21stCenturyFix.org

Chaos at RBS: good, bad and very very ugly

2012-01-29T13:39:00.000Z

This, from the BBC last November, reminds us how chaos is in the eyes of the beholder:

Eviction notices have been attached to tents at a protest camp outside St Paul's Cathedral.

The City of London Corporation notice tells Occupy London Stock Exchange (OLSX) activists to clear the "public highway" by 18:00 GMT on Thursday.

The "public highway" being the land occupied by the protest at the time which did not belong to the Cathedral.

Obviously, the kind of chaos this was leading to - on a shared "public highway" - was considered by those who we presume should know more about these things as completely unacceptable in a modern civilisation. Two reactions then: first, this was chaos; second, we should not tolerate it.

And I can live with that conclusion - even where my instincts are not to approve.

This morning, meanwhile, we have another example of chaos - this time as defined by Iain Duncan Smith:

Iain Duncan Smith has said there would have been "chaos" if ministers had overruled the board of RBS and vetoed a £963,000 share bonus for its boss.

The government has come under pressure to act over Stephen Hester's bonus as it owns 82% of the bank's shares.

Cabinet Minister Mr Duncan Smith told the BBC "nobody would be happier" than ministers if Mr Hester declined it.

But it had been up to the RBS board - if they had gone, it would have had a huge impact, he said.

The kind of huge impact - on an 80 percent state shareholding, on tens of thousands of workers and on millions of customers - which no one in our society is willing to do anything about, at least in the sense of proactively preventing its occurrence.

Except, of course, by not only giving entirely in to but also sanctioning fully the rights of those making these implicit threats of executive blackmail.

Again, my reactions are twofold: first, as in the case of St Paul's, this was chaos; second, we have no alternative but to tolerate it.

Oh, people!

Really!

How do you expect us to believe in a socioeconomic environment which behaves like this?

I really find no other way of describing this second example than to call it economic blackmail by corporate hooligans of the very lowest order. And these are the captains of industry whose behaviours we are being asked to support and even emulate?

How very very short the modern representatives of capitalism are happy to sell their baby these days.

Just the Facebook mindset - or is our whole economy becoming sociopathic?

2012-01-29T10:34:00.000Z

John Naughton quotes from his own Observer column today over at Memex 1.1:

The truth is that companies such as Facebook are basically the corporate world’s equivalent of sociopaths, that is to say individuals who are completely lacking in conscience and respect for others. In her book The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout of Harvard medical school tries to convey what goes on in the mind of such an individual. “Imagine,” she writes, “not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern of the wellbeing of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.”
Welcome to the Facebook mindset.

And in the light of some of the thoughts I've been having recently, I wonder if this profile couldn't be applied to our whole economy. As the Martha Stout quote shows us, the very fact that a company not only as large as Facebook but also as intricately folded into many of our daily lives is so psychologically disconnected from the feelings of others really doesn't bode well for the future.

And not because I believe companies should show a moral side. After all, Milton Friedman disabused us a long time ago of this notion (the bold is mine):

[...] That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

Which, in the light of recent crises as well as their apparent causes, would be a rather big "if" to presuppose, don't you think?

No. In reality, what worries me far more than the simple and long-held thesis of corporate psychopathy is the fact that social media and web companies which behave in the way that both Friedman and now Naughton describe can interfere with and influence the behaviours of the people who use their products and services.

It does, after all, seem inconceivable that we can escape being fashioned by the tools we use so intimately.

What worries me, then, aren't the sociopaths who are populating our business world. What worries me, then, is that very shortly a wider society will begin to join them.

Fearful figures on the verge of an economic breakdown

2012-01-28T19:30:00.004Z

This is indeed a lost generation. The country of my wife and children, Spain, as reported by the Telegraph yesterday, now has a youth unemployment rate of 51.4 percent. Meanwhile, as painted by the English version of the Spanish El País newspaper, the wider picture is just as terrifying:

According to the National Statistics Institute's (INE) latest quarterly Active Population Survey (EPA), the unemployment rate climbed from 21.5 percent in the third quarter to 22.85 percent in the period October-December. The ranks of the unemployed swelled by 348,700, while the number of people who lost their jobs during the whole of last year amounted to 577,000. The number of people out of work at the end of the year stood at a record 5.273 million.

The solution to this problem? As follows:

The gloomy figures underscored the dire need for an overhaul of the labor market, a task the government wants to complete in the first quarter of this year.

But with an important proviso:

"This shows that the government has to carry out a labor reform that focuses on incentivizing hiring, rather than just on cutting firing costs," Bloomberg quoted Estefania Ponte, chief economist at Cortal Consors, in Madrid as saying. [...]

And I thought capitalism had all the tools it needed to sort out - all on its lonesome - the pretty mess someone, or something, has got us into.

Oh! It does ...

In 2011 Spanish luxury goods sales were up by 25% despite the economic climate in the country.The luxury goods sector brought in 4,500 million euros up to the end of this year.

Truth of the matter is that capitalism by itself offers no convincing solutions for a broader society. It can't. It's been so vigorously - and for such a long time - a fundamental part of the problem.

And as any good experienced teacher would tell you, there is no one methodology in the world which can ever teach you everything you need to know or do. We must apply the same principle to economic practice.

Instead of building these self-justifying barricades between different classes and ways of seeing.

I do wonder if the crisis isn't rather more profound, mind. What if the deficit isn't really financial? I mean obviously there's a shortage of political will to spend our way out of encroaching crisis, as perhaps we have preferred to do so on previous occasions - but, in reality, perhaps the problem is actually that we simply no longer have enough jobs to go around. No mystery here - nor a particularly perceptive remark. But, nevertheless, maybe - in the circumstances - worth revisiting. As the past century progressed, automation struck in more and more professions: we now learn by ourselves; medicate ourselves; bank by ourselves; book our holidays by ourselves; even get to the point where we contemplate the possibility of legally representing ourselves. And maybe - just maybe - all the aforementioned just goes to show that the balance generated by our economic structures between jobs and consumers is suddenly and irrevocably tipping in favour of the latter.

That is to say, our latterday Western economies - as they are set up and structured these days (and for some reason my unpractised eye is totally unable to fathom) - require far more of us to play the role of passive consumers than that of productive workers.

Does it have to be that way? I really don't know. Wasn't there a time, for a while, in the last quarter of the last century, that a potentially halcyon period of generous leisure activity began to be promised to our future generations? I can certainly remember the predictions made by the technologically minded stories and thinkers who dominated my scientifically influenced thought processes in my more tender years.

Of that - however - we hear little these days, it would seem. Instead, the things they tend to say now remind us we must work for less; work more flexibly; work more insecurely; and, above all, expect no guarantees whatsoever.

