,

It was easy, it was cheap - go and do it!

After that there were Scritti Politti, who thought deeply about the whole thing (Means of production : production of meaning); then there were labels like Small Wonder and Raw, and bands like the Cigarettes and the Filmcast and the Four Plugs. But it started with the Desperate Bicycles.

10. Three great songs
Peter Blegvad, "Me and Parvati"
Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"
Robyn Hitchcock, "Queen Elvis"

11. A song that I learned a long time ago
A long, long time ago, in fact, and I can still remember how that music used to make me smile... Ahem. I've only been singing (in public, in front of people who are listening) for a couple of years, but I've been singing (singing songs all the way through, learning the words and the tune and taking care to get them right) since before my voice broke. It started with "American Pie", which was number 1 in March 1972, when I was 11; it's the first song I remember learning from start to end. ("Vincent" was probably the second, but we'll draw a veil over that.) In the case of "American Pie", it was a couple of years before I heard the album version, so to begin with I learned the last four verses without being entirely sure how they'd fit the tune. (Three of them are quite straightforward, but "Helter skelter in the summer swelter..." was a poser.) I went on to learn songs by Peter Gabriel Ian Hunter Pete Shelley Julian Cope ect ect, as well as quite a few by Trad - mostly they just kind of stick - but it started with "American Pie".

And finally...

In my mind's ear: ten songs and ten albums

the Beach Boys, "Good vibrations"
Captain Beefheart, "Sue Egypt"
David Bowie, "Sound and vision"
the Fall, "Winter"
Faust, "J'ai mal aux dents"
Ed Kuepper, "Messin' pt II"
Pere Ubu, "Navvy"
Scritti Politti, "The 'Sweetest Girl'"
Sudden Sway, "Tales from Talking Town"
Wizzard, "See my baby jive"

the Beta Band, the Three EPs
Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain by strategy
Family, Family Entertainment
the Homosexuals, the Homosexuals' record
Joni Mitchell, Blue
A. More, Flying doesn't help
Public Image Limited, Metal Box
Soft Machine, Third
Underworld, dubnobasswithmyheadman
Scott Walker, Climate of Hunter

And I'm tagging... no, I wouldn't be so cruel. But if you want to answer these questions for yourself - or modify them even further, for that matter - feel free.

Snap into position

Here are three scenarios; see if you can spot the differences between them.

More people were found guilty of car theft in the first nine months of 2005 than in the whole of 2004.

One of four things has happened. The police and the courts are functioning as before but there's more car theft going on; the police are sending more suspects to court, perhaps because of a crackdown on this type of offence; the courts are processing cases faster; or the courts are returning proportionately more guilty verdicts. The first of these obviously isn't good news. The third (more efficient courts) is good; the second and fourth (more arrests, more convictions) may be good news or may not be. Second scenario:

More people were cautioned by police for suspected car theft in the first nine months of 2005 than in the whole of 2004.

Now we're down to two possibilities: either there are more car thieves or the police are working harder on nailing them. But this second possibility is not necessarily a good thing, and doesn't necessarily mean that justice is being done more effectively: remember the case of the 1989 gross indecency figures (misrepresented by Nick Cohen as the product of a passing obsession with public toilets in Slough). Cue the third scenario:

More people were cautioned by police for being "nasty little toerags who we can't actually pin anything on at this stage" in the first nine months of 2005 than in the whole of 2004.

The point here is that figures for police activity don't record crime; what they record is police activity, which doesn't necessarily track anything but itself. Tell the police to arrest more people and arrests will go up. Tell the police to arrest people for looking at them a bit funny, and there will be a dramatic rise in the level of looking-at-police-a-bit-funny offences - although this will be accompanied, encouragingly, by a highly effective police crackdown on the offence.

All right, let's be serious. Here's what's actually happening:

Between January and September last year judges used 2,679 Asbos, compared with 2,660 during the whole of 2004. [This also compares with 1,043 in 2003 and 976 between April 1999, when the ASBO was introduced, and the end of 2002.]

Home Office minister Hazel Blears said: "Antisocial behaviour can be a harrowing experience that no one should have to endure. Today's statistics show that local authorities, the police and the courts are not hesitating to use Asbos to clamp down on the problem. I am extremely encouraged that they continue to be used."

The first sentence of Blears' statement is true, of course, although 'can be' is the operative phrase: 'anti-social behaviour' is defined, in law, as behaving 'in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household', which not only gives thin-skinned neighbours a limitless licence to be offended but gives the police a licence to take offence on their behalf (caused or was likely to cause...). In practice 'anti-social behaviour' is pretty much whatever you want it to be (actual criminal offences apart). As Bev Hughes said in 2003,

It can mean very different things from one place to the next. In one area it’s young people causing problems on the street, in another it’s noisy neighbours or abandoned cars. In one town centre it’s street drinking and begging, in another it’s prostitution.

If you think it's anti-social, in other words, then it probably is.

The second sentence of Blears' statement is also true, but only up to the word 'Asbos'. There is no necessary connection between a rise in the imposition of ASBOs and any consistent or identifiable pattern of behaviour. Certainly the police are not hesitating to request ASBOs, nor are magistrates' courts hesitating to grant them; beyond that, it's literally impossible to say what's going on. More offensive behaviour? A progressive crackdown on existing levels of offensive behaviour? A progressive and expanding crackdown on ever less extreme examples of offensive behaviour? Or a crackdown on whatever and whoever police officers might feel like cracking down on, secure in the knowledge that the Home Office is right behind them? It could be any of these; it's probably a combination of all of them.

The danger here isn't just that the government endorses police harassment, as with 'sus' under Thatcher. An ASBO is a court order to refrain from certain, lawful, patterns of behaviour - which may include going to certain places or being seen with certain people, as well as behaviours such as wearing gloves or being a passenger in a car. The order may have a fixed term or run indefinitely; while it's in force, violating the order is a criminal offence. Since obtaining a court order does not require a full trial, courtroom standards of proof do not obtain in an ASBO hearing and hearsay evidence is admissible. In other words, someone who is accused of behaving in ways which might upset somebody - someone who has not been accused of any crime, let alone convicted - can be prevented by law from carrying out an arbitrary range of other non-criminal actions, at any time in future; if they do, they can be jailed. The danger here is that policing turns into long-term social control. Blears again:

"Over the past 12 months we have seen enthusiastic take-up of Asbos, which sends out a clear message to those people who persist in this behaviour that action will be taken against them."

Bad people! You bad people out there, stop it now! No more badness!

There's something very New Labour about the lightness of all this. (So, what we need is something that is free, universally popular and that we can roll out instantly...) A consistent authoritarian conservative - a Tory of the old school, say - would know very well what anti-social behaviour was and how you dealt with it: you define it, you make laws against it, you put more bobbies on the beat and you arrest the anti-social yobs and hooligans who are causing the trouble. New Labour have always had the problem that, while they wanted to get the working-class law-and-order vote, it wasn't really their thing - they didn't really know those people, and when push came to shove they didn't much care about them. So how do we define anti-social behaviour? Then the brainwave: We don't. They're worried about it, so we let them define it. We give them the tools to combat it, and how they do it is up to them. It's democratic, it's decentralised, it's empowering - and the tabloids will love it!

The trouble with this approach to policy-making is that it's always liable to grow beyond the government's control: it's easier to start a snowball of public outrage than stop it. Having said that, the recent rash of news stories about people getting Fixed Penalty Notices (and that's another story) for offences such as wearing an offensive shirt, using the word 'fuck' in conversation or putting an envelope in a litter bin suggest that this trend may be soon exhaust the available supply of natural outrage and grind to a halt. I wonder what they'll think of next?

