Actually Existing

Fifty people a day

2007-04-27T11:44:00.000+01:00

That's how many visitors this blog is still getting, a month after it shut down. There hasn't been a single new post since March the 28th. I've even closed down comments.

Please, everyone, go away. Go to The Gaping Silence, which is where I blog now. Read The Gaping Silence. Check back regularly. Subscribe to The Gaping Silence's RSS feed.

There is nothing here. The new stuff is somewhere else.

So please, go away.

OK?

The best one of the year

2007-03-28T22:56:00.000+01:00

Two announcements. Firstly, this is the last post here; there are no posts newer than 28th March 2007 on this blog and there won't be any in future. I've merged AE with my work weblog Cloud Street and moved to Wordpress; the result is The Gaping Silence.

Secondly, here's a book:

I'm in it. Jonny's in it. Harry's in it. Clare's in it. Justin's in it. (My son started quoting Chicken Yoghurt to me the other day, which isn't a sentence I ever thought I'd write.) Lots of people I've never even heard of are in it. It's good.

More specifically, it's funny. I'm not going to tell you it's all funny, because that wouldn't be very convincing. I mean, when you've got something like 101 different contributors with subtly different styles of humour and ideas of what's funny, the result of their intersection with any one reader's idea of the funny is going to be a pretty wide range of funniness (or, as we academics say, humorosivity). So for me to tell you it was all equally funny would be prima facie unconvincing. But to maintain the less extreme position that it was all merely funny would actually risk a similar error, as this would imply that my personal range of humorosivity values for the collection uniformly exceeded zero. Which would be nice, but it's rather a lot to hope for - I mean, 101 is a lot of discrete humorosivity values.

Where was I? That's right, it's not all funny. But some, nay most of it is, and some of it's very funny indeed.

“How can Amundsen be a Close as well as Scott?” I rage. “And it’s not even as though Amundsen Close is further south than Scott Close – that would have at least made some sense.”

My girlfriend phones our friends to explain that we are back by the shops and we may be some time.

Self-harmers
Who could fail to be cheered out of their depression by the oh-so-cute antics of a kitten? And if you're not, at last you'll have a much better reason for having arms covered in scratches.

Student: Do you have that blue book my tutor recommended?
Bad librarian: Yes, we do. It’s kept with all the other blue books in the blue room, between the green and purple rooms. Once you get to the room, you’ll find them arranged in order by how much the tutors like them, with books written by members of staff at the very beginning.

If none of that made you laugh, all I can say that your idea of the funny (and your consequent derived range of humorosivity values) differs from mine. But in that case something else in here almost certainly will make you laugh, even if it didn't have that effect on me. You see how this works?

It's available for a very reasonable price from Lulu.com, who will print a copy for you personally on receipt of your order, which is rather clever. A large proportion of the said price goes to Comic Relief, which is good. And I'm in it, which is nice. And Mike Atkinson of Troubled Diva put the whole thing together in a week flat, which is frankly amazing. Yay Mike, as I believe the young folk say.

Go on, buy one. Buy two, why don't you. Ideal Easter gift.

PS Quite a lot of it really is quite funny.

PPS I'm in it.

PPPS Now go to The Gaping Silence. Go on, get on with you. Shoo!

And we moved to Paraguay

2007-03-16T10:10:00.000Z

Will is keen to dispel some myths about think tanks:

Imagine you're throwing a party, and invitations have to be equally split into three factions. Firstly you must invite your grandparents, great uncles and great aunts. Secondly, you must invite your colleagues. And thirdly you must invite the kids who hang around the local park. When they arrive, they inevitably split into their respective groups, and congregate in separate areas of the room. As the host, it's up to you to come up with topics of conversation on which all three groups will engage enthusiastically and frame that conversation in language that all three groups can understand. If any group opts out or feels alienated by the conversation that you introduce, you have failed in your hostly duties. Within those limits, you have complete freedom to take the conversation where you like.

Now substitute 'government, business and media' for 'grandparents, colleagues and kids' ... and you have a sense of how much independence a think tank has in what it says.

There's a bunch of assumptions here which could do with unpacking - who is 'media'? who is 'business'? come to that, who's 'government'? Do the answers change over time, and do think tankers make any contribution to the way they change?

But what struck me was something about the metaphor itself. Firstly you must invite your grandparents, great uncles and great aunts. What this tells me is that British thinktanks are populated by young people. The last time I could have invited a grandparent anywhere, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

I used to work in IT - programming was my first job after college (Thatcher was in power then, too). Over a period of years I learned that young coders tend to be very bright, very keen, very confident and very prone to screw up (myself, in retrospect, very much included). They could really crank out the lines of code, but you needed to watch them. You wouldn't let them do their own program design without severe misgivings, and you certainly wouldn't let them go out and talk to the business.

This has nothing to do with intelligence or ability to learn - I had plenty of the former when I was a junior programmer, and probably more of the latter than I have now. (I seem to remember I had something called 'energy', too. Wonder what that's like?) What I didn't have was experience - including the experience of screwing up horribly. Consequently I didn't have a lot of the other qualities that go under the heading of 'maturity' - caution, circumspection, the sense that things are probably more complicated than you realise and that other people probably know more than you understand.

Greater than all of these is the sense that it's all been done. Back on comp.software.year-2000 (those were the days eh?) one of the regulars summed up the "old coder" mindset as

10 We tried it
20 It didn't work
30 GOTO 10

Which makes the encounter with old coders frustrating as hell for new-broom managers and business consultants.

Admittedly, this isn't a good guide to (in)action all the time - you'd end up with the character in La Peste who's described as a saint because he sits in bed all day, and hence doesn't do anyone any harm. But I can't help thinking that the old coders are likely to be right more often than not.

So, think tanks are meeting-places for government, business and the media, and places where they go to hear new and interesting ideas. And think tanks are staffed by young coders. I guess that explains a lot.

Red, gold and green

2007-02-20T23:22:00.001Z

David Cameron: active hypocrite or passive hypocrite? Or both?

Jim has an excellent post up discussing Tory Boy's not-quite-admission to a dope-smoking past. Clearly Cameron's a hypocrite, in the sense that he's conformed to other people's standards while covering up his past transgressions. But, Jim argues, that only accounts for passive hypocrisy; what's really objectionable about Cameron is that he's an active hypocrite, who advocates standards for other people which he couldn't meet himself.

This is a useful distinction: passive and active hypocrites are very different creatures. A passive hypocrite is simply someone who fails, sometimes, to live up to the standards he or she publicly advocates. If we share those standards we may find fault, but we're more likely to sympathise, particularly given that we're human ourselves. If we don't share those standards, the worst we're likely to feel is indifferent. Indeed, passive hypocrisy can be a positively good thing if it helps to erode bad and destructive standards. You can even think of it as a tactical move, temporary reticence: I never thought I'd vote for a dope-smoker, but seeing as it's that nice Mr Cameron...

Active hypocrisy, on the other hand, can only be bad news. I don't want someone who's failing to live up to standards I share to police those standards - they're not likely to do the job very well, for one thing. Again, perhaps the reason they're not living up to those standards is that the standards need revising - they may be standards which humans can't live up to. Passive hypocrisy might not make it any easier to make that discovery, but active hypocrisy - denouncing other people's shortfalls while concealing your own - actually makes it harder. In the case of standards I don't share, active hypocrisy is even worse - if you can't even live up to them yourself, why impose them on other people?

I'd got this far in my thinking about Cameron - which was broadly in alignment with Jim's - when a colleague asked an unexpected question: What if he'd been a shoplifter? What if the criminal escapades Cameron had concealed, in passive-hypocrite mode, had involved theft rather than dope smoking? There are two questions here: would we still regard him as an active hypocrite for denouncing teenage shoplifters? And, relatedly, would anybody much care?

I think the answer to both questions lies in an unexamined assumption about drug use, which is shared by many people on both sides of the debate. It was summed up by one of the more crazed letters printed in Metro, on one of the two or three days when the story was news. I forget the details, but the message was that Cameron could never be trusted on anything ever again - and not because he'd covered his past up, but because he'd been a "druggie".

Drugs are different. Thieving is something you do; a druggie is something you are. Or rather, it's something you become when you start using drugs - and never cease to be thereafter. Once your mind's been warped by drugs you can never go back; you'll always be confused, unreliable, self-indulgent, half-crazed and essentially a bad person.

This is presumably why it was headline news. What's interesting is just how few people would actually put their name to this kind of attitude: John Reid certainly wouldn't, and all the vox pops I saw were equally relaxed about the whole thing. The news media seemed more upset about the whole thing than anyone else in the country (and speaking of hypocrisy...). Presumably the calculation was that the story still had the potential to be scandalous, even though most people didn't give a damn, because those people who do care about it care a great deal. It's a clear case of valuing beliefs, not because of their content, because they're strongly held - and it shows what a bad idea that is.

(Incidentally, I think the outrage expressed by some advocates of illegal pharmaceuticals springs from a very similar outlook to that of our 'druggie' friend, albeit with a more positive version. You can steal and then not be a thief, you can start fights on a Friday night and then not be a brawler, but you can't use drugs and then not be a user: you can never go back. For drug criminalisers and advocates alike, Cameron isn't denouncing an activity he once indulged in and now wishes he hadn't: he's denouncing a permanent fact about himself.)

So, passive hypocrisy's not such a bad thing - it's pretty much part of being human. The active hypocrisy charge is tougher, but Cameron could dodge it by making it clear that he doesn't regard drug use as something that changes the user forever. It was illegal, he tried it, bad idea, it should stay illegal, end of story. (Yes, it would probably be better all round if he came out for legalisation - it would certainly be more interesting - but I don't think even Cameron is going to push the Tories that far.) This would be a particularly good strategy in view of the allegations of cocaine use which have stuck to Cameron since his PR days. Admitting to teenage cannabis use would make it all the easier to brazenly deny adult cocaine use. This might get Cameron into the realms of flat-out lying rather than mere hypocrisy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - as the relative popularity of Blair and Brown makes clear, the public prefers a liar to a hypocrite. (This comparison courtesy of David Runciman.)

So why hasn't he done this? Why does he persist in dodging the question and waiting for the issue to blow over? (Oh, it has. I've been a long time writing this post...) The answer, I think, lies in another odd feature of the drug laws, or the mentality underlying them. Since the days when constables of the Watch kept a look out for breaches of the King's peace, there has always been something chancy about public, social crimes: to be prosecuted depends on a three-way conjunction of offender, victim and guardian of the law. If you get nabbed while you've got your hand in the till, fair enough, but if not... well, the police can't be everywhere. (This is one of the reasons why the level of crime reported in victim surveys is so much higher than the level recorded in police figures.) And I think our way of thinking about crimes like this incorporates this assumption. We might want the police to be more effective in preventing burglary, but nobody thinks they're ever going to prevent it entirely. (The police themselves certainly don't - they're the first to recommend target-hardening and victim-centred crime prevention.) There's an acceptable level of burglary, theft, taking and driving away - or at least a level which we accept is never going to go away.

Drugs are different. To say that a substance is controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act is to say that the government wants it not to be used at all: the underlying mentality is one of prohibition. Some theft will always go on, and some will always go unpunished; even for the hardest law-and-order zealot there's a margin of resigned tolerance there. In the minds of drugs prohibitionists, there is no margin of tolerance for drug use: ideally the law would ensure that no drug use went on, and failing that it would ensure that no drug use went unpunished.

This is the real problem for Cameron. It's not that he's a druggie at heart and can't be trusted - or that he once turned on and shouldn't now denounce his brothers in the herb. (As I've said, I think these attitudes are essentially mirror images of each other, and I don't really like either of them.) The problem is that every drugs law is a zero-tolerance drugs law. For a politician, to admit to teenage shoplifting is to say I did it and I shouldn't have, but to admit to teenage dope-smoking is to say I got away with it and I shouldn't have. Which would leave Cameron with only two options. One would be public penitence - and I'm sure the Home Office could find a course for him, something to address drug-related offending behaviour. The other would be to come out and say that, yes, he got away with it and, damn it, people like him actually should get away with it. I suspect that if Cameron said that he'd be neither lying nor hypocritical.

Eat y'self fitter

2007-02-12T21:41:00.000Z

Inconsequentially: it occurred to me the other day that I'm firmly convinced that some kinds of food and drink are good for you. In most cases this belief doesn't appear to have any rational basis - although in some cases it's probably based on experience, which is almost as good. Anyone else have a similar list at the back of their mind, or is it just me?

Healthy Food

Ginger
Anything with ginger is good for you. Fact. A friend once advocated ginger tea to me as a cold remedy so persuasively that I was genuinely disappointed still to have the cold when I finished the pot. (It did do me good, obviously, just not quite that much good.) Chopped ginger in cooking is good, or sliced ginger. Crystallised ginger, even (lots of sugar is generally bad for you, but the ginger makes up for it). I'll reluctantly concede that chocolate ginger probably isn't very good for you. (Better than chocolate without ginger, mind.) Gingerbread. Ginger cake. Lebkuchen (although not the ones with jam in). It's all good.

Lemon
Anything with lemon is good for you, apart from sweet things. Apart apart from hot lemon with honey. Bizarrely, hot lemon with honey and whiskey is even healthier.

Chinese soups
Those clear broth ones. They're good for you. It's true. Not so much the ones with all the egg in or those crabstick ones. Hot and sour I'm not sure about, either. But the clear ones, they're great. Same goes for any of those Chinese main courses which are basically a slightly drier version of one of those soups, with noodles or boiled rice (not fried, sadly).

Goat's cheese
Not just goat, though. Blue Stilton, that's got to be good for you. And white's even better, if you can get it without the fruit salad stuck in it. Goes off in no time, mind you. So that's white Stilton before it goes off. Careful now.

Fruit and stuff
Yeah, I suppose.

Healthy Drink

Anything fizzy
Well, OK, not anything. But mineral water, certainly, and basically anything non-alcoholic. And a nice gin and tonic, that's got to be good for you.

Beer with yeast in the bottom
Bound to be healthy, isn't it? (As long as you drink the yeast. Whether you do this by swirling it up and drinking it out of the bottle or swirling it up and pouring it into the glass depends entirely on the type of beer. But you knew that.)

Beer
Not all beer, obviously. Not stout, and only some porters. And not keg beer, obviously. A nice well-kept bitter, that's what you want. Mild's even better.

So there you have it. Of course, you wouldn't want to let your life be governed by a list like this. Variety is important; custard, Guinness and curry are fine in moderation. But if you really want to pig out, go for Stilton, Hefe Weizen and a nice Chinese.

And ginger. Anything with ginger is good for you.

Music of the future

2007-02-02T22:10:00.001Z

About twenty years ago there was a Radio 4 sketch show called Son of Cliché, scripted by the not-yet-celebrated Rob Grant and Dave Naylor. Nick Wilton was one of the regulars (what's he doing these days, I wondered when I remembered this; the answer's "panto, mainly"). The music was by Peter Brewis, including one of the funniest moments in musical comedy I've ever heard: the credits sung in the style of Bob Dylan, to the tune of "Knockin' on Heaven's door", with each verse ending

"And the music was by - Peter Brewis,

Peter Brewis, Peter Brewis,

Peter Brewis, Peter Brewis..."

Well, I liked it.

There's an interview with Peter Brewis in today's Indie. It's not the same one - this one's a member of Field Music - but I do wonder if he's any relation. Now, Field Music, although they're quite young lads - this Peter Brewis would have been in nappies when the other one was doing his Dylan impression - make angular, jerkily melodic, thoughtful music, heavy on the keyboards and woodwinds. They're so 1970s they ought to be on Caroline, in other words. They're not alone, either. The Feeling are Pilot on a good day (or Supertramp on a bad one), and the Klaxons...

The Klaxons are a bit more complicated (not better, but more complicated). The Klaxons (or is it just Klaxons? I neither know nor care, actually) are 'new rave', apparently. Judging from the track "Atlantis to Interzone" (on the B-side of their single "Golden Skans"), 'new rave' essentially means 'retro'; the track starts with whooping sirens and (I kid you not) a woman singing the words "Mu mu". Then the bass kicks in. A couple of minutes later it kicks out again and the sound gets stroppy and punky, with a kind of 1979 art-school cockney vibe; my son pricked up his ears at this point and asked if it was Adam and the Ants. (He's a fan of Adam and the Ants.) "Make it new" clearly isn't an injunction that's troubled the Klaxons greatly. "Golden Skans" itself takes me back to a period I'd completely forgotten: post-glam, pre-punk pop-rock. Think Graham Bonnet-era Rainbow, but without the metal cliches or the long hair, and with aspirations to make both three-minute singles and deeply meaningful albums. Think Argent earlier in the 1970s, or City Boy later on, or John Miles at a pinch. Punk cut a swathe through prog rock, but the pop-rock scene it destroyed. But it's back in the hands of [the] Klaxons. I think they can keep it.

The Earlies, now - there's a fine band. I'm listening to their new album The Enemy Chorus at the moment, and even though it's only the first listen I can thoroughly recommend it. Most of the tracks have that "I'm going to like this later" itch to them, and a couple are instant synapse-flooding beauties. (Like a good strong cafe con leche, when it's cold outside. With two sugars. Like that.)

But even their music has its 1970s and late-60s echoes. It's stacked with them, to be honest - I've been reminded of Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, Faust, Neu! and the Beatles, and several times of Family (someone in that band knows Music in a Doll's House and Family Entertainment).

I'm not complaining about the Enemy Chorus - it's a wonderful album. But still... it'd be nice to hear something that would pin my ears back the way punk did - and, for me personally, the way the Desperate Bicycles and Scritti Politti did. The Fugees did it; cLOUDDEAD did it (cLOUDDEAD were very punk). Since then, not so much.

I wonder what they'll find to play at Noughties Nights.

Better in the long run

2007-01-02T22:25:00.000Z

Pessimistic Clive, 28th December:

When I find myself largely agreeing with UKIP leader Nigel Farage over the two new EU member states, despite disagreeing with the very basis of his party and being largely pro-EU, how much longer can the Union continue to keep its loose supporters on board with all this prevarication, shoddy decision-making and incompetence? There’s only so long you can hold on to hope in the face of so much mounting evidence of ever-worsening illness, after all - and no matter how much you may love your dear dog, at some point the realisation has to dawn that it’s so poorly, so incapable of looking after itself, and so unlikely to recover that the kindest thing is simply to have the poor mite put down and go get yourself a new one.

Optimistic Clive, New Year's Day:

In the short term, the lack of progress on the constitution, the lack of progress on deregulation, the ever-increasing piles of pointless directives, mountains of wasted produce, and continued disasters caused by the Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries Policies - all of these are problems, some more major than others.But all of these problems are transient in the grand scheme of things. Even if they continue throughout my lifetime, if these initial birth-pangs of an organisation that will only reach its half-century this year are the worst that the EU can produce - after all the centuries of warfare that Europe has suffered to date - then I think we can surive them, if this is what it takes for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world.

It's not the volte-face that bothers me so much the particular face Clive seems to have volted into. When I was about fourteen I converted to Communism; it came a bit after my flirtations with Buddhism and Christianity, but lasted a lot longer. I'd read a bit about Cuba, and the news from China was all very inspiring at the time, but what really did it was an anecdote our History teacher told in class (yes, it's a story within a story - David Mitchell look out). Our teacher said that he'd once met the Russian Ambassador, and asked him whether he really believed that the socialist states were progressing towards communism. Apparently the Ambassador said that he realised that he wouldn't live to see communism, and he doubted that his young children would - but maybe, just maybe, if everyone kept the faith and worked hard, maybe his grandchildren would live in a communist society. And that thought alone was enough to make him a believer.

To his great credit, our teacher told us that he personally couldn't believe anything like that, but that he did believe that people could make things a bit better in their own lifetimes, and that was why he considered himself a socialist. Me, I was a sucker for the grand plans and the glorious hopes and the torch of faith handed down through the generations, and I fell for it. It sounds rather as if Clive has too. I've arrived at roughly the point my History teacher was at in the seventies - I don't believe social projects have some sort of Hegelian essence which enables them to develop coherently over more than one human lifetime. I certainly don't believe in birth-pangs that last half a century. I wonder where the Ambassador's children are now.

To illustrate the kind of mentality I'm thinking about, particularly for anyone who's puzzled about some of the terminology I used up there (whether the socialist states were progressing towards communism and so forth) here's a poem, Roque Dalton's "On headaches". (Dalton was a Salvadorean guerrillero, tragically shot by his own side in 1975; he was 39.)

It's a great thing to be a Communist,
although it causes many headaches.

And a Communist headache
is a historical phenomenon, which is to say
that it can't be treated by painkillers
but only by the realisation of the earthly paradise.
That's just how it is.

Under capitalism our heads hurt us
and they take our heads off.
In the struggle for the Revolution our heads are bombs with delay fuses.
During the period of socialist construction we plan out our headaches,
which doesn't make them go away - quite the reverse.

Communism will be, among other things,
an aspirin as big as the sun.

It's a beautiful dream - but I don't trust politicians with dreams.

Update 3/1/06: Clive strikes back, and explains how he can be both cynical and idealistic about the European project. Long, but good stuff.

No secrets left to conceal

2006-12-21T13:16:00.000Z

Daily Mail, 5th June 2004:

Dr Phil Edwards is the national press officer of the BNP.
...
He may have an academic title, but Dr Edwards makes his living by letting off fireworks. When contacted via the mobile phone number given for his fireworks display company he is, unusually for a party political press officer, baffled and then furious that a journalist can call him, knows where he lives and has dared to pay a visit.
...
And, by the way, Dr Phil Edwards isn't his real name. It is Stuart Russell. When asked, Dr Edwards/Russell tetchily says he uses a pseudonym for 'personal reasons' and it's none of my business why. He is not unusual among his cohorts. Several have used names other than their own for 'personal reasons'.

Stormfront 'White Nationalist' board, 17th April 2006

boutye: Phil Edwards did a great job, and the interviewer knew it. Someone was on earlier from Searchlight saying that isn't his real name. What's the crack on that?

.:.BNP.:.: His real name is Stuart Russell, he is the father of Julie Russel
[attaches picture of Julie Russell with Jean-Marie Le Pen]

Sweetlips: That's a bit strange. Why doesn't he use his real name for heaven's sake?

BNP'er: Strange? I'll tell you what's strange! The Doc and his missis have suffered so much ****e you couldn't wave a stick at it. He is a personal friend of mine and, like me, he has suffered for the cause of his race. No wonder it was decided to give him a non-de-plume. What I find strange is some stupid bitch trying to imply he has something to hide.

Guardian, 27th April 2006:

Even if it is not your usual thing, there is a video report worth watching on the Sky News website. It concerns Phil Edwards, the far-right BNP's national press officer, and the recording of a telephone conversation he had at the start of last year with a student. When the student started working, Mr Edwards explained, he would be paying taxes to raise black children who would "probably go and mug you".

Daily Telegraph, 27th April 2006:

Dr Raj Chandran, a GP and Mayor of the Borough of Gedling, Nottinghamshire, was not prepared to let the unfounded allegations on the BNP website go unchallenged, said solicitor Matthew Himsworth.
...
Mr Himsworth said that the BNP press officer Dr Stuart Russell - who wrote the article - and website editor Steve Blake "freely and completely" accepted that Dr Chandran was misidentified in the article.

Guardian, 21st December 2006, "Exclusive: inside the secret and sinister world of the BNP"

The techniques of secrecy and deception employed by the British National party in its attempt to conceal its activities and intentions from the public can be disclosed today. Activists are being encouraged to adopt false names when engaged on BNP business, to reduce the chance of their being identified as party members in their other dealings with the public.
...
The techniques, adopted as part of the campaign by Nick Griffin to clean up his party's image, were discovered after a Guardian reporter who had joined the party undercover was appointed its central London organiser earlier this year.

Nothing like investigative reporting, eh?

Update 12/2/07

Last week "Dr Phil Edwards" made another appearance in the Graun, in an article co-authored by Ian Cobain (he who went underground in the BNP and emerged with the shocking news about activists being encouraged to adopt false names). I complained, as I generally do, but this time I included some of the material I dug up for this post. The result was a phone call from Ian Mayes (the paper's Readers' Editor) who was very concerned; he said he'd advise the news department to refer to Stuart Russell under his real name from now on, and asked me if there was anything else I wanted from them. (I said No, since I don't really feel that I've been defamed by the blighter. There was one occasion a few years back when my mother said she'd heard "Phil Edwards of Manchester" announced on Any Answers and been quite surprised by the views which followed, but I doubt many people were confused.)

So: a result, provisionally (we'll know when the Graun refers to Russell under his own name). I think it was probably the Torygraph quote that swung it. Top tip: if you're going to publish under a pseudonym, don't write stuff that puts you in the dock for libel.

Heart of this nation

2006-12-21T00:06:00.001Z

Who's with me?

We have to wake up. These forces of extremism based on a warped and wrong-headed misinterpretation of Islam aren't fighting a conventional war but they are fighting one against us - and 'us' is not just the West, still less simply America and its allies. 'Us' is all those who believe in tolerance, respect for others and liberty

We must mobilise our alliance of moderation in this region and outside it to defeat the extremists.

And mobilisation begins at home:

Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other faiths have a perfect right to their own identity and religion, to practice their faith and to conform to their culture. This is what multicultural, multi-faith Britain is about. That is what is legitimately distinctive. But when it comes to our essential values - belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage - then that is where we come together, it is what we hold in common; it is what gives us the right to call ourselves British. At that point no distinctive culture or religion supersedes our duty to be part of an integrated United Kingdom.

...

Obedience to the rule of law, to democratic decision-making about who governs us, to freedom from violence and discrimination are not optional for British citizens. They are what being British is about. Being British carries rights. It also carries duties.

...

We are a nation comfortable with the open world of today ... But we protect this attitude by defending it. Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don't come here.

One more?

The refusal to engage with opponents and the exaltation of intolerance are the ante-chamber to blind violence — and this must not be granted any space.

(OK, I cheated - that last one wasn't Blair. I'll come back to that.)

There's a point to be made here about Blair's record with regard to the rule of law and democratic decision-making, to say nothing of freedom from violence. But there's something going on here that's deeper - and stranger - than simple hypocrisy. Look at that odd formulation from earlier this month, we protect this attitude by defending it: to be open is to reject anyone who threatens openness; to be free is to reject anyone who refuses freedom; to be moderate is to reject anyone who isn't. Or look at that list where democracy and non-violence are prefaced by 'obedience to' - as if democracy were not an achievement but a duty, not something we build but simply something we're ruled by. For Blair, apparently, tolerance really is something to conform to.

You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means. But this isn't simply the eternal Anglo-American invocation of 'freedom' and 'democracy' as brand names. The terms Blair leans on most heavily are adjectives like 'moderate' and 'tolerant', which have the odd property of being positive but not absolute. You could make a case for maximising freedom for all people at all times and in every situation. It would probably turn out to be a lot harder than it looks, but you could do it - and you could do something similar with democracy, justice, equality or love, sweet love, to name but a few. Talk to me about universalising moderation and I'll ask for details of your moderate position on the death penalty or freedom of speech; talk about maximising tolerance and I'll just ask, of whom and of what? Where moderation and tolerance are concerned, it makes a difference. Some beliefs shouldn't be held moderately; some practices shouldn't be tolerated.

As for deciding what those beliefs and practices are, that's what we have politics for. But it's precisely that debate which Blair is trying to foreclose, by rhetorically turning 'moderation' and 'tolerance' into absolute principles, counterposed to their eternal antagonists Extremism and Intolerance. What's missing here is any real sense of what we're supposed to be moderate about and tolerant of - and where that moderation and tolerance is supposed to end. Of course, Blair has his own ideas about this - even in multicultural, multi-faith Britain, freedom from violence and discrimination trumps the right to practice [your] faith and to conform to [your] culture. I don't dissent from this statement; what I object to is the idea that these limits to tolerance and moderation can somehow be justified by the principles of tolerance and moderation themselves - and not, for instance, by a broader statement of liberal humanist principle.

But then, the beauty of relative virtues is precisely that they don't lead out into broader statements - or broader debates. If I could make an appeal to everyone else in the world who believes in freedom, I'd get some replies from people with very different ideas about freedom for whom from what and for what purpose, but I think we'd recognise that we were all interested in starting the same kind of argument. If I could appeal to everyone who called themself 'moderate', the chances are I wouldn't recognise half the people who reply as deserving the name. (You're a moderate Creationist?) When I say 'moderate' I mean 'moderate like me'; and when Blair says 'moderate' he means, more and more explicitly, 'us'. Where 'us' means 'not them' - or, if the cap fits, 'not you'.

Rochenko went over much of this ground some time ago. Excuse the long quote, but this stuff is hard to cut (and I know, I've tried).

The much-spoken of Manicheanism of the US and UK governments and their media supporters plays out now alongside the Israelis’ pursuit of the fantasy of the unbreakable iron wall of security. In both cases, the fantasy of incommunicability covers everything. The hatred of our values by all those who practice Terror, the existential threat posed by Hizballah.

The fantasy is fed by the belief in the incommensurability of values. I cannot communicate with you because your fundamental beliefs are absolutely at odds with mine. There is undoubtedly slippage, in politicians’ and media talk about the current ‘global situation’ between this hard Manicheanism and the kind of disagreements better represented as cases when ‘you’ don’t agree with ‘me’ about lots of things that I consider to be important. When someone mentions, usually in a racially or ethnically inflected context, ‘alien values’, they often slide very easily – and often hysterically – from a case of the latter to a case of the former.

The only thing that can overcome this situation, generally referred to as something like the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ or whatever, is held to be a reaffirmation of ‘common values’, be they ‘core British’ or whatever. Supplementing the fantasy of incommunicability with one of unproblematic communication is I suppose the natural thing to do. But it’s a highly damaging manoeuvre. Obviously we cannot locate any ‘British’ values, except either at the level of popular culture, or at the most generalist and therefore inclusive level, where their supposed Britishness and purported minimal exclusiveness immediately evaporates. But the whole gesture of trying to solve the problem of communication by commanding those you have defined as alien to subscribe to a set of values is again an affirmation of your separation from them, which simply reproduces it. We rule you, and we shall demonstrate it by defining your world for you.

But the problem with this whole fantasised solution to the problem of incommunicability is that communication doesn’t require ‘common values’ in the first place – not, at least, at the concrete level where disagreements take place. The fantasy of incommunicability mirrors the relativist concept of the untranslatability of languages ... this states that in recognising someone as a speaker of language, we already have understood that they operate with criteria of consistency and truth, and that we therefore already have the capacity to understand them. Without a commitment to consistency and truth, there is no possibility of a ‘perspective’ in the first place. What matters in such situation is not ‘common values’, but the capacity to make a creative gesture of translation ... The shift here is in possibility: from a standpoint where the only possibility seems to be separation, sealed-in individuality, the clash of civilisations, to the emergence of another space in which two or more agents are located, not yet as interlocutors perhaps, but now no longer as implacable contraries either. Such movements are always possible.

trying to solve the problem of communication by commanding those you have defined as alien to subscribe to a set of values is again an affirmation of your separation from them, which simply reproduces it. To demand a response you will understand is to demand a response you already understand, and to dismiss any other response as incomprehensible. To demand tolerance and moderation is to demand tolerance and moderation in precisely those areas where you display them, and no others.

Ultimately, as that third quote demonstrates, to demand tolerance is to offer intolerance. The refusal to engage with opponents and the exaltation of intolerance ... must not be granted any space. This wasn't written this year or in this country; the source is a front-page opinion piece in the Italian Communist Party's daily paper l'Unità, the year is 1977 and the subject is the radical youth movement of that year. Which, as I've noted before, didn't end terrifically well. Rather than granting the movement any kind of legitimacy - or even stealing their ideological clothes - the Communists repeatedly denounced 'violence' and 'intolerance' and demanded that the moderate students dissociate themselves from the violent minority. No 'moderate' student movement ever did make itself known, not least because every time a group of students did dissociate themselves from violence the Communist Party raised its demands (if they're really opposed to violence, why don't they co-operate with the police?). In the mean time, the party backed the police clampdown on the movement to the hilt. By the end of 1978 the movement had been policed into submission - but the number of actions by left-wing 'armed struggle' groups had risen dramatically, from 169 in 1976 to 1,110 during 1978.

The refusal to engage with opponents and the exaltation of intolerance are the ante-chamber to blind violence. Well, maybe so, but the thing with ante-chambers is that they have a door on each side - and if you can't get your opponent out of one door you might push them through the other.

The most cruel has passed

2006-12-11T22:50:00.001Z

Newsflash.... General Augusto Pinochet of Chile has just died. His condition is described as 'satisfactory'.

(Thanks, Rob.)

Like Rob (and Ellis), my thoughts turned to Victor Jara, the Chilean Communist singer whose brutal murder would be enough in itself to damn Pinochet, even if Jara hadn't been one of 3,000. Jara's writing is vivid, poetic, charged with love, passion and humour - and it's deeply political. Look at this song, "Abre la ventana":

María

Abre la ventana

Y deja que el sol alumbre

Por todos los rincones de tu casa

María

Mira hacia afuera

Nuestra vida no ha sido hecha

Para rodearla de sombras y tristezas.

María ya ves,

no basta nacer, crecer, amar,

para encontrar la felicidad.

Pasó lo más cruel,

ahora tus ojos se llenan de luz

y tus manos de miel.

María...

Tu risa brota como la mañana brota en el jardín.

María...

Our life wasn't made to be eaten away by shadows and sadness

Let's remember one of the great unpunished crimes of the last century: a moment of revolutionary joy and revolutionary hope, snuffed out by the General. I could almost believe in Hell if I thought he'd rot in it.

Update 12th December

OK, OK, here's a translation.

Open the window

Open the window, Maria
Let the light shine in
To every corner of your house

Look around, Maria
Our life wasn't made to be eaten away
By shadows and sadness

Now, Maria, you can see
There's more to finding happiness
Than just living, growing, loving
The worst time has gone
Now your eyes are filling with light
And your hands with honey

Maria...
Your laughter breaks as the day breaks over the garden

Maria...

Pasó lo mas cruel. Gets to me every time.

I'm no leader...

2006-12-06T22:50:00.000Z

Here's why I like Italian politics. My recent Sharpener post on the state of the two major Italian alliances concluded that a key concern of both Berlusconi and Prodi is securing the loyalty of the former Christian Democrats who are in their coalition and, if possible, luring across some of those on the other side. And:

In this game Prodi is faring conspicuously better than Berlusconi. The leftish ex-Christian Democrats of ‘the Daisy’ are resigned, if not positively committed, to an eventual merger with the ‘Left Democrats’; by contrast, Pierferdinando Casini of ‘Christian Democrats United’ periodically makes pointed comments about having his own electorate to represent and not wanting to be a follower of Berlusconi all his life. The dream of rebuilding the centre also seems more likely to damage Berlusconi than Prodi. One ‘centre’ splinter has already flaked off from Casini’s party: Marco Follini, Casini’s predecessor as party leader, now leads a tiny new party called ‘Middle Italy’. The chances are that Follini’s going nowhere, but his defection hasn’t helped Berlusconi.