Stability of personal income is no virtue or given of modern Western society. As an American called Kirk (and spookily so) apparently said at Davos today:

US trade rep Kirk: "More and more Americans question value proposition of trade... think weve traded jobs for cheap t-shirts /iPads #Davos

And it's not just the jobs - it's the nature of those jobs.

For Christ's sake capitalism - get your bloody act together before it's too late!

You'd almost think your proponents thought there was no alternative.

But there always is - to everything.

So where have all your competitive instincts gone? Is it in fact - and here perhaps we have a horrifying unspoken truth - that, after so much time spent managing and manipulating and operating in monopolistic markets, our capitalist captains have forgotten what real free markets feel and look like? As well as the instincts which should correspond to such mindsets?

Fearful figures, indeed, then, on the verge of an economic breakdown.

All of us, that is. Sooner or later.

On British government plans to privatise all viruses and bacteria (and other matters of potential interest)

2012-01-27T23:18:00.000Z

It's been announced tonight in a sweeping programme of privatisations - leaked in exclusive to this blog for some utterly unknown reason - that Andrew Lansley, the man irresponsible for health services in England, has drawn up a blueprint to privatise 99 percent of all known viruses and bacteria.

The rationale behind such a move is unclear at the moment but it is believed that five extra layers of viral and bacterial management may serve to slow down the capacity of such organisms to attack English citizens - especially the still gainfully employed who may yet serve the nation well.

Meanwhile, in a separate announcement, Iain Duncan Smith (or IDS as we prefer to call him), the man irresponsible for generating a more inclusive level of poverty in the realm, has publicly admitted for the first time in polite society that the government is working closely together with the famously philanthropic Close The Stable Door After The Horse Has Bolted Foundation to develop a brand new type of anti-serum designed to target those poisoned individuals who don't agree wholeheartedly with all Coalition policies.

It would appear - at the same time - that IDS is also working hand-in-glove with Theresa May, the woman irresponsible for emptying the streets of hard-working police officers, as they attempt to rid the country of all abnormal people classified by the DWP as officially workshy.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, are said - as I write these very lines - to be preparing their barricades and defences.

And that's the way it is.

Good night.

How the Coalition is deliberately engineering a competitive deficit in British business

2012-01-27T18:42:00.003Z

Prologue

I will try and limit myself to simply quoting two contrasting situations tonight, though this may prove rather difficult - if not entirely impossible. [Editor's observation: in hindsight it was!]

Act I - Banking on it!

The first involves the Royal Bank of Scotland. Quote number one here from our dearly beloved Guardian:

Royal Bank of Scotland stoked a political row on Thursday night after it announced it had awarded its chief executive, Stephen Hester, a bonus worth almost £1m.

The payment was derided as "utterly unacceptable" by one Liberal Democrat peer, while a Foreign Office minister calculated that Hester's package meant he was paid in three days what a soldier in Afghanistan, "risking his life", earned in a whole year.

What's more:

The bailed-out bank attempted to justify the bonus – which is being paid in shares that Hester will be able to gain access to in 2014 – by saying it needed to reward the chief executive for the progress he had made in reducing the size of RBS.

Since he joined in November 2008, the bank has cut 33,000 jobs.

So Hester needs to have his already lavish salary almost doubled - in this case it is the state, as 80 percent shareholder, which has voluntarily chosen to act thus (for no prior contractual agreement imposed by a previous regime was operating in this particular instance) - in order to reward him for the magnificent skills and prescience required which allowed him to discover how to save pots of shareholder money by prejudicing the lives and times of what we must conclude are 33,000 unskilled and short-sighted workers.

So let's just weigh that one up as we move onto quote number two, from the same newspaper:

The Royal Bank of Scotland has spent more than $4m (£2.5m) of British taxpayers' money on lobbyists in Washington since it was bailed out by the government, documents disclose.

Both in-house and commercial lobbyists have been paid to influence American senators and congressmen reforming US finance law since the bank's collapse and government bail-out in October 2008.

The money has been handed over despite calls from ministers for RBS and other banks that have received taxpayers' handouts to refrain from hiring public affairs firms.

So is there anything I can add to this which you are not already thinking?

One rule for the rich - and quite another for the poor?

Act II - In the black!

It looks like the government might be trying to work out a way to limit the black economy in the UK to a maximum of £1000 in cash payments. I'm not sure how many cash payments this might eliminate in reality - but let's put that thought to one side for the moment. Anyhow, today I read from tris over at Munguin's Republic the following pair of golfing metaphors (ie par for the whole damn bloody dispiriting public-private sector course):

HMCR chief Dave Hartnett (you remember him, don’t you?), says that it is the public's duty not to pay tradesmen cash in hand, otherwise said tradesmen may be tempted (look away if you are of a sensitive disposition) to 'evade paying their fair share of tax.' (Shock, horror.)

And, if you do not act as tax collectors (unpaid), and they do "forget" to declare all their earnings, this might result in even deeper government cuts to public services. (More shock and horror!!)

However, according to tris the very same Mr Hartnett has also been responsible for a number of other matters over the past couple of years about which the Telegraph actually had this to say way back in December; matters which, in reality, cast a teensy bit of doubt on his intellectual cogency. These matters are somewhat distanced from the alleged behaviours of your neighbourhood builder (who, incidentally, though probably irrelevantly to civil servants like the aforementioned individual, may as a result of government economic policy be currently struggling to make ends meet). To continue in tris's own words:

Now, would this be the same Dave Hartnett who, having allowed himself to be bought, on over 100 occasions, incredibly expensive meals, arranged multi-billion pound tax avoidance schemes with the Goldman Sachs and Vodafone...who, by strange co-incidence, had picked up the tabs for these "fine dining experiences"?

And did this multi-billion pound drop in tax revenue not in some way result in the government having less money to spend?

Meanwhile, we have a story from False Economy from September 2011 which clearly indicates that the government is actually being extremely coherent indeed (table here):

Disturbingly our research shows that some of the companies lining up to take a slice of the mushrooming multi-billion pound public service sector are among the most unethical in the UK and many remain largely unknown to the public

We’ve found that the biggest companies that are playing an increasingly important role in running our public services have the bottom rating for many of our ethical and environmental criteria, including environmental reporting, supply chain management, human and workers’ rights and political activity.

The government is now selling our public services to companies seemingly without any scrutiny of a company’s ethical or environmental policies. This apparent policy vacuum challenges the coalition’s stated claim that ‘this will be the greenest government that the UK has seen’. This is significant as it threatens to undermine the progress that the previous government had made in terms of its ethical and environmental purchasing policies.