Many many sheep

I dreamed about my father this morning. In the dream, I'd somehow managed to establish contact with him where he is now (he died in 2001). He wasn't happy: he was bored, he was lonely, he missed us, he missed his home. I didn't like to explain to him that he couldn't come back; it seemed unnecessarily hurtful. I told him that they'd built a whole new wing on the place where he was living, but he wasn't interested.

(I realised afterwards that this last part was a reference to John 14:2.)

I don't believe in personal survival, not least because I find it hard to believe that anything recognisable as the soul of an identifiable human being would not be dreadfully homesick. (I think it's Little My, in one of the Moomin books, who asks how you get back down from Heaven and is outraged to hear that you don't.) I like Robyn Hitchcock's lines:

I was free as a penny whistle
And silent as a glove
I wasn't me to speak of
Just a thousand ancient feelings
That vanished into nothing - into love

Along similar lines, here's a poem I wrote many years ago. I'm not sure where it came from - falling asleep, possibly.

Dying

After my last visitor was gone,
I lay and let my eyes close.
The world dwindled away, and I watched
A noise of memories jostling, chattering,
Seeing images snap out of nowhere, shrinking, dilating,
Muttering... Then they too left me.
My eyes held only a deep, clear grey.
My body lay, now, calm and heavy,
My limbs, their weight, spread like scattered rocks,
Rocks tumbled on a shore, slanted from the sea's waves,
Or rocks old on a hillside scattered, crooked
Huge. A river rose among those rocks:
A river, cold and quiet in the night,
My running slowly out to meet the sea.
Passing, then, down through dark valleys,
All through grey and gravel-bedded lands
And on to cliffs, and cataracts! falling in foam
Into the still air, smashed on rocks and splashing,
Hurrying, trembling, coming at last to the shore,
To the rim of the ocean. Under the stars
Flowing, oh coursing into the sea's cold basin,
And my diffusion, out to horizon's depth,
Mingled with the dark, glimmering sea,
And ah! the infinite circles of the stars!

That would do. (Poetrivia: the last line came first, in the best Hunting of the Snark style. I can also reveal that, in the phrase 'rocks old on a hillside scattered', 'old' is meant to qualify 'hillside'. I'm sure you were wondering.)

Another way of looking at death is to say that, whatever it is, it's not life - which is to say, it's not any of the things that we know in life. Which leads in to these words, which I sang at my mother's funeral. It's mostly Shakespeare, with a couple of modern amendments (mine).

Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning-flash
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear no slander or censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan.
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
Follow thee and come to dust.

May no misfortune take thee
Nor remembrance forsake thee.
Unquiet spirit forbear thee,
No ill thing come near thee.
Quiet consummation have
And renowned be thy grave!

A friend commented that our parents have 'big lives'. It's an odd phrase, but I think it captures something. My life (or your life, if you insist) is vast: my life contains everything there is, as far as I'm concerned. Other people's lives are tiny by comparison. Only a few people have lives anywhere near as big as mine: my partner, my children, my very closest friends (perhaps) and, above all and before all, my parents. Big lives, and big absences. But if they're not here I can't really see that they're anywhere - and I'd hate to think of their spirits parked endlessly in a kind of heavenly holiday development, bickering idly and wondering how we were getting on without them. Better to melt into a cosmic background thrum of love - or flow into a dark sea reflecting infinite stars.

He once inspired awe

Tonight, we burn the king of straw

I've been critical of Chomsky's political work for some time; his writing on the Balkans, in particular, strikes me as not only obstinately self-deluded but actively poisonous. Francis Wheen, Oliver Kamm and David Aaronovitch (a fairly unlovely troika, I admit) have now published a devastating case against Chomsky, focusing in particular on the Srebrenica massacre. They demonstrate conclusively that Diana Johnstone, a writer commended by Chomsky, systematically minimises and downplays the massacre, using an armoury of devices familiar to any student of Holocaust denial. They also show that Chomsky's commendation of Johnstone's work specifically and emphatically endorses its factual content, rather than being based on a 'free speech defence'.

If you've been inclined to give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt - or to dismiss him and Kamm as equal and opposite obsessives who deserve each other - you should read this now.

I've been critical of Chomsky's political work for some time, but I've always assumed that his eminence in linguistics was unchallenged; I've certainly never felt I had the academic chops to challenge it. Fortunately not everyone is so timid. Thanks to Stuart and Dave, I've recently become aware of Chris Knight's critique of Chomsky the linguist. Knight, who has nothing but respect for Chomsky as a political activist, traces the tangled evolution of Chomsky's linguistics and finds it wanting. More, he argues that it is shaped by the twin imperatives offered by Chomsky's institutional background (military-funded computing) and by an anarchist mistrust of social science. The result is that, as a linguist, Chomsky is driven to positions of Cartesian rationalism, biological determinism and psychological individualism: we have language because we are the kind of animal that we are; we are that kind of animal because at some unknowable point we just, mysteriously, became that kind of animal; and nothing about how we interact with one another in society has, or has ever had, any bearing on the question. Needless to say, Knight finds this an extremely unsatisfactory account of human nature. This essay (also published in this expanded version (PDF)) is well worth reading, if only for some extraordinary passages of peevish circular logic from Chomsky on the subject of the social sciences ("I don't think they've ever made any great breakthroughs, so they can't have done, or I would have heard of them...").

Smash your idols, kids! (Only not my idols, all right? I'll deal with them myself. Later.)

Been in this town so long

A couple of months back I promised a post about the Brian Wilson album Smile. Here it is.

Smile would always have been a very strange album; now, it's an extremely strange one. Don't get me wrong, it's a very beautiful album and probably a great one. I'd recommend it almost without reservation to anyone seriously interested in music: you won't have heard anything quite like it, and you won't forget it when you have heard it. It's made a stronger impression on me than Pet Sounds, put it that way.

But it is a strange album. The best reference point - and also, to get a bit Paul Morley for a moment, the worst - is "Good Vibrations", which I've loved ever since it came out as a single. (I got into pop music at an early age, I should add - I've got fond memories of "Have I the right", and I wasn't even four when that came out.) "Good Vibrations" has some strange things in it: melody lines that twist around or stop dead; instruments - and combinations of instruments - that are naggingly, unnervingly wrong. Then there are the vocals: there are a lot of those sweet, soaring harmonies which the Beach Boys could do in their sleep by this stage. (But if it is a formula, it's a magical formula; when they got into it the Beach Boys could combine the ear-filling lullaby sweetness of barbershop with the drama and uplift of Gregorian chant, which is quite a trick if you think about it.) And then there's something else: moments of intense stillness and awe, when the music gestures to something outside itself, something beyond. (At the risk of descending irreversibly into Pseuds' Corner, the full second of tape decay at 2:57 always sends me - and no, I don't know where.)

So there are three things to say about "Good Vibrations": it's very strange, it's very beautiful, and it works. Smile can only rate two out of three. Partly I think this is simply because everyone concerned was working so much harder and trying to produce so much more: an entire album constructed with the jigsaw intricacy of "Good Vibrations", and with lyrics at once celebrating and questioning US nostalgia for the early years of the nation... Let us now, incidentally, praise the lyricist, Van Dyke Parks, although not without wondering what he was on back then. An American journal of record recently ascribed the lyrics of Smile to Brian Wilson, prompting a letter from Parks, who pointed out that Wilson's contribution to the lyrics consisted of providing the melody; specifically, "Brian sang 'Da da da da da da da da da', I wrote 'Columnated ruins domino'". He added that he'd been embarrassed to admit to his part in Smile for most of his adult life; now that it was seen as something to be proud of, he felt he deserved to take some of the credit as well. Rightly so. Something odd and powerful happens - something unlike anything the Beach Boys had done before - when Brian Wilson gives voice to Parks' fantasia on American themes: you wonder how the jockish innocence of the Beach Boys has produced the godlike omniscience of this singer/narrator. When it works it's a magnificent conceit, but it doesn't always work.