That was the 23rd of November. On the 2nd of December Berlusconi presided over a huge rally of his coalition, widely seen - not least by Berlusconi himself - as the first step towards a federation, and ultimately a single party of the Right. The only person on the scene missing was Casini, who unfortunately had a prior engagement - addressing a rally of his own party. The snub hasn't gone unnoticed; Berlusconi's immediate reaction was to demand that Casini 'come back', adding a warning that he'd better make it soon. Casini's response:

I don't accept ultimatums from Berlusconi or anyone else - I was fighting the Left when I was in short trousers ... My job is not to ape Berlusconi or to dance along behind him, but to win over disillusioned Prodi voters

Berlusconi's reply also deserves quoting: "I was just making a joke when I said that we were rearing the fatted calf and that we'd kill it when Casini's party came back. And I said, jokingly, that I hoped they came back soon, because otherwise somebody else would get to eat the fatted calf. It was just a joke - it's not my nature to make threats." Say what you like about Berlusconi, he's got a sense of humour.

There are regional elections in Italy next March; Casini's party has its annual conference the month before. If Casini breaks with Berlusconi and brings his party with him, Berlusconi can forget about coming out ahead at those elections - or any other elections. If Casini breaks with Berlusconi and leaves his party, the party is going to suffer - as is Berlusconi's coalition. The one thing that isn't going to happen is Casini bowing the knee and taking his place alongside Berlusconi's other lieutenants, Bossi of the Northern League and Fini of Alleanza Nazionale. They both need Berlusconi to give them respectability and a way into national politics. Casini seems to have realised that he doesn't.

And this is why I like Italian politics: there's always something going on. The multiform polarisation of the main political parties, together with the inherent fragility of coalition politics, makes for an unusual combination: it's machine politics, only it's played out with real issues. Ironically (if predictably) both Berlusconi and Prodi want to build single parties, putting an end both to the uneasy coalitions which give Italian politicians leverage and to the small parties which enable them to stand for identifiable principles. So enjoy it while it last: in ten years' time Italian politics may have been normalised into Anglo-American torpor.

Don't shade your eyes

2006-11-29T13:28:00.000Z

I'm posting from work, because this is (unusually) a work-related question. And I do mean 'question': I will be expecting comments. Look sharp.

I'm formulating a research proposal, building on the work I've done on what went on in Italy between 1966 and 1980. Basically, you have two successive waves of protest: one which starts in the universities around 1966, spreads to the factories and goes crazy around 1969 before subsiding; and another which starts in the factories around 1972, spreads to working-class neighbourhoods and from there to the universities, and goes crazy around 1977 before subsiding.

I've made them sound reasonably similar, but there was one crucial difference between the two. The first wave died away because Communist-affiliated trade unionists got behind it, with the result that the workers basically got what they were asking for (on the condition that they stayed with the union). By the time of the second wave, by contrast, the Italian Communists were in their ultra-respectable phase: the second wave died away largely because the police forced it off the streets using armoured cars and live ammunition, with the Communists' full support. So in one case the protest achieved a lot and stopped because, for most people, it wasn't needed any more; in the other case it achieved next to nothing and stopped because, for most people, it wasn't worth the aggro any more.

What I'm looking for is examples of the same scenarios happening in Britain. Either:

Protest starts
Protest spreads
It all kicks off in a big way
Demands are more or less met with a little help from Labour
Protest dies away because most people don't see the need any more

Protest starts
Protest spreads
It all kicks off in a big way
Public order clampdown with full support of Labour
Protest dies away because most people don't think it's worth it any more

I don't think I'm going to have an enormous amount of difficulty thinking of examples of the second scenario - the 1993-4 period springs to mind straight away. I could do with some suggestions for examples of the first scenario, though. There have to be some...

Becoming more like Alfie

2006-11-27T22:40:00.000Z

It seems to be compulsory for reviewers of Charlotte Gainsbourg's 5.55 to get in a couple of references to her father. This is unfortunate; the fact that the singer is the daughter of the more famous Serge is certainly an angle, but it's not one that tells us a lot about this album.

So forget Serge; forget Charlotte, even. Consider 5.55 for what it (mostly) is: a set of songs composed and played by Air, with lyrics by Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon. Godin and Dunckel, Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon, together at last. And a French actress supplying the vocals.

No, it's not as good as that sounds. But it's not far short.

Air never were particularly spiky, and over the years they've lost a lot of the rough edges and homed in on a lush, lounge-friendly sound; played after "Cherry blossom girl" or "Alone in Kyoto", Premiers symptomes sounds positively avant-garde. The instrumentation of 5.55 is very lounge; most tracks are dominated by Dunckel's grand piano, backed by a string section. What redeems it and makes it interesting is a couple of oddly spare, pared-down elements amid the general lushness. One is the composition itself, which centres on simple, repeated patterns of five or six notes on the right hand; not so much Air, more Beta Band. The other - and the really unique feature about the album - is Gainsbourg's singing voice, which is quiet, light, delicate and frankly rather weak. But the contrast between that voice and that accompaniment - the sweeping strings and the lush, circling piano figures - is arresting; it makes you listen.

And there's a lot here to listen to. There are three songs which slide back and forth between English and French. The Godin and Dunckel composition "Tel que tu es", beautifully sung - and beautifully enunciated - by Gainsbourg, had me struggling for a translation: "such as you are"? "how you are"? "just the way you are"? The last verse is in English; the line is "Come as you are". Very nice. "Jamais" similarly plays with the different expressive qualities of the two languages. Each verse sets up a rejoinder of "Never", which is delivered in French:

You think you know me, that's your trouble
Never fall in love with a body double
Jamais

The word 'never' is an undramatic trochee - one stressed syllable and one 'uh'; 'jamais' is much more satisfactory, with two good vowels and a stress on both syllables. Lyrically it's fine stuff:

I can act like I'm dumb, I can act like I'm clever
You thought that was me? Well I never!
Jamais

And then there's the title track, a fragile, bruised meditation on insomnia, which gets a lot of its effect from the sound of that pre-dawn time-check in English and French: 'five fifty-five', resigned, hopeless, here I still am; 'cinq heures cinquante-cinq', nagging, insistent, isn't it morning yet?

A cinq heures cinquante-cinq
Nothing will ever change
On the altar of my thought
I sacrifice myself again
And again and again
Five fifty-five

Two songs are co-written by Neil Hannon, who even plays guitar on one of them; I suppose he must have been passing. "Beauty mark", I'm sorry to say, stinks. I've never really understood - or believed - the classic film reviewer's dismissal of porn as 'boring', but I must admit that this track's attempt to conjure a certain kind of atmosphere rapidly gets tedious. "This darling bud... this little death..." Yes, yes. Put it away now.

Hannon's other song, "The songs that we sing", is one of the album's highlights.

I saw a photograph:
A woman in a bath of hundred-dollar bills
If the cold doesn't kill her the money will

I read a magazine
That said, by seventeen your life is at an end
Well, I'm dead and I'm perfectly content

What really lifts this track is the animation in Gainsbourg's voice; it's a perfect match with the lyrics.

And these songs that we sing,
Do they mean anything
To the people we're singing them to?
Tonight they do

The vocal on this track is particularly powerful precisely because of the contrast with the previous track and the next track; it's certainly not that strong in itself. (Charlotte Gainsbourg sings Ethel Merman will not be appearing any time soon.) It's a trick that can be pulled perhaps twice in the space of an album. The second time, and the album's other highlight, is the penultimate track, "Everything I cannot see". By the standards of this album it's a big production number. Gainsbourg pushes her voice to the limit: she peaks with a kind of petulant mew, bizarrely affecting in the emotion it doesn't quite convey. Dunckel's piano-playing similarly lets rip, sprouting flourishes and curlicues of melody in all directions. Even Jarvis's lyrics jettison all traces of irony and pitch for heartfelt without worrying about overshooting:

You're my friend, you're my foe
You're the miles left to go
You are everything I ever wanted
And you are my lover

After that, the album closes with "Morning song", whose lyrics (in English) are by Gainsbourg herself; it's either about falling in love with a ghost or about spending the night with an ex-lover, it doesn't really matter which. All that matters at this point in the album is the still, trembling presence of Dunckel's vibraphone and Gainsbourg's half-whispering voice, gently promising or warning:

Ah, but to get to the morning, first you have to get through the night...

On the subject of Serge Gainsbourg, I'm pleased to report that What I wrote is now hosting the first in a series of extracts from the recollections of Sir Frederick William Jefferson Bodine, a man equally at home in theatreland, Hollywoodland and the Land of Green Ginger. In part 1 of his showbusiness memoir Remembering Judy Garland, Sir Frederick brings to life the Serge Gainsbourg he knew:

the uke had to go, for a start. The songs got a lot slower, and of course their lyrics had to be translated into French, pretty much in their entirety. Even then, they didn't really take to him. Eventually I realised the name was giving us problems: we'd changed everything else, but Alfie was still going out with an English name. So out went 'Khaki' Gainsborough and in came 'Serge' Gainsbourg.

And more, much more than this.

Just like they said they would

2006-11-26T21:23:00.000Z

There's a point in some political arguments where opposition turns into personal antagonism, which itself is liable to turn into smouldering, resentful bitterness - normally I wouldn't think anything of it, but seeing that he's one of those people.... We're lucky in this country - as compared with, say, the USA - that it's very rare for people to view other people's political allegiances as this kind of personal threat or affront. I've had Tory friends, and while I'm quite sure they thought I had idiotic and dangerous ideas, I never had any sense that they thought I was a dangerous idiot. (Is there an inverse correlation between levels of political activism and the tendency to take politics personally?)

There are exceptions, of course. The miners' strike of 1984-5 was one; Ireland has often been another. I remember one day in 1988 when the office where I worked ground to a halt for a morning while we debated the 'Death on the Rock' shootings in Gibraltar - and Michael Stone's attack on the victims' funeral in Milltown cemetery. Everyone had an opinion - and a strong one, which coloured their view of anyone who disagreed. Not that many people did. The view with regard to Gibraltar was that the SAS commando were reacting on the spur of the moment to an imminent threat, and had no choice but to act as they did; I was in a minority of two in dissenting from this. The view with regard to Milltown, on the other hand, was that there were all kinds of murderous headcases on both sides, and Michael Stone might well have been working for the IRA to gain them public sympathy by making them look like victims. I was in a minority of two on this one as well, although I had a different fellow-dissenter this time. Things were a bit tense in that office for the next few days.

But not as tense as they must have been in a lot of other workplaces, a short hop from Holyhead. My other memory of 1988 is the New Statesman column which reprinted a poem in praise of Stone that was circulating in Loyalist areas of Northern Ireland - a broadsheet, really. It consisted mainly of a list of the various Sinn Fein worthies who were at the cemetery, each of them described as panicking, running away, soiling his pants and so forth as the noble Stone took them on. (A completely fanciful description, incidentally - Martin McGuinness for one reacted by heading towards Stone, showing what can only be called courage under fire.) The poem ended by apostrophising Stone:

Your brave deed today
Against Sinn Fein/IRA
Put you top of the heap - BOY YOU'RE GREAT!

Michael Stone was a folk hero in certain circles - a symbol of intransigent opposition to the 'Shinners'. And this despite the fact that this symbol had not only attempted to murder McGuinness and Gerry Adams while they attended a funeral, but succeeded in killing three other mourners.

Eighteen years on, Stone is clearly a troubled man:

“Michael had become obsessed with the idea that the IRA were going to shoot him with the gun they captured from him [at Milltown] before any peace deal was finally concluded. That is why he turned against the Good Friday agreement after initially supporting it. He was totally paranoid and receiving treatment.”
...
“He saw a deal between the Democratic Unionist party and Sinn Fein coming, and he believes there will not be a deal until he is dead. He has been trying to get put in jail for about the past nine months.”

There are two bitter ironies here. On one hand, Stone's current state of mind isn't a million miles from a rational response to his particular situation; if he is paranoid, he's got more than most to be paranoid about. On the other, his current condition isn't so far removed from a state of mind which - as that poem suggests - many people over many years have been quite happy to condone, even celebrate. Quoting from the same piece in the Times:

He wrote a book and launched a career as an artist, mainly based on his notoriety. The signature on the back of paintings was the print of his right index finger, which he told buyers was “Michael Stone’s trigger finger”.

It's no problem, you can't have it

2006-11-25T22:36:00.000Z

Robert Skidelsky, author in 1975 of a rather nasty biography of Oswald Mosley (on which I've commented before & will do again), is going strong as a cross-bench peer and occasional newspaper commentator. Witness this piece in last Friday's Indie:

The elements of a "whole Middle East" peace settlement are easy to see, though they will be hard to achieve. These elements include: a federal Iraq, with an agreed formula for sharing out the country's oil resources between the three main provinces; a fully-independent Palestinian state roughly within the 1967 borders, with an internationally-patrolled demilitarised zone along Israel's borders; a phased withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East in return for a guarantee of an uninterrupted oil supply; a nuclear free zone, without which Iran will never give up its nuclear ambitions (but Israel will have to give up its bomb as well); finally, a reactivation of the suspended customs union between Israel and Palestine, with a phased extension to Jordan and the Lebanon, and with a "Marshall Aid"-style programme to get it started, as happened in Europe in 1948.
...
Such ideas may seem crazily unrealistic. But sometimes crazy ideas are the only realistic ones: it is the cautious people who are the real crazies.

There's a false opposition in that last sentence, or rather a dishonest and wishful conflation of two separate oppositions. I'm reminded of something Terry Eagleton wrote in the current LRB:

the fixed is not necessarily to be regretted, or the fluid to be celebrated. Capitalism is endlessly fluid, whereas the demand that the Israelis stop mistreating the Palestinians should be unwavering. The belief that the malleable is always preferable to the immovable is a postmodern cliché. There is a good deal about human history which ought not to alter (educating our children, for example), and quite a lot of change which is deeply undesirable. Change and permanence are not related to each other as radicalism is to conservatism.

The opposition between change and continuity is not the same thing as the opposition between the cause of righting injustices and the cause of preserving them - and it doesn't do anyone any favours to pretend that it is the same thing, unless there's anyone whose interests are served by confusion. Similarly, the opposition between radicalism and caution is not the same thing as the opposition between what can realistically be achieved and what can't. Boldness of vision may be a political virtue (the Skidelsky who worshipped at the shrine of Mosley certainly thought it was) but boldness alone doesn't overrule reality. On the contrary, the truly bold vision is the one which identifies a real opportunity for change and formulates it in way that makes it realisable. The true critique of political caution, in some historical conditions, is precisely that it isn't adequate to reality.

But those conditions can't be conjured by an act of philosophical will - or by the exercise of imperial force. Under current conditions, Skidelsky's 'crazily unrealistic' ideas suggest nothing so much as a longing for somebody - or a lot of uniformed somebodies - to get stuck in and cut the knot of rebarbative reality. But the point is not to erase our starting conditions but to work within them. Debord had it right, again: "A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait."

Never be your woman

2006-11-24T19:38:00.000Z

Will:

Yesterday I was giving a talk on the egocentricity of the digital revolution ... and afterwards stood around chatting to some media lecturers, all seemingly left wing intellectuals. They were dolefully discussing how their students showed no interest in criticising brainless, celebrity-obsessed and pornographic magazines, deeming it to be purely a matter of choice what one reads, and whether a woman chooses to be photographed naked. One of these academics said that it is only around five years since every class contained at least one out-spoken feminist, but that these have either disappeared, or been silenced by a new majoritarian view that it is arrogant/pretentious to take up political positions in such a way.

Five years. The Blair government has coincided with an important generational-cultural shift, just as the Wilson government did 30 years earlier. If racism and sexism started to become unacceptable in the late 60s, thanks to a post-war generation that refused to accept them, then perhaps the defence of rights started to become unacceptable in the late 90s thanks to a post-Thatcher generation that refuses to accept it, on the basis that political rights arrogantly trump consumer rights.

Today the newspapers report that sexual harassment of teachers and pupils in schools is widespread, and that girls are starting to accept sexist language as the norm ... Have I simply dragged some value set from the distant past, which I want to see imposed upon this new social avant garde? My sense of frustration about this is doubtless no more morally sincere or keenly felt than that of the 60s conservatives, who despaired at what the kids were doing then. In each case, a moral gulf opens up, and politics struggles in vain to bridge it.

If history really is repeating itself, expect to see a 'conservative' backlash, whereby those born between 45-79 seize power and attempt to force some traditional values on the youth (more or less what we're already seeing, even from Ken Livingstone), followed by a bright new political dawn around 2020, in which a young fresh-faced child of Thatcher marches down Downing Street in a hoodie, swigging from an alco-pop, and announcing in faux-cockney tones that he's a pretty straight guy who used to be into 50 Cent.

The horror, the horror.

I don't know about the last paragraph - I just kept it in because it's funny. The part about sexism is interesting, though. Here's a comment I posted on Will's blog:

I am not a Hegelian... oh all right then, I'm a recovering Hegelian... but I think there's more historical cunning at work than your academic friends allow. As little as thirty years ago, it was widely assumed that women's only roles were to be decorative and look after children; women who 'made it in a man's world' were freakish oddities. (When Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, a popular slogan on the left was 'Ditch the Bitch'. Right on, brother.) If seventies feminists did a lot of shouting, they had a lot to shout about.

So it's true on one level that magazines like Nuts and FHM take us back forty years, to the days of Titbits and Reveille - and it's true that pornographic imagery is degrading, oppressively so when it's ubiquitous. But it's also true that some of the core feminist arguments have been won, or at least conceded. The very language in which these students defend those magazines reflects the radical liberalism of mainstream feminism, or of the mainstreaming of feminism: why shouldn't a woman be a doctor/bus-driver/MP/astronaut? why shouldn't a woman go where she likes and wear what she likes? why shouldn't a woman take her clothes off for the cameras if she wants to?

Feminism also meant a much harder set of arguments, having to do with dignity rather than freedom of action. These are questions of what's good for women as women - and, more importantly, who gets to decide. I'd say that the problem on this front isn't that the gains of women's liberation have been rolled back, so much as that they were never really made. "Women shouldn't have to look sexy all the time" is a fine liberal argument - it's a subset of the belief that nobody should have to do anything. "Women shouldn't be expected to look sexy" is another matter, and finds a lot of liberals on the other side of the fence - after all, why shouldn't people have expectations of one another, and why shouldn't people sometimes choose to comply with other people's expectations?

It's an argument which was never really won - and, I would argue, it's come back to bite us in the shape of the hijab debate. Twice over, in fact: advocates of hijab play a distorted and sexist version of the dignity argument ("why should a woman be expected to put herself on display?") while advocates of other people's right to wear hijab play a version of liberalism that seems equally distorted by sexism ("why shouldn't a woman have the right to shield herself from prying eyes?").

So I think you can add to your list of prophecies that feminism will be back, but it won't be so liberal next time. And it'll probably be wearing a pinafore dress over jeans. (Why do people do that? Women mainly.)

While I'm in philosophical mode, a swift plug for Clive's dissection of Blair's weird and sinister maunderings on the 'social contract', which he seems to want to replace with... well, an actual contract (only this time round they would impose it on us, not the other way round). I rarely succeed in getting through Blair's statements, what with being overcome by outrage, panic or sheer pedantic irritation (no, look, it doesn't mean that...). Fortunately Clive is made of sterner stuff.

Q: Why is the Italian government letting convicted fraudsters out of prison?
A: It's all because of the Christian Democrats.
Q: But the Christian Democrats ceased to exist over a decade ago, didn't they?
A: Indeed they did, my knowledgeable questioner. But they're still making the political weather.
Q: Oh. What's that about then?
A: Read "Open up the nicks", new from me at the Sharpener. The second in a six-monthly series of commentaries on Italian politics. Possibly more interesting than it sounds. (I can't really tell - I mean, it sounds pretty interesting to me...)

Just the power to charm

2006-11-19T20:07:00.000Z

Dave:

In a post yesterday, I pointed out that Tony Blair - currently in Pakistan to meet president Pervez Musharraf - at least did not feel the need to salute the military dictator's 'courage, strength and indefatigability', as George Galloway famously did on meeting Saddam Hussein.

But I've just heard the World at One on Radio Four. There was Blair, praising Musharraf's 'courage and his leadership in taking Pakistan on this journey of change and modernisation'.

Modernisation, eh? This touches on something Chris wrote recently:

[the] invocation of modernity is one of Blair's common rhetorical tropes ... Managerialists like Blair don't like the language of value judgment and choices. So they try to pass these off as things that are inevitable, modern. David Marquand has said that this is the "myth" of New Labour:
There is one modern condition, which all rational people would embrace if they knew what it was. The Blairites do know. It is on that knowledge that their project is based, and by it that their claim to power is validated.

One more quote, this one from myself back in 1997:

Perhaps the strongest theme in the repertoire of New Labour - certainly the most inspirational - is that one word: New. Curiously, among the true believers - many of whom seem to be former Communists - the fervour for 'renewal' coexists with a passion for 'realism': a fierce disdain for anyone advocating reforms which would actually redistribute power or wealth. Ultimately the two enthusiasms seem to spring from the same source: the convulsive, triumphant abandonment of all those things Kinnock and Smith spent years edging away from. It must be quite a relief to admit that you don't really oppose the status quo - nuclear weapons, privatised railways, 40% top rate of tax and all: it must feel like coming home. What is new about New Labour, in short, is that the party doesn't plan to change anything fundamental and it admits it. (This combination of ideas also enables the party's ideologues to claim that Labour's policies had to change because they were 'old': a deeply dishonest presentation of a transformation which was entirely political, and by no means inevitable.)

Like David Marquand, I think there's more going on here than 'managerialism'. 'Modern', in its New Labour usage, reminds me strongly of the old Communist term 'progressive'. Both terms have an emptily circular quality - the leaders of New Labour (or the CP) call for commitment to the progressive cause (or modern values), but the only way to find out if a specific policy is modern (or progressive) is to ask if it's supported by the leadership of the Party (or the Party leadership). At the same time, however, progress (or modernity) is seen as a real political value, rousing genuine commitment - even fervour - in Party loyalists. To be modern, as Marquand suggests, is to be cutting with the grain of history. Things are changing, in ways nobody can resist; great forces of historical change are working their purpose out in the world. (The pseudo-religious language is deliberate; Christopher Hill suggested in The world turned upside down that one way to understand the Puritanical sense of being part of a blessed revolutionary elect may be to think of the Marxist sense of working for the forces of historical progress. And, perhaps, vice versa.) 'Modernisation' (or 'progress') is both a world-historical force and a tangible fact; the only question is whether we are going to let ourselves be crushed by the steamroller or climb aboard - and, posed in those terms, the question answers itself.

But the emptiness of the concept remains. In 2006 as in 1997, for Blair to describe something as 'modern' means nothing more specific than that he supports it and anyone who opposes it is deluded. The positive content of 'modernity', in other words, is all in the type of commitment it evokes; the term itself is purely rhetorical, and can be applied to any policy, any regime, any change, any resistance to change. What interests me about Blair's invocations of 'modernity', in other words, is not the indiscriminateness with which he sprays them around, but the reverse. If we could track the specific ideas, things and people Blair has identified as 'modern' over the years, I suspect it would give us a pretty good picture of how Blair's thinking has evolved - and of which specific all-powerful historical forces have populated his personal cosmology at different times. In 1997 'modernity' had something to do with Thatcherism; now, apparently, it has something to do with Pervez Musharraf.

Mistakes were made

2006-11-18T22:09:00.000Z

The incomparable Emma Brockes has turned music critic:

The orchestral arrangements for [the ballet] Chroma were commissioned last year by Richard Russell, head of the XL record label, as a gift to the White Stripes' Jack and Meg White. Three of their songs, The Hardest Button To Button, Aluminium and Blue Orchid, were re-arranged by Joby Talbot of Joy Division

I've commented before now on my admiration for Joby Talbot; he's a bright lad. But he was never a member of Joy Division - not least because the band ceased to exist when he was nine years old. A howler like that could be quite embarrassing for Ms Brockes (and her editors). It's just as well nobody's likely to read this stuff. It's only a ballet review, after all.

On the front page. Of the Saturday edition.

Still wearing flares

2006-11-09T21:07:00.000Z

Do you have some jeans that you really love,
Ones that you feel so groovy in ?
You don't even mind if they start to fray
That only makes them nicer still

I don't have a lot in common with Donovan Leitch, but I can agree with him on this one. I wore the jeans that I really love last weekend, briefly - they were £5 from Dunne's Stores and worth every penny - but I had to change out of them later; the fraying certainly makes them nicer still in my eyes, but it's reached a point where few other people are likely to share this view.

In short, they're now my decorating jeans. For wearing outside the house, they had to be replaced some time ago, even at the cost of another fiver. (It's a good five years since I stopped paying proper money for jeans. Not having a permanent job will do that.) On that occasion Dunne's Stores came up with a bit of a curate's egg: a pair of jeans whose cloth is a pleasure to behold in both weight and texture, but whose cut features a high waist and what I believe professional tailors refer to as a huge baggy arse. I tried to persuade myself I'd get used to the style, but it was no good - I had to haul the waistband up to my navel, which left me feeling as if I was auditioning for the Drifters.

So it was back to the mostly-reliable Dunne's Stores, where a "20% off" promotion gave me a third pair of jeans for a mere £3.20. (I know, but I wasn't going to argue.) The cloth isn't as nice this time round, but at least the waist is where it ought to be. The cut of this pair does have one disconcerting feature, though: the leg's got a slight flare.

I haven't worn flares since 1977. For the benefit of readers who don't immediately understand that statement (I know that some will), 1977 was when everything changed: music changed (both what it sounded like and who could make it); politics changed (what mattered and who could say so); and, perhaps most enduringly, trousers changed. Robert Elms said once that punk was first and foremost a trouser revolution, and I have to admit that the slimy little soulboy has a point. I was wearing flares in 1972 (and the kids I looked up to were wearing big flares). I was wearing flares in 1975; at my sister's wedding in that year I wore a brushed denim suit with aircraft-carrier lapels and, yes, big flares. I was forcibly reminded of that suit this summer - the evidence is preserved in my sister's wedding photographs, a set of which we found when we were sorting out my mother's things. (Not visible in the picture is a pair of fudge-brown platform shoes with chocolate-brown piping, of which I was enormously proud. Those were different times.)

Come 1977, I was still wearing flares - at least at the beginning of the year. And, if you were around at the time, so were you. The flares, the wide lapels, even the platform soles became mainstream after a while; the soberest 'business suit' would have broad lapels and a discreet flare. One of the less obvious changes made by punk was to banish the flare and return jacket lapels to their previous modest, Graham Parker-ish proportions. Punk, in short, didn't just change what the kids wore; it changed what the next generation of kids wore, and even what the kids' parents wore. By 1979, if you were wearing flares, you were by definition still wearing flares. It's hard to imagine any subsequent wave of musical fashion - the cocktails and zoot suits of the early 1980s, say, or the tatty jeans and lumberjack shirts of grunge - having effects as far-reaching as this.

The 1970s, it seems to me, really were different times. Looking through my mother's old photographs - and there were plenty of them; even the ones taken by my father go back to 1950 - I was suddenly struck by how different the clothes didn't look. Show me a flared trouserleg and an acre of lapel, and I immediately know we're in the early 1970s - but where were the blatantly obvious fashion statements which signalled the 1960s, the 1950s, even the 1980s? Before and after the 1970s, people just seemed to be wearing stuff.

There's a school of fashion writing, associated in particular with men's tailoring, which I find unutterably boring; I just don't understand how Elms (among many others) can get excited about the presence of four cuff-buttons instead of three, or about a chalk stripe being 1/12th of an inch across instead of 1/16th. A set of those tiny differences adds up to a whole different style, I realise that - and consequently much of the history of fashion is ultimately about these tiny differences. I realise that, but it doesn't move me. Why should I choose between white and pale blue when I'd rather choose turquoise? Why should I agonise over switching from dove-grey to battleship-grey, when I could be wearing jet black with a purple lining? And if I couldn't, why not?

The history of counter-cultural fashion (hippie, punk, goth) is the history of sweeping challenges like these, just as the history of mainstream fashion isn't. Perhaps what happened in the 1970s - something that may never have happened before or since - was that the boldness of a particular counter-cultural fashion went so unchallenged for so long that it actually permeated the mainstream. (It's only a shame it had to be that particular fashion.)

Or perhaps I'm just more conscious of fashions that were around when I was a teenager.

The curse of the underground

2006-11-08T18:53:00.000Z

I've started another blog, What I Wrote. As well as being a homage to the second greatest double-act ever, it's a home for relatively long-format stuff that I've written but not blogged - articles for the radical press, columns for small-circulation magazines, position papers for now-defunct organisations, and various pieces that somebody should have published but nobody did. Not that I'm trying to put you off or anything. There's going to be some funny stuff in there too.

I've kicked it off with two pieces, one written in 1997 about why I hadn't just voted Labour and one from 1993 about the former Yugoslavia. I'll be updating it a couple of times a week - I've got what's technically known as a bunch of stuff to draw on - so stay tuned, or indeed subscribed.

The sound of the keys as they clink

2006-11-06T21:33:00.000Z

Back here, I wrote:

my children are far closer to being 'colour-blind' than I'll ever be. The other day my son got picked on in the swimming pool; we asked him to describe the kids who did it, and when we asked him whether they had brown skin he said "yes, but why do you ask?" That told us.

What I didn't mention, probably because it hadn't happened yet, was the sequel: a note from the police, passed on through the school, to the effect that they'd be interested to take a statement from my son, particularly given that there was a possible racist motive. (My son said he just wanted to forget about the whole thing, so we let it drop.)

So there's one obvious reason to be sceptical about Manchester councillor Eddy Newman's letter to Saturday's Graun:

The study to which you refer suggests that Asbos are used disproportionately against ethnic-minority groups. In Manchester, by contrast, about one in 10 of Asbos include conditions banning racist abuse, threats or harassment. In this way Asbos can be used to combat racism and promote community cohesion.

The two sets of ASBOs - "used disproportionately against ethnic-minority groups" and "include conditions banning racist abuse" - aren't mutually exclusive. But even if they were, there's an even more obvious reason for scepticism: put simply, the fact that 10% of ASBOs have anti-racist strings attached says nothing about the other 90%. But the numbers are less important than the mood music. Let's not worry about how ASBOs have been used - think about all the good things they can be used for! Never mind the evidence, just think of all the bad people out there - and trust us to deal with them.

Over the weekend I was also gobsmacked (like Jamie) by Nick Cohen's latest:

For the first time in British history, there are asylum seekers who could attack the country which gave them sanctuary. I don't think people realise how unparallelled this change is.

For the first time in British history, by gum. Never before have murderous foreigners lurked among us, plotting anarchy and destruction under cover of our fabled British hospitality. The Fenians in Victorian England don't count, obviously - nor do the revolutionary exiles who converged on England from across Europe and beyond in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Conrad thought they were pretty threatening - The Secret Agent even has a suicide bomber as one of its central characters - but he was obviously exaggerating. There was a great deal of alarm about German exiles in Britain when the Great War broke out, but all that was just hysteria, obviously. Same with the Russian revolutionary exiles, around the same time. Sidney Street? A storm in a teacup. Things got a bit more lively in the late 1930s, mind you:

In September 1939 there were a total of 71,600 registered enemy aliens in Britain. On the outbreak of the Second World War the police arrested a large number of Germans living in Britain. The government feared that these people might be Nazi spies pretending to be refugees. They were interned and held in various camps all over Britain. Like other refugees they were eventually appeared before tribunals which classified them into three different groups. 'A' class aliens were interned, whereas 'B' class aliens were allowed to leave the camps but had certain restrictions placed upon their movements. The vast majority of refugees were identified as 'C' class aliens and were allowed to go free. When Benito Mussolini declared war on the Allies on 10th May 1940, Italians living in Britain were also interned. This included 4,000 people with less than twenty years' residence in Britain.

But still, there's no comparison: For the first time in British history, there are asylum seekers who could attack the country which gave them sanctuary. Or if it's not quite the first time in history, well, never mind. Just think about all the bad people out there, and trust us to deal with them.

I used to read Nick Cohen regularly; I used to think of Eddy Newman as a reliable voice of the municipal Left (he's a solid Old Labour councillor from way back, one of a very few Manchester councillors to have built a personal reputation in the Stringer period and hung on to it). These are strange times for the Left - it's easy to forget just how strange.

Update 7/11

As Andrew points out in comments, Nick is a troubled man:

When, at the age of 13, he found out that his kind and thoughtful English teacher voted Conservative, he nearly fell off his chair: 'To be good, you had to be on the Left.' Today he's no less confused.

I'll say he is.

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam that stands for everything the liberal-Left is against come from a section of the Left? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the Left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal-Left, but not, for instance, China, the Sudan, Zimbabwe or North Korea? Why can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a liberal literary journal as in a neo-Nazi rag?

I can actually sympathise with parts of this; back in the early 1990s those of us who thought the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina was worth defending against armed Serb irredentism seemed to be in a very small minority on the Left. Seeing sizeable swathes of the Left apparently signing up for the Genocidal Bastard Fan Club (and no, the RCP wasn't its only chapter by any means) isn't an experience you forget.

But if I'm not with Neil Clark, I'm not with Nick either. This synopsis is sloppily written even by the standards of its kind (I don't recall any "American and British war" in Bosnia, apart from anything else), but as far as I can tell Nick's main concern isn't that the Left has chosen some dodgy causes lately. He's not even harping on the Left's wilful blindness to the historically unprecedented menace of the lurking foreign mad bomber. For whatever reason, the point Nick really seems to want to make is that supporting the Palestinian cause is wrong. Or rather, it may be right, but only if you a) support several other causes as well b) oppose the politicians Palestinians actually elect and c) oppose criticism of Israel. (Like Andrew, I really hope that last line isn't a reference to Mearsheimer and Walt. I'm tempted to dismiss the idea out of hand - you'd have to be wearing a very strong prescription indeed to see a 'sinister conspiracy of Jews' in M&W's LRB piece, let alone to imagine that it could appear in a 'neo-Nazi rag' - but the reference to 'a liberal literary journal' is disquieting.)

A Left critique of the Gleichschaltung of the 'anti-imperialists' might have been useful and telling; unfortunately it looks as if Nick has found another cause to be gleichgeschaltet by. These are, as I was saying, strange times for the Left. As Victor Serge never wrote:

- What's to be done if it's midnight in the century?
- What, already?

These are your favourite things

2006-10-30T17:12:00.000Z

I undertook last night to defend Torchwood against its critics. Having seen last night's episode I'm less enthusiastic about this task than I was - about the kindest thing that could be said about episode 3 is that it was a load of old tosh. Still, I feel much more kindly disposed towards the series than Justin or Dave - and some of their criticisms strike me as not so much unfair as irrelevant.

I'll set the scene with a couple of Russell T. Davies' earlier hits.

DOCTOR: Look at these people, these human beings, consider their potential. From the day they arrive on this planet and blinking, step into the sun, there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do... no, hold on... sorry, that's the Lion King... but the point still stands!

HOMELESS MAN: Big Issue?
VINCE: Yes, it is! Unrequited love - it never has to grow old and it never has to die!

A lot of Davies's dialogue - a lot of his best dialogue - is like this: elaborate, tasteless and entirely unbelievable, but at the same time moving, funny and enthusiastic.