And what's more:

Another area that gives great cause for concern is the evidence we have uncovered that shows that 13 of the companies we surveyed have subsidiaries in countries that are widely considered to be tax havens, something that is included in our Anti-Social Finance category.

This implies that the companies concerned, including some of biggest names in the outsourcing industry such as BUPA, Capita and Sodexo, are managing their finances in such a way that they may be actively avoiding paying tax here in the UK.

Coherent government, that is, in the sense we have already observed: one set of permissible behaviours for the poorer end of society - and clearly quite another set for the wealthier ones amongst us.

Epilogue

I'm beginning to get the feeling that this government and its civil servants are not only being actively encouraged through close and carefully weaved private connections to set up a two-tier Britain as far as public services are concerned, they're also being actively encouraged to create a Britain whereby:

everything which private companies need in order to function in the public space is externalised onto a rapidly shrinking state evermore at the exclusive service of private sector interests - that is to say, we as a voting public lose out twice: a) fewer public resources will remain as a whole and b) of the fewer resources that remain, more of them will end up in the pockets of private sector advocates
large industry interests will be massively prioritised at the expense of the small - that is to say, whilst only big companies will be able to afford the technical advice to avoid paying tax, small companies will inevitably end up paying proportionately far more than their big cousins ever will

This is in no way a free-market level playing-field of any kind whatsoever. Traditional economies of scale mean those with a monopolistic stranglehold over whole sectors and industries already have a substantial advantage over their small- and medium-sized competitors. But factor into the mix the reality that most large companies will now interpret the government's recent agreements on tax liability as providing a green light for such behaviours ... well, we can only then conclude that a competitive deficit is being deliberately engineered into the British business environment - a deficit intentionally designed to prejudice the smaller companies on that spectrum of economic activity and favour the much larger.

There must, of course, be a better way. The question, of course, is who may provide the leadership we need on the matter.

I would like it to be someone from the party I belong to.

And I do wonder if, one day, it could ever be the case.

Yesterday

2012-01-27T13:32:00.000Z

It wasn't yesterday - I think it was the day before - but on the digital TV channel Yesterday, at the very least this week, I caught a little of a programme on Auschwitz and the Final Solution.

Now much of my TV is out of the corner of my eyes these days, as I sit at my computer more often than on the traditional sofa of yore. So this is how I saw what I saw. No graphic images as such. Just the calm and measured tone of the narrator - as well as that of some still inevitably shell-shocked interviewees.

The bit of the programme I caught described an apparently "illegal" and "devolved" lead-up to the gas chambers, which were of course later sanctioned and constructed with the full complicity and intentionality of the Nazi regime and its leaders. It described how from relatively small beginnings - using "hell vans" to gas small numbers of gypsies with carbon monoxide - the experiment was extended to Jews who lived in the locality. One lady villager was interviewed describing how the cries of those dying under such circumstances were heard across the village. Her face was a picture.

Not a picture you'd like to see.

And the most shocking thing about it all was that apparently - as I pointed out above - these initial experiments, these examples of what we might crudely describe as "genocidal DIY", were carried out by someone (I didn't catch the name) who took it on himself to push the envelope of evil off his own awful bat. Somewhere, then, in some place amongst that regime of punctilious civil servants, they had found time to record that the authority and line of command did not entirely register as it should have done. Which didn't - even then - stop them from going ahead with the experiment.

No matter. In the event, it wasn't to be long before it was proven an interpretation of a wider score - a sick symphony of prejudiced harmonies which soon enough claimed for itself a right to decide who could exist and who could not.

Over Christmas, my wife and my daughter watched the Spanish version of the "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas". Even as the viewers' desires to hurt the wickedness of the Nazi regime, as exemplified by the father in the story, lead us unerringly into the narrative trap the film sets, we cannot but sense a terrible duality at the end.

Punishment, whilst sometimes inevitable, as well as unavoidably just, surely also requires us in each and every case to dig two graves.

And if I remember what I saw rightly when I watched that snippet of that documentary this week, the almost Heath Robinsonian aspect of the - at the time - small events I saw described showed how easily from petty infamy humanity could reach a morally corrupting industrialisation.

In a sense, perhaps, then, the Nazi Final Solution was nothing more nor less than a logical consequence - even where not inevitably so - of the brutalisation of human relationships which the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century incited us to.

For we are still little more than serfs under the thumbs of all-commanding lords. Even as we have the daily opportunity to use mediums such as this to not only defend but also try and extend our freedoms.

So if you have forgotten, just a little, and maybe daily life makes us all do so from time to time, take some time out to read this from Wikipedia - and remind yourself what's really at stake.

"Osbornomics: political stardust but an economic placebo"

2012-01-27T11:00:00.002Z

A few choice phrases from Fraser Nelson's latest piece over at the Telegraph:

George Osborne should be having similar thoughts. His old routine is now failing. The embarrassing truth is that, for all his talk about how you can’t borrow your way out of a debt crisis, he is now trying to do just that. [...]

And this (the bold is mine):

Treasury officials who have worked for both men are struck not by the differences between them, but the similarities. Brown was nicknamed Macavity for his habit of disappearing at the first sign of trouble; Osborne is known as The Submarine, surfacing only a handful of times a year. Both see economics as a game of political chess, each policy designed to outwit the opposition. [...]

Not a way of making the world a better place, then - more a tool to batter what the rest of us can only define as a proxy enemy. For the real enemy is what we live from day to day.

Nelson also points out that:

[...] The political narrative thus detaches from the economic reality. And this is why a Government that is widely regarded as radical, and hawkish on the deficit, is making virtually no economic progress, while running up the debt like there’s no tomorrow.

And this:

Even Osborne’s critics cannot deny that, politically, his policy has brought devastating success. He has won the argument on cuts, even though – as the monthly spending figures show – he has hardly made any. [...]

Whilst for Labour the comfort is getting forever colder:

[...] The Chancellor told friends that he expected to be the most hated man in Britain by 2012, but there is surprisingly little hatred. Instead, there is ridicule – and it is largely heaped upon a Labour leader whose skills seem not to extend much beyond solving a Rubik’s Cube in 90 seconds.

Or, indeed, not eating a chocolate orange ...

As I sift through Nelson's piece - as always tightly, pointedly and fairly written (you can tell he worked for a tabloid, can't you? Nothing better for those with the verbose tendency to write about politics than to have to do so in the context of flashy headlines and tawdry entertainment stories) - I can't avoid coming to the conclusion that Osborne is actually truly some politician of considerable standing. More adept, perhaps, at the presentational arts than the PR man that is Cameron himself.