Smile is a strange album musically, as well - stranger than Pet Sounds at its most ambitious ("I wasn't made for these times", "Caroline No"), or even "Good Vibrations". Lush vocal arrangements meet twisted, off-kilter melodies amid orchestration that ranges from ambitious to bizarre; the elements are familiar, but - with only a couple of exceptions - the overall effect falls short of "Good Vibrations". (Sadly, this is even true of "Good Vibrations", a briskly cheerful version of which closes the album.) Still, there are glories here. "Wonderful" is perfectly named; "Heroes and Villains" tacks obsessively back and forth between suspense and resolution, but does it so elegantly that you only want it to continue; and "Surf's Up" is unlike anything you've ever heard, unless you've spent time in Heaven recently. But as a whole Smile feels like a delirious fantasy: a jumble of endlessly, naggingly charming musical ideas, the product of a mind which had overdosed on sunny major chords. Which, I suppose, was precisely what it was.

Or rather, what it would have been. Nobody has ever heard the Beach Boys' Smile, or ever will (although I gather there are some interesting mix-tape versions out there). What we've got now is the product of the two-decade pause in Brian Wilson's life after 1966, and of the eternal present of rock music which began shortly afterwards. It's an album that Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks left incomplete, some time ago, and which they and some other people have now got round to completing. But it's also a Cream-at-the-Albert-Hall thirty-year-retrospective Mojo-reader cultural event, commemorating and celebrating the album that was never made - and it probably wouldn't have been completed if it didn't function on that level. The combination of those two perspectives is always present when you listen to Smile now - and sometimes makes it a heart-wrenching experience.

Brian Wilson's vocal range would be remarkable at any age; for a man in his sixties it's astonishing. He's still got it. Except that a large part of it, for the Beach Boys, was youth - youth and freedom and potential. Really, Brian's were quintessentially adolescent songs - standing at the edge of childhood and looking into a wide-open future when anything would be possible. Sex, for example - the Stones celebrated it, the Beatles avoided the subject, but the Beach Boys sang about it (sweetly, joyfully) as something to look forward to:

You know it's going to make it that much better
When we can say goodnight and stay together

On the original Smile Brian Wilson was looking ahead to an adult existence which included everything: Old World decadence, life on the Western frontier, the colonisation of Hawaii and, er, the pirates of the Caribbean (not the album's high point, that). On the Smile we have now, he's looking back on the youth in which he looked forward to those things. The man who voiced the dreams has forty years of (often traumatic) experience behind him; the dreams are unchanged. And so, in the album's first full song, the weathered voice of a sixty-year-old man sings a twenty-year-old's fantasy of maturity - and, for a moment, he relives his ignorance of what the words would come to mean.

I've been in this town so long
That back in the city
I've been taken for lost and gone
And unknown for a long long time...

Letting go

I went to my mother's funeral on Monday. Writing those words I'm immediately reminded of Camus' use of a similar opening, which he put to strikingly blank and dissociated effect (After the first sentence: "Aujourd'hui, Maman est morte," you know that you are in the good hands of Albert Camus. The existential theme is just awsome - Josh, Great Falls.) Well, I'll see your Meursault, Josh, and raise you Oswald Bastable:

There are six of us besides Father. Our Mother is dead, and if you think we don't care because I don't tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all.

Or, for that matter, Lemony Snicket:

If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels; and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.

This quite complete statement will stop here.

The funeral was an odd affair. It was billed as a 'celebration of the life', with a brief family committal ceremony afterwards. This way of rebranding funeral services usually strikes me as inappropriate at best and positively unhelpful at worst: to celebrate a life is all well and good, but the loss also needs to be honoured - and surely it can't entirely be honoured without letting go and howling. (She wouldn't want us to be sad? Not forever, no, but I think she'd want us to miss her.)

In the event, though, the celebratory elements of the ceremony didn't grate on me; I never felt we were rejoicing in the life so as not to look at the death. The life we were celebrating is over, after all: ultimately, celebration only adds to the keenness of the loss. What I couldn't share was the consolation-of-faith element. I wondered if this was simply because my religious faith, if not quite non-existent, isn't strong enough for me to entertain any thought that my mother is in a better place or happier now, let alone that she's hooked up again with my father. But then, I don't think I'd want a faith that gave me such certainty about something so unknowable. I'm not sure I'd want a faith that took the edge of something so sharp, either - but that's not quite the same thing.

The mood of the committal ceremony was quite different. The minister opened by saying that we were there "to let go and let God", which struck me as exactly right: this was a ceremony to move us on, a place for us to say she's not ours any more and begin to let our mourning take a different colour. (No less intense - no less painful, for that matter - but different: less anxiety, more melancholy.) The tone of the committal was not at all consoling, and it was all the better for that: the message was a public, collective acknowledgment that something huge and incomprehensible had happened; and that those of us left were in enormous pain; and that this is how it is. Which doesn't bring in consoling certainties; what it does do (oddly) is make the pain a little more manageable. There's no denying how I feel - but there's no denying how it is, either.

China Miéville (via Ellis) got me thinking about mourning and celebration, by way of some thoughts on revolution in fiction. (Stay with me here.) China:

the fantastic is uniquely well suited to examine these issues. I think that there are certain political issues that cannot be dealt with by 'realistic' narrative, and for me, revolution is a key one.
...
a revolution described by someone not in a revolution, let alone a post-revolutionary society so described, cannot be anything other than the palest imitation of the Carnival of the Oppressed that it would be, the earth turned upside down, because our minds are the minds of those living in an earth stubbornly and annoyingly the right fucking way up so if we take seriously the utter radicalism of a revolution and after, it is unthinkable for we who aren't there. It either turns into absurdity or bureaucracy, in our telling - but with the fantastic, and only with it, I can literalise, concretise, Rosa's insistence on the revolution's immanence: I was, I am, I shall be.
...
actually existing humanity is already pretty fucking great, in much of its numbers, much of the time, so just imagine how fucking great the unfettered variety will be. I'm trying to remember the last line of Trotsky's Literature and Revolution: 'From these, new heights will emerge' - something like that, about the astonishingness of the new human

For what it's worth, here's Leon:

the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

But let's not linger over Communist man. China's key point - and a deeply Marxist point, for most decent values of the word - is that actually existing humanity is already pretty fucking great, in much of its numbers, much of the time. Amen to that, and cue Russell:

DOCTOR [genuinely shocked]: Who said you're not important? I've travelled to all sorts of places. Done things you couldn't even imagine, but... you two... Street corner. Two in the morning. Getting a taxi home. I've never had a life like that. Yes. I'll try and save you.

Ordinary people - or rather, ordinary lives - they're great.

But note the echo of Roy Batty's death scene ("I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...") Street corner. Two in the morning. Getting a taxi home. - those moments, too, will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Ordinary lives, they're great. They deserve to be celebrated - and mourned.

Not to mention tea

My mother once said that when she retired she'd call her house "YBOTHACUKIN". (After some discussion she agreed that this spelling was a bit common and accepted my suggested alternative, the fake-Welsh "Y-BODD-Y-CWCYN". Too clever by half, we were.) She never quite reached the point of "why bother", and never intended to; it was a daring, scandalous suggestion. Still, in her last few years she didn't do much cooking - quiches from M&S and Waitrose were a favourite.

When we were young, though, she cooked a phenomenal amount. There was, among other things:

Bara brith. Served sliced and buttered. The trick was soaking the fruit in tea beforehand.

Cheesecake - and one recipe in particular, set rather than baked and using cottage cheese as well as curd cheese. Sounds a bit odd but was wonderful.

Cheese scones. Particularly good split and buttered while still warm from the oven.