Especially enthusiastic. Davies's imaginative world has three consistent features, all of which play in the direction of upbeat. There’s faith: faith in love and desire (which are seldom far apart); faith in emotions, and letting them out and acting on them; and ultimately an optimistic faith in people. Nothing is more characteristic of Davies than his setting a vision of the end of the world, in the eponymous Doctor Who episode, five billion years in the future:

DOCTOR: You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're going to get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. Like maybe you survive.

Then there’s sex. For Davies there’s always sex - he’s described it as the single most basic plot driver, whatever the plot is. The promise that Torchwood delivers on (or at least promises to deliver on) was made by Doctor Who as long ago as Captain Jack’s first appearance, and as recently as the Doctor’s parting with Rose. (And remember the Doctor and Rose tumbling out of the Tardis into Victorian Scotland? Why were they so unsteady on their feet - and why were they giggling so much?)

The third key element of Davies’s vision - and the one which seems to have given Dave and Justin the most trouble - goes back, I think, to Davies’s early days as a screenwriter for children’s TV. It’s a quality which Torchwood and Doctor Who share with Buffy and Serenity but not with Star Trek, let alone Star Wars. It’s a kind of unencumbered, disrespectful, not-quite-adult lightness, flippancy even. This is partly about the dialogue - you don’t ask whether a line is credible, you ask whether it sounds good in performance - but it also goes deeper, to the level of character. You don’t say, What does the willingness to do this say about Character X? or How will Character X handle the consequences? You say, Would Character X do this? What about you - would you? What about if you could get away with it, would you then? The characters aren’t burdened with foresight or moral reflection, and the writing doesn’t take up the slack with foreshadowing or ominous sound effects. They do what they do, and the consequences come along later to bite them - or not, as it suits the plot. And what they do is what you would do, if you weren’t too inhibited, too boring, too grown-up. I felt quite comfortable with this element of Torchwood - or rather, I wasn’t consciously aware of it - until I read Dave’s comment

The writing team has a low opinion of their creation’s integrity; three out of six are office thieves.

and Justin’s:

A member of the Torchwood team is revealed (in a *hilarious* scene) in the opening episode as a bisexual rapist who traps his victims using an alien aftershave he’s borrowed from work that makes him irresistible.

Office thieves? Rapist? They borrow stuff from work (including the said alien atomiser which induces immediate desire in anyone who gets a whiff). Sure, they’ve been told not to do it - but with stuff like that lying around, well, you would, wouldn’t you?

Youth, sex and optimism: the trio embodied in Queer as Folk in under-age Nathan, amoral Stuart and the eternally hopeful Vince, and subsequently rolled into one in David Tennant’s Casanova, John Barrowman’s Jack Harkness and (most strikingly) Tennant’s Doctor. This isn’t a world where gains are wiped out by their cost, where dilemmas are unresolvable or where darkness means more than the absence of light. It’s a bright and mostly beautiful world, where external threats needs to be resisted because people matter - and people matter because of their capacity to love. It’s also a world brought to us in a hectic patchwork of action scenes, character development, horror, plot exposition, character-based comedy, backstory exposition, beautiful camerawork and moments of calm, still wonder.

It’s not Our Friends in the North; it’s not even ER. It’s not trying to be. But what it does, it does well. At its worst it’s tosh (albeit beautifully-executed tosh), but at its best it’s good.

Update 31/10

Whoa, comments! Sod the politics (and the music), Whoblogging is obviously the way to go.

There's some interesting stuff coming out. Jonn:

"So far the pattern seems to be that a) the Torchwood team have moral compasses that are spinning wildly; b) Gwen is already getting corrupted by it all (look at the shooting range scene); c) Jack isn't nearly as concerned about these missteps as he should be
...
but I trust the moral grey area stuff to be going somewhere. In fact I suspect it's what the show is going to be all about."

biscit:

"Torchwood are supposed to be acting in humankind's best interests- they keep a lid on things because others can't be trusted. But the thing is can they? This isn't subtle extrapolating, the question is more or less baldly asked by Gwen, a policewoman brought in to be the team's moral compass.

This is a post watershed show, there is scope for the central characters to be devious and amoral."

A couple of preliminary thoughts. Firstly, I think RTD is a genuinely amoral writer, partly because he sees morality as anti-sex and partly because he likes people. In other words, I think he'd argue that if you just wind people up and let them go it'll work out for the best, probably, for most people - and that even if it doesn't always work out well it's still a better alternative than trying to control them. So I don't think an RTD character is ever going to be riven with self-doubt - or if they are they'll probably grow out of it (cf. Vince). Secondly, there's a question of genre (and in this respect I stand by the comparison with Buffy); you could even say that a basic character makeup of looking for fun and acting without forethought (but learning from the consequences) is a genre convention for this kind of drama.

That said, even I found the shooting-range scene hard to take. I haven't seen lethal violence made to look so attractive since the Matrix - and even that didn't make it look so sexy.

So, I dunno. Two basic possibilities, I suppose. Perhaps it really is just the Double-Deckers with added sex and guns, in which case I'd reluctantly concede that RTD may have pushed the young/sexy/optimistic thing a bit too far into amorality - and amoral nastiness at that. Or perhaps there's some dark stuff coming, but it's not really being foreshadowed - which would fit with the lack of overt morality and the "act first, reflect later" thing. (Let's not forget, the first episode included a character who'd become a serial killer for the love of Torchwood - and who killed herself onscreen. That's pretty dark.)

The big question for me is what they're going to do with Captain Jack - the second and third episodes have suggested that he's not the best person to look after the kids he's surrounded himself with, what with being an amoral bisexual seducer, but also that he's so damn attractive that you probably wouldn't care. Gwen's relationship with her partner - who's been laboriously established as a boring old Welsh spud - is going to be one to watch, I think.

One last update 2/11

It occurred to me today - not that I'm brooding over this obsessively or anything - that the key to Captain Jack may be that odd scene with Gwen where he told her that he couldn't die, and added that if he could find "the right kind of doctor" he might become mortal again. We all spotted the D-word, of course, but was there something else going on there? Why would somebody who'd just survived being shot in the head want to be mortal again? What this suggests to me is that, despite all the tall buildings and general Neoish posturing, the Captain Jack we're seeing is damaged goods. He's survived a major trauma (none more major) and been abandoned by his closest friends - and now, perhaps, he's trying to outrun the effects by turning stress into duty ("Gotta be ready!").

Alternatively, perhaps it really is just a load of old tosh.

Driving aloud

2006-10-22T20:36:00.000+01:00

He was writing in 1959 (and he was wrong about the helicopters), but Debord got driving right:

A mistake made by all urban planners is to consider the private car (and its by-products, such as the motorcycle) as essentially a means of transport. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout society.

Isolated and in charge, every driver is (in fantasy at least) being driven, being transported; every man his own chauffeur! Every driver is a privileged being, someone superior to everything else in sight. Get these dead bodies off my racetrack! I wonder whether cycling incarnates - or, less ambitiously, symbolises - an alternative notion of happiness. I sense that it could: the obdurate materiality of cycling - the unavoidable contact with the road and the weather, not to mention the effort it takes to get anywhere - suggests a much more physically engaged, and much more egalitarian, vision of travel than driving can ever be. (The same goes for walking and for public transport, pretty much.)

But driving isolates. I feel similarly about wearing headphones in public - which these days I almost never do, train journeys excepted. One of the most uncanny musical experiences I've had occurred when I was sitting on a bus with the Gang of Four's third album on my walkman:

Everybody is in too many pieces
No man's land surrounds our desires
To crack the shell we mix with others
Some lie in the arms of lovers

The city is the place to be
With no money you go crazy
I need an occupation
You have to pay for satisfaction

We live as we dream, alone
To crack the shell we mix with others
Some flirt with fascism
Some lie in the arms of lovers

It was an extraordinary combination: on one hand there was the power of the music - Hugo Burnham's drumming is mixed really high on that track - and the awful minatory aptness of the lyrics; on the other, there was the awareness that, vast and all-embracing as the sound was for me, nobody else could hear it... We live as we dream, alone - never more so than when listening to music on headphones.

Or listening to music in a car - and when I'm driving, alone, I almost always have music on. (If you're going to be locked into a dream of mechanical omnipotence, you might as well control the soundtrack.) Some songs work particularly well for me. For short and familiar journeys, a particular kind of lyric can be good. About eighteen years ago I discovered Prefab Sprout's first album (Swoon) and loved it instantly. What I responded to was the lyrics, and particularly the sense that Paddy McAloon didn't care whether anyone understood them or not:

Are they happy to see you? No,
You always bring trouble.
Cast a shadow on Mexico -
Denial doesn't change facts.

Unlike Wire (say) the disjointedness didn't seem showy or self-indulgent; I felt that he knew perfectly well what he was talking about, and if nobody else got the point, too bad for everybody else. (Prefab Sprout's subsequent albums have nothing like this wilfully cryptic quality, more's the pity, although you can hear a bit of it on McAloon's peculiar solo album I trawl the Megahertz.)

I got something like the same vibe from "To you alone" by the much-lamented Beta Band, which for some time was a fixture for short journeys in town:

She's like the snow-capped trees in my jigsaw,
Loose at the seams with inferior dreams
She's like a fool that you meet in the heart store
Hand in the pail and the blacker the veil,
The blacker the veil...

I have no idea what Steve Mason is talking about here, but when you listen to the track he seems to know. And after a few listens they're great lyrics to sing, talk or mutter along to, half-consciously, while the other half of your consciousness deals with the same old traffic lights and gear-changes.

The other great boon for town driving is the song that makes the experience seem more exciting than it really is (which mostly, after all, it really isn't). Volume is important here. The Dandy Warhols' "We used to be friends" works well, particularly if you can time it so that the car is at least in motion when the bass kicks in. Super Furry Animals' "Ice hockey hair" is also good, particularly for journeys that don't last much longer than its 6:57 duration.

Motorway driving is another matter - apart from anything else, most of the time there's no point picking out individual tracks. But I can think of a few recurring situations which have their own ideal soundtrack.

For beautiful but long and unchanging stretches of motorway, particularly where the road curves gently in one direction or the other for miles at a stretch, so that you can watch an evenly-spaced series of vehicles ahead of you passing down the curve like beads on a wire: The Divine Comedy, "Eric the Gardener". Orchestrated by Joby Talbot, this song is built around a six-note phrase which repeats, unaltered, throughout the song's 8 minutes and 26 seconds (not counting a patch towards the end where it fades out before coming back in). All this while oceanic strings sweep over you, like nothing so much as that J.G. Ballard short story where somebody has the experience of drowning in the hugely-amplified sound of a kiss. The lyrics are about a metal-detector enthusiast (viz. Eric), and about history, and how history has always got to the world before you:

Dig deep and dig some more
Dig to the planet's core
Dig till you've gone out of your mind
But all you will ever really find
Is Eric the gardener

Chilling and strange, and beautiful - and mesmeric, and very long.

For driving down a stretch of unfamiliar motorway after realising you've missed the junction you wanted, not knowing how far it is until the next roundabout but wanting to get there as quickly as possible, in the rain: Ed Kuepper, "Today Wonder". From the album of the same name - which is a record of some casual and unhurried sessions with guitar and drumkit - "Today Wonder" consists mainly of a medley of Donovan's "Hey Gyp" and Eric Burdon's "White Houses"; Burdon has recorded "Hey Gyp", so I should imagine he came up with the medley first. I don't know how many chords Ed Kuepper plays in "Today Wonder", but I wouldn't be too surprised if the answer was 'two'; he's the kind of guitarist who doesn't seem to play a chord the same way twice. The effect here is of a dense, hypnotically repetitive pattern of strumming, overlaid with a shifting range of augmentations and pulls and, er, other things you can do to jazz up a guitar chord. It's great - all the more so when combined with the yearning, frustrated and frankly rather pissed-off sound of Kuepper's vocals:

Gonna buy you a Ford Mustang
Gonna buy you a wedding ring
Gonna buy you a mansion on a hill
If you'll just give me some of your love
Please give me some of your love

For driving down an unfamiliar motorway in the dark, uncomfortably aware that you don't know where you are or how to get to where you want to go, but stubbornly convinced that the next junction will give you enough information to tell whether you're going the right way or not, or failing that the one after next: the Doors, "Break on through". Or just about anything else by the Doors, within reason. It can be an unforgettable experience. I drove about sixty miles listening to the Doors' Greatest Hits, once. I was only going from Reading to Bracknell.

For the M25, and in particular for sitting stock still in the second of four lanes, in the sun, completely surrounded by equally stationary traffic, but unable to relax for a second in case the queue started to move again as it had done several minutes ago: Soft Machine, "Facelift". Or, more generally, the wonderful Hux double CD of [the] Soft Machine's BBC sessions from 1967 to 1971 - but there's something about the sheer self-confidence and abrasiveness of "Facelift" that makes it particularly relaxing, somehow.

There's a fugal, "go away, I'm busy" quality to this and to several of the other tracks I've listed here; I'm not sure if that's what makes them particularly well suited to driving, which is fundamentally a rather strange, alienated experience. I'm not sure whether they assuage or exacerbate it, either. As my use of words like 'hypnotic' up there suggests, part of what's going on here is that the music gives part of your mind something to chew on while the rest concentrates on manoeuvring a large and solid lump of metal at high speed. Perhaps this is a dangerous luxury, and driving in near-silence would induce the driver to devote all of his or her attention to the road. Or perhaps, in the world behind the windscreen, silence just creates more scope for free-association and daydreaming - perhaps the driver with music on is actually less distracted, by virtue of having something to concentrate against.

It's a strange world, the world we drive in, but it's a world that can change (and may soon have to). Debord:

The breaking up of the dialectic of the human milieu in favor of cars (the projected motorways in Paris will entail the demolition of thousands of houses and flats although the housing crisis is continually worsening) masks its irrationality under pseudopractical justifications. But it is practically necessary only in the context of a specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the present society.

Step right up and show your face

2006-10-20T23:22:00.000+01:00

The following letter appeared in the 20th October Independent.

Sir: My fellow countrymen seem bewildered by the niqab, a bewilderment rapidly turning into anger and repulsion; but it is just a simple garment with a simple purpose.

Every other person in Britain has been affected by infidelity, and it all boils down to either party having been charmed by someone else, hence losing interest. Britons are so used to this reality that they view any means of prevention, however logical, as absurd and futile.

Dress code plays an integral part in the promotion of fidelity in a society. Islam seeks to preserve the family and quash promiscuity. Immodest dress is a direct cause of this vice. As for men, in Islam they need to be in the world of work for most of their day, and wearing similar clothing would be a major impediment. Islam prescribes this formula as the only way to attain harmony and peace in marital life.

Do commentators and politicians honestly believe an extra garment worn only outside the house means a woman loses her meaning, her value, her self? This is a backward and oppressive concept which amazingly is being referred to as "progressive" and "empowering".

A woman in niqab is not a mere shadow; she has family and friends who know and appreciate her. They are the only people she is concerned with and who should be concerned with her. A friend of mine complained: "For God's sake, I have a great life, I have a family, friends, go to parties, and everyone I know knows me. The only people who I haven't been quality-stamped by is the public, and I don't see why I need to be."

I and many other Muslim women view the present furore as nothing but a politicised version of being nosey.

Women's faces should be concealed, lest they charm another woman's husband. Promiscuity is a vice. Sex is dangerous. Sex is caused by women's attractiveness to men.

Men need to be in the world of work. Women don't.

A woman's family and (presumably female) friends are the only people she is concerned with and who should be concerned with her.

I grew up in a society which had been deeply affected by the achievements of the women's liberation movement and its successors. As a result, I grew up in a society where attitudes like those expressed in this letter would be laughed at, or at best treated with pity and scorn. I don't respect these attitudes or the practices which derive from them; I don't believe they deserve respect. I believe they're an insult both to women and to men, and should be criticised on those grounds.

This isn't to say that they shouldn't be tolerated. The most worrying thing about the current furore about the veil is that the difference between tolerance and respect seems to have been forgotten or obscured, on both sides of the debate. Defenders of the niqab argue that it's just one more outwardly visible sign of religious observance, like a crucifix or a turban, and should be respected as such; I don't need to restate my disagreement with this position. But critics of the niqab go to the opposite extreme, arguing not only that the niqab is objectionable but that women should be asked - or compelled - to remove it. I detest the niqab - come to that, I'm not at all keen on hijab in general, which seems to me to embody very much the same set of sexist assumptions - but I was shocked and offended by Jack Straw's casual revelation that he asks niqab-wearers to unveil. I find myself in qualified agreement with this columnist from the Arab News:

Mrs. Azmi was suspended not because she is Muslim but because she is unable to perform her job to the standard that parents have a right to expect for their children. If she believes that it is her religious duty to wear the full-face veil — as she does — then clearly she cannot be asked to remove it, but neither can she expect to teach in a mixed-gender environment. I have no doubt that Aishah Azmi is a dedicated and capable teacher but she should be teaching at a single-gender school where she can be free to teach without a face cover. Clearly she knows this since she did not wear a face covering to her job interview at the school.

There are a host of jobs that Muslims cannot undertake. Some, like wine tasting, are out of bounds for men and women. Others, like being a lifeguard, are out of bounds for veiled women. It is in the nature of the job. It is ludicrous to cry racial discrimination because the job we wish to do is incompatible with our religious customs.

One final note on the sexism of the niqab. Apparently Aishah Azmi was happy to teach a class of children unveiled, as long as she could replace the veil if a male member of staff came into the room. Picture the scene: a man comes into the room, the woman hides her face. What message does that send to the girls in the class? What message does it send to the boys?

PS Fortuitously, Brian (who didn't grow up in the 1970s) has been thinking along similar lines.

Update 23/10
Rob, in comments: "to tolerate something requires that you disapprove of it"

Interesting angle. Apparently on Question Time the other night the idea that this is historically a tolerant society (and so why should we have a problem with this?) got a lot of play. My first reaction to hearing this was to laugh out loud - we may live in a society which respects non-white and non-Christian cultures now, but it sure as hell wasn't like that in the 1960s and 1970s, to go back no further than that. (Flicker of sympathy for the anti-Islamophobia lobby at this point. On the anti-racism front we've come a long way, in quite a short time.)

But tolerance - in the sense of "I think the way you live is wrong but you've got a right to carry on doing it, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else" - probably is better-rooted in this society than intolerance ("I know the way you live is wrong and you've got to stop it right now"). And it's intolerance, of course, which Straw and Kelly play to. All very communitarian, in New Labour's understanding of the word - compare Cameron's ostentatious tolerance of 'hoodies'.

(There's a difference between tolerance (public attitude) and toleration (official stance), but since Straw & co are effectively playing both ends - evoking intolerance in support of decreased toleration - the difference may not make much difference in this case.)

Update 30/10

DUKE.
Is this the witness, friar?
First let her show her face, and after speak.

MARIANA.
Pardon, my lord; I will not show my face
Until my husband bid me.

DUKE.
What! are you married?

MARIANA.
No, my lord.

DUKE.
Are you a maid?

MARIANA.
No, my lord.

DUKE.
A widow, then?

MARIANA.
Neither, my lord.

DUKE.
Why, you are nothing then: neither maid, widow, nor wife?

LUCIO.
My lord, she may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid,
widow, nor wife.

[From Measure for Measure, Act 5, Scene 1. 'Punk' = prostitute]

Karen Armstrong (via Rob) makes some excellent points drawing on her own experience of veiling as a member of a Catholic religious community [sic], a group which has attracted its own share of opprobrium in this country:

When my order was founded in the 1840s, not long after Catholic emancipation, people were so enraged to see nuns brazenly wearing their habits in the streets that they pelted them with rotten fruit and horse dung. Nuns had been banned from Britain since the Reformation; their return seemed to herald the resurgence of barbarism.

She also brings out the history of governmental and imperial oppression which official demands to un-veil bring with them. It's as well to be reminded that reactionary customs may be a resource of resistance to the coercion of state-sponsored liberalism.

And yet, and yet. There's a large hole in Armstrong's argument; she ignores or obscures the crucial difference between the nun's veil and the niqab. To take the veil is to devote oneself to God: it's an emblem of withdrawal from any kind of involvement with society or with men, and of being set apart from the great majority of women. To become a nun, in a time when the options for women are defined by their relationship with a man (maid, widow [or] wife - or prostitute), was to refuse a role in a gender-defined social structure; for some women it could be an act of self-determination, even rebellion. To put on the niqab is an act of religious duty, and it's an emblem of withdrawal from involvement with male-dominated society, but these similarities are deceptive. The niqab-wearer's withdrawal from society goes along with a continuing relationship with one man (and his children). It's a way of living within the framework of maid, widow or wife, not withdrawing from it - and its advocates recommend it for all women, even (or especially) those women who are already actively refusing to live a life defined by gender roles. If putting on the niqab is a rebellion, it's a rebellion against self-determination. In many respects it's the polar opposite of the nun's veil.

Don't go changing

2006-10-08T14:07:00.000+01:00

I recently read Alison Lurie's New York Review of Books article on C.S. Lewis and Narnia. It's worth reading, if you haven't seen it; her Guardian article includes some of the same material but is much shorter.

This, in particular, leapt out at me:

Many readers have been infuriated by Lewis's final condemnation of Susan Pevensie, the former wise and gentle Queen Susan, as "no longer a friend of Narnia." In The Last Battle she is cast out of Paradise forever because at twenty-one she speaks of her earlier experiences as only a childhood fantasy, and is "too keen on being grown up" and "interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations." Apart from the fact that these seem very minor sins, it is hard to believe that Susan could have changed that much and forgotten her happiness in Narnia and her commitment to Aslan. Apologists have claimed that her banishment was necessary to demonstrate that even those who have once been saved can fall from grace. Nevertheless it has seemed deeply unfair to many readers that Edmund, Susan's younger brother, who has betrayed the others to the White Witch, is allowed to repent and stay in Narnia, while Susan, whose faults are much less serious, is not given the opportunity.

It's not a new criticism, but I think Lurie's wording is particularly forceful: it is hard to believe that Susan could have ... forgotten her happiness in Narnia and her commitment to Aslan. What this brings home to me - the last phrase in particular - is that, if Aslan is (more or less) Christ, then Susan had been as much a Christian as the other three children; if belief in Aslan equates (roughly) to Christian salvation, then Susan had been saved. But nylons and lipstick and invitations were enough to damn her - quite literally, as the Last Battle ends with Aslan enacting the final division of sheep and goats.

There's an interesting defence of Lewis on this point on a blog written by two Christians:

Lewis is at this point deliberately illustrating a very Christian contrast, between the forgiveness Jesus holds out to even the very worst person who turns away from their sin, and the rejection Jesus promises for those who finally reject him:
I tell you that any sinful thing you do or say can be forgiven. Matthew 12:31 (CEV)

The master will surely come on a day and at a time when the servant least expects him. That servant will then be punished and thrown out with the ones who only pretended to serve their master. Matthew 24:50-51 (CEV)

Jesus himself told a story about the jealousy that this free offer of forgiveness arouses in some people, in Matthew 20:1-16. The idea of unmerited forgiveness does seem “unfair” to us, but it is also unfair to accuse Lewis of carelessness in this instance, where he is in fact being careful to follow what Jesus taught.

It's a fair point, but it doesn't go far enough. The real problem is that, in order to illustrate this contrast, Lewis put a traitor to Aslan in the role of repentant sinner, and made his despiser of God a young woman who liked going to parties. In other words, as Lurie says, Lewis 'allowed' Edmund but not Susan to repent. The same contrast could just as well have been worked in reverse, with the committed opponent of Aslan turned away from salvation and the worldly backslider seeing the error of her ways. Susan even had form in the matter of backsliding and redemption: one of her main functions in Prince Caspian is to doubt Aslan and then regain her belief in him. But by the time of The Last Battle, Susan’s worldly unbelief seems to have hardened, in Lewis’s mind, into something worse: she ends up in very much the same position as the characters in the Last Battle who genuinely opposed Aslan. Admittedly we don't actually see her being cast out into the darkness - but we certainly don't see her in the Narnia-beyond-Narnia which is Lewis's final vision of Heaven. She doesn't even end up marooned in Heaven while not believing in it, the ironic fate of a group of selfish and mistrustful dwarfs - they're good-hearted underneath, presumably.

So what's going on here? Philip Pullman got this mostly right:

Susan ... is undergoing a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn't approve of that. He didn't like women in general, or sexuality at all, at least at the stage in his life when he wrote the Narnia books. He was frightened and appalled at the notion of wanting to grow up.

(Lewis: When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown-up.) Susan hasn’t simply taken sides against Aslan rather than for him; she’s changed, in a way that takes her right out of the Narnian picture. The adult Susan is somebody for whom belief in Aslan - i.e. Christianity - is neither a good thing nor a particularly bad one; she doesn’t think in those terms. And this transition, for Lewis, is far worse than the transition from virtue to sin. Not to care about sin is the truly unforgivable sin - which is to say, it’s the sin which determines the sinner not to seek forgiveness. And, for Lewis, the desire to be very grown-up, and in particular the desire to be a grown woman, is incompatible with caring about sin - so into the outer darkness with Queen Susan.

I think this is just how it was for Lewis - which in turn makes you wonder about how his mind worked. What kind of religion is it that makes indifference to itself the worst possible sin? Or rather, indifference to religion - the ranks of the saved, at the end of The Last Battle, include lifelong worshippers of Tash (the bloodthirsty god of the swarthy Calormenes), but no atheists (with the possible exception of those dwarfs). The bad news is that being good doesn’t get you into Heaven unless you’re also a believer; the good news is that it doesn’t much matter what you’re a believer in. To believe in something is the main thing: something beyond; something other; something not here. To do good is a good thing - which is reasonably uncontroversial; say what you will about Christianity, it’s hard to argue that Love thy neighbour as thyself is bad advice (particularly when coupled with the “Good Samaritan” gloss on the ‘neighbour’ part). But doing good for no other reason than that it’s a good thing isn’t virtue; to be virtuous, good deeds need to be done for the sake of something utterly removed from the people they actually benefit. To be virtuous, in other words, is to do good not because it’s good but because it’s right: to judge your actions by criteria entirely different from the question of whether other people benefit or suffer from them.

It's this abstract, disciplined calculus of virtue which is threatened by the onset of nylons and lipstick and invitations. For Lewis, growing up - becoming a sexual being, not to put too fine a point on it - was a fall from grace, not because adulthood meant living in sin but because it meant living in the world. The world we know, Lewis believed, is only a poor shadow of a real world we can only know through the imagination. As early as the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis rhapsodises about the vividness, intensity and power of Narnian experience, then cautions his readers that, regretfully, we had never experienced anything like it and never would. (Neither had he, of course.) The land where the three good Pevensies go, at the end of The Last Battle, is described as brighter and more vivid - more real - than even Narnia. Lewis's vision recalls the sad but ghastly words of Christina Rossetti in "In the bleak midwinter":

Our God, Heaven cannot hold him
Nor Earth sustain
Heaven and Earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign

To be a Christian, for Rossetti, is to worship God and commit oneself to Him, in the consciousness that our God is greater than anything we know and anything we can imagine. God has no imaginable connection with the world; the Incarnation is more tragic than glorious, and more pathetic than tragic. In this perspective, to withdraw from immediate sensuous engagement with the world - and to devote oneself to oceanic fantasies of being ever more utterly abased, ever more utterly known, ever more utterly forgiven - was not a retreat from reality but a closer approach to it. Further up and further in!

If that's what Narnia stands for, I'm with Susan. As Pullman says, Lewis’s version of Christianity is not only shot through with racist, sexist and elitist attitudes; at a much more fundamental level, it’s ‘anti-life’.

Serene machine

2006-10-03T21:42:00.000+01:00

There's a lot to dislike about Serenity, but...

Actually, no - there's not much to dislike about Serenity. (Joss Whedon's address to the fans, now, that is dislikeable. It's three parts you-guys-are-great motivational pitch, two parts my-mental-horizons-are-expanding-right-now! Emersonian wonderment and one of saving irony; it's very American, in other words. But you can always ignore it and just watch the film.)

Serenity does have one big flaw and one major weakness. The flaw is closely related to one of the film's great strengths: the dialogue. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Whedon gave the world an unprecedented three-way hybrid - genre-based action crossed with teen heartache, presented in language as mannered and frivolous as Wilde. (Sure, it looks easy now...) Serenity is coming from the same world, only with grownups instead of teenagers and outer space instead of the occult. But the language... Here are two excerpts:

- This landing is gonna get pretty interesting.
- Define "interesting".
- "Oh God oh God we're all going to die"?

This is the captain. We have a little problem with our entry sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence and then explode.

There's a scene early on in Good morning Vietnam, when Robin Williams' manically free-associating DJ first lets rip. After a few minutes he finds a gap in his stream of consciousness big enough to fit a record in; then he kills the mike, looks up and says "Too much?" For a moment it's as if Robin Williams is seeking reassurance from the director of the film. Of course it wasn't too much, it wasn't that kind of film; in real life it would have been enough to get the guy suspended from army radio pending psychiatric reports, but never mind. (The true story on which GMV was based is a quieter affair, by all accounts.) But either one of the lines quoted above verges on too much, and using them both in the same scene tips the film momentarily from 'adventure film with gags' to 'Airplane with SFX'. Joss Whedon's a fine writer, particularly with regard to the cracking of wise, but as a director he needs to rein that writer in.

Still, there really isn't a lot to dislike about Serenity - and there is a lot to like, starting with the great majority of the dialogue. I liked the odd, sketched-in back-story, and the way the names of the characters ranged from Star Trek-standard ('Inara', 'Shepherd Book', 'Fanty and Mingo') to just plain standard ('Malcolm Reynolds'). I liked the ventures into Andre Norton 'space Western' territory (two genres, count 'em), and the way Whedon is clearly conscious of going there: at one point our heroes are driving across a semi-desert planet pursued by a gang of savages who want to kill them, and sure enough, arrows begin thudding into the ship. (Possibly spears, but the resonance was there.) I liked the technology, which has a solid, grungey, Chris-Foss-with-rust quality to it: the ship being chased through the scrub looks like nothing so much as a JCB, albeit one which (to paraphrase Douglas Adams) is flying through the air in exactly the way a JCB doesn't.

I also liked the acting, even if there were too many characters to keep track of - as the Star Trek films have shown, you can't do as much with an ensemble cast over the length of a film as you can across a series. (Most of the problems with the film, major and minor, come back to it being a spinoff from Whedon's cancelled TV series Firefly, which had the same setting and most of the same cast; to put it more bluntly, the trouble with the film is that it is a film and not a TV series.) I particularly liked what were effectively the two male leads, the wonderful Chiwetel Ejiofor as the Operative (who wasn't in Firefly) and Nathan Fillion as Mal (who was). Before Firefly Fillion was in Buffy, towards the end - he played Caleb, the backwoods hellfire preacher who had gone to the bad and kept on going. Personally I didn't think much of him, but I think now the problem was more with the character than the actor. Mal is a great character. He gives the impression of blundering through life without much to sustain him but his determination to keep on blundering through, and of being the captain of the ship for no real reason other than that somebody had to do it. That, and a deep but unfussed love for the ship and its crew, and the determination to keep the show on the road for as long as possible. It's the ordinary bloke as leader, essentially; it appealed to me. Fillion brings it off well, particularly the anti-heroic moments where Mal's inner shallows come out:

- Zoe, the ship is yours. Remember, if anything happens to me, or you don't hear from me within the hour... you take this ship and you come and you rescue me.

- Do you want to run this ship?
- Yes!
- Well... you can't!

He also delivers one particularly fine line of dialogue which I won't quote - it's the last line of the last deleted scene on the DVD. It's a good scene - an exception to the general rule that deleted scenes were deleted for a reason.

As for the film's major weakness, it's the plot. Without giving away too much, the film sets up a horrifically evil force early on, apparently as part of the back-story scenery. Much later, this force turns out to be centrally involved in the main plot of the film, in an entirely unexpected way. I was left feeling that there was something wrong about this - it didn't seem to work as a feature-film plot motor. I don't know if any of the plot of the film figured in Firefly, but it seem to me that what Whedon gave us wasn't so much a plot as a story arc - a theme which could run underneath a series of plots, occasionally affecting the way they developed, before being resolved at the end of a series. (Think "Dawn as the Key" or "Faith and the Mayor".) If you take that out, the plot of Serenity boils down to two people chasing each other - and in the end they both get away.

But perhaps we wouldn't want it any other way: a good plot has a resolution, and resolutions end things. Even Buffy ended, after the total implosion of Sunnydale, with the casual revelation that there was another Hellmouth out there (Cleveland, apparently). Harry Shearer once said that the reason Hollywood studios don't get comedy is that in comedy you don't want your characters to go on a journey or learn a lesson - you want them stuck, like Laurel and Hardy on the steps with their piano, and you want them to stay stuck. Something similar applies to genre fiction, perhaps. Having met Mal and his crew, I feel about them very much as I do about Buffy - I don't want to know how they got to be 'brown coats', and I certainly don't want to know about what happened after they gave it all up and settled down. But I wouldn't mind another story about them flying the ship, going where they go, doing what they do. This one was fun.

You young people

2006-09-27T19:47:00.000+01:00

100 years ago:

To be blunt, the problem is a large majority of Labour MPs in the Commons; it's only going to be addressed by reducing that majority.

But what would that get us, apart from making the Whips work for a living and preventing another disaster like the Prevention of Terrorism Act (which isn't nothing)? The obvious answer is, of course, "Blair out". I wonder about this; I wonder if anything short of a hung parliament would loosen the man's grip on power. But let's go with it: on May 6th Labour is returned with a majority of 35 (say), and on May 7th the knives are out for Blair. And then what?

When I first started thinking about this scenario I came up with all sorts of possibilities involving four- or five-way internecine warfare within the Labour Party: Blairites vs Brownites vs Old Labour (right) vs OL (Campaign Group) vs OL (left but anti-CG)... It could get extremely messy, and extremely interesting in terms of who would come out owing favours to whom. It won't, though, for the simple reason that Blairites are serious about power (as, indeed, are Brownites). As soon as Brown emerged as the front runner (i.e. almost immediately) the Sensational Tony Blair Machine Without Tony would swing behind him, and it would all be over bar the shouting.

Blairites vs Brownites vs Old Labour (right) vs OL (Campaign Group) vs OL (left but anti-CG)... I don't know what possessed me to nominate 'Old Labour (right)' as a runner - most of them jumped ship to either Blair or Brown long ago - but apart from that I think I called it pretty well. 'Old Labour, left but not Campaign Group' won't have their own candidate, but the way they break between the other non-McDonnell candidates will be interesting and may be significant. Watch for the apologias: Alan Johnson is still a trade unionist at heart; Why Brown/Cruddas is the dream ticket...

The last couple of sentences, though... how wrong you can be. There's a song by Peter Hamill which sums up a certain kind of anti-political cynical populism, the kind of sentiment which seems at once radical and common-sense (a combination I always distrust):

Politicians fight it out on the conning-tower
But they all agree not to rock the boat

That's just the trouble with populism: no imagination. I don't see much sign of that gentleman's agreement in the Labour Party at the moment. I see factions fighting like rats in a sack, and be damned to what happens to the country (or other countries) as a result. It's one of those moments when political spectacle starts to present itself as such - compelling but distant, autonomous and utterly unaccountable - so brazen is its participants' disdain for their audience, the voters. It's disgusting, but it's still fascinating. Equally: it's fascinating, but it's still disgusting.