What has Osborne - in reality - achieved then? Well. He's increased the indebtedness of the nation whilst at the same time savaging all manner of social services. "And this is an achievement?" you wonder. Well, yes - mightily so. Because Osborne is a three-dimensional politician who plays the long game. "And what may that be?" you might ask. Why, make it financially impossible - absolutely out of the question - for Labour ever to bring back the socialism by stealth we enjoyed for so many years under the New Labour regime.

Osborne, in his apparent ineptness, has shown himself to be not a son of Blair but a son of Brown. For neither have ever been inept; both are consummate manipulators of the body politic.

This isn't, after all, a battle between right and left but - rather - between those who would use politics as a tool to do something useful in the outside world - and those who do politics simply to keep the opposition at bay.

The pursuit of power above all is at the heart of Osbornomics. As Nelson so memorably points out in his piece:

[...] Osbornomics: political stardust but an economic placebo.

With one small caveat: whilst the placebo is designed to strategically convince us he's doing everything he should, in reality it's there in order for him to have the time to burn all those bridges back to any kind of British socialism. That is to say, on his part it's not unconscious at all. It's a deliberate administration of a drug which allows us to die.

And therein my absolute misery this morning.

http://youtu.be/zxg7j6rQDLM

Redemption (II)

2012-01-27T08:38:00.002Z

I posted about redemption - and a rather partial forgiveness too - in my previous post "Redemption". A couple of tweets on the back of that post have made me think again; at least, in relation to the second half of the post on the subject of the erstwhile software businessman, and now - perhaps - self-redeeming philanthropist, Bill Gates.

Deborah, from the excellent World Development Movement, has these two points to make. Firstly, that:

@eiohel it's not just a matter of how Gates acquired his fortune but that 1 man has the power to decide how to solve the world's problems

To continue with:

@eiohel and his version is top down technocratic favouring his cronies in pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies

It does, therefore, lead one to wonder - maybe a little uncharitably - that Gates the philanthropist, wrapped up in that mindset of excluding copyright and IP laws and legislation - a mindset which has served to make him so much money in the software publishing and development businesses - is now quite naturally setting up the ground rules for branded medicine and crops the world over.

It is only human to favour those who think as one also thinks. That he may believe in massive technological solutions - implemented by pyramidal organisations where one or two men (or very occasionally women) are paid enormous amounts of money to take relatively dictatorial decisions - is hardly surprising in the circumstances. But as I pointed out in reply to the first of Deborah's tweets above:

@DeborahDoaneWDM Yes. That's absolutely the problem. Excellent point. For where one man can decide for better, one man can decide for worse.

And so it is we come back to the paradox of devolved governance and democracy in general: one highly driven man can do so much more and so very much more quickly. But once the tools and structures are in place for this to happen for the wider good, those who would wish to abuse for their own advancement may do so far more easily.

And in a sense, as the BBC did indicate on Wednesday, Gates hasn't changed from his Microsoft days:

His foundation's work is carried out with a "hard-nosed mathematical" approach, he says, calculating the impact in terms of "dollars per year of life saved".

He is applying the same attention to detail that made him such a business success into the business of saving lives.

Substitute "dollars per year of life saved" with "dollars per year of sales bonus achieved at the expense of sustainable, safe, cost-effective and user-controllable software" and you might get a flavour of what I'm getting at.

All those shady agreements to load only Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player on new computers or the decisions which made it impossible to open new Word documents with older versions of the same software are simply a few reminders of how empires are built.

So Deborah is right to take me to task. And I'm glad she did. I'm glad she did.

Redemption

2012-01-26T23:08:00.000Z

Two examples of redemption tonight. There's not enough of it about. We need more.

Firstly, the Twitter storm-in-a-teacup that today has been the hashtag #savetheintern. The full story can be found here at Tom Watson's blog. This is the bit I most like about the whole matter:

8. The intern has not been sacked nor was she ever going to be. She’s young. We all make mistakes.

This is true. And needs to be said, far more often. Without, that is, the desire to redeem being worn too brightly on one's sleeve. A normal humane instinct to treat people as people. Instead of cattle to be disposed of all too hurriedly.

Meanwhile, another case where redemption seems to be an unspoken driver is the philanthropic Bill Gates of today. Firstly, from the BBC, this quote yesterday:

"If I hadn't given my money away, I would now have more money than anyone else on the planet," he said casually.

And it's the giving away that makes him so interesting.

But it's not quite true. What really makes Gates interesting is that he can publish letters like this - thoughtful, considered, accurate, needed - at the same time as maintaining the monopolistic empire that is Microsoft's Office and Windows operating system software.

That is to say, it is true that we must doff our virtual caps in admiration when the BBC points out that:

His philanthropy is on an epic scale. He is seriously planning to eradicate diseases in his lifetime that have plagued humanity for thousands of years.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already given $26bn (£17bn) to fund health, development and education projects.

Even the biggest cynic would have to be impressed by this massive engine of generosity, with Bill Gates working full time on donating the income from an endowment worth $33.5bn (£21.5bn).

But we must also remember that the money he so laudably donates was often arrived at in a less than seemly way; and perhaps, in some parts of the globe, continues to be questionably obtained to this day.

So it is that redemption is never simple - even as, in its messy and incomplete manner, it must be a better way than no kindness at all.

On messages and margherita pizzas

2012-01-26T15:32:00.000Z

I prepare my children's lunchtimes thus - and for one of them there is this pizza today. And so I am driven to consider the messages behind the messages in front of a margherita pizza.

"Established 1965" - that seems fair enough. Pride in tradition; the value of longevity; the perfect practice that comes from plenty of practice.

"Pizza Express" - well, it's the name and brand that they are stuck with. Perhaps the previous message is designed to undermine in some constructive way the negative connotations of fast food for supermarket consumers.

And so I come to the final message which caught my attention:

"Individually handmade" - as opposed to what then? "Industrially handmade" - or perhaps "Individually manufactured?"

You can see how the marketing teams and focus groups try to cover every base here. And yet, as they try and anticipate every unspoken criticism we might have of the product under discussion, in truth - as consumers - we will more often than not buy because of a cheapening red sticker which proclaims "Half Price"!

A cheapening red sticker designed by a different marketing department - perhaps out of a cheapening desperation.

Oh, how our dreams and ambitions do tumble and fall.

Damn good pizza, by the way.

At the price ...

Do we need more customer focus in university education?

2012-01-26T09:25:00.000Z

I have to say I speak out of ignorance - or, at least, an absence of firm data and inside knowledge - on the topic that I raise today in this post. On the other hand, we may fairly retort, this hasn't stopped me from writing in the past.

Which is true.