Devil's food (never "Devil's food cake"). Very dark, very dense, very rich. Served in small slices.

Eggy bread - my breakfast every day for several years, school days included. (I don't know what time my mother got up.) A slice of bread soaked in beaten egg and fried, served in quarters. Not to be confused with

French Toast, a simple but beautiful recipe consisting of two thin slices of bread, sandwiched together and toasted on the outside, then buttered on the untoasted side while still hot.

Hamburgers. When I was about ten I went to an air show with a friend's family, and was surprised to hear his father talk about going to get some hamburgers - I couldn't imagine anyone going to all the trouble of making hamburgers in the middle of a field. My mother's hamburgers were labour-intensive; as well as mince (which she minced herself, sometimes from cold leftovers) they contained onion, flour and egg - and then there was all the bother of frying them, two or three at a time. They were good, though.

Hot cake. As this list grows I'm becoming aware of the key role played by butter in our family recipes. Hot cake was so called because it was best eaten hot from the oven. It was a lemon-flavoured sponge, baked in a square tin; you ate it in small slices, buttered.

Kartoffelpueffer (potato pancakes). You grate raw potatoes coarsely (squeezing the water out), then combine with chopped onion and bacon, bound with egg. And fry. One of the most satisfying meals I can imagine. (My wife's Ukrainian mother had a similar recipe, but with the potatoes grated finely - more like latkes. Latkes are very nice, but my Mum's kartoffelpueffer went up to eleven.)

Lemon meringue (never "Lemon meringue pie"). (Another Americanism - perhaps borrowed from Americans they'd met in Germany?) Every Sunday, we would all go to church. Every Sunday after church, my mother would make a roast dinner. And every Sunday, she would also make a lemon meringue, from scratch. This is, essentially, three desserts in one: make pastry, line a dish and bake it blind; separate some eggs and make a thick, sharp, translucent lemon custard with the yolks; combine the whites with sugar and beat them into meringue. Then combine and bake. By our current standards it's insanely labour-intensive, especially for following a big meal; you wouldn't dream of putting yourself through that on a weekly basis. But she did.

Marmalade. The first time I worried that my mother's health might be failing was the winter when she said she wasn't going to make marmalade. There are some good shop marmalades out there - I'm quite partial to Duerr's 1881 - but nothing has ever come close to the marmalade my mother used to make.

Rolled oats. We were highly European. One of our favourite breakfast cereals consisted of rolled oats with sugar and milk. It was only years later that I realised I'd been eating a makeshift muesli.

Rum cake. A Christmas speciality, served from the fridge; as far as I can remember it consisted mainly of sponge fingers, buttercream icing and rum.

Spaghetti Milanese. We had spaghetti bolognaise [sic] and macaroni cheese, but we also had this recipe, which combined spaghetti with onion, bacon, chopped hard-boiled egg, grated cheese and tomato puree. (I've no idea if this is what anyone else would call 'Milanese'.) It's dry without being bland; if you make it right the tomato puree, the cheese and the boiled egg yolk effectively coat the pasta. Like the kartoffelpueffer, I still make this from time to time. Like the kartoffelpueffer, it's superb.

Some of these are already lost to me - I doubt I'll ever make marmalade (or lemon meringue for that matter), and 'hot cake' will probably always be a mystery. Still, some remain. I'll take them from here. And I will mention

Tea. My mother was a great believer in cups of tea. She would always put the kettle on when I arrived, and always top up the pot so that I could have a second cup. She introduced me to tea when I was eleven or twelve years old. My son, who is ten, has recently started drinking tea. I'm glad about that.

I'll see you in my dreams

My mother died this morning. She was 84.

She was brought up in the Plymouth Brethren, a Protestant group with strict ideas about most things but not much internal hierarchy. At their Communion services, PBs would share actual bread rather than the rice-papery wafers they use in the Church of England. According to my mother, one member of their 'Meeting' argued that modern English bread was just as inauthentic as the wafers, and that they should be using unleavened bread. He lost the argument, but got his way; from then on, he brought his own supply of unleavened bread and communed with himself.

Growing up in an intensely religious household, my mother had the worst of both worlds: she believed that her parents' religion was true, but she didn't, herself, believe it; she wasn't saved. Which meant that Jesus could come back at any moment, and she'd be bound for preterition. For a while she used to pray that Jesus would at least postpone the grand finale until her younger sister had been saved. Her sister spoiled this plan; not taking the whole religious thing quite so seriously, she was quite happy to please her parents by announcing that she was saved.

My mother didn't do too well at school. She was studying psychology in evening classes when she got married; she gave up the course shortly before she would have completed it, feeling it wasn't the kind of thing a young married woman should be doing. So, no qualifications. She always regretted this, but never did anything about it; she didn't even learn to drive when my father did, feeling (in her fifties) that it was too late to be bothering with anything like that. (Then she regretted that decision, too.)

She'd married my father, anyway, when she was 28 and he was 35. (I always found their wedding day easy to remember in my Red youth, as it was the 1st of October 1949.) Neither of them ever talked much about the war. They lived in London throughout it; he'd had TB and wasn't fit enough to enlist (he also worked at the War Office, which might well have been a reserved occupation). Soon after they were married he was posted to Germany, where they had a house, a maid and money to spend. They also had three children in just over two years (all girls, two of them twins). Coming back to Britain in the early 1950s - with no servants and a mortgage to find - must have been a shock to the system. I think it was around this time that my mother in turn developed TB, had half a lung removed and gave up smoking. (It's thanks to my mother that I've only ever bought two packets of cigarettes - and one of those was for research purposes (If you can get twenty cigarettes for 50 pesetas, just how bad can they be?) She found out I was smoking halfway through the first packet (Gitanes, naturellement), and she came down hard.)

I was born in Purley - which wasn't a famous place at the time, thanks all the same - at home, at midnight, assisted by a midwife who (bizarrely enough) had previously nursed my mother when she had TB. (She recognised her; her first words were "Do you think you ought to be having a baby?") My mother told me later she was afraid for me during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We moved down the road to Coulsdon when I was three; I grew up in a detached, four-bedroomed house, which my mother later said they would never have taken on if they'd realised how much work it needed. When I was still quite small my father's TB recurred; apparently my mother was just giving me my lunch when I saw him being taken out of the house on a stretcher and screamed. I don't remember that, but for a long time I had a vivid compound memory of the music from Desert Island Discs, a willow-pattern plate and a nice big helping of some unidentified stuff (a bit like baked beans, only not beans, that other stuff, that stuff I used to have, I really liked that stuff...). I guess that was the moment before.

They were quite religious in this period. From my mother's PB background and my father's Chapel they'd both migrated to the Church of England, where they were fairly active; for a few years we even had holidays at church retreats. (On one of these I played with Tim Westwood and acquired a red plastic fish called Belinda. Unfortunately I only remember one of these.) There was religion and there were rows; my mother walked out on one occasion, fully intending to go to her mother in Thornton Heath, but came back when she realised that she didn't have the bus fare. Things were less stormy by the time I was taking notice, but I do remember that the Sunday Lunch Washing-up Row was a regular fixture. (They even shut the kitchen door.) My younger sister was born in 1966. My father was still working for the War OfficeMinistry of Defence (the Civil Service may have changed now, but in his day once you were in a Ministry you stayed put); when my sister was two and I was eight, he was posted to South Wales.