Top tip for any would-be late entrant in the contest: change your name by deed poll to None Of The Above. You'd walk it.

171.69

2006-09-21T22:53:00.000+01:00

The British land speed record currently stands at 300.3 mph. It doesn't look as if Richard Hammond will be the driver to break it.

If 'driver' is the word. News coverage of the Hammond story has stressed how unlike a car, in any familiar sense of the word, was the thing that Hammond tried and failed to guide down a track. Apparently there's some form of steering, but apart from that you've got a jet engine and some parachutes and, er, that's it.

No disrespect to the neurally-injured Hammond, but I can't help feeling that's not driving. Parry Thomas, now, there was a driver. He was also the chief engineer of Leyland Ltd, but it's as a driver that he'll be remembered, or deserves to be. He was the last driver to set the (world) land speed record on a racetrack (Brooklands, where else?); in one extraordinary contemporary film-clip, Thomas's long-nosed 1920s racer scoots casually past everything else on the track, looking for all the world as if everyone else was standing still.

But there were limits to what you could do on a circuit, and Thomas (along with rivals like Malcolm Campbell) needed space. Hence his choice of the seven-mile beach at Pendine in South Wales, where in 1926 he pushed the record up to 169.30 mph and then to 171.02 (or, in some accounts, 172.33). His car Babs was a heavily-modified Higham Special, bought from the estate of the racing driver Louis Zborowski (killed at Monza in 1924); Thomas even fitted pistons of his own design.

Enter Campbell, who in January 1927 took the record back with a speed of 174.22 mph (or possibly 174.88). In response Thomas took Babs back to Pendine. On the 3rd of March 1927, at a speed of anything up to 180 mph, he lost control of Babs; the car skidded off course, turned over and crashed, killing him instantly.

Babs was buried in the sand, and since then the beach has never again been used for speed trials. There was some talk of mounting a British land speed record attempt there in 2007, supposedly to tie in with the eightieth anniversary of Campbell's 174 mph; it may not come to anything, particularly after Hammond's crash. Personally, I'd have thought another eightieth was a bit more pressing.

Babs was buried in the sand, anyway, but it didn't stay there. In 1969 the car was dug up by a local enthusiast who wanted to rebuild it; my family lived in Pendine at the time, and I vividly remember the exhumation. I remember that my father, who was the Senior Administrative Officer on the local military base, was involved in some capacity - although, thinking about it now, it was probably a "here comes the SAO, look busy" kind of capacity. Eventually Babs was rebuilt, and it now takes pride of place in the Museum of Speed a mile or so down Pendine Sands. It's well worth a look if you're passing - and Pendine is well worth passing. (No, I mean it's well worth passing that way in order to visit... never mind.)

I'd like to say that Parry Thomas was the last British holder of the land speed record, or the last to break the record in Britain, or the last to do so in something even vaguely resembling a car, or something - but history's not that neat. Nevertheless, you don't break land speed records these days in a car with a piston engine, and you certainly don't do it in Britain. Parry Thomas's death may not have ended an era, but it was very much of an era, and one which doesn't seem much less distant now than Stephenson's Rocket.

Footnote: the speed in the title comes from the Tea Set's 1979 tribute to Thomas. I haven't seen it anywhere else; all the sources I've seen set Thomas's record-breaking speed either lower or higher. He was going pretty bloody fast, anyway.

Just to keep you from danger

2006-09-20T22:51:00.000+01:00

An open-and shut case?

The charge alleges the force "failed to conduct its undertaking, namely the investigation, surveillance, pursuit and detention of a suspected suicide bomber, in such a way as to ensure that the person not in its employment (namely Jean Charles de Menezes) was not thereby exposed to risks to his health or safety".

Apparently not.

In a statement released after the hearing, the Met said the prosecution was based on actions taken by officers facing "extraordinarily difficult circumstances" on that day. It said they were "not criminal acts" and that the officers had the support of the force.

It went on: "The decision to defend the case has been reached after the most careful consideration. It is not about diminishing the tragedy of Jean Charles de Menezes' death.

"We see it as a test case not only for policing in London but for the police service nationally. It also has implications for the general public in that it concerns the ability of the police service to protect the public at large when carrying out armed operations.

"We also profoundly question whether health and safety at work legislation, originally designed over 30 years ago to protect employees in the workplace or those affected by commercial enterprises, is the right 'vehicle' for evaluating the actions of an emergency service in relation to decisions made during fast-time, life-at-risk anti-terrorist policing operations."

There are a couple of interesting aspects to this. One is the apparent absence of wiggle room in the charge brought by the Crown Prosecution Service. Whether 'criminal acts' were committed, whether officers faced difficult circumstances or whether the individuals responsible enjoy the support of the force: these are not issues. The CPS isn't even asking whether the risk to the public posed by police action was avoidable, let alone whether it was in some sense acceptable. The question is whether the Metropolitan Police, collectively, conducted anti-terrorist operations in such a way as to avoid endangering the life of Jean Charles de Menezes. Defending the Met against that charge isn't a brief I'd like to take.

That said, it seems unlikely that the Met's defence case will rest on the claim that they didn't put de Menezes at risk. One line of defence is hinted at by the (otherwise baffling) comment that the case concerns the ability of the police service to protect the public at large. As a member of the public at large, that's very much my own view of the prosecution, and one reason why I'd like it to succeed. The police statement presumably intends a different inference: to convict the people responsible for de Menezes' death, by implication, would make it harder for the police to protect the public at large. We shouldn't hold one death against them - after all, another time that guy running for the train with a Metro under his arm might actually be a suicide bomber, and if they couldn't shoot him down like a dog we'd all be sorry. Well, maybe.

The Met's other line of defence concerns the appropriateness of Health and Safety legislation. I'm in two minds about this. On one hand, you can see their point - this isn't legislation that was drafted with police work in mind, and to have it apply to anti-terrorist policing seems particularly incongruous. On the other, the argument against having it apply seems shaky. Should the police be exempted from a duty of care towards the public - or at least, a duty not to put the public's lives at risk? Should armed police? It's not an appealing thought. As for this specific case, ~~criminal charges against the officers responsible~~ a prosecution for corporate manslaughter would be more conventional - but, since that ~~isn't likely to happen~~ offence doesn't exist in English law, a Health and Safety prosecution is hard to argue with. [Thanks to Chris for pointing out the obvious problem with my initial thoughts. It was late.]

So it's an odd case, but I think the charge is fundamentally sound - and, as it stands, unchallengeable. My only real misgivings concern what happens when it gets to court (not until next January); I hope for the best and fear the worst. In particular, I fear that the Met and its allies in the press will play up the novelty of a Health and Safety prosecution - conveniently ignoring the absence of any other prosecution - and harp on the vital importance of anti-terrorist work. At worst, the Met could end up laughing the case out of court - and securing themselves a Get Out Of Jail Free card in the process, against the day they screw up again and kill another innocent passer-by.

Mind how you go.

I am nine

2006-09-06T23:30:00.000+01:00

Here are some of the things that happened when I was nine (give or take a couple of months either way), and which I remember. (I'm using the BBC site rather than Wikipedia, which doesn't seem to have much British news from that far back.)

Apollo 11 (I remember watching the landing)
The introduction of the 50p coin (I remember ten-bob notes, anyway)
Apollo 12 (I watched that too; I thought this was what life was going to be like)
The first jumbo jets
Apollo 13 (whoa, bad news)
The World Cup
Ted Heath winning an election (vaguely)

And, er, that's it. I have no memory of (among other things) Chappaquiddick, the murder of Sharon Tate, the Chicago Eight, the Piazza Fontana bomb, Ian Smith declaring UDI or the PFLP hijacking four airliners and blowing them up. (Quite a year, really.)

The first political event I remember? Probably the Aberfan disaster, when I was six. World events didn't really impinge, although I do remember answering a question at school about plagues by suggesting that you could have a plague of gorillas; there seemed to have been a lot on the news about gorillas recently. My first poem, written at the age of eight on a prescribed theme of 'sunset', was about refugees from a 'bloody war' 'far away' (who didn't get much joy out of the aforementioned sunset). I was taken to see the headmistress on the strength of it; these days they'd probably call Social Services.

It's probably not surprising that my musical memories of 1969-70 are a lot clearer. But I mean, a lot clearer. I remember

Thunderclap Newman, "Something In The Air"
(I thought this was wonderful)
Zager & Evans, "In The Year 2525"
Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Bad Moon Rising"
Bobby Gentry, "I'll Never Fall In Love Again"
the Archies, "Sugar Sugar"
Rolf Harris, "Two Little Boys"
(I hated this with a passion)
Edison Lighthouse , "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)"
(as with the Thunderclap Newman, I thought this was v. meaningful and moving)
Lee Marvin, "Wanderin' Star"
(I hated this too)
Simon & Garfunkel, "Bridge Over Troubled Water"
Dana, "All Kinds Of Everything"
(and I wasn't too keen on this one)
Norman Greenbaum, "Spirit In The Sky"
England World Cup Squad, "Back Home"
Christie, "Yellow River"
(a friend at school was born in Hong Kong; this song was the bane of his life)
Mungo Jerry, "In The Summertime"
(this was absolutely the best thing ever)

In other words, I've got distinct and in some cases vivid memories of just about every number one single in the period. I could even say I remember

Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg, "Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus"

inasmuch as I clearly remember watching Top of the Pops the week it was Number One. (At least, I remember the studio audience dancing for three minutes in silence in a darkened studio, but I think memory must be exaggerating slightly.)

Pop music goes back earlier than politics, too. The earliest pop music I remember would have to be the Honeycombs' "Have I the right"; it was number one the week I turned four (two years before Aberfan). And it still sounds wonderful.

Then there was

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, "Tears Of A Clown"

It's just outside the period - after Elvis singing the ghastly "The wonder of you", which followed "In the summertime" - but the memory's too vivid to pass by. Not so much the song (fabulous though it is) as the accompanying performance by Pan's People. I can't remember the details, but I know I fell in love with one of the People there and then. (The pretty one, you know.)

But by then I was ten, which is quite another story.

No more toys for grown-up boys
When I am ten I'll remember when
I was nine and had a wonderful time
I'll look back nostalgically...

This is the first verse

2006-08-30T23:30:00.000+01:00

Nothing much here lately. Just to stop the grass growing, here's another 25-first-lines thing: song titles and artists in comments, please. This one's a bit different, as you'll see. Some more obscure than others; there are a couple I'd be particularly pleased for somebody to get, and one which would probably earn you a pint (it's from a privately-produced CD by a friend of mine). (A couple of bona fide Chart Hits, too.)

Update 4/9/06 An email from Tina bags the last easy ones, plus a couple of difficult ones. (Hi Tina!) The rest are all a bit on the obscure side, I'd say - not that I'd mind being proved wrong. Have at it.

Update 13/9/06 All remaining beans spilled.

A certain kind of love, I’d say
- Soft Machine (Rob)
A long time ago, we used to be friends
- Dandy Warhols (Tina)
Bonfires in forests, lamplights in houses, all obscured
- Graham Coxon (Tina)
By a waterfall, I’m calling you
- the Bonzo Dog Band (Rob)
Colin Zeal knows the value of mass appeal
- Blur (Tina)
For years unspotted, Henri Dupont wheeled his barrow in Marseilles
- Barry Booth (lyrics by Terry Jones)
Give me your love and I’ll give you the perfect lovesong
- the Divine Comedy (John)
I can see clearly now the rain has gone
- Jimmy Ruffin (JJ)
I don’t know what to do with my life, should I give it up and make a new start?
- Buzzcocks (Jamie)
~~I often dream of trains~~ when I’m alone
- Robyn Hitchcock (Tina)
I stand by the building in the pouring rain
- the Mekons
Inside of me, take as much as you can find of me
- David McComb
It’s happened before, most likely it will happen again
- Ed Kuepper
Jacqueline was seventeen, working on a desk
- Franz Ferdinand (Biscit)
Loving you is easy 'cause you’re beautiful
- the Charlatans (Syd)
Mother Mary and the morning wonder, take me home
- the Earlies
Nothing you could say could tear me away from my guy
- Mary Wells (and subsequently Aretha Franklin, among others) - Alex
~~Put your hands on the wheel, let the Golden Age begin~~
- Beck (Justin)
Red rain is falling down
- Peter Gabriel (JJ)
Señor, Señor, can you tell me where we’re heading?
- Bob Dylan (Rob)
Sometimes love is friendly
- Hilary Bichovski
~~This time we almost made the pieces fit, didn’t we girl?~~
- Jimmy Webb (Brian)
Waste of time - it’s all a waste
- Peter Blegvad
Well, it seems like the funky days are back again
- Cornershop (Rob)
You rolled into town like an unscheduled train

Nothing Painted Blue

Never return again

2006-08-06T20:42:00.000+01:00

It's been a bad week for deaths. Arthur Lee died last Thursday. If you drew a line from Brian Wilson's ice-cream symphonies to Dylan's lyrical manifestoes, you'd meet the Arthur Lee of Forever Changes right in the middle. Arthur Lee was a great artist, responsible for some of the strangest and most beautiful moments in recorded music. His best years were well behind him when he died - but then, I would have said something similar in December 1980, and that was still a dreadful loss. So is this.

On the same day that I heard about Arthur Lee, I read that Pierre Vidal-Naquet had died (thanks, Paul). Vidal-Naquet was a great scholar, a lifelong political activist, a consistent left-libertarian and an equally consistent challenger of historical revisionism - no small matter on the French ultra-left, sadly. He leaves a gap which it's hard to see any one person filling. (Writing that line reminds me of yet another recent departure, for whom it's just as valid: Murray Bookchin, who died the day before Vidal-Naquet. Hard times for left-libertarians.)

But I have to say that none of these losses affected me as much as a fourth. Bob Smithies, who died the same day as Arthur Lee, was a gifted photographer, a Manchester Guardian man and a local TV personality. But more, much more than this, he was Bunthorne, compiler of some of the best crosswords I've ever attempted to solve. Bunthorne didn't go in for the kind of themed crossword which John Graham ("Araucaria") made his own, or for Araucaria's meticulous distribution of easy and hard clues. The puzzle as a whole, for Bunthorne, took second place to the clue. Here Bunthorne had two specialities. One was the vast, sprawling anagram of thirty or forty letters, spread over six or seven separate lights and immediately identifiable by the liberal use of punctuation marks and contractions. The other is harder to describe, but can be summed up as "clues that don't look like clues": sequences of words which make a kind of sense, but seem to supply either far too little information for solving purposes or far too much (the page linked above features a celebrated example of the latter: "Amundsen's forwarding address" (4)).

Solving a crossword clue (for me at least) is primarily a matter of letting my mind work on it while I'm doing something else; the answer generally comes to me fully-formed, leaving me to work out how the subsidiary indications fit in afterwards. Still, there are clues that you can solve by mental brute force, decoding the subsidiary indications one after another and trying to make a word from what comes out ("between the points, that'll be compass points, maybe it begins with N and ends with S?"). It's a perfectly valid way to set a puzzle; most of Araucaria's puzzles could in theory be solved entirely by this approach, without any relegation to the mental back-burner. Not Bunthorne's. I've never known a setter whose clues were so unamenable to the methodical approach or so insistent on being solved in a flash of (delayed) realisation. There was a teasing, gnomic quality to the best of Bunthorne's clues: you knew you were being told something; you knew you didn't - yet - know what it was; and you knew that thinking wouldn't help. You couldn't say, afterwards, how you'd worked it out, because you hadn't. Every Bunthorne clue solved was a small but mysterious victory.

And now it's over: there will never be another Bunthorne crossword. Bob Smithies has left a gap - and, unlike the other three people I've mentioned, he's left a gap in my life personally. I hate that feeling, particularly at the moment. It's been four months now but I still miss my mother, in much the same sense that somebody in a liferaft misses being on board ship. I've lost people before now and felt there was a gap in my mental skyline, but this time it's more as if the ground's gone.

Death just doesn't seem like something we're equipped to deal with. Tolkien wrote somewhere that he'd realised, after seeing friends killed around him in the First World War, that death was the great paradox: on one hand, for a loved one to die is the worst and most unbearable thing that can happen; on the other, death is absolutely universal and absolutely unavoidable, the one thing which we can say with certainty will happen to everyone who's been spared it so far. Crushingly unbearable yet universal and inevitable: how can that be? Apparently the story of Aragorn and Arwen began as an attempt to deal with this paradox, as it were by taking a God's eye view. If love, among mortal beings, leads to the worst pain imaginable, how could an immortal love a mortal? But if love is divine and mortals are worthy of it, how could an immortal not? To put it more simply and without the elves: how can love be worth the pain?

The answer is, I suppose, that it is because we need it to be - or else that it isn't but we still need it to be, because the only alternative which would be even halfway comfortably numb would be a life without love, and that would be unbearable in itself. Shortly after a friend died, a couple of years ago, I saw a prize example of stoner-philosophy graffiti, which nearly sums all this up:

LOVE + PAIN = LIFE WHICH LEEDS TO DEAF

Nearly, but not quite - life also leeds to birf (and a whole new round of LOVE + PAIN), as eny fule kno.

The cold in our eyes

2006-08-04T00:14:00.000+01:00

Is it anti-semitic to criticise Israel? Is it anti-semitic to criticise Zionism? Is it anti-semitic, even, to oppose Zionism - to believe that the state of Israel (as established in 1948) was a thoroughly bad idea which should be replaced by something better?

To put it another way, does anti-semitism lead coherently to opposing Zionism - would we expect somebody who hated Jews also to hate the state of Israel? Because, if this logical entailment is invalid, it follows that the reverse inference - from anti-Zionism to anti-semitism - also falls. To put it crudely, if you can find me one Jew-hater who doesn't also hate the idea of Jews having their own state, then we can no longer assume that anti-Zionism follows from anti-semitism.

Sir Oswald, would you care to comment?

[anti-semitism is] a very old growth in British soil especially with people who come from the countryside when they come into contact with Jews. It is probably latent in the racial or traditional consciousness of a great many of these men. I am not arguing the merits of it. You may think me a great scoundrel for indulging in this and for developing it as much as we have, but there is something in it ... [My solution] is constructing a national home for them which would put an end to all this friction it engenders which is as harmful to the Jews as it is to us. It changes his character into a gangster and arouses in us a certain brutality and it is bad for the Jew and bad for us.

From the records of Mosley's appeal against detention as a fifth columnist, 1940 (quoted in the Skidelsky biography).

Now, Oswald Mosley is not the most reliable witness, even (or especially) on his own account. Skidelsky portrays him (apparently without realising it) as a monster of arrogance and sadism, utterly without loyalty or scruples, consistent only in his drive for personal dominance. If Zionist sympathies would make it easier for him to get out of jail, Zionist sympathies he would have. Nevertheless, it's a coherent argument he makes here. If British Fascists attacked British Jews, their objection was not to Jews per se but to the 'friction' which inevitably results when Jews live among Gentiles (T.S. Eliot had developed a similar argument). Since Fascists are primarily concerned with building their own homogeneous nation, there's no obvious reason to object to the formation of a Jewish nation by some of the Jews who were excluded from the Fascist fatherland; indeed, Fascists might offer Jewish nationalism a distant brotherly welcome.

I don't know what Mosley would have said about the invasion of Lebanon; it's entirely possible that his anti-semitism would have triumphed, and that he'd have been prominent among the critics of Israel. That said, it's clear that there's a line leading directly from hatred of British Jews to approval of a Jewish national home - and that it was possible, without any kind of contradiction, to oppose the presence of Jews in Britain and approve of their presence, under suitably nationalist auspices, in Palestine.

So, you can say that criticism of the Lebanon operation is anti-Israeli; you can even say it's anti-Zionist (some of it certainly is). But don't even think of saying it's anti-semitic.

The answer lies in yesterday

2006-07-24T21:30:00.000+01:00

Call me insufferably pretentious, but when I think of the Labour Party I can't help thinking of the opening of Chtcheglov's 1953 Formulary for a new urbanism. (Bear with me, there's some good stuff further down.)

We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the roadside hoardings, the latest state of humour and poetry:
Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines
Notre Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden Touch Sawmill
Centre for Functional Recuperation
Saint Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street
And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement centre on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.

And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

I do like 'Golden Touch Sawmill'; it's not quite 'Lucky Smells', but this was (a) 1953 and (b) reality. But anyway:

Maintenant c'est joué. L'hacienda, tu ne la verras pas. Elle n'existe pas. Il faut construire l'hacienda.

Call me insufferably pretentious, but where the Labour Party's concerned that for me just about says it: maintenant c'est joué. The Labour Party under Kinnock and Smith was still, in some significant and useful respects, the same organisation that it was under Wilson and Gaitskell and Attlee. When radicals like me argued against Labour there was always an unanswerable counter-argument: this is the Labour Party; this is the party of the organised working class in Britain. It's a big argument, and it got a lot of use. Labour leftists used the Argument to justify staying in the party; entryists used it to justify burrowing away within the party rather than building their own organisations; even Socialist Workers used it, to justify supporting Labour 'critically' (or 'without illusions' or 'go on, just once more' or whatever it was).

Maintenant c'est joué. Firstly, the Labour Party - whatever else it is these days - is not the party of the organised working class. Secondly, the New Labour clique (who are serious about power) have taken steps to prevent it ever becoming that party again. Thirdly, the frankly spectacular New Labour approach to mobilisation, combined with a massive and broadly welcome disaffection with Labour as a party, have left the Labour Party in so weak a state that it wouldn't be much use to the organised working class, even if they turned up tomorrow asking for their party back. If we want a party of the Left, we'll have to build it. The actually-existing Labour Party is a distraction at best.

I've thought like this for a while, but a debate I was in recently brought home to me again the enduring weight of the Labour Party on the Left - and the increasing deadness of that weight. In a comments thread on Dave's excellent blog, I recently got involved in an argument with a Labour Party member. It was something of a dialogue of the deaf; I never really got an answer either to the question "why are you in the Labour Party?" or to "why do you think you're on the Left?", and I got the impression my interlocutor's silence wasn't down to inadvertence or rudeness. Rather, it seemed that the two questions were at once inseparable and unanswerable:

of course I'm in the Labour Party, I'm on the Left!
And:
of course I'm on the Left, I'm in the Labour Party!

It's an increasingly meaningless and arbitrary association of ideas, I'd argue, and one which badly needs to be challenged.

Anyway, here's my half of the conversation (with light edits):

[quote]
I'm slightly depressed, but mostly surprised, to see someone talking about 'us' being in power. Mind you, I didn't really feel that the Labour Party was in power under Callaghan and Healey (for verily, I am an old fart and do remember the last time Labour won elections).

...

Parties change, and the Labour Party's changed more than most. I voted Labour all through the Foot, Kinnock and Smith years; right now I'm actively opposed to Labour and doubt I'll ever vote for them again.

I used to vote Labour, because I believed in what I thought to be Labour policies and I thought that the Labour leadership in government, kept under pressure by the Labour Party in the country, would implement some of those policies. All that's gone now. The policies of the leadership are far to the right of anything that has ever gone out under the name of Labour before, even under Ramsay MacDonald. The mood of the party in the country is better, but it's still more right-wing (and more leadership-friendly) than anything I remember even from the Kinnock/Smith period. In any case, the leadership has systematically dismantled all the structures which enabled the party to hold it to account, and now openly claims the right to make Labour policy on the hoof.

New Labour doesn't mean socialism, or social democracy, or even the kind of timid while-resources-permit reformism the party had been reduced to by John Smith's time. New Labour means corporate capitalism, disciplined communities and a tight hold on the reins of power. So, for as long as Labour means New Labour, Labour is not us.

...

The long-term trouble with Labour is that if you back away from 'extreme' left-wing policies for long enough, you end up with something that nobody will actually vote for, because there's nothing really there. Blair understood this: he offered a break from the Labour leadership's long history of apology and evasion, all those years of left-wing but not far-left, left-wing but responsible, left-wing but patriotic...

Blair isn't left-wing at all: that's precisely his strength. He came to power promising something radically different from the previous fifty years of Labour policy, and he's delivered it in spades. I distrusted him from the off, but he's gone beyond even my expectations. (Privatisation of the Health Service, by a Labour government - I wouldn't have believed it even five years ago.)

What I don't understand is where Labour Party members actually stand these days: setting aside group loyalties, what is it they believe in which the Labour Party can deliver, and only the Labour Party?

...

[in response to a comment that this is a 'centre-right' country]

You can't say there was massive popular support for New Labour in 1997. Nothing, short of a major split in the party, was going to stop the Tories losing to Labour in 1997. John Smith would have won easily if he'd lived. (Perhaps he wouldn't have had quite so many ex-Tory votes or quite such a huge majority, but neither of those is necessarily a good thing.)

You can't say there's been massive popular support for New Labour since 1997. Guess which election had a larger number of Labour votes - 1979 or 2005?

And you certainly can't say there's been massive popular support for New Labour policies. Who knew in 1997 that they were voting for ASBOs and Neighbourhood Wardens? Who knew in 2001 that they were voting for an appointed House of Lords and an invasion of Iraq? Who knew in 2005 that they were voting for NHS privatisation and compulsory ID cards?

I don't think this is a right-wing country. I do think that submission to authority runs very deep in British society, though: there are a lot of people who want to feel they're being led by a strong leader, someone who knows what's best and may even punish them for their own good. And what better proof of strength could a leader have than taking on his or her own party?
[endquote]

I think this last, tangential point may have been the most important one. You could argue that the Blairites haven't done anything qualitatively new; they've simply improved and enhanced a self-destruct mechanism which was built into the Labour Party all along. I'm referring to the eternally recurring confrontation between the Moderate Leader and the Extremist Agitators. Labour is a left-wing party, but it's not really acceptable to bring a party of the Left inside the institutional tent - at least, not until the leader has proved his party's moderation by facing down the extremists at the grass roots. Blair has only done what Kinnock and Gaitskell did before him, only at a higher level.

The odd thing is that this anti-democratic manoeuvre - a trial of strength, a proof of mastery by leader over party - seems to have a definite emotional appeal. My interlocutor on Dave's blog repeatedly harked back to the glory days of Kinnock's leadership; it turned out that the pinnacle of Kinnock's achievement, in this person's eyes, was his confrontation with the Mils.

Shortly after the debate on Dave's blog had petered out, I started reading Robert Skidelsky's ghastly biography of Oswald Mosley. (Quite interesting in many ways, I have to say, and I'm sure there'll be more mosleyblogging in the days to come. Still ghastly, though.) Here's an excerpt from the original Introduction:

From 1961 onwards I was actively involved in the Labour Party, both at the university level and in the Campaign for Democratic Socialism. It was Hugh Gaitskell's courage, in face of the bitterest denunciations from his own party, in fighting for what he believed to be right, that really attracted me to Labour politics at the time. To be drawn into politics by the personality of a leader may seem immature. Yet there is a sound reason for it. On the quality of the leadership depends the possibility of action. This truth has never, it seems to me, been adequately grasped by social democratic parties. They spend their lives talking about the world to come; yet saddle themselves for the most part with leaders who are all too obviously content with the world as it is: hence the literature of 'betrayal' which pours out in unceasing flood from social democratic pens. Early on in my reading about Mosley I was struck by the dedication of John Strachey's book Revolution by Reason (1925): 'To O.M. who may some day do the things of which we dream'. This exactly parallelled my own feelings about Gaitskell, though not about his successor.

(Sorry, Harold.)

What Skidelsky says here, among other things, is that he was drawn to the Labour Party because the leader was at odds with the party. In effect, his loyalty wasn't to the party but to the leader, and the leader's faction - since, after all, the quality of the leadership determines the possibility of action.

Politics as the cult of the leader - and the cult of action (a favourite Mosley word). It's a way of thinking that hollows out the party, and ultimately the government; democracy doesn't really come into it, either ideologically or structurally. In this perspective the tragedy of the Labour Party is that, although the movement from which it grew represented a strong and coherent challenge to this mentality, the structure of the party itself created opportunities and incentives for new leaders to assert and impose themselves - progressively weakening the party's democratic values as they did so. The rot set in a long time ago, in other words; by 1997 I suspect it had already gone too far to reverse.

L'hacienda, tu ne la verras pas.

Update 25th July: Today's dose of Skidelsky fortuitously brought me to this passage:

Although officially the struggle was between socialism and capitalism, Labour and Tory, Mosley interpreted it in personal terms: himself versus the Chamberlains and the press-lords.

(On the same page Skidelsky writes: "With the local Labour newspaper, the Town Crier, and its editor, W.J. Chamberlain, Mosley established excellent relations (fortified by substantial subsidies)." Not all press-lords, then - or all Chamberlains. But anyway...)

This personalisation of the conflict heightened its drama and bound working-class voters to Mosley (and through him to the Labour Party) in a way which more orthodox methods would never have done (or at least so quickly); at the same time it left something of a bitter taste in the mouths of some of the eclipsed, plodding, local Labour officials. ... Mosley's fault to these Labour activists was that he identified the Labour movement with himself, rather than the other way round.

It looks as if one reason why Oswald Mosley never made it as a Labour politician was simply that he was ahead of his time.

There's a party somewhere

2006-07-24T17:29:00.000+01:00

I'm not much of a raver; actually I've never raved in my life, with the possible exception of a couple of hours at a hotel near Preston, one night in 1988. (I was there for a systems analysis course. I said I wasn't much of a raver.)

All the same, I remember smiley-face music, and I remember how things heated up a few years later, with the CJA and 'repetitive beats' and so forth. So I probably shouldn't have been too surprised by this:

Police are desperately trying to find out details of a "mega" illegal rave expected to take place in the coming weeks, as forces across the country begin to report a significant resurgence in the free party movement.
[...]
Forces admit there has been a surge in activity, including one party in north Cornwall that was attended by more than 5,000 revellers. Officers are warning landowners and the public to be on their guard after receiving intelligence that large raves may be being planned for weekends in August, particularly over the bank holiday.
[...]
On a national level forces are working hard to make sure they share information about raves in the pipeline. Thames Valley police is using Asbo legislation to try to take out prolific rave organisers, while police in Norfolk, another rave hotspot, this week urged landowners to make sure ravers cannot get access to prime party sites.
[...]
Over May bank holiday this year hundreds of VW and custom car fans headed to Newquay in north Cornwall for an annual Run for the Sun rally. The police did not notice that among them were many hundreds much more interested in sounds systems than air-cooled engines. Officers watched helpless while as many as 5,000 people partied at a well-organised but illegal rave on a disused airfield at Davidstow, near Camelford. Once thousands of people are on site the police tend to monitor and contain the event rather than try to break it up.

In other parts of the country police have managed to stop big raves. One which had attracted as many as 2,000 people in Northamptonshire was halted; a week later Avon and Somerset police got wind of a planned rave at an old firing range and managed to blockade it. Chief Inspector Richard Baker of Devon and Cornwall's contingency planning unit accepted the Davidstow rave had not been on the police's radar but said the force was now better prepared. Intelligence specialists were monitoring websites and party phonelines to try to pick up word of further free parties and festivals.

But I was mildly surprised, not by what's in this story so much as what's not there: any reference to why the police are so keen to stop people dancing on airfields. The last time things were kicking off, I'm pretty sure that the news coverage was all about how dangerous these scary new wild parties were: the neighbours would be deafened, the sites would be left knee-deep in litter, the countryside would be trashed... As for anyone foolhardy enough to actually go to a rave, they'd be lucky to escape with their lives, what with the dangers of being crushed, trampled underfoot, overheated, dehydrated or unknowingly taking a lethal cocktail of drugs. As time went by it became clear to anyone who bothered to look into it that the organisers of free parties were generally pretty responsible when it came to trashing the environment; that remarkably few people were getting crushed trampled overheated, etc; and that even the drugs people were taking were, by and large, non-lethal. But by that time the legislation was in place and the scene had gone into an enforced decline.

So it's not entirely surprising that, faced with a new wave of rave (sorry, please nobody use that), the relevant police forces are ready and waiting to stop it in its tracks. What is interesting is the absence of any kind of justification - or, in the case of our man at the Guardian, any sense that there ought to be some kind of justification - for these operations, which seem to be a fairly massive clampdown on activities which don't appear to be doing anybody any harm.

Of course, there are laws against raves, passed by the Tories in the mid-90s (with the assistance of the then Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair). It'd be understandable if the police were making a case for impartial law-enforcement (we don't have opinions about the law, sir, we're just here to make sure it's obeyed), although obviously there would be room for arguments about priorities. But what's going on at the moment appears to go further. Note the reference to anti-social behaviour:

Thames Valley police is using Asbo legislation to try to take out prolific rave organisers

According to the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (which introduced the ASBO), 'anti-social behaviour' equals 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' (emphasis added). Picture yourself a rave organiser up before the court. How do you fancy your chances of persuading a magistrate, not only that your activities were not illegal, but that they were not likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress?

I'm old enough to remember acid house; I'm also old enough, just about, to remember this. It looks as if that's where we're heading.

Save our kids from this culture

2006-07-21T21:30:00.000+01:00

My frustration with the bearpit that is Comment is Free was brought to a head by this bizarre post by David Hirsh. Once again, I'm going to reproduce my CiF comment here, because frankly I think more people will pay attention to it here than there.

First, a word about Hirsh's argument. He opens thus:

Since before it even existed, Israel has been engaged in two wars with its neighbours. One is a just war, waged by Palestinian Arabs for freedom - which became a demand for Palestinian national independence; the other is a genocidal war that aims to end Jewish life in the Middle East.

The job of the left is to insist on the reality of this distinction and to stand against those who recognise the reality of only one or other of these two separate wars.

The job of the left - ugh. Something very Euston about that formulation - the call to duty, with the implication that this might not be a duty we all like.... But let's press on.

The problem with social reality is that if enough people believe something to be true, and act as though it is indeed true, then it may become the truth. So if Israelis believe they are only ever fighting a war of survival, then they will use tactics and strategies that are proportionate to the war they believe themselves to be fighting. If Palestinians, meanwhile, come to believe that they can win their freedom only by destroying Israel, then they will think of the Jew-haters of Hamas, Hizbullah, al-Qaeda and the Syrian and Iranian regimes as their allies in the task.

The only way out is for cosmopolitan voices and political movements to insist on the reality of both wars - to separate them conceptually and to stand clearly for a Palestinian victory in the fight for freedom and equally clearly for an Israeli victory in the fight against annihilation.

There's a certain narrowness to Hirsh's focus here. I'm quite prepared to nail my colours to the mast and say that I'm not in favour of annihilation, by and large. On the contrary, I'm very much in favour of people who are alive being enabled and permitted to remain alive. But I don't think this commits me to supporting 'an Israeli victory' of any sort, in any set of geopolitical circumstances which I can begin to imagine developing out of the current situation.

But maybe my imagination just isn't up to the job. A few more words from David, this time in the comment thread:

its not far-fetched to imagine a very serious threat. Imagine if the regime in Syria and Iran were joined, perhaps by a Jihadi-revolutionary regime in Saudi and perhaps a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. Add these to a Hamas led Palestine and a Hezbullah led Lebanon. This is hypothetical, yes, but entirely possible.

Imagine also, perhaps that the neo-cons in Washington are replaced by the neo-realists - Mearsheimer and Walt advising the White House that it is in the national interest of the US to ditch Israel.