Recent events, however, even so, have brought me to consider that as always politicians will prefer to deal with the most easily measurable matters before they deal with the most useful ones. Whilst there was a big hoo-hah last year - and quite rightly so - on the tuition fee disgrace that was the transfer from students to both the banking industry and universities of yet more profit and business, little attention was placed on the matter of what all that money was supposed to be purchasing.

I mean, of course, the university teaching itself.

And whilst the government has recently announced plans to fire underperforming teachers, I'm not sure this is aimed at affecting precisely the sector (that is to say, the universities) where the direct customer (that is to say, the student) not only pays upfront but also pays the most.

My experience of university education was relatively benign. I wasn't a particularly applied student but did thoroughly enjoy my three years at Warwick where I studied Film & Literature. I managed to get a 2(i), probably due mainly to the results of my third year Creative Writing module under the inspiring Andrew Davies. And the different elements of the course - film on the one hand and literary studies on the other - were well coordinated and structured.

The course influenced the rest of my life. For better or worse, it changed me most profoundly.

Not long ago, however, I had the opportunity to talk to a student currently at a university in the North West of England. This student seemed unhappy for a number of reasons. Two appeared to be at the top of the list: first, the university teachers had been utterly unresponsive to the feedback the student had given about the level in which he had been situated at the beginning of the first year, an error of judgement on the part of the professionals the implications of which became compounded in the first semester of the second year - and apparently led to a reactive depression on the part of the student.

Second, and perhaps much more revealingly, in what is now clearly a consumer-driven and consumer-structured society, he felt - and, indeed, feels - that he wasn't getting his money's worth, his value for money, from the style, substance and take-it-or-leave-it attitude of the vast majority of his teachers.

Over the past decade or so, an enormous amount of work has gone into improving the quality of compulsory education: from inspection regimes to teacher-training; from school infrastructures to cross-curricular subjects ... all these items and far far more out there have helped to radically re-engineer the compulsory education system in the UK. Yet, from my unpractised and looking-in-from-the-outside eye, it would seem very little has been done to track the behaviours, efficacy, pedagogical worth and consumer focus of university teaching - precisely the teaching, in fact, where the link between payer and payee would be easiest to establish, forge, develop and take advantage of.

So I do wonder as the government continues to fill the pockets of its sponsors in universities and the financial services sector, and at the expense I might say of the students, why it doesn't place as much emphasis on improving the teaching standards in higher education as it clearly wants to do for the rest.

I'm not saying we should go as far as to be able to fire a university lecturer in a term - for the relationship between lecturer, teaching and research is far more complex than compulsory education has to date been able to contemplate; but I do wonder if it isn't time for university lecturers and their teaching behaviours to come under the microscope of an institution with absolutely similar criteria to those a rejuvenated Ofsted might wish to contemplate.

And at the very least begin to create a shared university mindset which sees the student as a customer with the right to the very best pedagogical systems in the world - especially where in some cases they are being obliged to pay a very 21st century £30,000 for the often dubious honour of a 19th century kind of tuition.

Should our economy be democratic - and is this something Labour and its potential voters can agree on?

2012-01-24T16:49:00.000Z

This introduction to the term "economic democracy" came my way via Tom on Facebook today. I republish it in full below:

Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that suggests a shift in decision-making power from a small minority of corporate shareholders to a larger majority of public stakeholders. There is no single definition or approach for economic democracy, but most theories and real-world examples challenge the demonstrated tendencies of modern property relations to externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit, and deny the populace majority a democratic voice in economic policy decisions.[1]

It's the next bits which I really like, though (the bold is mine):

Classical liberals argue that the power to dispose of the means of production belongs to entrepreneurs and capitalists, and can only be acquired by means of the consumers' ballot, held daily in the marketplace.[2] "The capitalistic social order", they claim, therefore, "is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word."[3] Critics of this claim point out that consumers only vote on the value of the product when they make a purchase; they are not voting on who should own the means of production, on who can keep its profits or on the resulting income redistribution. Proponents of economic democracy generally agree, therefore, that modern capitalism tends to hinder or prevent society from earning enough income to purchase its output production. Centralized corporate monopoly of common resources typically forces conditions of artificial scarcity upon the greater majority, resulting in socio-economic imbalances that restrict workers from access to economic opportunity and diminish consumer purchasing power.[4][5]

Economic democracy has been proposed as a component of larger socioeconomic ideologies, as a stand-alone theory, and as a variety of reform agendas. In most cases, economic democracy promotes universal access to "common resources" that are typically privatized by corporate capitalism or centralized by state socialism. Assuming full political rights cannot be won without full economic rights,[1] economic democracy is a proposed solution for the problems of economic instability and deficiency of effective demand. As an alternative model, both market and non-market theories of economic democracy have been proposed. As a reform agenda, supporting theories and real-world examples range from decentralization and economic liberalization to democratic cooperatives, fair trade, and the regionalization of food production and currency.

It seems to me that in this concept we might have the seeds of a properly renewed Labour Party - even if some significant proportion of a decade down the line. Rather than focussing on the "how" - the policy-making details so beloved of professional politicos but of so little immediate interest to the wider voting public - surely what at least Labour needs far more urgently is a "what" everyone, voters and supporters, can agree on.

"Responsible capitalism" is certainly a nicely turned phrase for policy wonks - but at least fifty percent tainted by many people's current experiences. Meanwhile, applauding the ability to learn from one's enemies obviates the need to admit that choosing one's friends is a far more significant leap in political activity.

Far better surely, then, than the triangulation of the latter - or, even, the uncertain timbre of the former - is precisely the concept under discussion in this post which Tom has brought to our attention: bringing democracy to economic activity.

But as an overarching and shared meme to capture people's imaginations. Neither workers' cooperatives nor mutual business structures; neither stakeholder consultations nor a popular capitalism. No detailed instructions which would allow the enemy to pick away, perhaps quite rightly in the event, at the gorgeous potential of such an idea.

Rather, we should argue that where we really place the source of our deficit in modern societies is not in our voting system; not in our media; not in big or small business behaviours; not, even, in our politics. Instead, it is entirely to do with how imperious that "consumers' ballot" isn't: a ballot, right now, which covers only a discrete set of purchasing decisions and ignores almost everything else of importance in the processes that run our economies.

An "everything else" which - to be honest - has clearly failed us of late. Perhaps precisely because economic democracy in Western societies is such a limited, empty and anti-democratic practice.

On empowering the poor

2012-01-23T19:59:00.001Z

That's the issue to hand, isn't it? How to empower the poor. The right obviously believe that what the poor really need is a good kick up the backside; and according to such theses, we need, as a society, to put the frighteners on them all so that - out of thin air - they will somehow manage to magic themselves better jobs, better schools, better housing and better lives.