The next five years were, fundamentally, magical. The schools weren't great, the social life was highly circumscribed and it was a twenty-mile journey to the nearest cinema, concert venue, large supermarket or school uniform shop; for my older sisters it was a very mixed blessing, and for my mother - at least to begin with - it was unimaginably dull. But I remember it very fondly, as does my younger sister. There were woods to explore and cliffs to climb and miles of beach to walk, in and out of season - especially out of season. And there was that year-round sense of occasion that only village life can really give you: that sense that there are only a few events to look forward to, but everyone will be taking part in those same few events and everyone's looking forward to them. (Years later we happened to be on holiday in Mullion Cove, in the West of Cornwall, on the day of the annual fete. I knew exactly what was going on - it hadn't changed a bit.) Then there was the background thrum of pride that characterises the world of the armed forces. This isn't just an officer-class thing. My parents, uniquely and rather scandalously, used to go to the Sergeants' Mess as well as (and more often than) the Officers' Mess. (My father was head of the local establishment on the civilian side, so naturally we were ranked as an 'officer' family; he was also the son of a Welsh miner and rock-solid Labour, so the idea of only mixing with other 'officers' didn't sit too well with him.) I'd say that the sense of pride - and the sense that any privileges we might enjoy were entirely justified - came from (and was felt by) the other ranks as much as the officers: it was partly when the chips are down, we run this place but mostly if it needs doing, we'll do it. It's a remarkable atmosphere, and I'm not sorry to have been exposed to it.

I was nearly 13 when we came back to Coulsdon, and my mother was 52. My father was approaching retirement age, and there was some talk of retiring right there in Wales; they even looked into taking over the post office in a village called Login, which would have been interesting if nothing else. Nothing came of it, though. Once, before we went to Wales, my mother had got a part-time job on the telephone exchange; I more or less forced her to give it up, at one stage going out in the street with the intention of waiting till she came back. Things were a bit easier now, and she took a part-time job working at the godforsaken Immigration and Nationality Department of the Home Office, at Lunar House in Croydon. (Someone who's an authority in my current academic field was working at Lunar House in the same period, as a twenty-something Executive Officer. I'm meeting him soon and had been looking forward to asking him if he remembered my mother, and telling her about it afterwards. I suppose I can still do some of that.) When she got home, during the school holidays, we would regularly share a pot of tea and a Caramel bar. (Doesn't sound like much, I know.)

Later, she got involved in teaching English as a second language. This wasn't class-based; she was given the details of two or three immigrant women who wanted to improve their English, and she'd go round and chat with them. I remember the Nigerian woman who my mother introduced, purely for social reasons, to a young Nigerian guy we knew; what she hadn't factored in was that he was Yoruba whereas she was Ibo, which meant that it went off rather like a royal visit (So you do all the cooking? Good, good!) Another of her clients, Mrs A from Sri Lanka, became a family friend; I've got fond memories of her 'rich cake', which was essentially fruitcake reimagined as an Indian sweet.

It was Mr A who suggested that I get a job, between school and university, at the local psychiatric hospital (which was one of the institutions that ringed London, where the old Green Belt began). My mother encouraged me to take the job and to stick at it. I'll write about that job another time; a two-word summary would be "unbelievably awful". Then I went to university; then I went back home; then I moved to Manchester, to the great displeasure of both my parents. They didn't understand my choice of career, they didn't immediately get on with my girlfriend, and they certainly didn't approve of my decision to move to be with the latter before I'd even got a job. Eh, well - water, bridge.

After my father retired, they moved to Brighton (selling the house to Mr A). The community in the street and the local church gave them both a new lease of life, my mother especially; she also worked in the local Citizens' Advice Bureau for a while, and kept in touch with CAB people for a long time afterwards. (She also kept in touch with church people who had moved on, as well as with a lot of people from Coulsdon and one or two from Wales. That was how she was.) For several years I went to Brighton on my own at Christmas, while my girlfriend (same one) went to her mother's. With five in the family, family Christmases were always a very big deal. It wasn't quite the same in Brighton - not everybody could stay, apart from anything else - but for a while it was close. And then of course there was Brighton - pace Arthur Machen, the best town there is for wandering around. It was less tarted-up and redeveloped then than it is now; the North Laines, in particular, were still scrubby and bohemian.

Then my girlfriend and I got married (still the same one) and had two kids of our own. When our second was still quite young, my father died. He'd been ill in various ways for quite a while - that's another story which I'll write another time - but the end, when it came, was gentle and quiet: one day he stopped eating, and the GP advised my mother to stop trying to feed him; a few days later he stopped talking; a few days after that it was over. It was a good death, for him. My mother had run herself ragged looking after him; she was determined to make sure he could die at home, even if it meant she had to give him what was effectively 24-hour care. She grieved a little after he'd died, but she didn't collapse. She confided later that a large part of what she felt was relief.

I stayed in touch, of course, and we kept on taking the children down to Brighton, of course. As time went on there began to be something odd about the way she talked. The stream of recollection and anecdote was as fluent as it had ever been, but it seemed less focused - half the time I really didn't know these people she was talking about - and more repetitive: she'd start with a story, move to a general point, then use the same story to illustrate it. But who was to say how well you or I would be functioning at 83?

Shortly before her 84th birthday we had a family get-together. We were missing one of my sisters (plus husband and two children), but otherwise we were all there: four children, five grandchildren and her. Apart from my father's memorial service, that was the only time we were all in the same place. It was also the only time she visited the sister who hosted it in that house. She didn't travel much after my father died; she said a few times she'd come to see us in Manchester, but never managed it.

Two months after her birthday she had a stroke. She didn't lose consciousness, but she was paralysed down one side and couldn't speak at all. Within a couple of weeks she'd regained most of the motor function and verbal ability that she'd lost, but something else had gone adrift. She went from the hospital to a specialist stroke rehabilitation unit, which discharged her with indecent haste (or so, at first, it seemed to us); she went to a nursing home, fees to be funded from the sale of her house. Gradually we realised that it wasn't simply a matter of recovering from the stroke; dementia had already been eating away at her mind and memories, and the stroke had only made matters worse. ('We' here refers to her children, or at least the four of us who were in Britain and in regular phone contact. I will happily throttle anyone who uses the words 'bright side' or 'silver lining', but it's true that we're talking a lot more than we had been before.)

She was in that home for a little over two months. I'm not sure she ever really settled there. On two of the last three times when I saw her there, she was quite convinced that we had come to take her home - or, if not, that we could be persuaded to take her home - or, if all else failed, that we couldn't actually overrule her if she told us she wanted to go home. It was distressing. Fortunately the third time was the odd one out; she was a lot calmer that day, possibly because we'd told her that we were calling in on our way back to Manchester. A few days after that she actually made a break for it and got about fifty yards up the road before anybody from the home caught up with her. Brighton's not the kind of town where dotty old ladies can safely wander; the home told us that she'd have to go to another home, preferably one which was geared up to deal with dementia patients - and had locks on the doors.

Nothing ever came of that. About a week later, she had another stroke: a much larger bleed this time, and on the other side of the brain. She lost consciousness and didn't come round again. My sisters and I went to Brighton, to sit with her. There was nothing to be done; the consultant told us that, while a sudden reversal couldn't be ruled out, the chances were that she was in "the dying phase of her life" and that heroic efforts to revive her - or even to treat any infection that might develop - would be misplaced.

She didn't develop an infection, as far as we could tell. I saw her yesterday morning; by all appearances she was simply sleeping peacefully, her breathing shallow but relaxed. I think now her breathing had grown more shallow over the three days that she'd been unconscious, but I may be imagining that. In any case, she died this morning, without ever regaining consciousness.

Early this morning I had a nightmare: four black dogs - squat, belligerent Labrador crosses - were outside our front door; when I opened the door a little way, one of them lunged, got its nose into the door and tried to attack me. No prizes for guessing where that came from. But there's a difference between 'bad' and 'sad': this is an unutterably sad time, but what's happened isn't wrong or frightening, even for us. Certainly not for her. I talked to her a few times while I was there; one of the things I told her was that it was time for her to rest, and that she could go in peace. My sister helped to lay her out. She said that her face had an expression of pleasant surprise, "as if she'd just got the punch-line of a joke".