Imagine also a global liberal intelligensia and labour movement that believes the Israelis are so evil that they deserve what's coming to them.

But its OK, because Israel is heavily armed.

The logic of your position, then, is that it is a good thing that Israel has the 4th largest army in the world (or whatever it is) because it guarantees their survival.

So how do you feel about the proposal of an arms embargo against Israel? How do you feel about the proposal to stop US aid and to stop the US selling arms to Israel?

What then is there to guarantee Israel's survival?

I'll stop beating about the bush: I think this argument is silly, offensive and dangerously dishonest. If Israel's apologists genuinely believe the country is engaged in a fight for survival at this moment, they're self-deceived to the point of insanity. If they don't believe that but think that what's going on now should be understood by reference to a completely hypothetical worst-case scenario, they're grossly dishonest. Perhaps even more important, the 'fight for survival' argument is being used to divert attention from what the Israeli government and army are actually doing; in other words, it's being made to do work that it couldn't do even if it was valid.

Here's a comment I prepared earlier:

David,

I think your argument is interesting & instructive, but not quite in the way that you think it is.

There are (at least) three questions which can legitimately be asked of the state of Israel without arousing suspicions of anti-semitism. Firstly, can the state itself be described as constitutionally unjust, either from its founding or since 1967 (and two-thirds of its history is post-67)? I assume you'd answer No, but many people would answer Yes - including many diaspora Jews and a good few Israelis. But a constitutionally unjust state is one which needs to be replaced, not reformed: replaced through the actions and with the consent of its citizens, certainly, but still replaced. In normal circumstances (I'll return to this point), asking whether - as a matter of principle - a constitutionally unjust state has the right to perpetuate itself is asking whether injustice has the right to continue.

Secondly, is the state's posture of perpetual war, and its repeated use of force rather than diplomacy, an appropriate response to the situation Israel finds itself in? Answer No (as many of us do) and any incursion into Gaza, any house demolition, any IDF sniper bullet carries a burden of justification: is this specific action justifiable, or is it just another example of an established, unjust pattern? This is where the allegations of prejudice start flying - those who answer Yes to the second question don't believe there is any such pattern, and consequently judge each specific action as 'innocent until proven guilty'.

Lastly, when the state does resort to military force, is its use of force appropriate and proportionate? It's important to note that this is a completely separate question from the previous one (and does have to be judged on a case by case basis). If I'm fighting for my life and I kill a defenceless passer-by who wasn't threatening me, I'm still a murderer. (Cf. suicide bombers.)

I found your 'Imagine' comment particularly enlightening. Because circumstances alter cases - a position that would be appropriate in normal circumstances isn't necessarily appropriate in the middle of a war. If Israel were an isolated underdog, entirely surrounded by states which seriously wanted to invade and destroy it, and unable to count on any outside assistance - if this were the case, my answer to question 1 would change (from 'Yes' to 'Maybe, but that's not important right now'). And if Israel were not only surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned, but on the brink of an exterminationist final conflict - in that case my answer to question 2 would probably change (from 'No' to 'Maybe not, but it's not for us to say').

So what's instructive about your article is the insight it gives into a certain Israeli mindset - a mindset which I can't regard as being grounded in reality, and one which I'm happy to say isn't universal among Israelis. I also think it illuminates a further, basically irrational slippage over the third question: are the IDF's tactics in Gaza and Lebanon (and elsewhere) disproportionate and inhumane? The answer which comes from Israel's apologists seems to be, essentially, "They had to do something, these people were going to kill them all!" Even in the nightmare scenario where this was actually true, it wouldn't be an adequate answer: if someone's trying to kill you, it's not self-defence to burn out the family who live next door.

Not that anyone appears to be listening to arguments like these. (They certainly aren't listening on Comment is Free...) In a way that's the worst thing about the current situation - the sense that the killers of the IDF are doing exactly what the killers of Hezbollah want them to (and vice versa), so that things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better.

It will have blood, they say - blood will have blood.

Don't have nightmares.

Free of the need to be free

2006-07-20T16:56:00.000+01:00

At the risk of sounding like a bad standup -

Mark Thomas: ...this - thing - that’s really tepid and bland and moulded to fit this Lego model of comedy... seventies gag, TV presenter gag, difference between cats and dogs, difference between men and women, have you ever noticed at a dinner party...

- have you ever noticed, right, you know that Comment is Free site? It's not very good, is it?

Here's a comment I posted today (and it says something that I think I'm giving it a wider distribution by posting it here):

I find myself in the weird position of both agreeing and disagreeing with you. I agree with you that there is a problem. The comment threads on CiF are a complete and utter mess; I'm approaching the point of giving up on CiF and posting anything I want to say about CiF/Graun content on my blog, just like I used to.

What I don't agree with the way you describe the problem. I found the tone of both this and the previous 'Less is more' post really startling - offensive, even. You [addressed to Georgina Henry] seem to genuinely hate a lot of the comments posted on CiF; not all of them, of course, just the ones you describe as 'pointless chatter', 'slanging matches', 'quick-fire insults', 'mindless irrelevant chatter' and indeed 'rubbish'. That doesn't necessarily mean you hate the commenters, but I imagine your attitude to anyone who positively values the comments you hate would be pretty tetchy.

But how can you sustain this opposition between the pristine blog and the spoilsport commenters? In other words, when did CiF exist in the form you think it ought to have, before the invasion of the pointless chatterers? I wasn't watching CiF all that closely over the first couple of weeks, but I strongly suspect the answer is 'never'. This is your blog: this is how you designed it. The comments threads would look very different now if you'd required real names to be printed; or if you'd required commenters to display an email address or a blog URL under their name - or even if you'd allowed email addresses or URLs to be displayed. It would look different if you hadn't thrown open commenting rights to anyone who applied; it would look different if you hadn't allowed talkboard users to inherit commenting rights. And it would look different if all CiF content were written by journalists with a personal interest in blogging, rather than consisting very largely of rebadged opinion columns.

All of these are design decisions. The decisions which you (or your blog advisors) made created CiF as it is now.

One other thing leapt out at me from the previous piece.

persistent breaches of our talk policy ... pointless chatter that litters threads ... degenerate into back-and-forth slanging matches ... try our talk boards. Alternatively, as some have done, they can start their own blogs (we're happily linking to quite a few) and continue the quick-fire insults in their own space.

Leave blogs out of it, eh? I could name several blogs where the quality of the debate is in a different league from CiF - where it's something like how I imagine the Platonic ideal of CiF debate, even. But none of those blogs was widely advertised and immediately thrown open to all their readers - and none of them was written by high-profile journalists with a record of ignoring their critics.

To sum up, the reason CiF almost immediately became a high-volume, high-polarisation, Harry's Place/LGF scratching-post isn't that it's a blog. The reason is that it's a blog designed by people who don't understand blogs, and written by people who don't like blogs.

It happened before

2006-07-18T10:03:00.000+01:00

I hate it when my doctoral thesis gets topical. Here are some figures:

1975	1976	1977	1978	1979	1980	1981
333	282	277	190	103	33	81
92	169	460	1110	802	258	141
3	8	5	28	21	25	15

Take a moment to read across the rows and get a feel for the shape of the series. Row one starts pretty high - almost one of these things per day - then declines year on year, plummets to almost nothing in 1980 and makes a weak recovery in 1981. Row two starts low-ish (about one every four days) then rises continuously and rapidly as the first series falls; it peaks in 1978 at the extraordinary value of 1110 (three of these things per day) then declines quite steeply, although the 1981 value is still higher than the 1975 starting point. As for the third row, it starts low, jumps to a higher value at the time of the 1978 peak, then stays close to that higher level for the next few years, even while the second series declines.

The figures all relate to Italy. Row one represents the number of mass radical protests (strikes, demos, occupations, mass shoplifts, rent strikes, etc). It's an approximate figure in all sorts of ways, but everything I've read suggests that the trend is valid.

Row two is the number of actions by radical 'armed struggle' groups.

Row three is the number of people killed by those groups.

And here's Anjem Choudray, self-described spokesman for the banned organisation Al-Ghurabaa:

We have been functioning here for the last 10 or 15 years and nobody has ever been arrested for any terrorism-related offences. What this will do is it will militarise many people, because if you stop people propagating their thoughts and ideas, then you will push them underground and after that you have no control over them.

Nice one, Dr Reid.

Forza Italia!

2006-07-09T22:18:00.000+01:00

And you won't often hear me say that.

There will be time to wonder about the mysteries of this World Cup - why were the announcements in English? why did the band keep playing "Go West"? why did the crowd keep singing "Vindaloo"? and what did England think was going to happen if they went on playing like that? Time to lament Zidane's idiocy (and Rooney's), time to talk about penalty shootouts, time to wonder why the Germany/Italy match was quite so beautiful. And, not least, time to assemble a fantasy squad consisting entirely of players with Christian names for surnames (Terry, Neville, Gerrard, Henry, it practically writes itself).

For now I just want to leap around like a loon. The result couldn't have been better, apart from the bit about being decided on penalties. Italy were one of the two or three best teams right through the championship; they played against Germany like wolves on speed, and if the final was a bit of a bundle by comparison they still handled themselves nicely for the full two hours. And, most importantly, Berlusconi got kicked out before the contest began, so all the reflected glory will go to Prodi & co ("Have you noticed how we only win the World Cup under a Labour Government?")

Zambrotta, Cannavaro, Materazzi, Grosso, Camoranesi, Pirlo, Gattuso, Perrotta (he's a local lad, you know), Totti, Toni, Iaquinta, De Rossi, Del Piero and (not least) Buffon, vi salutiamo. And I won't apologise for saying it again - if we think it's a big deal to reclaim our flag from fascists, spare a thought for Italian fans who can't say "come on Italy" without it sounding like an endorsement for you-know-who. Time to have done with that.

Forza Italia!

Searching for something to say

2006-07-06T22:27:00.000+01:00

Time for a bit of pure self-indulgence; I'm doing the 20-first-line thing again. Only with 25 (thanks Rob), and with a whole bunch of songs either missed out or included for completely arbitrary reasons. (So I skipped some albums which appeared in the earlier attempts, but not all of them.) The difference from the previous two attempts is essentially that this is 25 songs I actually like.

~~"When your world is full of strange arrangements and gravity won't pull you through"~~
- ABC, "The look of love" (Justin)
~~"Well I remember when you used to look so good and I would do everything I possibly could for you"~~
- Love, "Bummer in the summer" (Chris)
~~"Summer was gone and the heat died down"~~
- Nick Drake, "Time of no reply" (Justin)
~~"Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad"~~
- the Velvet Underground, "Pale blue eyes" (Larry)
"As I was walking all alane"
- traditional, "Twa Corbies"
~~"You've got to hope for the best, and the best looks good now baby"~~
- Spiritualized, "Do it all over again" (Unity)
~~"They stumbled into their lives"~~
- Blur, "Fade away" (Justin)
"Everyone's too nice to me, the way Vincent Price would be with midnight coming on"
- Peter Blegvad, "Special Delivery"
"D'you lay with a shallow girl?"
- James Yorkston, "I awoke"
~~"Your railroad gauge, you know I just can't jump it"~~
- Bob Dylan, "Absolutely Sweet Marie" (Alex)
~~"Who could find him, the sidewinding Indian?"~~
- Spiritualized, "Do it all over again" (actualfactual)
"~~Moon is giving sunshine, clouds are full of wine"~~
- Laika, "Marimba song" (Unity)
~~"Boy, do you hear me say, do you hear me say now?"~~
- the Concretes, "You can't hurry love" (actualfactual)
~~"This old world may never change"~~
- Fred Neil, "Dolphins" (Jim)
~~"Sonically we're in control"~~
- Leftfield, "Original" (Unity)
~~"I want, him wants, you want, who wants, he wants, I want, him wants, I want"~~
- Happy Mondays, "Do it better" (actualfactual)
~~"They're nice and precise - each one begins and ends"~~
- Buzzcocks, "Fast cars" (actualfactual)
~~"Drag boy dog boy dirty numb angel boy"~~
- Underworld, "Born slippy" (James)
~~"Why this uncertainty? It's not clear to me - would you rather be independent?"~~
- Pet Shop Boys, "One in a million" (Unity)
~~"Spring was never waiting for us, girl"~~
- Richard Harris, "MacArthur Park" (Lisa)
~~"So you lost your trust, and you never should have"~~
- Coldplay, "See you soon" (actualfactual)
"It's the darkest time of year"
- Robyn Hitchcock, "Winter love"
"Thinking of all the times you missed digging it in, you can't resist"
- Ed Kuepper, "By the way"
~~"First time, I did it for the hell of it"~~
- SFA, "Something for the weekend" (Alex)
~~"Brown Eyes and I were tired"~~
- Brian Eno, "St Elmo's Fire" (Unity)

Have at it.

Update 13th July: that's your lot. Well spotted, all.

Hide them when you're able

2006-07-05T21:58:00.000+01:00

I've got a logical mind, perhaps excessively so; people sometimes call me a pedant, but I always point out that pedantry is characterised by excessive reliance on canonical sources and works of reference rather than by mere consistency in the exercise of rational thinking. That shuts them up, I can tell you.

Anyway, having a clear and intuitive sense of propositions such as "if A is true, not-A must be false" is surprisingly useful in some lines of work, but it can make the fuzzier areas of human interaction a bit problematic. In my last job but one I had the misfortune to be part of a group that was selected for an Outward Bound-style 'team-building' exercise, which would take place over a weekend and include lots of the kind of jolly fun activities which I'd managed to avoid for the whole of my adult life and most of my childhood. Correction: a voluntary Outward Bound-style 'team-building' exercise. Cue a conversation with my manager:

"I don't think I'll go on this thing."
"Are you sure? You know, I think you should."
"Well, maybe. But, I mean, it's not compulsory, is it?"
"No, no, it's not compulsory. Think about it, OK?"

And another:

"I really don't think I'll go on this thing."
"I don't know, I really think you ought to. The idea is that the whole group goes."
"Sorry, you mean it's compulsory?"
"No, no, of course not. It's just that it's better if the whole group goes."
"I appreciate that, but it's just not my thing."
"OK, well. It's not compulsory, of course. But just think about it, OK?"

And another:

"Look, I've thought about it some more, and..."
"OK, I know you don't want to go, but I really think you should."
"But... what can I say? I really don't want to go. And it's not compulsory..."
"No, no, of course it's not compulsory. But I really think you should go."

If it's not compulsory, it must be voluntary.
But:
If I can't choose not to go, then it's not voluntary and it must be compulsory.
But...

Brane hertz.

(I went, of course. Parts of it were OK - the rope walk was very cool - but other parts were truly, enduringly awful. I got my revenge in the whiteboard feedback session on the Sunday afternoon.)

That was a long time ago, and I've had a bit more experience of smudgy social reasoning since then. But sometimes even now the fit descends and I turn into LogicMan (None withstand his remorseless inferences!). Most recently in the case of that cuddly Old Labour mascot, John Prescott. Charlie has the story; Alex has the British background; and Dave has the American ditto. Me, I've got the logic.

You see, Prescott's stay on the Anschutz ranch was either personal - an even lower-rent version of Blair's hols with Berlusconi - or business. It can't be both; it can't be neither; it must be one or the other.

If it was personal, why wasn't it declared in the Register of Members' Interests at the time?
If it was personal, what were civil servants doing on the trip with Prescott? (Ugh - better rephrase that before the mental images get out of hand.) If it was personal, how does Prescott justify taking civil servants with him?
If it was personal, why was the offsetting payment to charity made out of government funds?
And if it was personal, why on earth would Prescott choose to spend his holidays with an unsavoury character like Anschutz? (See Dave's post for details.)

On the other hand:

If it was a trip on government business, why has the trip been declared in the Register of Members' Interests at all?
If it was business, why has a payment been made to charity?
And, if it was business, what business could Prescott possibly have to discuss, legitimately, with Anschutz?

Logically, the whole thing's a tissue of contradictions. There are only two interpretations that make any kind of sense. Either it was a personal holiday funded by the taxpayer - including personal assistance from Prescott's civil servants; in this case Prescott is personally corrupt on a truly Italian scale, as well as having lost any sense of political principle. Or else it was a business trip laid on to ease the path of Anschutz's bid for the Dome Casino (si New Labour monumentum requiris...); in this case Prescott is politically corrupt, as well as having lost any sense of principle. And either way he's a liar.

Perhaps this is LogicMan speaking, but surely there's no way out of this one. Prescott has to resign as Deputy PM; if he's any sense he'll resign as an MP, too, before the Standards Committee pushes him. And then he should apologise, in person, to the people of Liverpool. (Not because he's done anything to them, just because it was funny when Boris did it.)

Tell me, how much can you take?

2006-07-04T19:53:00.000+01:00

The blogs I read regularly have changed a little since I started blogging, but not the blogs I avoid. I can think of a few right-wingers whose frame of reference is so different from mine that, if I did read them, I'd spend all my time responding to them - I mean the kind of people who not only use 'socialist' as an insult but apply it to Blair. Fortunately there aren't many of them (I'm speaking only of British bloggers here) - and besides, depriving myself of Tory blogs isn't much of an effort. Unfortunately there are also some left-wingers whose frame of reference is so different from mine that, etc, and they're harder to avoid.

All of which is prompted by one of my very rare visits to the Normblog; I was genuinely interested to know what Geras would say about Gaza. What he said about Gaza was this:

No government could ignore them.

That's the Qassam missiles that have been fired from Gaza into Israel; and who is saying it is today's Guardian leader. From that you might infer that the Guardian thinks Israel is justified in taking retaliatory action of some kind to put an end to these missile attacks, as well as to kidnapping incursions into its territory. Forget about it.

No, 'the distinction between preemption and retaliation [is] now bloodily blurred', there's a 'harsh cycle of attack, retaliation and vengeance', and everything's too much of a mish-mash to be able to discern anything clearly about actions and responses - I mean too much of a mish-mash in that Guardian leader.

The fact remains: no government could ignore them, and no other would be expected to.

No government could ignore them; ergo it's hypocritical to argue that Israel should ignore them, and the only debate to be had is about 'how' rather than 'what' (let alone 'why'). Some form of armed response can be justified; or, if we can't justify it, perhaps we can condone it; or, if we can't justify or condone, we should recognise that it was inevitable and stop carping. In effect we bracket the morality of the Israeli armed response, taking it as read that armed response is the kind of thing nation states do. What we can legitimately discuss is the scale of the Israeli armed response and the choice of one set of targets rather than another.

But something's wrong here. I can concede the premise that No government could ignore them - any government of any nation state would respond in some way to missile attacks and an abducted serviceman - but not that we have a duty to put ourselves in the offended government's position, trading off our moral instincts against interests of state and the logic of military expediency. Even the Guardian leader which offended Norm goes down this route:

Bombing bridges may have some military logic, but the destruction of a power station seems intended solely to intimidate and inflict collective punishment.

Unsurprisingly, a commenter promptly weighed in in support of bombing power stations as a military tactic.

I keep remembering a grotesque image from children's literature - E. Nesbit, perhaps, or C.S. Lewis in a darker moment - of a friendless giant: he wants someone to play with, but every time he finds somebody and picks them up they break and then they're no good for playing with any more... Israel's intentions with regard to the Palestinians aren't playful, as far as we can see, but the government's actions and its self-image remind me of that giant's endless, unstoppable destructiveness and his undentable innocence.

But they were killing our people - of course we dropped bombs on bridges and a power station and a university and the Prime Minister's office! We had to do something!

Or, for that matter,
But they were living on our land and they said it was theirs - of course we blocked their roads and ploughed up their orchards and closed their shops and bulldozed their houses and shot at their children! We had to do something!

There comes a point, I would argue, when quantity becomes quality: when the disproportion between the two parties to a conflict becomes so huge, so glaring and so consistent as to make it impossible to treat them as interchangeable (But he hurt me, says the giant sitting amid the smoking ruins, I had to do something...). There comes a point when the question is not "After this provocation, could any government do nothing?" but "Whatever the provocation, should any government do this?" I can't think of many governments which have gone in for forcible demographic re-engineering as heavily as has Israel, under Right or Left. Ceausescu springs to mind; Pol Pot, of course, and Mao for that matter; Saddam Hussein, maybe. It's not what you'd call a Hall of Fame.

This relates to a minor but telling weakness in the Euston worldview. The Euston Manifesto's seventh paragraph didn't get much sustained attention at the time, perhaps because everyone was still boggling from the sixth ("Opposing Anti-Americanism"), perhaps because it didn't seem to do very much apart from committing signatories to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Personally I've been a single-secular-democratic-state person for some time - I remember a friend asking me, all of twenty years ago, why it was that the same people who denounced the bantustan system in South Africa seemed to want to create bantustans for the Palestinians. Euston paragraph 7 nicely crystallises my doubts about the two-state solution:

We recognize the right of both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution. There can be no reasonable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that subordinates or eliminates the legitimate rights and interests of one of the sides to the dispute.

Or, as I parodied it at the time:

Palestine. Ah yes, but Israel. Palestine: Israel. Israel: Palestine. We can't have a settlement that the Palestinians don't like, but that also means that we can't have a settlement that the Israelis don't like, because that wouldn't be fair. Palestine: Israel. Israel: Palestine. You see my point? It's a tough one, isn't it?

The problem is that, for as long as Israelis define themselves as 'the Israeli people', whose self-determination is a distinct issue from the self-determination of a 'Palestinian people', the identities of 'Israel' and 'Palestine' will be perpetuated; and those identities are the identities of the perpetrator and the victim of a great wrong. A great and continuing wrong, but one specifically excluded from the professed universalism of the Euston project. Ellis:

Three of the greatest propaganda achievements of the Israeli state are the concealment of the origins of that state, the construction of an image of Israel as a state much like other states, and the representation of Israel as the victim rather than as the aggressor. The violence, terrorism and injustice of what happened in 1948 are written out of history. And Israel is not in any sense like, say, Italy, or Britain, or the USA. The condition of Israel as an institutionally sectarian state which comprehensively discriminates against its Arab citizens and which for 58 years has been engaged in seizing more and more Palestinian land and water is rarely acknowledged.

No one is a nobody

2006-06-30T12:37:00.000+01:00

So we've just helped ourselves to a couple of chocolates from a left-over box of Miniature Heroes when our son walks in. He's eating an apple, but his attention is caught by the chocolates and he begins at once to plead and beg in a frankly rather undignified manner. Wife points out that he's got an apple. No, I say, he's holding out for a Hero. How we laughed. (Well, I did.)

(Left over from Christmas, since you ask. That's a lot of leaving-over, and I'm personally convinced that the salmonella risk is far from negligible. My wife, on the other hand, is personally convinced that I've taken hypochondria to previously unscaled heights of self-absorbed irrationality. It's a point of view.)

About heroes, anyway. That is, about managerialism, and about dedication and skill at work. (The following was formulated for a workplace IT survey, but I thought I'd give it a wider airing.)

There's a common misconception that informal technical support ("I just ring Bob and he comes over and sorts me out") doesn't work, and that tech support needs to be formally managed and controlled. This can lead on to a greater misconception, that formally-managed tech support can be delivered by people with less outstanding levels of knowledge and dedication than poor old Bob - "if you get the system right you don't need heroes".

Actually informal tech support works tremendously well, from the user's point of view. (Yes, there will be a backlog of unresolved problems and dissatisfied users - but there will be a backlog whatever you do.) That said, the first misconception has an element of truth, inasmuch as informal tech support is a nightmare to manage - but the managers aren't the ones whose problems need solving.

The second misconception, however, is flat wrong, and dangerous with it. Heroes are precisely what you need: people who know everything, can prioritise six half-finished tasks in their heads and (very important) like talking to users. Tech support is hard - you've absolutely got to have the right people doing it. And management doesn't help. Imposing formal management systems on those people may make their managers' lives easier, but it won't get the job done any better - it's more likely to get in the way.

In technical support, management isn't a substitute for heroic levels of skill and dedication. Management (from the point of view of the techie being managed) is a necessary evil - and you still need the heroes.

Ain't that close to love?

2006-06-24T14:38:00.000+01:00

When my son was born the midwife commented on his oily skin - "he'll be a spotty teenager". My own skin is noted for its sebaceous quality, so my reaction wasn't surprise so much as anticipatory fellow-feeling - tempered by the utter inability to imagine this eight-pound armful as a teenager, spotty or otherwise.

He's nearly eleven now and he's just got his first spot. I guess it all starts now. I wish him luck.

But I've got solid proof that he's not a teenager yet. We were watching The Breakfast Club last night (online DVD rental, it's a great system) when he walked in. He asked what it was about, and we told him the setup - five kids are thrown together in a Saturday detention class and we see what happens. He was baffled - he literally could not comprehend why anyone would want to watch a film with no plot, as he put it.

You have to have been a teenager, I think, or else still be one. My son had walked in on the effective, understated scene where the teacher cracks and challenges Bender to a fight. Bender, whose own father regularly beats him up, shrinks into a corner looking scared, bewildered and above all stuck. It's as if he's realising that his whole repertoire of bullying and violence depends on adults not replying with greater force - but that adults ultimately, inevitably, will. I can't imagine even explaining that one scene to my son for another year or two. (Mind you, all of that goes for nothing in the crawl-space blonde-joke scene that immediately follows, where Bender's back to playing a cross between Tony from West Side Story and Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. But it's that kind of film - the point's been made, so it moves on.)

I didn't see The Breakfast Club when it came out; it's a bit odd seeing it now, when I'm the age of the older-generation characters (the kids' parents, the sadistic teacher, the philosophical janitor). Some things which I expected to grate were surprisingly bearable - chief among them the ghastly scene where Molly Ringwald's character gives the Ally Sheedy 'basketcase' character a makeover, turning her from a nervy urban gipsy into a kind of sleepwalking Pre-Raphaelite mannequin, and hence enabling her to get the guy (in the shape of Emilio Estevez, 'the athlete'). I'd love to think this was ironic, but I don't think John Hughes really does irony, or not at anything above a Readers' Digest level ("His parents wanted him to be a success, but it was the pressure they put on him that made him fail!") If I'd seen that scene back in the 80s I would probably have walked out there and then. Now... meh. It doesn't offend me, because it's so clearly not about me. It could even be the kind of thing kids do.

On the other hand, I was irritated by some things which would probably have rung true to me back then. So Bender ('the criminal') has problems with his parents, notably that they get drunk and beat him up. It comes out over the course of the day that 'the athlete' has problems too - specifically, he has problems with his parents and their expectations of him. Ally Sheedy's character has problems with her parents (they ignore her); the Molly Ringwald 'princess' character has problems with hers, too (they're divorcing and use her to get at each other). The nerdy Anthony Michael Hall character doesn't appear to have any problems, until it turns out that he's contemplating suicide because he's not getting high enough marks... to satisfy his parents. I mean, come on, kids! Isn't even one of you losing sleep over your prospective choice of career or your gender identity or a lack of friends or illegal drinking or illegal drugs or illness or your penfriend not answering your letters or your cat dying, or anything apart from your parents? Always with the parents! They haven't got it easy, you know, and I'm sure they're all trying to bring you up properly (with the possible exception of the Bender household). We didn't ask for you to be born, you know. Well, OK, I suppose we did in a sense, but we didn't ask for you to be teenagers.

Still, they were nice kids. The dancing scene was another one which would have had me groaning and tutting twenty years ago - what's this doing here, it's just an excuse for a cut-price pop video.... Last night, I have to say, I found it really charming. I've retrospectively hated my teenage years for a long time (my twenties weren't that great either), but that scene in particular made being a teenager look like a lot of fun; more to the point, it stirred a few vague memories suggesting that it might occasionally have been like that. As I head towards being the father of a teenager - a role I'm sure I'll screw up horribly, just like everyone else - it'll be good to have those memories to hand.

And I wish him luck.

When you're a kid they tell you it's all grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have kids and that's it. The truth is, the world is so much stranger than that, so much darker and so much madder - and so much better.

There's safety in numbers

2006-06-20T22:35:00.000+01:00

Some time in the mid- to late 1970s I saw a fairly right-on play, set in Hulme in a dystopian near-future. (I had never been to Manchester and thought I was hugely enlightened for already knowing not only that there was such a place as Hulme but how to pronounce it - the L was silent, like the second K in Kirkby. The Guardian has a lot to answer for.)

Anyway, the idea of this particular dystopian near-future seemed to be that the out-of-touch benefit-cutting so-called-Labour government had washed its hands of the unemployed, the North or both, and what then? what then, eh? And no, we had no idea Thatcher was round the corner, but that's not what I wanted to talk about (although it may turn out to be relevant).

There were three characters in this play, a well-meaning politicised couple and a scruffy Manc on his own; they were sharing a squat in Hulme, the couple on grounds of principle and the second guy because he couldn't find anywhere else to live. As well as being well-meaning and political, the couple are both educated or Southerners, or possibly both. The scruffy Manc is none of the above. He's the one who complains, at one stage, about the (offstage) West Indians in the squat next door and their incessant loud reggae music.

Well-meaning woman: "Why don't you go and ask them to turn it down?"
Scruffy Manc: "Because I don't speak Swahili!"

Of course she came back immediately with some stuff about how they would certainly speak English, and in any case they were as British as he was. What sticks in my mind is that his line got a big laugh. That was the seventies; racism wasn't Till death and Love thy neighbour - what we tend to forget now is that those programmes were at the liberal end of the spectrum. Racism was a mundane, ubiquitous, unquestioned reality - even among the Guardian-reading types who would have been in the audience for that play. (I could make the same point quicker by referring to the Kinks' "Apeman" (1970) or John Gotting's "The educated monkey" (1979), both of which feature white guys affecting West Indian accents and singing about being an ape. I mean, really, what were they thinking? Or rather, what were we...)

So where did it go? Because there's no denying that the racism I grew up with has gone, or at least changed out of all recognition. When I was a kid 'Eenie-meenie-minie-mo' included the word 'nigger'; forty years on, my children have learned a version that doesn't involve catching anyone or anything by its toe, and the N-word is rather less acceptable in polite conversation than the F-word. This is certainly a gain in terms of civility, but I'm starting to wonder if it's anything more than that. Certainly the recent localised electoral victories for the fash suggest that the language of race still has some power to mobilise.

What's going on? I can see three main possibilities.

1. Genuine Progress (with pockets of ignorance)
The school where my children go is terrifically right-on, which can sometimes be rather wearing. (If they ever use the word 'culture' you know what you're in for, and it's not Beethoven.) Still, I know my children are far closer to being 'colour-blind' than I'll ever be. The other day my son got picked on in the swimming pool; we asked him to describe the kids who did it, and when we asked him whether they had brown skin he said "yes, but why do you ask?" That told us.

Maybe he's just less racist than we are in the same way that we were less racist than our parents, let alone our grandparents (ask me about my grandmother some time). Maybe in ten or fifteen years' time "why do you ask?" will be the default answer. Maybe this is what Progress looks like, and it's just progressing a bit slower down Dagenham.

That's the optimistic version. Then there's

2. "Face don't fit": prejudice by quota
The pessimistic assumption underlying this model is that people, en masse, have a tendency to hate, and they've got to hate somebody. We tend to hate people, en masse, on fairly irrational grounds, and probably always will - at least until the glorious day when people are spat at in the street for carrying the Daily Mail. (All right, not glorious as such, but you can't deny it'd be an improvement.) And, if one form of out-group identification is repressed, another will take its place. On this model, if we no longer talk about niggers and queers - that is, if nobody talks about niggers and queers - this isn't because tolerance and harmony have permeated white straight society. It's the other way round: if we don't routinely use offensive terms, after a generation or so the out-group production mechanisms which they stand for won't work any more.

But if, for whatever reason, people need an out-group to hate; and if, for very good reasons, the out-groups I grew up with have been ruled unavailable; then where does the hatred go? Ask a Traveller; ask a pikey. As much as I hate even appearing to agree with Julie Burchill, I think the hatred and contempt heaped on 'chavs' is a sign of something seriously wrong in our culture. (To be clear about this, I'm pretty sure that all actually-existing cultures have at least one thing seriously wrong with them. Which doesn't mean it's not worth concentrating on what's wrong with this one round about now - any more than saying that most gardens are full of big stones makes it less useful to dig ours over.)

The key point about 'chav' is that it derives from Traveller slang, and ultimately from the Romani for 'boy' or 'lad'; 'pikey', similarly, derives from (or rather is) a straightforward outgroup label for people who travel the turnpikes. Hatred of Travellers is the only form of racism which is still respectable. When a new outgroup was needed the 'gipsy' stereotype was readymade: 'chavs' are idle spongers, aren't they, and they're dirty and dishonest and flashy and aggressive... If the racism we knew has virtually disappeared, in other words, this may only mean that it's been replaced by new bigotries that we don't yet recognise as such.

Alternatively, maybe we should be thinking in terms of

3. The bitch who bore him
Think racism's gone away, or at worst gone to Dagenham? Think a brown skin is less of a bigot-magnet than a Burberry check or a tight ponytail? Well, actually, so did I, but I'm not sure now. It was a Manchester Evening News roadside hoarding that got me thinking. The headline read:

VIOLENT MIGRANTS STILL AT LARGE

VIOLENT MIGRANTS - there's a certain evil genius to that phrase. Back in the 1970s people moaned about reggae and the smell of curry, or at worst about 'them' coming over here and taking our jobs and our houses. You'd have to be at a National Front rally before you'd hear anyone talking about big black men who would kill you if you weren't careful. But here we are in 2006 and there it is on the front of the Evening News: VIOLENT MIGRANTS STILL AT LARGE. In other words, KILLER WOGS - BE AFRAID.

And this language has real effects. Here's that nice Dave Cameron's shadow Home Secretary; he's talking up recent prison breaks by arguing that earlier prison breaks, while there might have been more of them, weren't so bad because of the kind of prisoner involved:

The shadow home secretary, David Davis, said: "The Home Office's claim that the level of absconds from open prisons is the lowest for 10 years misses the point entirely.

"Ten years ago the people absconding from open prisons were not dangerous criminals or deportees. Since the government's decision in 2002 to put such people in open prisons, every abscondee represents an unnecessary potential risk to the public."

Dangerous criminals or deportees - classy. Here's what it's like if this unnecessary potential risk to the public has your name on it:

Since April 25, when the foreign prisoner story broke, at least 200 - perhaps many more - foreign inmates have been moved, without warning, from open prisons to closed ones. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that all of them had "offended against prison discipline" - the usual reason for such transfers. Last Friday [May 26], 300 prison officers in riot gear rounded up 135 foreign nationals at Ford open prison, Sussex, to be taken to closed jails. The previous week, according to a prison source, 30 foreign inmates were transferred from Latchmere House, a highly regarded resettlement prison in west London, to closed jails in the London area. Similar exercises have been carried out across the country, although yesterday [May 30] a home office spokesman said only that "around 70" prisoners had been removed from open prisons in this "temporary measure".

Lawyers and organisations such as the Prisoners' Advice Service have heard from scores of prisoners who have been suddenly moved in this way. Many are EU citizens; a few, though born overseas, even have British passports. Meanwhile, prisoners who were expecting to move from closed to open conditions have been told that the transfers are cancelled. At least some were not expecting to be deported at their end of their sentences. Elsewhere, prisoners who had been released under licence have suddenly been hauled back to jail. Some of these also had no reason to expect to be deported.