On the other hand, the left are looking to implement ameliorative policies which, little by little, succeed in providing a better environment first - an environment which, so the argument goes, will lay the foundations for future success.

The left say that without the environment, everything is unfair. The right say that without the fear, nothing ever gets done.

But surely what we all need to do is sit down round that inevitable negotiating table - for a battle and war of sorts it has certainly been to date; and then proceed to ask the poor how they actually see the situation ... how they would best like their lives to pan out.

Instead of grandly doing and undoing prejudiced generations of political guesswork, how about we truly empowered the very people at the centre of it all? Give them the control and hold over the very levers of power. Directly. Without prejudice.

Without political grandstanding.

Give them - for the first time ever, that is - both the right and holy duty to actually decide what gets down, how and why.

And in the process, remove both fear and amelioration from the equation that is poverty on this planet.

How the dependency culture is here to stay - precisely because the Coalition says so

2012-01-23T13:52:00.001Z

The benefits cap the government proposes is all in the news at the moment. Left Foot Forward uncovers six myths you might be interested in finding out more about here.

Meanwhile, if the meme really is how we all need to work together to get the country out of the massive mess recent economic and political histories have engendered, why isn't the government also proposing a salary cap? Why, in fact, every time it proposes a new policy, does it prefer to further impoverish the already impoverished in society? Why doesn't it look to other methods of resourcing the country's wealth?

Why is it all so damnably one-sided?

A quotation attributed to Ralph Nader came my way this morning which made me think that perhaps the answer is to be found somewhere here. It goes as follows:

"The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers." — Ralph Nader #business #leadership

As far as I can see, Cameron & Co understand quite the contrary. And it's absolutely clear that they don't want to remove the dependency culture at all.

Instead, what they really want to do is transfer our sense of dependency from the state to their private sector buddies.

Not change us at all, then - just rearrange the furniture for the benefit of their deep-pocketed sponsors and bosom business pals.

Leadership? You gotta be joking. The Coalition know as much about the true tenets of leadership as did the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They don't want to amplify our initiative - they just want our docile consumer complicity.

And that's a really long way from encouraging independence of action.

The fundamental contradiction at the heart of Coalition thinking (or the real benefits society)

2012-01-23T09:52:00.000Z

There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Coalition thinking which the left is failing to clearly define; an unenunciated contradiction which - as a consequence - is serving to confuse us all.

On the one hand, Cameron & Co don't believe in a benefits society and - instead - claim to believe in what we might term an initiative society. On the other hand, however, their sponsors are massive corporate institutions - accustomed to a ready supply of wage slaves who know their place and are accustomed to staying put. So whilst the government suggests in its spin we should all become entrepreneurs, the reality is that in its policy it is orientated towards making labour cheaper and more plentiful - that is to say, anything but entrepreneurial.

If my thesis is right, the benefits mentality isn't even primarily engendered by the state but, rather, by the millions upon millions of workers who spend their lives ensconced in a corporate cocoon of bonuses, pensions, career ladders and perks.

And if that's not a benefits society, I really don't know what is.

In a perfect Coalition world, what the Tories and their supporters are looking to achieve - then - is a) for no one to claim benefits; b) for the privileged to maintain their position as entrepreneurs at the top of the hierarchical pyramid; and c) for the wage slaves to earn just enough to keep them content, politically neutered and docile - as well as out of the horrified public view which some mainstream media, even under such a regime of political duplicity, are still currently prepared to contemplate.

And until the left is able to reveal this reality in a punchy and convincing way, the dissonance created by naked "do as I say, not as I do" politics - visible primarily on the right end of the spectrum but with an increasingly hearty support on the left - will continue to leave the progressives falling violently between two stools.

Two stools which are allowing the Coalition to get away with ruddy murder.

Defining oneself in terms of what a government is doing is the road to a political hell

2012-01-22T22:02:00.001Z

Politics should not be about doffing our (benefits) caps in mutual incomprehension. But it certainly looks to be heading in that direction.

We simply do not understand each other, do we? On the one hand, the government has clearly decided that the whole nation needs re-engineering far more than it needs a helping hand. On the other hand, the opposition (that is to say, the political party I am a member of) can only see the degrading piecemeal destruction of a vast infrastructure of little-by-little policy decisions - all originally put together with the very best of intentions by New Labour and its protagonists over a long decade of social repair.

Sadly, most modern politicians seem - eventually - to get stuck at "changing things" instead of "changing things for the better". Even such enlightened observers as Éoin are now urging Ed Miliband to come over all pragmatically populist.

Out of sheer desperation, Labour is now uncertain whether to triangulate the short game of the general election in 2015, in the faintest hope that maybe the polls will eventually support what is now fast becoming a manifest absence of convictions; or, alternatively, give up on the short game entirely and properly play the long game of 2020.

Between two such stools we are rapidly falling. And no: populism is not the answer.

On the other hand, a careful weaving of a tapestry of real and appropriate convictions, whilst surely just what the (spin) doctor ordered, doesn't seem to be all that close to a sensible realisation.

For we, on the progressive side of politics, appear to have learnt absolutely nothing from our last disagreeable encounter with a conviction politician. Mrs Thatcher finally managed to impose on us her cruel brand of politics because we gave her the space to demonstrate she was perfectly coherent in everything she did. She might not have been, of course; but her discourse clearly gave the impression she was. And that, far more than populism, convinced us there was no alternative.

Triangulation; populism; to be reactive; to have no clear centre of political gravity ... well, these are ideas I all find an anathema to what I believe a politics of the people should really be about.

Essentially, we need to know three things: why we are here; what we want to achieve; and how we want to achieve it.

Defining oneself in terms of one's eternally piecemeal responses to a multitude of government policy objectives - objectives which only serve to shotgun our body politic - is a lily-livered and ultimately futile exercise in short-term political survival.

We have no alternative, any more, to entirely reinventing ourselves.

This is not a party political luxury of the self-indulgent.

This is a precondition to long-term survival. A precondition to any progress from here on in.

"Gold Diggers of 2012" (or that curious choreography of British politics and business)

2012-01-22T12:25:00.001Z

I honestly think this is all a conspiracy of sorts. The population is ageing dramatically; the consumers are getting grey- (or no-) haired; and potential markets in developed worlds are beginning to seize up. Who wouldn't, then, want to release onto the open market the massive host of products and services that is health, social care and legal support? In this sense, everything our British government is doing right now can be seen as a way of sustaining future profits for companies which are surely worried about the end of rabid (and youthful) consumerism. In the light of such a thesis, we could even argue that socialism in the UK was spreading not because New Labour made it stealthily so but - rather - simply because as you get older you are going to be more inclined - out of understandable self-interest - towards a society which cares.