Oh, so I don't have to go back there!

I hope it felt like that, anyway.

Goodbye, Mum.

And feel your lumps

Go and sit upon the grass and I shall come and sit beside you...

Back in the early seventies a couple of forward-looking sixth-formers at my school booked a series of acts, with varying degrees of success; Hatfield and the North were very nearly booked at one stage, but they ended up with Keith Christmas. I always wanted to be like those sixth-formers, but by the time I got there respect had given way to derision; they shouted at me in the corridors, in other words. (They called me 'Medusa', which was literate at least.) Anyway, Keith Christmas was pretty good; he could certainly bring off the long hair. The Albion Dance Band (as they then were) were also good, although I'd been hanging around all day with the people doing set-up and was out of my head on London Pride by the time they came on. And then there was Ivor Cutler, who disappointed some by not bringing his harmonium and disappointed me slightly by giving half a set to Phyllis April King (as she then was). I was prepared for the writing, as one of my sisters had left a copy of Cockadoodledon't! at home. The writing was good.

But Ivor Cutler is dead.

Years later I saw Ivor Cutler again; at least, it was either him or an elderly man of medium height who was determined to look as much like Ivor Cutler as possible. Our paths crossed on a bridge over the Thames - one of those railway bridges with the fenced-in pedestrian section to one side. (Blackfriars, Waterloo, I don't know.) I contemplated saying something but rapidly realised that I didn't have anything more cogent to say than "Hey, you're that Ivor Cutler, aren't you?". (Unlike my sister, I had never purchased any of his works.) I didn't say anything.

But Ivor Cutler is dead.

As you'll read in his interview with the Wire, Ivor Cutler wasn't entirely pleased to have his contribution to Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom described as his own work. His own work was quite different. Wyatt later paid him a greater homage with his version of "Grass", a.k.a. "Go and sit upon the grass": a wonderful, hilarious and highly meaningful song about the path to enlightenment, which I have myself sung in public to great acclaim. (I made somebody cry with laughter - of which I have to say I am rather proud. Thanks, Ivor.)

Ivor Cutler is dead.

He has left a gap. The gap has many shapes; one of them is this. That's a good gap.

And we shall talk...

To the great dominions

Harry:

Hitler had his faults, of course, as he himself would be the first to admit. Many of his “Nazi theories” have now been debunked. With the benefit of hindsight his invasion of Russia was ill-conceived, and his scheme to exterminate the “lesser races” has been widely discredited.

Hitler was also a lousy manager. During the war years, in particular, he tended to sleep all morning, go for a long walk after lunch, then settle down to watch a film before a dinner which would last all night - not because the dinner itself was particularly lavish but because this was when he would talk about his plans for the world, for two or three hours at a time. If you wanted to get a decision out of Hitler, your best bet was to get him either straight after lunch or after the afternoon walk. Either that or sell your idea to Martin Bormann, who got himself into the position of being Hitler's gatekeeper in this period; even he couldn't always get the Fuehrer's attention, but with any luck he'd send out the memo anyway.

Hitler's working practices were more efficient earlier in his career, but even then he knew nothing about delegation. He was the kind of boss who keeps everyone hanging around until he's ready to start a meeting, then talks at great length about whatever comes to mind instead of sticking to the agenda. He inspired - if that was the kind of thing you were inspired by - and, er, that was it. Except that, in the classic style of hands-off managers, he was also a micro-manager when the fancy took him; as the German armies faced defeat on the Eastern and Western fronts, the Fuehrer would make time to read the complaints and denunciations ordinary Germans had written to him and ensure that such-and-such a slacker or hoarder received the appropriate punishment.

Hitler's style of management was dreadfully inefficient, but it has a certain definite appeal - at least, for the manager in question. What could be better, after all, than to sweep armies across the map and condemn thousands of enemies to death in the afternoon, then in the afternoon reach down to pluck out a single lurking malefactor and consign him to his personal doom - and finish the day by outlining those still greater things that you would achieve, when the downfall of all your enemies had finally given you a free hand? What a combination: vision, strategy and a grasp of specifics, all managed from the lofty vantage-point of the true leader, with a true leader's wisdom and authority. What a piece of work such a manager would be - how infinite in faculty, in apprehension how like a god!

Henry Porter:

I certainly understand that the capillaries of a society run from bottom to top, bearing all the bad news, intractable problems, mood swings and crises; that it is all ceaselessly pumped upwards in the direction of the Prime Minister; and that the view afforded in Downing Street must sometimes be truly extraordinary, a seething, organic, Hogarthian panorama of delinquency and unreason.

A Prime Minister must try to reach beyond the day-to-day business of government, frantic though it is, and make sense of what he sees below, seek the connecting threads, order up the policies and implement them so that improvement becomes possible. ... Because he is by his own account well-intentioned, [Blair] believes that nothing should get in the way of this modernising purpose, the exercise of his benevolent reason on the turbulent society below. Like Mrs Thatcher, he has become almost mystically responsible for the state of the nation.

Kenneth Boulding (via Chris):

There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.

Careful with the spoons

Depressing If True Dept. In comments here, Kevin writes:

I was half asleep this morning when it was on Today and heading to the pub tonight when Shahid Malik MP spun the line on Question Time but I think I heard it right: the Labour establishment's second front is that the Italian legal process is politically motivated, a bit way-hey and not to be trusted.

That's precisely Berlusconi's own line on the investigations - and it's a beguiling blend of truth, half-truth and lies. The idea that the magistrates are gunning for him because they hate his guts is true enough; people investigating major frauds which have gone unpunished for the better part of a decade tend not to be too fond of the perpetrators. It's half-true that they hate his guts for political reasons; the point here is that, in Italy, integrity in politics is a political cause in itself, and not necessarily one which has anything to do with being on the Left. Much of the Left has kept far too quiet - sometimes to the point of complicity - about Berlusconi's corruption; some of his fiercest critics would be on the Right, if it were possible to be on the Right and oppose Berlusconi. But it's utter nonsense - a real insult to the intelligence - to suggest that the charges against Berlusconi are in some way political: they're not, it's a simple(!) question of tax-evasion, fraud, perjury, transnational money-laundering, witness suborning, illegitimate political funding and straightforward bribery.

If Labour has bought into this farrago... ugh. If you dine with the Devil long enough, eventually the abyss looks back into you. (I said that.)

Get the right arm up

A couple of Italian links.

Berlusconi to the US Congress, 28th February:

For my generation the United States represent a beacon of liberty and economic progress. I shall always thank the United States for saving my country from Fascism and Nazism, at the cost of so many American lives.
...
Allow me to conclude by sharing a brief story with you. One day, a father took his son to a cemetery, where there lay soldiers who had crossed the ocean to defend our freedom. The father made his son promise eternal respect to those men and the values they represented. The father was my father, the son was me. And I shall never forget that promise.

(Berlusconi was born in 1936 and brought up in Milan, approximately 200 miles from the nearest US cemetery. It may have happened exactly like that, though.)

Democratici di Sinistra (Italy's main left-wing party):

The Prime Minister ... recalled that young Americans died on Italian soil to free Italy from the Nazi and Fascist yoke. What a shame that the Prime Minister signed an electoral pact, only a few days ago, with heirs of those dictatorships - violent enthusiasts for that obscene chapter in European history ... [including] even those who have stated publicly that the British and Americans were fighting on the wrong side in World War II.