Perhaps even the qualified progress of the second model is an illusion. Perhaps the old forms of hatred are just as available, if you break through the crust of conventional anathema, as the new forms. And perhaps all it takes to bring racism back into the mainstream is a new spin, and (most important) a reason why a powerful group would want to try and pump it up - and groups don't come much more powerful than the Home Office.

Next: the lurking menace of the paedophile asylum-seeker. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Cold if you want it

2006-06-09T22:35:00.000+01:00

I interviewed Mark Thomas once - you can probably find the interview on the Red Pepper Web site if you look hard enough. Originally it was in three or four sections, each one prefaced with a quote from "White man in Hammersmith Palais"; a bit of a pretentious device, which unsurprisingly got lost in subbing. It seemed important to get punk in, though; Mark Thomas is a bit younger than me, and like me had his head turned round by what happened to music in 1976-7.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and so forth. But I'm not sure you can really remember '77 unless your memory goes back a bit further than that. The letters pages of the NME and Sounds at the time were full of what were essentially conversion narratives - Until last week I was a hippie - I had long hair, wore flared jeans and went to one concert a year... It wasn't quite that abrupt for me (or Mark Thomas) but there was definitely a before as well as an after.

Mark Thomas: I was into Yes, ELP... the first album I bought was Tarkus...
Phil: Top album!
MT: No! Sorry, no - it is not a top album. Step away from Emerson, Lake and Palmer...

Actually I've never heard Tarkus - I was basing my opinion on the track "Aquatarkus" on the live triple album Welcome back my friends to the show that goes on and on for bloody ages. I wasn't even into ELP. No, I was strictly Gentle Giant and Soft Machine.

I'll say more about Giant another time - I still think of their stuff with some fondness, as well as a lot of embarrassment. This post is about the Softs.

I got into Soft Machine rather late; around the time of their seventh album, to be precise. They were featured on a TV programme which I now can't identify (don't suppose anyone reading this has a copy of Graham Bennett's Out-Bloody-Rageous to hand?) on which they played, among other things, the track "Nettle bed". It consists mostly of a synthesiser solo, played over an endlessly-repeated synthesised bass riff, which itself is played over the kind of 4:4 drumming that gets called 'driving'. It's atypical of Seven, which itself was pretty unlike most of what Soft Machine had done before, but I didn't know that at the time. The music - combined with the sight of Mike Ratledge, all long hair and dark glasses, jabbing studiously at a bank of keyboards - made the same kind of impression on me as Eno-period Roxy Music had done a couple of years earlier: I thought I'd seen the future. For several days afterwards I held forth to anyone who would listen - my best friend, mainly - about my discovery of a whole new genre of music, which I called "soft rock". (Eventually my friend unsportingly pointed out that a) other people were already using the phrase "soft rock" to mean something different, and in any case b) I couldn't actually describe what I meant by the term without referring back to the track "Nettle bed" by Soft Machine.)

Still, I was sold - and the subsequent purchase of Soft Machine Seven only confirmed my conviction that this was the stuff. Over the next year I got hold of almost everything that was available by the band - which would involve a serious investment in time and money now, but at that time meant that I bought three albums. I remember that CBS had marked down both Third and Six, the band's two double albums, to £2.83; since my friendly local record shop took 10% off the price of everything, I got them both for £2.55. (Or rather, I got Six and my parents got me Third, an album which consists of four twenty-minute slabs of experimental jazz/rock. What a Christmas that was.) I also got Fifth, with its black-on-black sleeve design - but not Fourth, as by the time I got to it the stark embossed tan sleeve had been replaced by a two-tone brown-on-tan design, which wasn't nearly as impressive. (For anyone who’s counting, the first two albums were either deleted or had never been available in the UK.) Still, with that lot in hand I had a good two and a half hours of music to keep me going while I waited for Soft Machine Eight.

Which never arrived. Soft Machine were a band who had gone through some serious changes, and one of the most serious happened around that time. To simplify an extremely complicated band family tree, Soft Machine from the second to the fourth album consisted of founder members Ratledge and Robert Wyatt (drums), together with bassist Hugh Hopper (who replaced original bassist Kevin Ayers). Hugh's brother Brian played a bit of sax on the second album; he was replaced on a more permanent basis by Elton Dean (as of the third album), after a brief but productive experiment with a seven-piece lineup including trombone, cornet and flute. On the first couple of albums the Softs combined psychedelic pop songs with experimental jazz; Elton Dean's arrival tipped the balance definitively towards jazz, and began what's generally regarded as the Softs' great period. They were a band stretched taut between Dean's soloing and Ratledge's disciplined compositions, driven on by the power of the brass section and underpinned by a bassist and a drummer who could switch between 7/8 and 5/4 without drawing breath ("A few fives to take away the taste of all those sevens..."). A typical Soft Machine number would set up a melodic theme - often over an odd chord sequence and almost invariably over an odd time signature - then let a soloist loose on it (often Dean but sometimes Ratledge - an extraordinary soloist in his own right - and occasionally Hopper). But nothing went on too long: Soft Machine worked in suites. On Third, the LP-side-long track "Slightly all the time" actually consists of three separate pieces, built on themes with accompanying solos (in 11/4, 11/8, 9/8, 6/4 and 9/8 again). The power, the range and the sheer confidence of the band were extraordinary. They really were quite good.

But, on a personal level - as Bennett's book makes clear - it was all a bit of a mess. Wyatt liked to drink and socialise; he also liked singing, and tried for a long time to keep a vocal element in Soft Machine's music - in songs and then, as the big-band sound took hold, as scat improvisation. Neither Hopper nor Ratledge was big on the party scene, and neither of them had any interest in music with vocals. Third is a magnificent album, but the vocal/instrumental patchwork of the previous album is conspicuous by its absence: Wyatt's vocals are confined to the song "Moon in June", most of which was played and recorded by Wyatt alone and unaided. (One of my many anorakish niggles with Bennett’s book is that he doesn’t say enough about what was going on on that track - did Wyatt play the acoustic guitar solo? Is that Marc Charig’s cornet parping forlornly at the end, Nick Evans’ trombone or something else entirely, such as Wyatt making mouth noises? And am I the only person to spot the quotes from Kevin Ayers’ “Hat Song” (what about me...?)? Bah.)

Ultimately, Wyatt was going to have to go; ultimately he went, but not of his own volition. Perhaps due to the nature of the leading personalities in the band, being in Soft Machine was never a particularly convivial experience, but the sacking of Wyatt seems to have started a process which chilled the atmosphere in the band permanently. Dean got hold of a replacement drummer, the extravagantly energetic Phil Howard; Howard's style of drumming, heard on the first half of Fifth, isn't so much time-keeping as a permanent drum solo, with accents chosen for their expressive value as much as for the beat. Unfortunately, Howard got on much better with Dean than either Hopper or Ratledge, who felt the band was drifting into free jazz territory. So Howard in turn had to go, and Dean had to be the one who told him to go - an experience which soured Dean on the band. When he left, ironically, his replacement was nominated by Howard's replacement, John Marshall - Howard's antithesis, a timekeeper of metronomic precision (even in 11/4). The reeds gig went to Karl Jenkins, a personal friend of Marshall with whom he had played in Ian Carr's Nucleus. Jenkins was one of Britain's few jazz oboists and a fluent composer, if not a great one; Bennett quotes Hugh Hopper describing Jenkins' musical ideas as "third-hand and third-rate". (Incidentally, Bennett didn't manage to speak to either Jenkins or Ratledge, but includes quotes from both of them; like several of the book's quotes from Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Daevid Allen and other ex-Softs, these are taken from published sources and printed without attribution. This is seriously shoddy practice, which really diminishes the value of the book - although I can't say that I wasn't interested in what they said, whenever it was they said it.)

With Jenkins' arrival, at the time of the band's sixth album, the nature of Soft Machine's music changed. Listening to Six after Fifth, much of the improvisation is more pedestrian than before; the rock-influenced approach of improvisation over a riff is more prominent, as distinct from the jazz structure of theme and elaboration. Another thing that stands out when you listen to the Softs' albums chronologically is the quality of Jenkins' own solos, on oboe and sax; compared to Dean's endless melodic invention they're pretty thin stuff. Thin, and scratchy with it. With Hopper's fuzz bass and Ratledge's fuzz organ, there always was something abrasive about Soft Machine's sound; it was never easy listening, in any sense of the phrase. Jenkins' oboe solos take this to a new level, not only because of the harsh, whining tonality of the instrument but because of the narrowness of his range as an improviser: there's lots of high-then-low squawking and parping in octaves and fifths, lots of trills, lots of nagging repeats of a single note. Close-mike the instrument, as he did on Seven, and the sound's not so much abrasive as downright inhuman. To be fair, Jenkins always was a composer first and foremost. Some of Jenkins’ contributions to the sixth album are fully-scored, with no improvisation at all; in others the improvisatory element is confined to conservative electric-piano doodling. The composing's pretty conservative, too. Spotting the time signature had always been an incidental pleasure of listening to Soft Machine; on Third, Ratledge's superb "Out-bloody-rageous" (another track which doesn't really get its due from Bennett, ironically enough) is in the unheard-of time signature of 15:8, variously divided for rhythmic purposes into a 6 and a 9, a 7 and an 8, and three 5s. (Hence the title, presumably.) Nothing says more about Jenkins' approach than the fact that "The Soft Weed Factor", his contribution to the studio-based half of the album, is in 4:4. Where's the fun in that? (The other three-quarters of the studio LP are much better; Ratledge's "Chloe and the Pirates", in particular, which is built around two contrasting oboe themes, both equally striking but entirely different in mood. I'd been playing it for weeks before I realised that the second one was the first one played backwards.)

Seven came after Six - and after Hopper had left the band - so listening to it now, thirty-odd years on, should have been a massive disappointment. And, to a large extent, it was: the riffing is dogged and narrow (very rock); the solos (Ratledge's apart) sound elbowy, simultaneously unimaginative and ostentatious; the short tinkly piano pieces sound more than ever like a waste of space. I still enjoyed it, though: it's got the best production of any Soft Machine album, combining some emphatically synthetic tonality with a real sense of space and texture. (Kieran Hebden would like it.) And, if the solos and the compositions now sound like a poor copy of Third, I know that when I first heard the album I was comparing it with the likes of the Neutrons, Camel and Genesis - and, considered as jazz-rock, it's really not so shabby.

From then on that was about as good as it got, though. In June 1974, eight months after the release of Seven, Soft Machine did a session for Jazz in Britain. I never listened to JiB, so I don't know how I found out about it - idle reading of the Radio Times, probably. They did two tunes, "Plain Bob" and "The man who waved at trains". I taped the latter, an eight-minute composition. It began with a discordant cymbal-and-gong improvisation, which gave way to a beautiful, meandering oboe and guitar theme. (From "Slightly all the time" through "Pigling Bland" (Fifth) to "Chloe and the Pirates", Ratledge always did write good themes.) The statement of the theme was followed by a change of pace and a hurried, urgent oboe solo, before the track ended with a restatement of the theme. Unfortunately my supply of cassettes was limited at this point; after playing "TMWWAT" to death for a couple of weeks I taped over it, reasoning that it would be bound to appear on the band's next album.

Before that was released, though, there was one more major event in my career as a Soft Machine fan: I saw them live, for the first (and only) time. Since I was 14 and the gig was up in London - at the Rainbow, no less - my older sister accompanied me, with her boyfriend; as you can imagine, I didn't get much conversation out of them. The gig was a bit of an anti-climax. I remember very little about it now, possibly because Larry Coryell, the support act, overran wildly; by the time the band actually came on it was past my bedtime and looking ominously close to the tube-drivers' bedtime. (Bizarrely, I had a very similar experience at the Rainbow four years later, when the Slits were supported by Don Cherry. Must be something about the venue.) I remember the gig began with some complex but bland two-electric-piano noodling, which began, then went on without developing very much, then went on some more. I remember John Marshall pausing midway through his percussion solo to sprinkle some kind of powder on his skins; I remember that people started a slow handclap at this point, and that Marshall replied by holding up his sticks in a V sign. And that's about all I remember about the music. I do remember making what I hoped was a wittily blasé comment about looking forward to one of Ratledge's ghastly fuzz organ solos, directed at no one in particular (I'd given up on my sister by this stage); I remember making this remark at least twice, to no reaction from anyone. I don't remember any organ solos, certainly not with fuzz. Then again, I don't remember a guitarist, and I'm pretty sure Alan Holdsworth would have been there. I do remember the writeup in the next day's paper: "Musicians' musicians to a man, Soft Machine played themselves into a corner last night". Spot on, although of course I refused to admit it at the time.

There were flexis [Translator's Note: the flexi-disc or flexi was a seven-inch single, manufactured using thin plastic rather than standard vinyl and generally produced for promotional purposes] on the seats at the Rainbow, featuring extracts from the Softs' forthcoming album Bundles. For the first time ever, a Soft Machine album had a title, and a singularly unenlightening one it was too (it didn't even match the album cover). When the album came out, a few months later, I was pleased to see "The man who waved at trains" present and correct in the track listing but mystified to find (on getting the record out of the sleeve on East Croydon station) that the vinyl it occupied only looked a couple of minutes long; if that was eight minutes, I reasoned obtusely, how long was the whole album?. Of course, the band hadn't mastered some bizarre groove-cramming technique. "TMWWAT" really was only a couple of minutes long, and consisted of a theme, a bit of desultory oboe noodling and a restatement of the theme; the other parts of the composition had been scissored into separate tracks. "Plain Bob" was there, too, covering most of side 1 under the ridiculously pretentious name of "Hazard Profile parts 1-5"; as it turned out part 4 was just a riff, part 2 was a brief piano composition, and part 3 was an even briefer bridge between the two, with ascending organ chords and Allan Holdsworth's guitar in plangent, Camel-ish form. With part 5 a rather unexciting Ratledge synth solo, the main action was in part 1, where Allan Holdsworth sounded less like Andy Latimer and more like John McLaughlin.

Holdsworth's Soft Machine solos are extraordinary stuff, it has to be said, but his sudden prominence in the band was a bad sign. The Softs needed a soloist with the range, speed and melodic invention of Dean or Ratledge in his heyday, and Holdsworth certainly fitted the bill. But, unlike Third-period Ratledge, Holdsworth wasn't a writer as well as a soloist - and, unlike Dean, he wasn't working in creative dialogue with a writer. (Dean's blowing and Ratledge's chamber composition had a strange but productive relationship, summed up by Dean's one composing credit on Fifth: the final track, Bone, consists of the improvisation by Dean which opens the first track, Ratledge's All White, played note-for-note by Ratledge on fuzz organ.) Essentially, the problem with Holdsworth was that Ratledge wasn't doing any serious writing by this stage - and Jenkins, who had ostensibly replaced him as the driving force of the band, didn't have anything like his chops as a composer, let alone as an improviser. Jenkins' Soft Machine was a band which went from tasteful piano noodling to heavy-booted riffing and back again. They were in a rut, and plugging in a soloist - even one as driven and driving as Holdsworth - wasn't going to lift them out.

I didn't formulate all that at the time, but I did take Ratledge's overdue departure from the band - midway through sessions for the ninth album, the ironically-titled Softs - as a cue to lose all interest in them. (Plus by this stage punk was starting to kick off.) After Holdsworth, as I understand, John Etheridge joined on guitar; after Etheridge, Alan Wakeman joined on sax and Ric Sanders on electric violin. After that - not long after that - they wound up, although Jenkins later made a 'Soft Machine' album with Marshall and various other people; it's called The land of Cockayne, it's fully-scored and it's bland in the extreme. Jenkins later worked for several years with Ratledge (of all people) on music for commercials (of all things); Ratledge even had a small part in the early days of Jenkins' hugely successful 'Adiemus' project.

I remember vaguely believing - certainly at the time all this was going on, and for some time afterwards - that being in a band was rather like being in a gang, only more so, what with being grown up: if you didn't actually live in the same house, you would certainly spend lots of time hanging around together and know one another really, really well. And what did it mean when a band split up, other than that friends had fallen out? I couldn't imagine that you could be in a band and not spend time with the other members of the band, outside the times when you were actually making music together. Ironically, this was precisely true of Soft Machine, the band I followed more than any other. Bennett spoke to several ex-members of the band, and most of them tell the same story: from Fourth onwards - which is to say, from the time of Wyatt's departure - to join Soft Machine was to join a band whose members didn't socialise, didn't go to the bar together before a gig or the pub afterwards, didn't even chat or exchange the odd smile during rehearsals. You played the charts, you did your solo, you went home.

What I take from all this is that music is hard - or rather, working in groups is hard. For most of the time between Volume Two and Fifth, Soft Machine was a difficult band to be in - but throughout that time they produced music which (even with thirty years' hindsight) ranges from good to startlingly brilliant. Ten or fifteen years ago, I was in a political group called (hopefully) the Socialist Movement; we spent a lot of time and effort shaking off Trotskyist groups who wanted to latch onto us. Shortly after we'd got rid of the last of them - a tiny grouplet which held the British franchise of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International - the whole thing folded, either because we didn't have the numbers to run it any more or just because agreeing with each other was no fun. I think something similar happened in Soft Machine: the years when the group was biting chunks out of itself were also the most productive years. By the time of Seven (and "Nettle bed") the group had settled down in reasonable harmony around the core of Jenkins, Marshall and bassist Roy Babbington - all old Nucleus hands, effectively replacing the old Volume Two trio of Ratledge, Wyatt and Hopper. But by then Ratledge (still just about in the band) had long lost his fire, and the music had lost its edge. This just left Jenkins, neither opposed nor assisted by any other band member, to turn it out by the yard - as he has done ever since.

Groups shake themselves apart; if they're not doing that, they're stagnating. Perhaps.

We are the tables

2006-05-31T23:59:00.000+01:00

As the upload of Robert Wyatt's A short break completes, I have now ripped my entire CD collection; rather smaller than my vinyl collection, but it still amounts to 2690 songs (or seven days and 20 hours, as iTunes helpfully informs me). So let's do this properly. Hit it! (And for a bonus point, name two Talking Heads songs where David Byrne uses that un-David-Byrne-like expression.)

Step 1: Put your media-player on random play.
Step 2: Write down the first line from the first 20 songs that play.
Step 3: Let everyone guess what song the lines come from.
Step 4: Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly.

Same rules as before: no instrumentals, no sampled spoken-word, no songs with the title in the first line and nothing I don't recognise myself. Also no repeats from the first time I did this - in fact, nothing from the same album as anything that came up the first time round. And no two songs from the same artist. Simple, really. I don't know why we don't do this kind of thing more often.

Update 17th June - remaining beans spilled.

~~"You're the only woman I need, and baby you know it"~~
- Amen Corner, "Bend me, shape me"
"Ar ol llond poced o fadarch roes ti'r ty ar dan"
- SFA, "Dim Bendith"
"My eyes burn naked, my black cold numbers, my insecurities, my devious nature, make it go away"
- Underworld, "Sola Sistim"
"The last message you sent said I looked really down"
- Franz Ferdinand, "You could have it so much better"
~~"See me comin' to town with my soul"~~
- Beck, "E-Pro"
"Did you ever hover in the distance?"
- Robyn Hitchcock, "Oceanside"
~~"Nobody feels any pain tonight as I stand inside the rain"~~
- Bob Dylan, "Just like a woman"
~~"I want to chill, want to sit real still, want to sleep like the dead on a bed of roses"~~
- the Divine Comedy, "Bad ambassador"
~~"Last night your shadow fell upon my lonely room"~~
- the Electric Prunes, "I had too much to dream last night"
~~"Alcohol, heroin, THC, care in the impotent community"~~
- Fatima Mansions, "Chemical Cosh"
"Over an ocean away, like salmon, turning back for Nayram"
- Robert Wyatt, "Maryan"
~~"You've been away so long, too long, what's wrong with us today?"~~
- Lightning Seeds, "What if"
~~"I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll this time"~~
- Radiohead, "Lucky"
"I don't want to lose her, I don't want to hurt her, I don't want to lose her"
- Mull Historical Society, "Her is you"
"Sitting in the classroom, thinking it's a drag"
- Brownsville Station (covered by REM), "Smokin' in the boys' room"
~~"There's a farm called Misery, but of that we'll have none"~~
- Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Jollity Farm"
~~"Here comes Johnny Yen again"~~
- Iggy Pop, "Lust for Life"
"I saw two shadow men on the Vallance Road"
- the Libertines, "Up the bracket"
"Reporting damage, it is soft rock shit"
- Cornershop, "Lessons learned from Rocky I to Rocky III"
~~"Damn that television!"~~
- Talking Heads, "Found a job"
"When the last frost of Winter has thawed"
- Nothing Painted Blue, "Career Day"
~~"Hi, we're your weather girls, and have we got news for you!"~~
- the Weather Girls, "Why don't you eat carrots?"

Definitely more representative of my collection than the previous take; I think it might be easier, too. Over to you.

Update 2nd June: I realised when I got to the end of this list that I'd missed one out. So now there are 21.

Another update, 5th June: Paul (comments) has me bang to rights - there were actually two that got missed out. Oh well, make it 22.

The Wehrmacht never got in here

2006-05-31T23:01:00.000+01:00

Chris has a point:

Whereas Britain pursues overseas expansion, England stays at home. The great statements asserting the rights and the dignity of the ordinary man - and it was the Englishman G.K. Chesterton who said there's nothing ordinary about the ordinary man - are all English: Magna Carta, the Putney debates, Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. England is about cultivation, improvement and the assertion of liberty. Britain is about conquest, albeit often in a good cause.
<...>
England stands for freedom, Britain for conquest. England stands for quiet dignity, Britain for glory. England is grown and natural, Britain is imposed by the ruling class.

Britain, he might have added, is Great (originally to distinguish it from Brittany, the lesser Brétagne, but never mind). By contrast, England is Little.

But being a little Englander has never really been respectable. The spectre of the little Englander haunted last year's debate over the EU Constitution, and doubtless would have got more of an airing if we'd had a chance to vote on the damn thing. Little England means isolation rather than co-operation, conservatism rather than progress, nationalism rather than federalism: to be a little Englander is to cling to the myth of autarchic national sovereignty in an interdependent world.

At least, it is now. For the original little Englanders - Chesterton among them - the connotations of the stance were quite different. As Patrick Wright wrote in 2005, referring to Chesterton and co-thinkers like Hilaire Belloc:

Their beleaguered "England" was on the side of the people against industrialism, monopoly capitalism and the rules and bureaucrats of what Belloc called "the servile state". Chesterton and Belloc would join the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in seeking to preserve traditional "thatched" roofs against the big businesses that could spend fortunes pushing synthetic alternatives. Yet if theirs was emphatically a "little England", this was also because it entailed a strong rejection of British imperialism. Chesterton elaborated on this aspect of his Englishness in an article entitled "On Rudyard Kipling and making the world small", included in his book Heretics (1905). Here he took issue with the epigram in which Kipling asked "what can they know of England who only England know?" It was, contended Chesterton, "a far deeper and sharper question to ask, 'What can they know of England who know only the world?'" As an imperial "globe trotter", Kipling may certainly "know the world; he is a man of the world, with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice." Insisting that Kipling's devotion to England was the outcome not of love but of critical thought, Chesterton values it far less than the "real" (by which he means instinctive and unreflected) patriotism of the Irish or the Boers, whom Kipling had recently "hounded down in South Africa".
<...>
This attempt to dissociate "England" from the British empire may indeed sound attractive. Yet it remained a thoroughly defensive definition of Englishness - one that was formulated in bitter awareness that the world was actually moving in the opposite direction. Its anti-imperialism was less a critical engagement with the British empire, than an act of retreat and even denial.

The last point deserves making, just as it's worth bearing in mind that Chesterton and Belloc were reactionary Conservatives of a fairly high order. But the main point remains: so far from resisting encroachments on British sovereignty from trans-national federalism, the original Little Englanders were against the imposition of British sovereignty on large tracts of the world. It's almost a 180-degree reversal, with 'little England' counterposed to two different 'Britain's. What has remained constant is the fact that 'Britain' represents a long-term governmental project - and a project which may take precedence over mundane everyday concerns such as the welfare of the people who live here. This, I think, is the heart of Chris's opposition between 'England' and 'Britain'.

Oddly enough, the original form of the 'little England' slur has been making a comeback recently. Here's Nick Cohen from 2004:

The beneficiary of the great left-wing revolt against Blair has turned out to be the right. The Tories are doing better than they have done for a decade. Voters disillusioned with established politicians are turning to the United Kingdom Independence Party rather than to the left. The reactionary shift should not be a surprise. The only unanswerable anti-war argument was the generally conservative, Little England case that it is no longer in Britain's interests to tag along behind the United States.

And here's Nick again from last week:

It is not at all clear that modern, middle-class, liberal-leftists are either liberal or left wing in the old senses of the words, although they will always be middle class to their bones. Many of them are becoming little Englanders, all for human rights and democracy at home but not abroad.

The argument in the first extract isn't so much constructed as free-associated: to argue that Britain should not take a subordinate role to Bush's USA is to be a 'Little Englander', to be a Little Englander is to be a conservative, ergo the anti-war movement was in some unspecific way stirring up conservatism. (Presumably CND were to blame for Thatcher.) The second extract is more straightforward: if you care about human rights and democracy then you should sign up to the Euston agenda, endorsing Bush and Blair's strategy of promoting those causes by military force. If you don't, you're a little Englander.

The 'ethical foreign policy' of our period bears a distinct resemblance to the 'enlightened imperialism' of Chesterton's; once again, we seem to find ourselves between England and Britain. Chris: England is about cultivation, improvement and the assertion of liberty. Britain is about conquest, albeit often in a good cause. On that basis, you can call me English. (And part-Welsh, but that's another story.)

You can bring your friends

2006-05-30T22:06:00.000+01:00

I hate to admit it, but some of these Tories talk sense. I heard a Conservative IT guy (Richard Bacon) dissecting the proposed NHS computer system on the radio today, and there wasn't a word I could dissent from. If you're designing and building a huge IT system, you just don't do it like that.

I find I can agree with Tory critiques of the government more and more often these days. I'm not sure why - it could be that the Tories are making an overdue pitch for the libertarian Marxist vote, but I somehow doubt that. Or it could be that I'm, classically, moving Right with age; I doubt that too (but look at the evidence - I'm 45, I've got a mortgage and two kids, the effect's got to kick in some time...) It could be that Labour's moved so far to the Right that even the Tories have got to attack them from the Left - certainly Mr Bacon's voting record compares well with that of my own Labour MP. Or it could just be that the last days of Blairism are such an extraordinary panorama of authorianism, incompetence, populism, venality and desperation that they're an open goal for almost anyone.

But I do say 'almost'. The Daily Mail are never going to get it right. "Italians dub Blair 'The Scrounger'", the Mail on Sunday told us two days ago:

The Mail on Sunday has learned that Downing Street has tacked on an 'official' meeting with new Italian Premier Romano Prodi, prompting questions about whether taxpayers will be forced to subsidise the Blairs' spring break.
<...>
This time last year, the Prime Minister - whose fondness for free holidays at other people's homes has earned him the nickname in the Italian media of 'Lo Scroccone' ('The Scrounger') - flew to and from a similar Italian vacation on a Royal Air Force jet from the Queen's Flight.

This is either wrong or wrongheaded in just about every way. The Italian story does offer grounds for quite a powerful critique of Blairism, but this isn't it.

Start with Blair and Prodi. The implication of the Mail's story is that Blair is getting chummy with Prodi just as he did with Berlusconi: Blair goes on holiday, Blair meets an Italian Prime Minister, the British taxpayer picks up the tab. But what's interesting about the meeting with Prodi isn't that it's tacked onto a holiday trip. What's interesting, as the FT pointed out, is that it's likely to be an extremely frosty meeting.

The most awkward part of Mr Prodi’s round of Euro-diplomacy is likely to be on June 2 when he meets Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, in Rome. Mr Blair had little respect for Mr Prodi when he was Commission president – although he initially nominated him for the post – and spent the last five years courting Mr Berlusconi as an Atlanticist ally. “Our policy is devoted to getting back to the role traditionally played by Italy in European politics,” Mr Prodi said. He would support a pragmatic policy programme in areas such as research and energy but would also back EU integration more than his predecessor did.

Romano Prodi is a former Christian Democrat; he leads the centre-left coalition, but for himself he's an economic liberal, a time-served Eurocrat and a careful, long-game-playing machine politician. He's about as much of a leftist as the late Roy Jenkins, in short. But Blair doesn't get on with him; he won't be coming to dinner at the villa. Someone else did, though:

San Gimignano (Siena), May 29 - "I'll have dinner with Tony Blair tonight: a man who has been a friend of mine for years. Therefore, it is a pleasure for me to be here with him and his family" Silvio Berlusconi told journalists shortly before entering Villa Cusona (San Gimignano) few minutes before 8pm.

Berlusconi, whose massive stake in the Italian media should have disqualified him from government in the first place; who would have had a hefty criminal record by now if he had been tried in the English rather than the Italian legal system; and whose actions in government were conspicuously dedicated to maintaining his business empire and warding off criminal prosecution. Berlusconi, who likened himself to Napoleon, described his political opponents as admirers of Mao and Pol Pot, and spoke favourably of Mussolini. Berlusconi, who refused to admit that he had lost this year's election until two weeks later, refused to congratulate Prodi even then, and who is still talking about one more heave to get the election result reversed. That Berlusconi. Right now I don't see how any principled Conservative could tolerate Berlusconi as a dinner guest, let alone a leader of a party that's ostensibly on the Left. But the Blairs still invited him.

For the Mail, though, the story is all in that word scroccone - which made me wonder where it had come from. It's all over the English-language Web, for sure: googling without Italian sites (blair scroccone -site:it) brought back "Results 1 - 100 of about 569". It seems to have appeared first in the Independent, from where it was picked up and amplified by assorted blogs (Blairwatch adds that the nickname is used by "the Italian press (left and right)"). Search for sites under the .it TLD only, though, and it looks a bit different: I get "Results 1 - 42 of about 61", and most of those are references to films whose titles include those words. Trawling through all the results, I only found three pages which actually called Blair a scroccone, and one of them was from a comment thread. Of the other two, one was a leader column unambiguously headed "Tony lo scroccone"; unfortunately this appeared, not in any of the high-profile national dailies, but in a September 2004 issue of a paper called Il Corsivo, which was published in Cagliari (Sardinia) and went bust in February 2005. The Corriere della Sera furnished the second example, which initially looked more hopeful:

hanno affittato gommoni, si sono dotati dei più potenti tele-obiettivi, lo hanno fustigato dandogli dello "scroccone"

Which is to say:

they've hired rubber dinghies and fitted themselves out with the most powerful long lenses, then they've laid in to him and called him a scrounger

The context here - as with the Il Corsivo comment - is Berlusconi's 2004 visit to the Blairs' holiday retreat. Unfortunately the 'they' in question are English journalists. The Italian press don't call Blair a scroccone; what they do report, occasionally, is that the British press call him a scrounger.

Italy's a bit too close for us to talk about Orientalism, but something similar seems to be at work here: a kind of romance of the swarthy peasant whose rough common sense lets him see through the pretensions that we urban sophisticates fall for, and whose blunt plain speaking lets him puncture them in ways that we would never dare. It's nonsense, of course - we're the ones who put the words into the swarthy peasant's mouth, so we get to say what we want to say, play at being unpretentious and plain-spoken, and congratulate ourselves on our sophistication, all at the same time. It's awfully useful nonsense, too - properly invoked, it gives an aura of unarguable rightness to any old myth or prejudice.

Or, in this case, any old red herring. The problem with Tony Blair isn't that he's a scrounger; the problem is who he scrounges from. If it's hard to realise quite how right-wing Blair is - quite how removed from the values and culture of the party he leads - one reason is that neither his friends nor his enemies on the old Right have any interest in acknowledging it. Last Monday's dinner date is a handy yardstick.

Q: What kind of politician is Tony Blair?

A: He's the kind of politician who, a few days before his first official meeting with Romano Prodi - little more than a month after Prodi narrowly won the most bitterly-contested Italian election for decades - would invite Silvio Berlusconi round for dinner.

No further questions.

[Italians and New Labour - I'm nothing if not predictable. Philosophy tomorrow, I think. Philosophy or 1970s jazz-rock. Terrors of the earth, I'm telling you.]

Yesterday's men

2006-05-19T22:04:00.000+01:00

The latest from Italy is that Prodi's government has survived a vote of confidence in the Senate. Which is good, as Prodi would have had to resign if he'd lost. The result was never in much doubt - the Unione majority in the Senate is small, but it's still a majority - but the seven independent senators-for-life could have made trouble for Prodi if they'd wanted to. Of course, they didn't want to - these are the 'seven wise men' (or rather, six and one woman), veterans of decades of machine politics with a combined age of nearly 600. When the youngest of the seven (Francesco Cossiga) was born Mussolini was in power; when the oldest, Rita Levi Montalcini, was born, Mussolini was still a socialist. If you've got that much political survival behind you and the choice is between voting for a quiet life and voting for a constitutional crisis, it's not hard to guess which way you'll go.

Berlusconi's reaction to the final (God willing) extinction of his dream of reversing the election result was typically gracious: "What they've done is immoral." Berlusconi's allies backed this up by shouting and jeering at the life senators as they crossed the floor of the Senate. This treatment wasn't reserved for longstanding political enemies of the Right such as Oscar Luigi Scalfaro; old friends like Cossiga and Giulio Andreotti got it too, not to mention the outgoing President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi - who was treated by the Right as the next best thing to the Pope, for as long as it looked as if they might be able to get something out of him. The 97-year-old Montalcini was spared, but only thanks to a pre-emptive ticking-off from the leader of the Senate.

It's depressing stuff, but what really got me down was the reaction of Piero Fassino of the Left Democrats. Not so much his denunciation of the Right's behaviour, which was on target, but his conclusion: Non hanno il senso dello stato. Well, no, Piero my ex-Communist old mate, they don't have the sense of the state. But do you know what? They never did.

Let's go back to 1978 and Leonardo Sciascia's book on the Aldo Moro kidnap. The Communist Party at that time held to a hard line on negotiating with the Red Brigades - harder than either the Socialists or a fair part of the Christian Democrats, notably including Moro himself (who was, after all, President of the party). The senso dello stato got repeated outings back then, generally in the context of criticisms of people whose willingness to negotiate with terrorists demonstrated that they lacked it. But this was very much a Communist Party theme, which didn't find much resonance on the Right, let alone the rest of the Left. Sciascia:

Neither Moro nor the party he presided over had ever had a ‘sense of the State’. The idea of the State, as it had first been menacingly bandied about by some representatives of the Italian Communist Party the previous May [1977] — an idea which seemed to derive ... from Hegel, and the Right rather than the Left of Hegel — had probably only crossed Aldo Moro’s mind in his youth [i.e. under Fascism] ... what has attracted and continues to attract at least a third of the Italian electorate to the party of Christian Democracy is precisely the absence in that party — an attractive and reassuring absence — of an idea of the State

Let the Communists talk about the noble duties of the Italian state and the glorious aims of the Constitution (and they did, they did). The Christian Democrats were out for what they could get, and if you were out for what you could get they were the party for you.