And so we come to the subject of this post: the complex and astonishing choreography behind the calls - in the midst of economic crisis - for a new yacht for our dearly beloved Queen. Or, as I have cared to title it, "Gold Diggers of 2012". Here's the historical reference:

And the background from Wikipedia. And the definition of "gold digger" from Wiktionary:

gold digger (plural gold diggers)
Someone who digs or mines for gold.
A person (usually female and considerably younger) who cultivates a personal relationship in order to attain money.

But since this is the 21st century, the female bit has reverse-liberalised itself considerably. Nowadays, I suggest, we could safely assume that instead of "considerably younger females", we might (though it still has yet to be entirely proven) be talking about "considerably older males":

[...] it seems the support is part of a well-choreographed campaign to make the yacht a reality. The project has had the backing of the royal family, a national newspaper, and the tacit support of at least two major organisations, for more than two years, suggesting last week's enthusiastic headlines have been a long time in the planning.

The campaign can be traced back to the mid-1990s when a powerful group of industrialists and monarchists, anticipating the scrapping of the royal yacht, devised a replacement that would not require funding from the taxpayer.

Thus far, no surprises. This is par for the course in a democracy where the wealthy reserve the important levers for themselves. The next bit is rather more disconcerting, mind:

The accounts note: "Particular interest in the project has been expressed by British Antarctic Survey and Edexcel, who are the project's science and education partners respectively."

Edexcel is owned by the FTSE 100 company Pearson, and describes itself as "the UK's largest awarding body offering academic and vocational qualifications and testing to schools". It has major contracts with the Department for Education, whose secretary of state, Michael Gove, has been a vocal cheerleader for the project.

Though Edexcel then go on to rather hurriedly distance themselves from any significant association:

An Edexcel spokesman said: "In 2009, we had some initial conversations with the group about the educational aspects of their plans, and said we would be happy to offer our expertise in support, if and when the project came to fruition. We have not been closely involved with the project since then."

Which does seem a little unseemly. After all, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee is either a jolly good thing or it isn't; it's hardly something one needs to be so equivocal about.

Does it?

And if so, why might that be?

Anyhow, the Guardian report clearly indicates that a considerable level of media management has been taking place. And I do wonder if this is the case in something as surely iconic and uncontroversial as our Queen, how much more choreography is going on behind the scenes in other areas to ensure that our grey-haired futures end up firmly in the pockets of our large consumer-loving corporates?

Gold Diggers of 2012? You bet your bottom dollar on it!

RBS and politics: two conundrums quite beyond me

2012-01-21T21:21:00.000Z

I'm finding all this difficult to understand and would like someone to explain it to me (the bold is mine):

Last week, after delivering a speech on "popular capitalism", the prime minister refused to say whether he would block a bonus for Hester, who is widely seen as having done a good job at RBS, after taking over from the much-maligned Sir Fred Goodwin in 2008. The board of RBS, which is 83%‑owned by the taxpayer, is said to be considering a bonus of £1.3m to £1.5m for Hester, on top of his £1.2m annual salary. A final decision from the company's remuneration committee is expected on Wednesday.

But Miliband, who is determined to define his leadership around the issue of "fairer and better capitalism", said it was entirely wrong for a bank, majority-owned by taxpayers, and which is making thousands of people redundant, to pay its boss a £1m-plus reward in such circumstances.

The Labour leader told the Observer that the public would not regard it as "fair or right" for the head of a company whose share price had halved in the past year and which had missed its target for lending to small businesses to cash in when so many hard-working people were struggling to make ends meet. [...]

A good job? A bonus equal to his salary? Thousands of people redundant? A share price which has halved in the past year? A bank which has missed its target for lending to small businesses? A good job? A bonus equal to his salary? Thousands of people redundant ...?

And so the circle continues.

I don't know. I mean I understand - but I don't know. There is nothing unusual, of course, about top-flight executives being paid enormous amounts of money to fire thousands of workers, not hit targets and fail their shareholders. Nor is there anything unusual about large companies believing that to retain such leaders - allegedly able to stand usefully on the pinnacle of these pyramidal organisations - they will need to reward them whatever they do because reward is the preserve of such beings.

It seems natural, in fact.

Even so, I don't know. Why can we not agree on something as simple - and as key - as remuneration policies in industrial relations? Why has it become so natural for money to accumulate more money - and for its relative absence, as time goes by, to lead to even lower incomes for everyone else? As I am clearly ignorant of the technical aspects of the conundrum under discussion, all I can do is presume that it's because we don't all value the same things. Balance sheets in such times are incompatible with full employment: those of us who want a job will never appreciate the intelligence required to slash a workforce by frightening percentages.

How can we ever possibly agree under such circumstances?

Meanwhile, Chris points out most accurately that capitalism is no longer efficient - not even on its own terms. Its ever-concentrating circles of wealth have meant that the money which used to swill more broadly around the economy now spends far more of its time in the pockets of the incredibly wealthy. Innovation and renewal - the opportunities for business ingenuity - are falling dramatically as fewer are able to get a sniff at that cash which once flooded our hopes.

The conundrum that is RBS, then, is but an element of a wider conundrum: how do we agree on what our society should value? Are we finally condemned to permanent disagreement? Are resolution and cooperation - words which we manage to value in other contexts - not to have their place in business and politics?

And how is it possible that governments themselves are never more firmly in place than when they break their election promises, ruin entire communities, send unemployment rates soaring and make a society more conflictive?

Why - essentially - do we reward so generously bad behaviours like these the higher up the hierarchical scale we go?

Why is it so good to be so bad when you're at the top?

Does #SOPA and its like promise a world without art?

2012-01-21T12:18:00.000Z

Louis quite rightly defines the forked paths ahead of us thus:

So the question is this:

* A lifetime of licenses routinized into the cost of living, and invisible in the enormous harm such a licensed life would put in play if only by suturing close the possibilities of having it some other way; or

* A lifetime open to innovation, collaboration, production unencircumscribed by closed licenses; markets would be built and profits made on the merit of one’s work and not on the right to work itself.

It seems to me that with the traditional content industries' massive desire to make copyright a tool for guaranteeing enormous cashflow without further creative effort - that is to say, without further artistic creative effort (for marketing tricks and discourses these moguls will always value and understand) - we are running the serious risk in our Western civilisations (and wherever their values manage to prevail) of destroying the very right to artistic creation itself.

Just imagine if versions of SOPA and PIPA finally get through, sanctioning the right of one discourse and society - the US capitalist cash-cow industrial model - to decide who sees what, where and when, as well as for how much and how often. With the vast quantities out there of already existing and licensed content, who needs new ground-breaking applecart-upturning ways of looking at the world?