Berlusconi's governing coalition consists of three parties: his own Forza Italia, the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale and the conservative Catholic Cristiani Democratici Uniti; the xenophobic regionalist Lega Nord is a semi-detached member of the coalition. But this isn't a story about Alleanza Nazionale; AN these days isn't much to the left of the Daily Mail, but it's emphatically not a fascist party. This is about some people who broke with the old, quasi-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano when it turned into Alleanza Nazionale in 1995, and some people who broke with AN when it explicitly repudiated Fascism in 2003. In short, this is about the real fascists.

In the beginning - at least, in 1995 - there was Pino Rauti's Movimento Sociale - Fiamma Tricolore. Rauti is a fairly serious right-wing subversive, who's been accused of involvement in neo-fascist terrorism. This is also true of Roberto Fiore, who broke with Rauti in 1997 to form Forza Nuova. In the same year another long-time neo-Fascist named Adriano Tilgher left Rauti's group to form the Fronte Sociale Nazionale. In 2003, Rauti was himself expelled from the MS-FT and formed something called the Movimento Idea Sociale. In the same year, Alessandra Mussolini (granddaughter of the old bastard) left AN in protest at the party's break with Fascism, to form a group initially called Libertà di Azione and subsequently called Azione Sociale. Mussolini's tiny group has since formed a united front with Fiore and Tilgher's equally tiny groups, under the name of Alternativa Sociale.

So that's the Italian extreme right: MS-FT (without Rauti), Alternativa Sociale (Mussolini/Fiore/Tilgher) and MIS (Rauti). (There's also a group called Destra Nazionale - Nuovo MSI, run by a strange guy called Gaetano Saya - but even the headbangers don't want to have anything to do with him.)

Alternativa Sociale is fighting the April election as a member of Berlusconi's Casa delle Libertà coalition.

Movimento Sociale - Fiamma Tricolore is fighting the April election as a member of the Casa delle Libertà.

Pino Rauti's Movimento Idea Sociale is not fighting the April election as a member of the Casa delle Libertà - but hopes to negotiate a stand-down agreement in a few seats.

"I shall always thank the United States for saving my country from Fascism and Nazism"

If nothing's right, what's wrong?

David Mills is a liar. At least, he is if he's telling the truth.

David Mills, under police interrogation, July 2004:

Silvio Berlusconi had decided to give me a sum of money in recognition of the way I had managed to protect him in the course of the judicial investigation

Mills volunteered this explanation when asked to explain the following letter, which he'd sent to his accountant in February 2004 (emphases added):

The brief relevant facts are these.

In 1996 I ended up with a dividend from Mr B's companies of around £1.5m after all the tax and fees had been paid. This was all done on a personal basis: I took the risk, and kept my partners right out of it. Wisely or otherwise, I informed my partners what I had done and, since it was a substantial windfall, offered to pay them (I think) around £50,000 or £100,000 each as what I though was a pretty generous gesture. Which shows you how you can be, as they insisted the transaction should be treated as a partnership profit. To avoid litigation (we had just merged with Withers) I agreed to put the money on deposit in my bank until they were satisfied that there would be no third part claim. By 2000 it was clear there would be no claim (I knew that all along) and the money was taken off deposit and paid out; I kept just under £500,000 out of what was then getting on for £2m.

So all that risk and cost for not very much. The greatest cost was leaving Withers. I was not asked to leave it, but felt so uncomfortable there, not least because my Mackenzie Mills partners had taken most of the benefit for none of the risk, that I really couldn't stay. I spent 1998, 1999 and 2000 as a sole practitioner, and it was evident that the trials were going on, there would be lawyers to pay and there was always the risk of being charged with something - which is actually about to happen now as a result of the latest investigation, which you know about.

I kept in close touch with the B people, and they knew my circumstances. They knew, in particular, how my partners had taken most of the dividend; they also knew quite how much the way in which I had been able to give my evidence (I told no lies, but I turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly) had kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble that I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew.

At around the end of 1999, I was told I would receive money, which I could treat as a long term loan or a gift. $600,000 was put in a hedge fund and I was told it would be there if I needed it. (It was put in the fund because the person connected to the B organisations was someone I had discussed this fund with on many occasions, and it was a round about way of making the money available.) For obvious reasons of their own (I was at that stage still a prosecution witness, but my evidence had been given) it needed to be done discreetly. And this was a roundabout way.

At the end of 2000 I wanted to invest in another fund, and my bank made a loan of the amount, secured on my house etc., of around 650,000 euros. I paid it off by liquidating the $600,000. I attach a copy of the dollar account. I regarded the payment as a gift. What else could it be? I wasn't employed, I wasn't acting for them, I wasn't doing anything for them, I had already given my evidence, but there was certainly the risk of future legal costs (as there have been) and a great deal of anxiety (as there certainly have been).

So Mills told his accountant that 'the B organisation' had put a large sum of money his way; when the Italian authorities asked him to clarify this, he explained that Silvio Berlusconi had given him a bung in recognition of service rendered. This all seems eminently consistent with the facts of the case, not least Mills' long association with the 'B organisation' in question. But Mills now says that the February 2004 letter set out a hypothetical scenario (which he presumably intended his accountant to take as factual) and that the July 2004 statement was extracted under pressure. (His Italian lawyer, wary of annoying the investigating magistrates unnecessarily, now denies that Mills actually said this. But denial is very much the order of the day in this case. Diego Attanasio, who Mills now claims gave him the money in question, denies it; Berlusconi himself has denied ever meeting Mills and spoken darkly of someone "tak[ing] advantage of my name to protect himself from the tax authorities in his own country".)

In any case, the best-case scenario for Mills and Jowell - the scenario that Mills is actually proposing - is that Mills lied to his own accountant, then lied to Italian magistrates who were investigating a serious financial crime. This is extraordinary. You've got to wonder, if the Berlusconi story was a lie, what on earth was Mills hiding?

The case has a couple of other interesting angles. One was pointed out yesterday by the estimable Craig Murray:

Tessa Jowell tells us she did nothing wrong. She merely signed documents to remortgage her home. She strongly asserted today that this was “a very normal thing to do, and certainly not illegal.”

It is indeed not unusual to remortgage, though it was unusual that she remortgaged with an offshore bank. It is also unusual to remortgage for as much as £400,000. But it is very unusual indeed to remortgage for £400,000, then pay off the full loan, within a month, with spare cash.

What sort of people do such a thing? Well, money launderers. If you have £400,000 of cash not easily explained, you now have remortgage papers available to show where you got it.

Mills, as we've seen, has another explanation for this money-shuffling operation - he needed some money in a hurry (I wanted to invest in another fund, presumably one which wouldn't accept new investors for much longer) and the loan provided it. This makes a certain amount of sense, although it's not clear why he couldn't have drawn on the hedge fund directly ($600,000 was put in a hedge fund and I was told it would be there if I needed it). But you do wonder how often this kind of contingency could be expected to arise. If you're David Mills, apparently, quite often. Tessa Jowell and David Mills bought their house in 1979. There was no mortgage at this stage - they bought the house outright, then borrowed money on it. Repeatedly. They took out a mortgage in 1987 and paid it off in 1996. In 2000 they took out the mortgage which is now under scrutiny, which they paid off (to the tune of £400,000) two months later. In 2002 they took out yet another mortgage, which is still outstanding. Mills has also raised a series of mortgages (in 1986, 2000 and 2002) on the couple's second home, which he bought outright in 1984. This is speculation at best - hocking your property, investing the loan and hoping to come out ahead when it's time to pay it back. The 2000 mortgage doesn't even have this justification; it's hard to see any rationale for it other than moving money from account A to account B. If Tessa Jowell thinks this is a very normal thing to do, her standards of normality aren't those I'd expect of a Labour MP.

Then there's the Ministerial Code of Conduct. As Craig notes, the question of whether Jowell's conduct complies with the Code isn't all that complex:

the Code precludes acceptance of gifts. That is what Mills claims this money was. As this "Gift" (note the use of a capital 'G') went to pay off a mortgage which was 50% in Jowell's name and which she had signed, she also accepted it.