Twenty-eight years on, the alliances have changed - to see Andreotti and Cossiga lining up with the ex-Communists brings that line from the The Leopard forcibly to mind - but the themes remain the same. On the Right, Berlusconi is that attractive and reassuring absence made flesh; on the Left, the old Communists are still in thrall to their sense of the state - and they're still more comfortable with the right than the left of Hegel.

You guys are crazy

2006-05-10T23:45:00.000+01:00

All you've ever wanted to know about the Italian elections, if not more: my inaugural return post at the Sharpener. Ite, legete.

The age of intuition

2006-05-08T23:59:00.000+01:00

As a brief postscript to the local elections, here are some tips for successful canvassing.

1. Do introduce yourself, even if you're a local MP - or rather, especially if you're a local MP. Do give the person on the doorstep (hereafter 'the punter') a chance to tell you they're not interested. Don't just launch into your spiel, like a Jehovah's Witness or an npower salesperson. Yes, they can see the rosette. Yes, they can always shut the door in your face. Not the point.

2. If the punter disagrees with you or expresses opposition to your party, do say something mollifying about how you understand their concerns or appreciate their point of view before resuming your attempt to gain their support. Don't argue back. Some examples:

2.1. Punter complains about communications with your party (wrongly-targeted mailshots, unanswered letters etc).
Do say: "I can't recall that particular letter, but I will look into it for you and make sure we respond to it."
Don't say: "When did he send it? Well, you can't expect us to have acted on it by now."

2.2. Punter complains that your party's campaigning was negative.
Do say: "I appreciate your point of view, but I think we did have a strong positive message in the area of..." (and complete as appropriate).
Don't say: "No it wasn't!"

2.3. Punter complains about the absence of appeals to ethical principle in party's campaign literature.
Do think of something. ("I understand your concerns, but...")
Don't say: "Like what?"

3. Do talk to the person in front of you. You may have a particular voter on your canvass list, perhaps because he/she has told an earlier canvasser that he/she intends to vote for someone else. If you find that the punter isn't your target voter, do ask him/her whether you can count on his/her vote. Don't make it look as if you don't care about anyone who's not on your list.

3.1. In particular, don't do this when your target voter is male and the punter is his female partner. Really, really don't.

This guy has a good voting record at Westminster, but his doorstep technique could do with a bit of work. Manchester was one of the few areas where Labour did well last week; they gained four seats from the Liberal Democrats. I'm slightly disappointed, but I can't say I'm surprised.

And when I have destroyed you

2006-05-08T23:21:00.000+01:00

This is the country where I grew up:

The half-sheet of neatly typed paper is still where it has been for the last 40 years, tucked under the perspex cover of a map table in an underground operations room beneath a nondescript suburb of York.

"Thirty minutes after the above occurrence the DC is to check Display A to see if the burst designation has been underlined in Yellow Chinagraph pencil, indicating that the first and/or amended communication has been incorporated in a MIDDD BB message. If not, enquiries are to be initiated to rectify the omission."

If there had been a failure in the yellow pencil department, that would probably have been because the observers who phoned in reports of nuclear bombs falling on the moors and dales of Yorkshire, and the operators who took the messages in the bunker, were all dead.

"This bunker was designed to contain a full complement of 60 people for up to a fortnight, but it couldn't have withstood a direct blast or even one reasonably nearby," said Kevin Booth, curator of the building, whose steel door will soon be thrown open to the curious for the first time. "It's perhaps just as well it was never tested to destruction, because I'm not sure how well it would all have worked."

It's all there. There's the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, coupled with the (well-founded) suspicion that the government's main priority in responding to this threat would be to ensure that its own bolt-holes were in working order. I was too young for the first Cold War (although I heard great things about the destruction of RSG 6), but in the 1980s Protect and Survive made radicals of us all - and War Plan UK made a lot of us into conspiracy theorists. Then there's the atmosphere of insanely detailed bureaucracy and jobsworthery (enquiries are to be initiated, indeed) - and that's coupled with the lingering suspicion that none of it, when push came to shove, would have actually worked.

It was a strange country, Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. I miss it, sometimes.

There's more on the Holgate bunker here (visiting times) and here (pictures); this page has more about English Heritage's bunker estate (and there's a phrase I never expected to write).

Some things remain from that distant post-war landscape. There's the pottering enthusiasm of bright-eyed antiquarians like Kevin Booth; small-town museums, bookshops and tourist attractions have been staffed by people like him for as long as I can remember, and it's good to hear that a relic of the Cold War will receive the same kind of care. And there's understatement - blessed British understatement.

"It's perhaps just as well it was never tested to destruction, because I'm not sure how well it would all have worked."

I do like that 'perhaps'.

I get so tired of my room

2006-05-05T00:25:00.000+01:00

[Updated 19th May - all is revealed.]

Jim: I decide to go hunting for a musical blog meme.

Cheers, Jim - don't mind if I do.

Step 1: Put your media-player on random play.
Step 2: Write down the first line from the first 20 songs that play.
Step 3: Let everyone guess what song the lines come from.
Step 4: Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly.

Here goes. Like Jim, I've excluded instrumentals and songs with the title in the first line; I've also excluded tracks I didn't recognise myself and, arbitrarily, a version of "Auld Lang Syne". I haven't ripped very many CDs, so the list that follows is biased towards certain categories of music - primarily a) things I really like and b) things from freebie CDs that I wanted to throw away. (And no, of course I'm not saying which is which.)

I saw you in your wetsuit, you were watching from the shower
- Orange Juice, "Salmon fishing in New York"

~~Belly up in a sea of love~~
- Doves, "Rise" (Paulie)

An address to the golden door
- the Shins, "So say I"

~~I come home in the morning light~~
- Cyndi Lauper, "Girls just wanna have fun" (Paulie)

I saw a boy’s t-shirt today
- the Earlies, "One of us is dead"

~~Put in your pocket for a rainy day, sing your song and you know you’re wrong now~~
- the Beta Band, "the House Song" (Rob)

~~Clouds so swift, rain won’t lift~~
- Bob Dylan, "You ain't going nowhere" (Jim)

All I wanted was your time
- Espers (or Durutti Column), "Tomorrow"

~~One-way system, smooth and commendable~~
- Half Man Half Biscuit, "For what is Chatteris" (Jim)

Well, she’s all you’d ever want
- Tom Jones, "She's a lady"

You say that your love was just for me now
- Toots and the Maytals, "True love is hard to find"

I’m just a common-or-garden guy
- Peter Blegvad, "Magritte"

~~Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street~~
- Joe Jackson, "Is she really going out with him?" (Paulie)

Hey, you - you wouldn’t make a phone call if it didn’t serve you
- Hamell on Trial, "Go fuck yourself"

We pulled up with three miles to go
- James Yorkston and the Athletes, "Banjo #2"

Waiting for the break of day
- Chicago, "25 or 6 to 4"

~~Practice doesn’t make perfect when you’re interbreeding~~
- Blur, "Villa Rosie" (Justin)

I could be pouring my heart out, I still don't think that you'd hear me
- King Creosote, "Marguerita Red"

The lunch bell rang at one o’clock sharp
- Barry Booth, "The hottest day of the year"

~~Oh, the towering feeling~~
- Vic Damone (and doubtless others), "The street where you live" (Larry)

Your complaint is my mandate

2006-05-03T20:09:00.000+01:00

So, if you aren't going to vote Labour (and I really hope you aren't), who does that leave?

For myself, I'm not voting Liberal Democrat. On the national level the party remains some way to the Left of Labour, but that's not saying very much. At the local level their campaigning is truly abysmal. The last councillor they got elected around here did a lot of old-style pavement-level campaigning before he was elected. The current councillor-elect, though...

I am returning this questionnaire uncompleted. As a disaffected left-wing Labour voter, I have been tempted to give the Liberal Democrats my support on a number of occasions.

However, I have been deeply disappointed in recent communications from your party, this questionnaire included. Firstly, the ‘personal details’ section of the questionnaire has been pre-completed, with the names of both the adults living at this address and our phone number. While I realise that this information is in the public domain, we have not given it to the Liberal Democratic Party and have no wish for it to be held on the party’s database. Please remove our details.

The questionnaire itself is a really dreadful piece of work, full of leading questions and generally calculated to produce a public endorsement of the local party’s existing positions. Questionnaires of this type are thoroughly dishonest; I’ve complained to the local Labour Party before about their use of this form of sharp practice, but nothing they’ve circulated has been as bad an example as this one.

Lastly, this questionnaire suggests that the Liberal Democrats have given up on opposing the two major parties in the area of law and order, just when a principled opposition is most needed. Labour, in particular, are currently proposing some startlingly reactionary and authoritarian policies on crime and ‘anti-social behaviour’. In the past the Liberal Democrats have raised a voice of sanity, tolerance and liberalism against these developments. It’s deeply disappointing to see the party trying to compete with Labour for the Daily Mail vote.

I sent them this letter on Tuesday. They phoned up today to ask if they could count on my vote. Joined-up campaigning!

I won't be voting RESPECT, either; I'd find it very difficult to vote for them in any circumstances, but they've saved me the trouble by not standing in my ward. Or, indeed, in any of Manchester's 32 wards, with the exception of one: Rusholme. As Andy Newman says in the piece I quoted yesterday,

Respect’s strategy outside East London is to throw all their resources at a limited number of target seats. This is a viable and rational strategy, if not necessarily the only one. In some areas like Manchester this has caused local controversy, as the tactic has been poorly applied. Respect are standing in a ward never contested by the left before and are abandoning the admittedly small base they had established elsewhere in the city. And they are standing against one of the very few Labour Left candidates.

Meaders dismisses the idea that RESPECT is running any kind of 'communalist' campaign - but it's difficult to see what other justification there could be for focusing on Rusholme. (Rusholme is currently represented by three Lib Dems; the Labour candidate this time out is John Byrne, who has in the past gone unchallenged from the left.)

I can forgive RESPECT a lot for the consternation they're causing New Labour and its sympathisers. Patrick Wintour's efforts to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room were particularly amusing:

Labour is expected to hold on to Greenwich, Barking, Hackney, Newham, Lewisham, and Haringey, but Tower Hamlets is unfathomable. In the west of London, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow and Ealing all look vulnerable. Croydon and Merton in the south, which were once deemed marginal, are now gone.

But much will depend on turnout. The Tories are confident about voting intention thanks to David Cameron, Labour's activists are thin on the ground, and much effort is being put into black church congregations, who are regarded as likely to vote. Mr Blair has held big, successful rallies with black Christians. In Brent and Harrow the Hindu vote is loyal to Labour. But elsewhere the traditional Labour vote is likely to stay home, or go elsewhere.

(Black Christians, Hindus, who does that leave? OK, never mind.)

But ultimately if you vote RESPECT you get the SWP, and I've been on the Left long enough to find that a really distasteful prospect. Meaders is a good bloke, Mark Steel has some good lines and even Richard has his moments, but I can't put any trust in the party. So RESPECT wouldn't get my vote even if they were standing in my ward, which of course they aren't. (And we're back with the reasons I don't trust the blighters.)

And I'm not spoiling the ballot. This isn't on principle - I respect the old Bennite argument about keeping faith with the people who fought for the vote, but I don't think casting a vote to maintain the status quo really qualifies. I think I can keep faith with them better by doing something that stands a chance of bringing about change. So a mass NOTA campaign would have been good - but it hasn't happened, has it? In the absence of concerted ballot-spoiling, I'm not going to risk my vote getting filed under 'apathetic' - or 'too contented to bother' (one of Prescott's, if I remember rightly).

I guess it's the Greens again, then.

Ship's a goin' down

2006-05-02T19:59:00.000+01:00

The word on the streets:

"Even the most loyal Labour voters look embarrassed and look away. Others just laugh. Now, I've never had that before," says one leading MP.

Loyalty to the Labour Party runs deep. You don't just vote Labour or support Labour, you are Labour. "We're Lib Dems" is a statement of principled, idealistic affiliation; "we're Conservatives" is similar, but without the principle or the idealism. But "we're Labour" is a statement of identity - it's an adjective, not a noun. (Of course, this may just be because Labour is the only major party whose name isn't already an adjective.)

Many of us on the Left used to be Labour, and many of us would quite like to be Labour again. The thought of voting for a Labour councillor, given the alternatives, is tempting. Many people who are still Labour are revolted by what they've had to accept since 1997 - since 2005, even - and have stayed with the party nevertheless. For them, a vote for a Labour councillor is an easy way to keep faith with the party - a party which has always meant much more than the policies of some clique of MPs.

But it's time, if it will ever be time, to abandon ship. Andy Newman:

The degree to which the party has changed is disputed, but it is certainly not a natural home for grass-roots trade union or community activists; the party no longer gives voice to its working class supporters; and within the party there is no significant ideological strand that prioritises the cause of organised labour as distinct from other interest groups, except an historical and financial legacy with the trade unions. What is more, the Blair/Brown victory over constitutional questions within the party means that the triumph of the right in the Labour Party is probably irreversible. Even under Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party had a vigorous internal life, and although much ward level and constituency activity was mind-numbingly boring, the national conference gave real expression to debates within the movement, with input from the trade unions and constituency parties, as well as the MPs. This will never be seen again.

It is significant that the government have not implemented even the modest promises of the pre-general election Warwick agreement with the unions. ... New Labour fully accepts neo-liberalism, but they are pragmatic, and largely work around organised resistance, rather than provoke confrontations. So their privatisation of the NHS, and their attacks on education are long drawn out and exhausting battles, not Thatcher style set piece battles. The stop go dance of the public sector pensions crisis shows how New Labour could wear out the resistance, unless the union leaderships lift their game.

The background therefore is that the Labour Party has a broadly progressive electoral constituency, and historical links with the trade union infrastructure, but it is in continued antagonism with both of these elements. Nevertheless, although the Party no longer articulates the aspirations of these support groups, they do provide a constraint upon it, and mediate the transformation of the Labour Party, so that it appears less dramatic than it is.

The key word here is 'appears'. That, and 'electorate': given the New Labour leadership's control over the party, Labour as a party is now significantly to the Right, not only of its union activist base - that much is old news - but of its own voters. Moreover, the fact that those voters keep the faith with the party - the fact that so many people still are Labour, even now, nine years down the line - has an effect on the image of the party: it mediate[s] the transformation of the Labour Party, so that it appears less dramatic than it is.

My father was Labour, and not on the Left of the party; he'd backed Gaitskell against Bevan, for instance. He died in 2001, and wasn't much interested in politics for the last year or so. Still, he saw Labour take power, and he saw what they did with it - and he was convinced that the "New Labour" turn was a stratagem adopted to gain power, and that Blair would eventually steer back to the Left. "He's going to surprise us all," he used to say. What Andy Newman's argument suggests is that for people like my father to back the party under its current leadership is strictly a one-way bargain. The longer Old Labour loyalists give New Labour the benefit of the doubt, the easier it will be for New Labour to retain control of the party, to retain the support of the party's voters - and to continue to remake the party in their own image. Nothing will make New Labour actually listen to Labour voters - nothing, that is, except losing their support. In 2006, that's all they deserve - and it's gratifying to see that it's beginning to happen. It's time to abandon ship.

PS Elsewhere in the piece quoted at the top, Polly (for it is she) writes:

As each new crisis eclipses the last, leaving no fewer than seven cabinet ministers in some trouble, their one comfort is in finding no great enthusiasm for Tories or Lib Dems either. The won't-votes or the anything-but-Labour voters are motivated by a negative push factor away from Labour with little positive pull towards anyone else. Expect the lowest turnout ever, according to seasoned observers. The Institute for Public Policy Research is dead right to call for compulsory voting, but this is hardly the week for Labour to press it.

Negative push factor away from Labour ... little positive pull towards anyone else ... dead right to call for compulsory voting. The thought processes here are a bit too obvious. What Chris says of Geoff 'Buff' Hoon appears to apply to Polly as well:

He hopes compulsory voting will raise the Labour vote disproportionately. He hopes a disaffected Labour voter – the sort who stayed away from the ballot box last year – who is forced to vote will figure: “well, since I’m here, I might as well vote for the party I’ve always supported.”

This, I guess, is the only way New Labour can get votes now.

It's just getting light

2006-05-02T14:47:00.000+01:00

He's gone - a mere 21 days after losing the vote. Phew - it was looking close for a while back there.

We're back - looking rather good, I have to say. Check it out.

Living in the thick of it

2006-04-28T20:49:00.000+01:00

Chris and Rob have been finding different kinds of fault in the classic left/right political spectrum: Chris prefers two criteria which (he argues) are more or less orthogonal (pro- and anti-state, pro- and anti-poor people), while Rob opts for 'conservative' and 'liberal' as fundamental alternatives.

The trouble with all these discussions is that so many different oppositions end up being overlaid. In comments on Chris's post, for example, Tim Worstall makes a pretty good fist of locating himself on the Left. Speaking as a Marxist, I'm not fooled for a minute - but I have to admit that I often feel closer to the Worstall Right than to the Euston Manifesto Left.

I gave some thought to this stuff some time ago, in an attempt to work out why I counted at least one Tory among my trusted friends while finding many genuine socialists hard to be around. I dismissed the thought that I was moving Right with age, partly because it was uncomfortable and partly because I knew that my position on Chris's rich-or-poor scale hadn't budged; I don't think there are many right-wingers who enjoy singing along to "The Blackleg Miner", put it that way. I also dismissed the thought that the difference between my Tory friend and my irritating socialist acquaintances was that the former was a thoughtful and intelligent bloke; there was no a priori reason for this exclusion, you understand, it was just a bit too obvious.

Anyway, what I came up with was a two-part scale, covering both your views on human nature and your views on political change (the greatest flaw of Robert's liberal/conservative scale, in my view, is that it tends to conflate these). Each of these two breaks down into two elements, giving a total of sixteen distinct positions. Where human nature is concerned, we look at whether people should be controlled or liberated and at who should be doing the controlling or liberating. As for political change, we ask both whether we believe change should be welcomed or resisted and how we relate this change to the present.

Human nature first. The most fundamental question: are people good or bad? In other words, if left to themselves would people destroy social order or create a new and better society? For this part of the scale I'll borrow from Church history.

An Augustinian believes that, ultimately, people are sinful; politics is, or should be, concerned with establishing laws and institutions which enable sinful people to coexist without tearing one another apart.

A Pelagian believes that, ultimately, people are good; politics is, or should be, concerned with enabling people to work together, play together and generally enjoy life in ways which have hitherto not been possible.

Now for the location of control or liberation: central or local? government or community? ruler or family?

A Jacobin believes that all politics worthy of the name happens in government; left to their own devices, communities tend to stagnate or run wild

A Digger believes that politics happens in affective communities and in everyday life; left to government, politics becomes managerial and sterile

An Augustinian Jacobin is an Authoritarian: people need to be governed, and who better to govern than the government?
An Augustinian Digger is a Communitarian: what we want isn't law-abiding individuals but communities of respect
A Pelagian Jacobin is a Liberal: the government can help people realise their potential, either by freeing them from oppressive conditions or simply by getting out of the way
A Pelagian Digger is a Hippie (sorry Paul): isn't it great when people get together and do stuff, without waiting for politicians to tell them what to do?

A Liberal is the opposite of a Communitarian; an Authoritarian is the opposite of a Hippie.

Now for attitudes to political change.

A Whig believes that change should, all things being equal, be embraced: that the risk of regression and lost opportunities is greater than the risk that change will destroy something worth preserving

A Tory believes that change should, all things being equal, be resisted: that the risk of losing valuable cultural and political resources outweighs the risk of failing to grasp opportunities for progress

Finally, let's look at how change relates to the present. For this part of the act I'll need a volunteer from the history of Western philosophy; specifically, G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel believed that historical change had an immanent meliorist teleology - in other words, that things were getting better and better, and would eventually reach a point where they couldn't get any better. He also believed that this point had in fact been reached (cf. Francis Fukuyama, who rather amusingly trotted out precisely the same argument the best part of two centuries down the line). Marx adopted the Hegelian framework, but with the crucial modification of placing the end of history the far side of a future revolution. We can call these two positions Right-Hegelianism and Left-Hegelianism.

A Right-Hegelian believes that, to the extent that it makes sense to talk of a good society, the good society is an extension of trends which have a visible and increasingly dominant influence on society as it is now

A Left-Hegelian believes that it emphatically does make sense to talk of a good society, and that such a society will in important senses require the reversal or overthrow of society as it is now

A Right-Hegelian Whig is a Reformer: things have changed, things will continue to change, there has been progress and there will be more progress

A Right-Hegelian Tory is a Conservative: our existing institutions are valuable and should not be put at risk for the sake of speculative benefits

A Left-Hegelian Whig is a Revolutionary: things could be much better, and things can be much better if we push a bit harder

A Left-Hegelian Tory is a Historian: things could be much better, but our main task is to keep alive the resources of that hope

The opposite of a Revolutionary is a Conservative.
The opposite of a Reformer is a Historian.

Liberal, Authoritarian, Communitarian, Hippie; Conservative, Reformer, Revolutionary, Historian. That gives us a total of sixteen hats to try on, and to fit to our various political rivals. See how you get on.

Me, I'm PDLT, a Hippie Historian (who'd have thought it?); this makes me the polar opposite of an AJRW, an Authoritarian Reformer. (Like, for instance, Charles Clarke.) Works for me.

I have spotted one potential weakness of this scale. It gets in most of the points made by Rob, Chris and their commenters, including Matt and Tim, but with one obvious gap: Chris's rich/poor scale, which (as I've said) is fairly fundamental to my own sense of political identity. Can this be fitted into the model, and if so where? Or is this a different kind of question?

Update 30th April

Jamie, the only other Hippie Historian to have surfaced so far (if anyone can think of a better label than 'Hippie' for the Pelagian/Digger combination, by the way, I'll be all ears), writes

I’m also, incidentally, mildly annoyed at having to qualify libertarian with left wing. Hayekianism is not a libertarian doctrine.

I think this is an important point & goes some way to addressing my point about the rich/poor axis, just above. Consider: if I believe in freedom of action, I must necessarily believe in freedom of action for everyone, to be curtailed only by provisions which have a similarly universal reach. But equality of opportunity and constraint for rich and poor is no equality at all - in Anatole France's formulation, The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread. Inequalities of wealth are, in effect, inequalities of constraint and opportunity; any consistent libertarianism would begin by establishing whether these inequalities follow any consistent pattern, and would oppose them if so. The alternative would be to take the current distribution of wealth and power (and hence of effective liberty) as given, accept it as a more-or-less immutable starting-point. I don't understand why anyone would do that - but then, I'm a Left-Hegelian (see also my posts on Euston).

We could crawl

2006-04-26T21:03:00.000+01:00

I had a letter recently from this young fellow, claiming to be my MP. Which was odd, as I'd understood that the job was held by this guy. It turns out that constituency boundaries are in the process of being redrawn, so that my ex-MP when Parliament is next dissolved will in effect be him rather than him - but until then he can hold his horses. (Opportunistic and misleading campaign literature, from a Liberal Democrat? Surely not!) Anyway, thanks to the people at TheyWorkForYou for sorting that one out, and when I say 'people' I actually mean Chris. Small world.

As it happens I also had a letter from my MP - the real one - the other day, complete with a copy of a letter from Hazel Blears, no less. Here's what I'd written:

I am alarmed and disgusted to read of the latest proposal to expand the use of automated number-plate recognition (ANPR) systems on British roads. This is nothing other than an extension of intrusive surveillance for the benefit of the police. It is even being argued for in these terms: quoted in today's Guardian, Robert Gifford of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety said, "One of the good things about ANPR is that people are often multiple offenders so it would provide useful intelligence," adding that "expanding the use of technology for tracking the movements of cars could lead police to people who had committed other offences". You'll note that Mr Gifford made no attempt to justify this proposal in terms of benefit to road users, which is ostensibly his brief.

The police forces of England and Wales are an institution like any other: they would rather have more power than less. However, the business of government is not to give the police (or any other institution) everything they ask for, but to stand up for the interests of the people of the country - including our interest in going about our daily business unmolested by intrusive and speculative surveillance. This proposal was not a manifesto pledge and runs counter to decades of Labour Party policy on surveillance and the police. It deserves to be thrown out. I trust you will oppose it to the best of your ability.

And here's Ms Blears' reply (addressed to my MP):

ANPR has been used by the Police Service for a number of years with the primary objective of denying criminals the use of the roads. It targets terrorism and other serious and organised crime, and volume crime such as burglary and vehicle crime. In addition, it is used to detect vehicle documentation offences such as uninsured driving and road tax evasion. It has been proved that many of those who are stopped for committing routine road traffic offences by the Police are themselves likely to have been involved in more serious offending.

I am grateful to Mr Edwards for bringing these issues to the attention of the Home Office. Please let me assure you that this technology is being used to support record numbers of police on the street and is proving crucial in reducing crime. A great deal of care is being taken to ensure that its use of this technology [sic] is cognisant of both Human Rights and Data Protection legislation. ANPR is not a 'Big Brother' technology - it is designed to target those who choose to use our roads illegally and allows law-abiding citizens to go about their business uninterrupted.

The idea that an extension of intrusive surveillance for the benefit of the police might be, you know, a bad thing in some sense seems to have got lost in translation. Beyond that... well, I haven't got the time or energy for a proper fisking now, but I'll suggest one question: if ANPR systems are designed to make it possible to watch the entire population of road-users and target a sub-group which is defined and identified by the police, in what sense are they not a 'Big Brother' technology?

We're all normal

2006-04-25T22:22:00.000+01:00

Everyone from Jamie to Tony has gone big on this story (old uncle Jon Snow and all). And I can understand that - if there's one thing more welcome than Charles Clarke looking incompetent, it's Charles Clarke and David Blunkett looking incompetent.

But I do wonder if this is the right stick to beat them with. Listening to the appalling Nick Robinson grilling Clarke on BBC news, you'd think the Bastille had just been stormed (or Strangeways at least): Minister, can you tell me where the three murderers who were mistakenly released are now? And the nine rapists? How about the five paedophiles? No answer, came the stern reply. Safety Elephant in Lost Dangerous Foreigners Shock.

I hate to come to the defence of Clarke, let alone Blunkett, but is this really a story? We're talking, after all, about people who have done their time: if they hadn't been foreign nationals the lot of them would have been Living Among Us all this time, even the rapists and the murderers. Admittedly, there are arrangements for keeping track of potentially dangerous ex-offenders, but they're relatively new - the first MAPPAs were set up in 2001, four years after the end of those wild, free-wheeling Tory years. They're also - at least from where I'm sitting - relatively controversial: the implicit message "once a dangerous offender, always a dangerous offender" may have the ring of truth from the standpoint of the police, but it's hard to square with the principle of innocence until proven guilty.

Nevertheless, the outcry over the failure to deport foreign ex-offenders seems to assume, as its psychological backdrop, something like the MAPPA mentality of indefinite surveillance after release. This essentially Lombrosian approach to the criminal justice system - where the top priority is to identify the criminals and segregate them from the law-abiding majority - is, of course, dear to the hearts of both Clarke and Blair; it was only the other day that Clarke proposed a new package of measures for controlling Bad Men.

At best, it's ironic that Clarke's undoubted incompetence should have been exposed in this particular way. At conspiracist worst, the release of this particular batch of bad news - which was first requested last October - may have been timed to test the public mood. If this is the case, I'm afraid they've got precisely the answer they were hoping for.

Update Paul Anderson is on the case:

It's outrageous that so many foreign murderers have been let out of gaol here and are now free to kill innocent Britons. They should have been deported to where they came from so they could now be killing innocent foreigners.

There's also been a statement from the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. I'm reproducing their comments here because I think they give some useful background and clarify the argument. (Thanks to AS for the link.)

For the last 24 hours there has been a media frenzy about 1,000 foreign national who had committed crimes, served time in prison but were not deported from the UK on completion of their sentences.

NCADC have always opposed the deportation of foreign nationals who because of the crime they have committed have been ordered to leave the UK because the Secretary of State deems their presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good.

Breaking the law is not acceptable but the law must be fair and seen to be fair in how it punishes someone who breaks the law. Sentencing must be consistent and not discriminatory. To sentence a UK citizen to 10 years for a crime and when the person has served the sentence is released back into the community with appropriate safeguards is correct, however to sentence a foreign national to 10 years for the same crime and when the person has served the sentence deport them from the UK is discriminatory and unjust.

It is a fundamental principle of UK law that a person cannot be punished twice for the same offence. However this does not apply to foreign nationals living in the UK, irrespective of how long they have been living in the UK or that they have established ties with their families and communities. If they commit a crime and are sentenced to imprisonment they can also face a secondary punishment of deportation.

Deportation can take place in two ways. Firstly, it can be recommended by a court following conviction for an offence punishable with imprisonment. Secondly, even where the court makes no recommendation, the Home Office can subsequently intervene and serve a deportation notice on the grounds that the prisoner's presence in the UK is not "conducive to the public good".

Deportation following conviction can be irrespective of how long a person has lived in the UK, irrespective of their family ties in this country. In many cases the Home Office will argue that to keep the families together, partners and children of convicted foreign nationals can uproot themselves and go and live abroad often in countries they may have never been to, this amounts to constructive deportation.
However the courts in these cases can often disagree with the Home Secretary when he tries to deport someone with family ties in the UK. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights provides that everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life. At times it would not be feasible, realistic, practicable, reasonable or sensible for the whole family to uproot and leave the UK because of the conviction of the head of the family. In one particular case where the Home Secretary's intention to deport was rejected the adjudicator said: "... deportation at the end of a ten year sentence may indeed come close to a double punishment - and one that would appear to be, largely, reserved for persons from the ethnic minorities."

NCADC call for an end to the practice of double punishment of foreign nationals as it is discriminatory and unjust.

Update 27th April
Brian is also talking sense with regard to this one:

Once a person — even a foreigner! — has served his sentence and been assessed to be safe for release as posing no likely further threat to society, he or she ought not to be further penalised by being deported, provided he or she was legally in the country to begin with. Deportation needs to be justified by specific and provable evidence in each case. Even foreigners have rights!

Read the whole thing.

Just take a look around you

2006-04-25T16:00:00.000+01:00

Sing it:

I charm you and tell you of the boys I hate
All the girls I hate
All the words I hate
The clothes I hate
How I'll never be anything I hate...

Bitterness can be a problem, even when you're out of school uniform. It's a particular problem for political writers, bloggers very much included. You hate the Other Side, they must be evil and contemptible to do what they do - but, if they genuinely are evil and contemptible, you can't do anything except hate them, and keep on saying how you hate them. As I wrote back here,

There's something obsessive, almost paranoid about those posts - See? See? I told you they were a bunch of bastards, and now they've as good as admitted it! Look, it says so here! All you really achieve with a post like that is to feed your obsession, making yourself - and anybody who shares it - feel righteously justified. Which is never a good look.

To be more precise, it's a hateful, joyless look - and if you're not careful the wind will change, and it'll stick.

So I almost agree with whoever it was that wrote this. (The opening quote is from Paul Foot's Why you should be a socialist.)

We socialists are not fanatics or timeservers. We are socialists because we see the prospect which life holds out for all working people. We want the commitment of workers who laugh and love, and want to end the wretchedness and despair which shuts love and laughter out of so many lives.
Well, 1977 is a long, long time ago, but Foot’s words survive beyond his sad decline and premature death to resonate in the present. When you’ve read anything written by any of the assorted dickheads mentioned above, have you ever, even once, got the impression that “love and laughter” matter a damn to any of them

I almost agree with this line of argument (never mind for a moment who the 'assorted dickheads' are): too much radical writing is both bitter and twisted, substituting vituperation for reasoning and personal attack for critique. I almost agree, but not quite. Here's the whole of the sentence:

When you’ve read anything written by any of the assorted dickheads mentioned above, have you ever, even once, got the impression that “love and laughter” matter a damn to any of them, or even mean anything much at all to people so repulsively stuffed to the gills with hatred, resentment and self-regard that any allegation, any misrepresentation, however trivial or ludicrous, will do, as long as it suits their wholly negative purposes?

Elsewhere in the same post we read that the Left represented by these people is "a pandemonium of sectarian infighting, self-righteous posturing, academic wankfests and just plain barking at the Moon"; that they're liars and fantasists, characterised by "dishonesty, paranoia and mauvaise foi"; and that they're fascists or Stalinists, or at best the fellow-travellers of fascists or Stalinists.

Enough! or too much. (William Blake said that.) Fortunately there aren't very many of these people, when you get down to it. There's Louis Proyect; there are Mike Marqusee, D.D. Guttenplan and Andrew Murray; there's Chris Bertram, and then there's

Phil Edwards of Actually Existing, who never uses one plain word where 15 pretentious words will do, thinks it’s mighty clever and original to pretend that there’s nothing to choose between liberal democracy and dictatorship because - in a deeper reality accessible only to the mighty clever and original - they’re both “undemocratic” (what do you mean, he should define his terms? he’s a poet, don’t you know)

I don't think I've ever been accused of both pretentiousness and mauvaise foi before. But it's true, I write poetry, which clearly implies... Actually it doesn't imply anything in particular, but it gives people who don't like what I write something to sneer at. Which is nice for them.

The post they're talking about, anyway, is here; I think the paragraph in question is reasonably clear, but if it does look as if I'm saying that there’s nothing to choose between liberal democracy and dictatorship - or that it's unclear what I mean by the word 'democratic' - let me know in the comments. But not anonymously: henceforth I'll only read anonymous and pseudonymous comments on this blog if I already know your real name or can find it out easily. Anything else gets deleted.

It's a bit funny to see a critique of life-denying sectarianism being advanced by writers who themselves seem so repulsively stuffed to the gills with hatred, resentment and self-regard that any allegation, any misrepresentation, however trivial or ludicrous, will do, as long as it suits their wholly negative purposes. It's a bit funny to have all this pointing of fingers and naming of names coming from people who appear to have operated under pseudonyms since 1998. (I say 'people', but the operative word may be 'person'; we've got no way of knowing that there is more than one person behind P.S. Burton, James Masterson, Ben Illin and the rest of their clever sobriquets.) It's a bit funny, but I'm not laughing.

Hideous tricks on the brain

2006-04-25T14:05:00.000+01:00

Since I started reviewing (eighteen years ago, mind-bogglingly enough) I've always wanted to get a review into the LRB. As of the current issue, I've finally succeeded. Well, almost.

On the back of the current LRB is a subs ad for the New Left Review. If you subscribe you can get one of two books free. One of the books is Benedict Anderson's Under three flags; beneath the jacket image you can read:

'Under Three Flags is an erudite and beautifully illustrated study of the life and times of José Rizal, the revered founding-father of the Philippines ... The book does triumphant justice to the multi-layered complexity of Rizal’s world ... the result is magnificent' - Independent

That's me, that is. I wrote that. Well, what I actually wrote (time-limited link) was more like this (some edits reinstated in italics)

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson traced the origins of nationalism in Spanish South America. The first nationalists, he argued, spoke for communities that had yet to be built - a formulation that neatly resolves the question of priority between posing political demands and building a collective identity. Moreover, the nationalist vision grew out of shared experience: of restricted career paths, in particular. Consciousness and campaigning, vision and career: Anderson's model of history is made up of pairings such as these.