To be precise, the Code (which you can download from here, if you really want to) says:

It is a well established and recognised rule that no Minister or public servant should accept gifts, hospitality or services from anyone which would, or might appear to, place him or her under an obligation. The same principle applies if gifts etc are offered to a member of their family.

The operative words here are would, or might appear to.

But there's yet another wrinkle, which Brian has pointed out. Gus O'Donnell, who is currently investigating the case against Jowell, has no authority to do so under the Ministerial Code:

The Code is not a rulebook, and it is not the role of the Secretary of the Cabinet or other officials to enforce it or to investigate Ministers.

As it stands, the Code is there primarily to be complied with voluntarily. If this fails, the only recourse is to the Prime Minister himself.

Ministers only remain in office for so long as they retain the confidence of the Prime Minister. He is the ultimate judge of the standards of behaviour expected of a Minister and the appropriate consequences of a breach of those standards.

The ethical buck stops not with O'Donnell but with Blair, in other words - Blair, whose personal relations with Berlusconi are good enough for them to have had a holiday together.

If Mills' past relations with Berlusconi kicked this story off, it may be Blair's which finish it. We should be clear at this point just how political the underlying story is - or rather, how political it isn't. It's true, but not entirely relevant, that there's an election coming up in Italy; the investigations into Berlusconi's business practices have been going on since before Berlusconi returned to power in 2001. It's true that the independence of Italian investigating magistrates allows them - or rather, obliges them - to investigate any possible criminal offence which comes to their notice: it is this feature of the Italian judicial system which led to Tangentopoli, the landslide of corruption cases which swept away Italy's old political class. And it's true that, while magistrates are barred from any party affiliation, in practice many are committed opponents of Berlusconi and believe that bringing him down will be a service to the country. What's not true - and in many cases grossly defamatory - is that the investigations are a political operation, a strategy to advance Communist interests by judicial means. (Grotesquely, Berlusconi has even characterised Tangentopoli in these terms.) Italian politics is even more complicated than it looks (and this post is long enough already), but I will say that, while Berlusconi is certainly on the Right, the split between those who want justice done at whatever cost and those who want to let sleeping dogs lie is not in any sense a Left/Right split. Dave (in the excellent post which gave me most of these links) has it about right:

"Italy’s independent magistrates have targeted Mr. Berlusconi for many years, in what he regards as a politically motivated vendetta." My emphases. That’s good writing.

This has the potential to be a highly explosive story, with implications for Blair's position as well as Jowell's - which almost certainly means that all concerned will handle it like an unexploded bomb, and nothing at all will happen. There was a straw in the wind two Decembers ago:

prosecutors made a tentative request to extradite Mr Mills in December 2004. But the Home Office responded by going to the Ministry of Justice in Rome - via the Italian embassy in London - rather than dealing with the prosecuting authorities. It is claimed that that meant they involved the government of Mr Berlusconi, which had a direct interest in the case.

The Home Office denied any wrongdoing. In a statement it said: "In late 2004, the Serious Fraud Office received a request from the Milan Prosecutor for legal advice about the circumstances in which David Mills could be extradited under UK law, based upon possible charges against him. The request was passed to the Crown Prosecution Service, who took legal advice which was passed by the Home Office to the Italian Embassy in May 2005, since extradition requests are normally handled on diplomatic channels. During this process, which was handled at Home Office official level in the routine way, there was no contact between the Home Office and Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) at any level, or indeed with David Mills."

Whether Jowell was told is hardly the point. The SFO by this stage knew the name of David Mackenzie Mills well; specifically, they knew he had for several years been in deep with a dubious Italian businessman called Silvio Berlusconi. And yet the Home Office, fielding a question about Mills sent to the SFO from the independent Milan Prosecutor, sent the answer to the Italian government. If this wasn't a deliberate tip-off it was quite staggeringly incompetent.

But perhaps incompetence was all that it was. And perhaps David Mills is telling the truth when he says he's a liar. We may know soon.

earlier this month the Home Office authorised the obtaining of two warrants by the police to search David Mills' property on behalf of the Milan Prosecutor, in accordance with UK law and the UK's international obligations. Neither David Mills nor Tessa Jowell nor DCMS were informed of this before the warrants were executed. Once the warrants had been executed, senior Home Office officials informed the DCMS of the factual position in relation to the warrant.

Tobias Jones:

Mr Berlusconi's lawyer, Mr Ghedini, was asked this week whether he thought that Mr Mills was foolish or dishonest. "Neither one nor the other," he replied. "I would simply define him as a person who was very frightened."

Not weak enough

Will Davies is cross with David Cameron:

he seems to have invented his own more radical way of by-passing politics. His mantra is to introduce 'a new approach'. Where Blair can claim the ghost of Keir Hardie and the strategic acumen of McKinseys, Cameron has adopted a view from nowhere at all. All he wants is a 'new approach', which could potentially exclude everything we've ever thought was politics, from policies, to media interviews, to empirical consensus on social problems. Asked whether his commitment to the environment might lead him towards policies to cut air travel, Cameron answered that this would not be the right 'approach' to the problem. Not only does this keep his policies hidden, it obscures a priori questions as to what the hell he's doing in public life. Is he even a politician at all?

I think this is perceptive, but also risks misunderstanding and underestimating Cameron's approach. Firstly and most fundamentally, Cameron's a Conservative - meaning that he'll do, say or think whatever it takes to get the Conservative Party into power. The last few Conservative leaders have assumed that they needed to replace ideologically-driven Thatcherism either with more of the same or with a more traditional version of ideological Conservatism (cf. Howard's flirtation with Powellism). Cameron seems to have realised that there's a deeper vein of Conservatism that's not ideologically-driven at all.

Secondly and relatedly, Cameron's oriented towards politics as culture and philosophy rather than project - which is to say, he's oriented towards Labour's weak spot. Even a baggy, miscellaneous, sacred-cow-free Conservatism is likely to have more internal coherence than New Labour. New Labour's coherence is all in the project - an intransigently future-oriented project which draws much of its power from its continual attacks on the party's own culture and philosophy. The justification for this approach was that it would take the party on a forced march into the terrain of middle-Englander common sense. But there are two ironies here. One is that this terrain is, if anything, even more alien to New Labour's managerialists than the party's own despised culture; witness Mandelson's ghastly attempts to evoke grassroots patriotism at the 1997 election, flag, bulldog and all. There was always a danger that the party wouldn't know the promised land when they saw it, in other words. The second irony is that the forced march was never going to stop there in any case: to change metaphors, once you've started throwing the floorboards into the furnace it's hard to stop the train. In other words, the very coherence of New Labour as a project is rapidly taking the party into areas where it loses any possible coherence as a culture - and loses touch with that very 'middle England' for whose sake the whole exercise was supposedly undertaken. Cameron's refusal to champion any kind of unifying project is a timely and appropriate response. If I were a Labour MP in a pre-1997 Tory seat - and plenty of them are - I'd find Cameron's nebulous 'approach' extremely worrying.

Thirdly, we are not in a pre-election period (although sometimes it's easy to forget). Cameron's main priority now is to oppose effectively - and, given the problems the New Labour project is already creating for the Labour Party, the most effective way he can oppose Labour is by supporting Blair, just as Baldwin supported MacDonald (or the rope the hanged man).

Cameron's an idiot - and a Tory idiot, at that - but I think for the Conservatives his 'approach' makes a lot of sense. By rallying apolitical Tories and ex-Tories, by exploiting the contradictions of the New Labour project and by driving a wedge between Blair and his party, Cameron's got the chance to do New Labour a great deal of damage in the next couple of years. As I said earlier, at this stage in the game that's all they deserve.