Under Three Flags is a formidably erudite and beautifully illustrated study of the life and times of José Rizal, the revered founding-father of the Philippines. A constitutional activist who spent much of his life in Europe, Rizal was a hero to the Filipino independence movement. This was largely due to his novels, which offer a bizarre mixture of bejewelled prose, pointed satire, sensationalist plotting and intimations of anarchist revolution.

In exile, Rizal was seen as an extremist for his insistence on Filipino autonomy; returning home, he was outflanked by the radical Katipunan movement, which nevertheless made him its figurehead. He was executed in 1896 for his part in the Katipunan insurrection, which he had disowned; soon afterwards, its leader was killed by a rival, who later served in an American-led government. The Philippines was ceded to the US by Spain in 1898, only achieving lasting independence in 1946.

This is, Anderson stresses, a contribution to the history of "early globalisation". In Europe, exile communities plugged Rizal into an international network of radicals. The dying Spanish empire linked the Philippines with Cuba, where José Marti's war of independence began the year before the Katipunan uprising.

Commendably, Anderson doesn't contrast the Katipunans' hopes disparagingly with the slow tread of history as usual, or the bomb-throwers of Rizal’s fiction with Rizal’s own professed gradualism. Instead, he demonstrates that French aesthetes and Russian nihilists, organisational slog and utopian dreams, all formed part of the same historical moment. This was the moment which Rizal’s fiction articulated, and one which had lasting after-effects. Anderson’s account opens and closes with the story of Isabelo de los Reyes: a pioneering Filipino folklorist who re-emerged, in American-ruled Manila, as a radical trade unionist. From anarchism to national liberation, to neo-colonialism... to anarchism.

This book does triumphant justice to the multi-layered complexity of Rizal's world, but at a cost. Even while he appears to be ambling digressively, Anderson sets a stiff pace; there are few concessions to readers wanting assumptions restated or conclusions underlined. The result is magnificent but overwhelming. Many historical works deserve abridgement; this one could benefit from dilution.

There's a definite art to picking the quote to go in the ad copy; I particularly like the way they closed with "the result is magnificent".

Anyway, buy, buy, buy, and so forth. (I would have been rubbish at marketing.) It's an extraordinary book in method and approach, even if its subject matter stops it hitting the every-home-should-have-one heights of Imagined Communities. More importantly, if Verso shift lots of them they might bring out a second edition and put my quote on the flyleaf, or possibly even on the back. There's glory for you.

We've already said goodbye

2006-04-19T22:00:00.000+01:00

[Updated and bumped up, 14/4 and 19/4. It's quite a story.]

Like Clive, I've seen better comment on the Italian elections in blogs than on newsprint. I think particular credit is due to Alex, the only person I've seen suggest that Berlusconi won't go if he loses. I thought he was being far too melodramatic at the time, but apparently not.

On the 12th of April Prodi and Berlusconi had appointments (separately) with Ciampi, the 85-year-old President of the Republic; Berlusconi spent his time haranguing Ciampi and demanding a recount ("What about you, which side are you on? We know that we've been cheated; it's your duty to check.") Italian electoral law recognises several types of spoilt ballot paper; at the moment the schede contestate - papers which have been claimed by more than one party - are being recounted and may be admitted as valid. But, although there are 43,000 schede contestate among the votes cast for the Camera - where Prodi's coalition won by a majority of 24,000 - it's highly unlikely that they're all going to come out as votes for Berlusconi; in practice they seem likely to split fairly evenly. With this in mind, Berlusconi is calling for a recount of all spoilt ballot papers - which he estimates at a million - or possibly all ballot papers full stop. This would require a new law; however, Berlusconi is still Prime Minister, and as such he could pass a decreto (a Prime Ministerial decree, which becomes law immediately but lapses after sixty days unless it has been endorsed by Parliament).

It seems - although Berlusconi has denied it - that he put this cunning plan to Ciampi. Ciampi evidently said No - or possibly You want to do what? - so it seems that Alex's fears won't be realised. The President can and does refuse to sign laws which he regards as unconstitutional; passing a decreto which he knew would not gain presidential approval would be a constitutional crisis too far, even for Berlusconi. The sound of Berlusconi's former allies tiptoeing away has also been noticeable over the last few days - leading members of the ex-Christian Democrat UDC, the ex-neofascist AN and even Berlusconi's own party Forza Italia have all made comments translating roughly as "Leave it, Silvio, they're not worth it." The latest word from Prodi: "There's nothing to worry about, we can be calm." (Although 'calm' doesn't quite capture it - the word he used is sereni. Prodi does a good 'serene'.)

Formally, the new government has to be appointed by the President. Ciampi's term ends on the 18th of May, and he's said that he wants his successor to do the job. In theory, it could be weeks before anything is decided - but in practice it doesn't look as if anyone but Berlusconi has the stomach for it. Unless the schede contestate do turn out to give him a majority - or reduce Prodi's majority to such small proportions that a broader recount becomes inevitable - I can't see Berlusconi doing anything but concede, perhaps after another few days of sulking and pouting. But don't count on too much international pressure: Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel have congratulated Prodi on his victory, but Bush is "awaiting final results" [sic] and Blair's saying nothing. Prodi thinks he's won; Lorenzo Cesa of UDC thinks Prodi's won ("checking contested ballots is a normal procedure, it won't change the outcome"); and Roberto Maroni of the Lega Nord is certain of it ("the Left has won; not only do they have the right to govern, they have the duty to govern"). But Berlusconi's still hoping that something will turn up, and Blair thinks it's worth waiting just a bit longer. Classy.

PS Berlusconi, 11th April: "The result has got to change: there's been cheating [brogli] all over the place."

Carlo Giovanardi (UDC), 13th April: "Nobody's ever mentioned cheating [brogli]; all we're saying is that there are irregularities in the count."

Update 14th April

Those contested ballot papers? It's emerged this morning - three full days after the count - that there never were 43,000 schede contestate. Or rather, there were 43,000 schede contestate, but some of them were dealt with satisfactorily at the time and had thus been included in the count all along. And when I say 'some' I mean 'most'. The number of schede contestate which were there to be recounted has now been revised downward from 43,028 to 2,131 - in an election with a majority of 25,726.

In other words, the recount has been a complete waste of time. Still, it bought Berlusconi three more days as Prime Minister.

With the last plausible reason for refusing to admit defeat out of the window, things are starting to get a bit Downfall. Berlusconi is now demanding that Ciampi agrees to a decreto ordering a full recount. If Ciampi doesn't agree, Berlusconi insists on being able to nominate the next President from the ranks of Forza Italia; if the Left don't agree to that, he promises stalemate in the Senate, where the two coalitions are evenly matched ("With those numbers, nothing gets through without us.") The only problem with this doomsday scenario is that 'those numbers' don't only consist of Forza Italia: the UDC are already looking towards what la Repubblica describes as the promised land of a de-Berlusconified centre-right, while the Lega Nord is out for whatever it can get from whoever it can get it from. In the mean time Berlusconi is attempting to bend reality with the force of his mighty chutzpah: this evening he said that he was entirely ready to carry on as Prime Minister, and hoped to do so once the provisional results had been replaced with definitive figures. Setting aside the fact that everyone from Angela Merkel to Roberto Maroni (which is quite a range) believes that these are the definitive figures, Berlusconi's effectively saying that he's not moving until after a recount - but for there to be a recount would require a decreto, which would require Ciampi to agree, which isn't going to happen.

It looks very much as if he's trying to make so much trouble that the Left buys him off by offering the Presidency to somebody from Forza Italia - or even (a truly ghastly thought) to Berlusconi himself. But he's got no cards left to play, bluster apart. (The former Tangentopoli magistrate Antonio di Pietro had a nice line today: we should "leave Berlusconi to his howling [ai suoi ululati]".) Taking the long view, it looks as if the Berlusconi period is drawing to a close; Prodi only needs to remain 'serene' and hold his nerve. (And, perhaps, look up some bailiffs.)

Update 16th April

So, OK, the results were solid, there isn't going to be a recount and the votes of a regionalist party allied to Prodi's Unione aren't going to be discounted (a recent invention from Roberto Calderoli of Lega Nord, whose colleague Maroni was an early member of the "let it go, Silvio" camp; my suspicion is that Umberto Bossi, the head of Lega Nord and a close personal ally of Berlusconi in the past, remained loyal to the capo and has since called the troops into line). What we need now is to recognise that nobody's won - the Left can't possibly hope to govern Italy against the wishes of half of the country - and form a government of national unity. That, at least, was yesterday's line, as represented by a letter from Berlusconi published in the Corriere della Sera. I'd say that Berlusconi's attempts to cling to power are shameless, but I don't think the word's strong enough. Certainly he doesn't seem to register the idea that "his people" can be represented by anyone but him - or that there are any Italians who aren't "his", apart from the hated Communists.

There was a ray of hope this morning (appropriately enough), in the form of an extraordinarily petulant and grudging statement from Giulio Tremonti, former Minister for the Economy and a close Berlusconi ally. If they don't want a government of national unity, Tremonti said in so many words, to hell with them - if they want opposition, we'll give them opposition. Even Berlusconi (currently sulking in Sardinia) has started talking about a firm and rigorous opposition with no concessions to anyone - which is, of course, dependent on Berlusconi formally acknowledging that he is in the opposition. I'm not holding my breath - I'm afraid this one could drag on for some time yet.

Update 19th April

Berlusconi's going to concede defeat, tomorrow or possibly even today. I say this because, in private - or in that weird, gossipy, deniable semi-private in which a lot of Italian political conversations seem to take place - he's already started to spread the blame. It's Calderoli's fault - if he hadn't been a shithead about it the Lombard autonomists who went with Prodi would have stayed with us, and we'd have won. Or else it was Tremaglia (who organised the vote for Italians abroad, on the mistaken understanding that most of them would go to Berlusconi) - there were four separate Forza Italia lists in Antarctica, what was that about? Or maybe it was our fault, Forza Italia's fault - the kids on our lists, they're good kids, keen as you like, but at the end of the day they're still kids. None of it, of course, is Berlusconi's fault - but if we were waiting for that thought to cross his mind we really would have to be patient. (Forza Italia took 29.7% of the vote in 2001, out of a total of 50% for the right-wing alliance; this time round FI took 23.7%, out of a total of 49.7%.)

Another update, also 19th April

Today the Corte di Cassazione ruled on the election results. 'Corte di Cassazione' is not easy to translate - one dictionary I've seen suggested 'Court of Cassation' - but its position in the Italian legal system is fairly clear: it's at the top. The Corte is the ultimate judicial authority on matters legal and constitutional. The Italian legal system is very big on appeal courts (which is one reason why Berlusconi's stayed out of prison all this time), and the Corte is in a sense the ultimate appeal court. Unlike other appeal courts, though, the Corte di Cassazione can only be invoked on matters of constitutional significance. If the Corte di Cassazione is ruling on it, it matters; if the Corte has ruled on it, the ruling stays ruled.

This evening the Corte di Cassazione ruled on the election result. They ruled, specifically, that the Unione had won, with an overall majority of 24,755: the recount of schede contestate had reduced it by a total of 469. They also ruled that it had not been inappropriate to count the Lombard autonomist vote as part of the Unione vote.

Within half an hour of the announcement, Lorenzo Cesa of the UDC acknowledged the result, wished Prodi well in the interests of the Italian people and promised to work hard to offer its supporters an alternative government.

Within forty minutes of the announcement, Giulio Tremonti of Forza Italia stated that his party did not recognise the result. Berlusconi's first public response took a bit longer in coming; addressing a group of supporters this evening, he said: "We'll give them a fight - they'll have to reckon with us." Forza Italia is promising to use all the instruments at its disposal to show that the Unione hasn't in fact won. The prospect of forcing a full recount is receding; they're now talking about appealing to the agencies which conducted the count, either to carry out a kind of alternative low-level recount of their own or simply to find some irregularity - any irregularity - in the conduct of the vote. In this increasingly shabby and desperate pursuit Berlusconi is backed by the Lega Nord (Calderoli: "the reality is that the Casa delle Libertà took more votes") but not by the UDC; we've yet to hear from Alleanza Nazionale.

I confess, I thought a Corte di Cassazione ruling would be the end of it. Perhaps it will; tomorrow we should find out whether Berlusconi has any shame at all. Failing that, the 25th of April is a national holiday, the anniversary of Liberation. I think it'll be a big one this year.

Update 24th April

Well, it's over: the leaders of the Unione have gone back to squabbling over who's going to line up with whom and who's going to get which job. Berlusconi still hasn't formally conceded, but everyone else is working round him. To date, Berlusconi's fullest statement on the election result has been to the effect that Prodi's government will be against the interests of the country, so he (Berlusconi) cannot be expected to congratulate him; the Right will stop the government getting anything important through, and will be back in power before too long; the election victory will always be overshadowed by the failure to recount all spoiled ballot papers; and, if you put the votes for the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies together, that the Right actually got more votes than the Left, so that he, Berlusconi, actually won a moral victory. Gracious as ever, then. Like Robert, I find this all a bit extreme even for Berlusconi; is he afraid that his shadier friends are going to call in their markers and he won't be in a position to pay up? Or did somebody bet him ten grand, before the election, that he'd be congratulating Prodi by the end of April?

Nothing in Berlusconi's record as Prime Minister leaves a worse taste than the manner of his leaving. Above all, there's the unpleasant feeling that we've been had. For people who take politics seriously - which includes most of the Italian Left and at least some of the Right - Berlusconi's post-election grandstanding was seriously alarming:

Never before [in a Western democracy] has the defeated candidate rejected the verdict of the ballot box even after the highest court in the land has given its ruling. The message from the current Prime Minister to 'his' half of the country verges on an invitation to insurrection. Objectively it's the language of a coup. Let's try taking it literally. If the electoral result has been overturned with the complicity of the Corte di Cassazione, then centre-right voters are entitled to any and every reaction to such a gigantic abuse of power - including kicking out the government by means other than voting.

But - the same piece continues -

Luckily nobody takes what Silvio Berlusconi says literally, not even his own voters. His civil war is a game, albeit a sinister game; his threat of a coup is out of a comic opera; the 'stolen victory' is just the final fable of the Berlusconi era; the shift towards subversion was only the tactic of a day.

The bad news is that Forza Italia's voters (and the Lega's) probably understood all this a lot better than we did: Berlusconi's populism, like Bossi's before him, is all about making exorbitant gestures and unreasonable demands, holding out for impossible or manifestly unfair objectives and seeing how much you can get away with. The good news is that it looks as if the Italian Left is starting to catch on. Prodi has proposed that tomorrow's Festa della Liberazione should be dedicated to the Italian Constitution - and against the 'devolution' reforms which were proposed by the Lega and approved by the outgoing Berlusconi government. It's a deeply divisive move, which has the great merit of drawing the dividing line some way to the Right of the Unione.

With this - and with the extraordinary move of backing Bertinotti for the Presidency of the Camera over d'Alema - Prodi is already showing himself to be a bold as well as a shrewd operator. Don't get me wrong, as a socialist I don't hold out much hope for a Prodi government - any hope, to be more precise. But after the last five years there's a sizeable cleaning-up operation needed in the Italian political system, and for that it does begin to look as if Prodi is our man.

Sounds so good in stereo

2006-04-17T19:13:00.000+01:00

I probably shouldn't go to National Trust houses. Visiting one this afternoon I was accosted by an attendant, who wanted me to know that the strip of linen in a glass case on the wall was a garter which had been worn by Charles I. As I walked away, I couldn't resist giving a quick finger-across-neck gesture, although I felt childish immediately afterwards. At least I didn't do it to her face.

Fortunately I think I'm reasonably safe with regard to the criminal law. Contrary to some readings, the Terrorism Act 2006 doesn't actually make it illegal to glorify political activity which involves carrying out or threatening personal violence, violence against property, economic disruption or a denial of service attack (otherwise known as 'terrorism'). It makes it illegal to glorify activity of any of these kinds in such a way that members of the public could reasonably be expected to infer that what is being glorified is being glorified as conduct that should be emulated by them in existing circumstances. So I think Garry can relax - as indeed can I, as long as I don't say anything about the current Royals. (Update - on second thoughts I'm not so sure; see the comments.)

Anyway, there was one genuinely interesting exhibit in among the rich people's playthings and copies of Old Masters: an early-nineteenth-century broadside ballad dedicated to the theme that British people wanted "King, not Consul" - more specifically, George III and not Napoleon. It seemed that what was particularly objectionable about Napoleon wasn't the fact that he was a foreign ruler - and thus could only come to power by defeating the British armed forces and overthrowing the British government - but his religious faith, or lack of it. Napoleon was as happy to negotiate (from a position of strength) with Muslims in Egypt as the Pope in Rome: at worst he was a Muslim himself, at best he was a slippery and untrustworthy atheist. From the second verse of the broadside:

No Corsican despot in Britain shall rule,
No avowed devotee of the Mussulman school

Reading these lines I was suddenly reminded of the tone of the Euston Manifesto:

We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently "understand", reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy

We reject the double standards ... [of] finding lesser (though all too real) violations of human rights which are closer to home, or are the responsibility of certain disfavoured governments, more deplorable than other violations that are flagrantly worse.

Terrorism inspired by Islamist ideology is widespread today ... like all terrorism, it is a menace that has to be fought, and not excused.

the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse-making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the "anti-war" movement with illiberal theocrats ... Leftists who make common cause with, or excuses for, anti-democratic forces should be criticized in clear and forthright terms.

The difference between the Left that I identify with and the Euston signatories seems less a matter of policy than of perspective. I look at the British government and I see several things that alarm me deeply: for example, the Terrorism Acts (2006 and 2000), the Iraq invasion, control orders, ASBOs, the creeping privatisation of health and education, an excessively friendly relationship with Berlusconi's Italy, a far too friendly relationship with Sharon's Israel and a downright subservient relationship with Bush's USA. The Euston signatories, apparently, look at our government and see a democracy - what's more, a democracy that's under threat from enemies of democracy. Which means that, before we get into the details of what a Left project might look like in current conditions, there are hard questions to be asked. One hard question in particular: which side are you on? Do you want to be ruled by a Corsican despot, or don't you? You don't? Well then, you'd better stop complaining, and support the only people who are in a position to protect you. God save the King!

Back in Euston (surely not the Head of Steam...) the point is not to support democracy as a principle but to oppose selected opponents of democracy - and support the nations which also oppose them. It's a retreat from politics into patriotism, essentially, sketchily covered by gestures towards universalism. (Like all terrorism, it is a menace that has to be fought, for example. Unlike the drafters of the Terrorism Act 2000, the authors don't pause to define terrorism, which is probably just as well: I'm not sure there is a definition which would make that statement valid.) As I wrote earlier, "Taking up the cudgels for one relatively undemocratic status quo against another is a mug's game"; in practice it may be locally appropriate or even necessary, but it doesn't follow that we should treat it as a political principle. Unfortunately, the drift from tactical accommodation to statement of principle seems hard to resist.

It is all very well to be ‘advanced’ or ‘enlightened’, to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England?
- George Orwell, April 1940

It seems the time has come for Norm, Nick and friends. At least they're in good company.

Small update (18/4)

Over at Crooked Timber, Marc Mulholland has an interesting angle:

The problem, I reckon, is the very vague formulation of the concept of agency. Classic manifestos identify a historic force (class, nation, the free-born or whatever) and pledge allegiance to it. For ‘Euston’, the agency seems to be ‘actually existing’ pluralist democracies as projectors of state power and example. But there is no examination of why governments should be privileged over, say, national communities, market-orientated civil societies or class alliance configurations as carriers of the democratic ethos.

I think this is backwards: I don't think the concept of agency is vague, or indeed that it isn't the starting point of the exercise (in the classic manifesto style). What the Eustonistas have done is precisely to identify an actually-existing (ha) historic force and pledge allegiance to it, then dress the whole in statements of liberal principle. That's why the end result reads so oddly ("straight-forward neo-cons do this kind of thing a lot more effectively", as Marc says).

Stick my neck out

2006-04-16T23:07:00.000+01:00

I used to live down the road from Marc Riley. I turned up at his flat a couple of times to buy In Tape releases, and once interviewed him (and Jim Khambatta) for a fanzine which I was vaguely thinking about putting together. (Somewhere I've got the answers Yeah Yeah Noh supplied to a questionnaire I sent them - could be worth a bit now. Or not.)

One of the things we talked about in my 'interview' with Marc was the Creepers' song "Make Joe". The starting-point was Marc's observation that skinheads freak people out: not big skinheads or hard skinheads, particularly, just anyone with a shaved scalp - even if there are normal-haired blokes around who are larger, harder or both. Hence:

Why does a head like a boiled egg make Joe shit himself?

Some years later Marc returned to the topic, in the song "Tearjerker" on the Creepers' last album. It's a great song, really poised - funny and touching at the same time. From memory:

Let me tell you a story of old
About a skinhead with a heart of gold
Who got chased down Dickenson Road
By some people that he didn't even know

Because he had a shiny bonce
Because he had size-ten feet
He was taken for a fascist slob
But a nicer bloke you'd never even meet

The same thing happened to me
I was taken for a racist rat
By a sensitive young journalist girl
Armed with pointed teeth and a cricket bat

But what about my clothes, she said
Visions of me in jackboots in her head
She was in for a terrible fright
In less than a minute I put her right

And serve her right, too.

Skins, though. Even now, there's something about a head like a boiled egg that sets middle-class alarm bells ringing. They're not nice, are they? What I'm saying is, they're not nice people, you know?

One topic that fascinates me, with my academic hat on, is the political management of violence. As a rule one of two things seems to happen: in some cases violent acts are reframed as somehow excusable, not real violence; in others the minority responsible for violent acts is framed as inherently violent, criminal by nature. (And sometimes both tactics are used, side by side.) It's a discriminatory manoeuvre, and as such it can take the shape of any existing form of discrimination: the irredeemable criminal minority may be an ethnic minority or a delegitimised political group, for example.

Or they may simply be a bit common:

Ablewhite was not the tough, independent type his shaven-headed appearance may have suggested. In fact, like many of those on the extreme fringe of the animal rights movement, he is a well-educated, articulate man from a supportive family background.
...
The campaign of intimidation and harassment against the Hall family and their employees began in 1999. Protesters threatened death and destruction, damaged property and sent a letter bomb to Sally Ann Hall, the daughter of John Hall, who runs Darley Oaks with his brother, Chris. Then, in October 2004, the remains of 82-year-old Mrs Hammond - Chris Hall's mother-in-law - were dug up and removed at night from the graveyard of a church in Yoxall, Staffordshire. The remains have never been found. Though the authorities are still not able to prove who was responsible for the desecration of the grave, the police were in no doubt that Ablewhite was at the centre of the campaign of fear.

I do like that second sentence - "In fact", indeed. I have to say, the guy sounds pretty tough and independent to me - and I can't see that those qualities are incompatible with being well-educated and articulate. Unless what the Guardian is really trying to say that, despite his scary appearance, he isn't one of those people. (He can't be, after all, what with being a teacher and having a vicar as his father and so forth.)

I don't feel any sympathy for Ablewhite and his mates - they sound like the kind of people who get into animal rights (to paraphrase the old 'vegetarian' gag) not because they love animals but because they hate people. But I'm struck by the sense of genuine shock expressed in the Guardian article that Ablewhite was a nice, middle-class boy as well as an animal-rights militant, and by the article's utter lack of comprehension of what's actually going on here. Yes, Ablewhite's educated and articulate. No, he's not a mindless thug (even if he does have a shaved head). And no, these statements are not at all surprising. Put it another way, is a clergy house in the rural West Midlands the kind of background you would not expect an animal-rights militant to come from?

Do you think you've made the right decision this time?

2006-04-14T00:11:00.000+01:00

Like Dave, I've got a lot of time for some of the signatories to the Euston Manifesto. And, like Dave, there is no way in Hell I'm supporting it.

The problems start in item 1, which yokes together "We are committed to democratic norms, procedures and structures" with "We value the traditions and institutions, the legacy of good governance, of those countries in which liberal, pluralist democracies have taken hold." In other words, we value democracy as it has been achieved. I have no problem with defending those relics of past practices which offer resources for a better future - I might mention jury trial, I might mention English apples - but this is very different from championing the institutions of actually-existing liberal, pluralist democracies. Democracy, if you're a socialist (or any other form of radical), is a goal to strive for, not a state already achieved. Taking up the cudgels for one relatively undemocratic status quo against another is a mug's game.

Item 2 is meaningless. No, really:

We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently "understand", reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy — regimes that oppress their own peoples and movements that aspire to do so. We draw a firm line between ourselves and those left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces.

Being democrats, we don't like undemocratic regimes; however, some other people who purport to be democrats make apologies for them. Well, more fool them; we already know that we're democrats, so what does it matter what some other self-styled democrats think? Unless we're meant to take this together with item 1: we like Actually Existing Democracies (whatever their faults), and we don't have any truck with Non-Democracies... And what is this about indulgent understanding and apologetic explanation? Are we being asked to "condemn a little more and understand a little less" (John Major said that)? Or are the Eustoners happy for us to attempt to understand and explain, just as long as all our explanations are based on the proposition that the bad men hate us because we're good?

Item 3 is even worse. Headed 'Human rights for all', it reads - at least, the business end of it reads:

We reject the double standards with which much self-proclaimed progressive opinion now operates, finding lesser (though all too real) violations of human rights which are closer to home, or are the responsibility of certain disfavoured governments, more deplorable than other violations that are flagrantly worse. We reject, also, the cultural relativist view according to which these basic human rights are not appropriate for certain nations or peoples.

What on earth is this about? Given two sets of human rights abuses, one perpetrated by a nation state which is denounced as an official enemy and one by a state which is treated with kid gloves, are the Eustonites seriously proposing that the latter should not receive more attention? From the Left? Imperial favour is capricious, God knows - Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were both men we could do business with, in their time - but the idea that it's not appropriate to draw attention to the crimes of the current favourite is grotesque. There are only so many campaigning hours in the day, and they're better employed pushing at closed doors than those that are already open. Taken literally, this 'Item' would be profoundly demobilising: it would make it impossible to criticise any abuse committed by governments 'closer to home' (presumably meaning Britain, the US and, oh, say, for example, Israel) unless and until a particular abuse was demonstrably the worst thing in the world. (Of course, this is not to say that it's appropriate to excuse or minimise abuses carried out by the current official enemy, either by massaging the figures or by reflexively pairing any abuse with one carried out by our side.)

Item 4 (Equality) is broadly OK, but: "We leave open, as something on which there are differences of viewpoint amongst us, the question of the best economic forms of this broader equality": why, exactly? What are 'we' united on that is more fundamental - or more urgent - than the question of socialism vs capitalism?

Item 5: oh good heavens. "We stand for global economic development-as-freedom and against structural economic oppression and environmental degradation."; "Globalization must mean global social integration and a commitment to social justice." Economic development-as-freedom, indeed. (Something to do with Amartya Sen, apparently - see the comments. Did you know that? I didn't know that.) This all sounds good, but, given the conspicuous absence of escape clauses - conditions under which the Eustonians would not support globalisation - I can't help feeling that this clause is summed up in the first six words quoted above. (Up to the first hyphen.)

Item 6: we like America. No, really, we like America. Some Americans are really quite nice. And they do make good TV. Have you seen the Sopranos? Because, you see in the current season - no, I won't spoil it for you. But really, America's great. They say they're great, and they're kind of wrong about that, but you know, in a way they're kind of right. Because of the whole democratic institutions thing, obviously, but that's just item 1 again. What's really special about America - well, you know Curb Your Enthusiasm? It's great, isn't it? That one where... never mind. America, anyway. It's great. And those people who hate America, what's that about? They're just wrong, aren't they? Yeah, that's what I thought. They're just wrong.

Item 7: Palestine. Ah yes, but Israel. Palestine: Israel. Israel: Palestine. We can't have a settlement that the Palestinians don't like, but that also means that we can't have a settlement that the Israelis don't like, because that wouldn't be fair. Palestine: Israel. Israel: Palestine. You see my point? It's a tough one, isn't it?

Item 8: racism. Racism is bad. Which means anti-semitism is bad. Which means that anti-Zionism is bad. Not all anti-Zionism, obviously, but some of it. We'll let you know.

Item 9: terrorism. Terrorism is bad. We don't believe anybody on the Left has ever said this before. We're not very keen on state terror either, by the way. But terrorism is bad. Always. Never mind defining it, you know terrorism when you see it, don't you? Well then.

Item 10: Humanitarian intervention, when necessary, is not a matter of disregarding sovereignty, but of lodging this properly within the "common life" of all peoples. Sovereignty doesn't exist when the sovereign state in question is really really bad, m'kay? This isn't just a matter of saying that, in certain extreme cases, it may be appropriate to violate international law (Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Ratko Mladic) but that international law should be rewritten pre-emptively to legalise all such interventions, and any such interventions that might take place in future. To say this is a dangerous doctrine is putting it mildly. This is the business end of items 1 and 3, and it's got a nasty smell.

Item 11: Leftists who make common cause with, or excuses for, anti-democratic forces should be criticized in clear and forthright terms. Conversely, we pay attention to liberal and conservative voices and ideas if they contribute to strengthening democratic norms and practices and to the battle for human progress. What's alarming here is what isn't said. To the extent that democracy is part of a radical project, all this can be taken for granted: a left-winger who makes common cause with 'anti-democratic forces' has ceased to be a left-winger and can be denounced in those terms; liberals and conservatives who favour democracy, perhaps despite themselves, are favouring the Left and can be endorsed, or at least co-opted. But I sense this isn't quite what the Eustonists mean. 'Democracy' here is being used in the right-Hegelian (item 1) sense, not the left-Hegelian (Marxist) sense: you are either for us or against us, and if you're against us we don't care whether you're on the Left or not. (Come to think of it, if you're for us we don't care if you're on the Left or not, either.)

Item 12: Historical truth. Right with you there, chaps. From Johnstone on Srebrenica to Clark on the joys of shopping in Belgrade, there are parts of the Left which have talked a great deal of garbage, in my personal opinion. But I'm not sure how much point there is in taking a stand for 'truth' - at least, not without specifying in much more detail who you're taking a stand against and why. (See also item 3.)

Item 13: Freedom of ideas, including the freedom to criticise religion[s]. Seems fair enough, actually.

Item 14: Open source. Well, yes, but what exactly is this doing here?

Item 15: 'A precious heritage'. Defies summary.

We reject fear of modernity, fear of freedom, irrationalism, the subordination of women; and we reaffirm the ideas that inspired the great rallying calls of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality and solidarity; human rights; the pursuit of happiness. These inspirational ideas were made the inheritance of us all by the social-democratic, egalitarian, feminist and anti-colonial transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — by the pursuit of social justice, the provision of welfare, the brotherhood and sisterhood of all men and women. None should be left out, none left behind. We are partisans of these values. But we are not zealots. For we embrace also the values of free enquiry, open dialogue and creative doubt, of care in judgement and a sense of the intractabilities of the world. We stand against all claims to a total — unquestionable or unquestioning — truth.

We're talking about the E-word, aren't we? And it's all fair enough, but I have to ask (again) who they're defining themselves against - and why they don't say so.

In summary (if you want commentary on the Elaborations you'll have to write it yourself) this is essentially a rallying-cry in support of 'democracy' as defined by Tony Blair and George W. Bush, 'humanitarian intervention' and all. God knows, the Left has some alarmingly wrong-headed elements, and has had for some time - during the Kosovo campaign a friend of mine canvassed the possibility of a new 'new Left', breaking with some of the tendencies rejected by the Eusteenies (and some of the people, more than likely). But to build a new Left you have to be on the Left to start with - and the Euston Manifesto isn't.

Escape routes exist

2006-04-12T19:28:00.000+01:00

Let's get productive!

At least 100,000 NHS employees will lose their jobs if the government carries through the health reforms Tony Blair wants as a lasting monument to his premiership, according to a report today from the pro-market thinktank Reform. Under the reforms, the benefits of a more efficient service, with greater productivity and a more highly skilled workforce, would be accompanied by severe unemployment, says the report by Nick Bosanquet, professor of health policy at Imperial College London.
...
Professor Bosanquet, who is an adviser to the Commons health committee, blamed Department of Health planners for pushing up staffing costs. Since 1999 the NHS workforce had increased from 1 million to 1.3 million, and was on course to reach 1.6 million by 2010, he said. But the reforms being pursued by the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, would make trusts think harder about productivity; foundation hospitals would negotiate local pay deals, and as more trusts gained foundation status, national pay agreements would become less important.

"It is likely that productivity gains will mean that staff numbers are reduced by at least 10%," Prof Bosanquet said. This would cut the workforce to below 1.2 million.

Professor speak with forked tongue. "Productivity" is one of those words that does a lot more work than it lets on. The measure of "productivity" is, essentially, how much work is done by each person employed. If you sack 10% of your staff while the overall workload remains the same or increases - and, in the NHS, we can reasonably expect that the overall workload is not going to go down - then productivity will go up by 11%; to put it another way, everyone who's left is going to have to do 11% more work. Note also that if the 10% of staff who are sacked are disproportionately un- or semi-skilled, the result will inevitably be both greater productivity and a more highly skilled workforce - albeit a skilled workforce which has achieved greater productivity by doing the dirty jobs as well. In practice calculating productivity is slightly more complicated than this, as the key metric is money: if the payroll costs of the 90% of staff who remain go up - perhaps because they want more money for doing more work - you won't see the full 11% increase. But that's where the local pay deals come in.

"NHS trusts will save money by sacking workers and attacking the pay and conditions of those who remain," says pro-market thinktank. It doesn't take much decoding - but putting it in those terms might provoke resistance, and would certainly raise the question why. Productivity, though - who could argue with that? Who wouldn't want to be more productive? (We feel bad when we're not productive, says top shrink.) And above all, who wouldn't want the workers to be more productive, lazy blighters?

Mario Tronti, as ever, is the man:

Capitalist society has its laws of development: they have been formulated by economists, applied by governments and endured by the workers. But who will discover the laws of development of the working class? Capital has its history and its historians to write it. But who will write the history of the working class? ... We ourselves have put capitalist development first, workers’ struggles second. This is wrong. We need to reverse the problem, change its sign, begin from first principles: and the first principle is the struggle of the working class.

In 1964, when Tronti wrote these lines (from "Lenin in England"), he was an Autonomist - one of the first - and a communist rather than a socialist. (That's 'communist' with a small C, although Tronti was also a Communist. Long story. Never mind.) Socialism, for the Autonomists, offered no more than collective self-exploitation and the rational redistribution of surplus value. Social democracy, for an Autonomist, would barely be worth defending: it would leave the bosses in place, merely fencing off a few areas which should be run for the common good rather than for profit (sanitation, education, health, that kind of thing). When we look at Tronti's communism now, it seems like a distant echo of a much more radical era - but, ironically, the long retreat of social democracy has left us few alternatives to a Trontian reversal of perspectives. What is the NHS, after all, or where is it - in a constellation of autonomous groups of managers who cost the human resources required to deliver a service, or in the nurses and the doctors to whom many of us owe our lives?

(And who the hell are the former to talk to the latter about being productive?)

Good news week

2006-04-10T15:11:00.000+01:00

Callooh! Callay!

All together now:

Ce n'est qu'un début! Continuons le combat!