The grand paradox of the traditional content industries since time immemorial (and certainly since Hollywood's inception) has been how they required of their artists an anti-artistic series of behaviours. Thus it is we could argue that finally working out how to censor the Internet's flow and exchange of information is nothing more nor less than an easy but unhappy return to a previous age: a Hays Code for our time.

It may be that history will teach us that the progress we thought was being achieved via virtual freedoms was actually a simple parenthesis between the instincts of the 1930s and the beginning of this fearful 21st century, where an openness to new ideas - and an inability to properly sustain the existing order - are taken as signs of a dangerous unpredictability which could serve to shake the very foundations of our societies, instead of a source of brilliant imagination and game-changing thought which - to the benefit of us all - could totally alter our future socioeconomic growth and development.

Proprietary cash cows which see creativity mainly in terms of repackaging and marketing existing material - or fleet-of-foot online and offline nexuses of real artistic endeavour? That is the crossroads we find ourselves at. And the stakes are far higher than simply a matter of whether the traditional content industries manage to reimpose far more forcefully a tired business model which - over the last decade - was clearly losing traction.

I would, in fact, posit that we run the risk of losing the very environments, conditions, instincts and impulses which would allow for future art itself - or, at least, future art as we have understood the concept to date.

A world without art then?

Or, at least, a world with only a marketable, packageable and securely licensable history of art - but no possibility any more of a confident future of mould-breaking innovation?

One step too far in my train of thought? It might all be closer than you think ...

Throwaway Family Values

2012-01-21T10:03:00.002Z

This apparently happened in the 1980s, during the previous Tory regimes:

Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.

In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers – whom they have not seen in decades – were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children's mothers for many years.

Mind you, other similar actions took place during both Tory and New Labour times:

Last month eight women who say they were duped into forming long-term intimate relationships of up to nine years with five undercover policemen started unprecedented legal action. They say they have suffered immense emotional trauma and pain over the relationships, which spanned the period from 1987 to 2010.

Family values indeed.

As disposable as our throwaway culture. Consumerism gone absolutely revoltingly coherent. From durables to intellectuals, all we argue is now at the mercy of a relativistic deconstruction of all that used to - so securely - frame our lives.

Precisely when a love child is anything but, in fact.

And in the name of state security, just one more example of how any line can now be crossed.

If only life was more like coffee ...

2012-01-21T09:41:00.001Z

Coffee is apparently not only good for you but also, now, thanks to Chinese researchers, demonstrably good for you:

Prior global epidemiological studies have shown that those who drink four or more cups of coffee a day have a 50 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, the most prevalent type of diabetes accounting for 95 percent of all cases. Every additional cup reduces the risk by an additional 7 percent.

The Chinese researchers in question have now discovered the mechanism by which such risks are reduced. Evidence that for once a vice may be a positive thing to possess.

Not all property being theft, then - after all.

Life would, indeed, seem to be looking up!

Even if only momentarily ...

It does make me wonder just for a second, mind: perhaps there are other virtues to other vices out there we simply have not stumbled across. It often has to do with our various ways of seeing. Prejudice so blinds us to data and reality that it sometimes becomes unhappily impossible to share useful perceptions.

If only life was more like coffee - wonderful to savour and constructive in its actions.

But it isn't, is it?

Not very often, anyhow.

In Cameron's Britain, even criminals work for less than the minimum wage

2012-01-20T18:37:00.001Z

From "Granada Reports" tonight, a story on the recent "mole gang" robbery in Manchester:

Granada Reports has been given exclusive access to the underground- tunnel, dug in secret, and used to raid a cashpoint machine in Manchester.

Police are still hunting those responsible for what's been described as an amazing feat of engineering.

After months of hard work, it would appear the gang only netted £6000 between them - and there are suggestions that this would amount to something rather less than the national minimum wage.

And so it occurs to me that in David Cameron's Britain of unrepentant capitalism, even the criminals with acknowledged initiative are fully prepared to work for far less than sanity might advise.

From turbo-capitalism to people's capitalism in one sly stupid step

2012-01-20T10:42:00.001Z

Cameron speaketh thus on the subject:

In the third new year intervention by the main party leaders on what is being described as "responsible capitalism", the prime minister revived a signature theme of his time in opposition when he said he would preside over an era of "popular capitalism".

"I want these difficult economic times to achieve more than just paying down the deficit and encouraging growth," he said. He also announced a co-operatives bill to give public sector workers a greater chance to create mutuals to deliver public services.

"I want them to lead to a socially responsible and genuinely popular capitalism," he said.

Meanwhile, the truth about capitalism, high-level corporate managers and the relationship they have with their ever-so-absent shareholders probably runs more along these lines than Cameron would care to admit:

The UK government assumes shareholders are the owners and main risk-bearers of companies. This is not the case. Most shareholders are traders and speculators and have little long-term interest in invigilating companies.

And I do wonder where in the world - when something breaks so profoundly as latterday capitalism - the solution is then to be found in spreading even more of the risk amongst its poorest participants: the working-classes. But I suppose, in this, I ought not to be at all surprised: the ways of the world may always have been as described. So it is that whilst risk is spread cleverly amongst the poor - and its downsides, when they come, as in fact they always must, are eventually paid for by the same - any benefits that ever emerge out of the brutal cycle that is unrepentant capitalism will always be reserved for those who manage our economies principally for their own advantage.

So will we, the voters, readily swallow this political hook of Cameron's? I'm sure we will - if only because anything which denotes "the people" is surely a "good thing". From that "people's car", then, to the rancid right-wing and now governing Partido Popular in Spain (more background here), when politicians get hold of the epithet that describes "common folk" we can only expect the very worst instincts to flourish.

As, perhaps, we in Britain have only too easily come to expect - and, even, given our apparently astonishing levels of tolerance, finally accept. As I pointed out over a year ago now:

Trends like these - and others we may perceive - are working together hard to make our blessed Big Society nothing more than an old boys' network of the retired and semi-retired. Putting people in their places and pigeon-holes is the game we're playing now.

We are in the process of disenfranchising politically and democratically whole swathes of the population, re-engineering society's wider expectations and leaving in the hands of both the conservative and the Conservatives amongst us the running of our schools, hospitals, local communities and neighbourhoods.

And all the above will - one day - be a breeding-ground for petty corruption.

Everything this government is doing is all part of the same long-term strategy.

And in the trees that are the detail of a truly popular protest, outrage and revulsion, we lose sight of the fact that the Coalition is still rapaciously destroying our woods. A generation to destroy; a generation to repair; and barely two years to initiate a final countdown none of us could have expected. This is the story of British politics since the 1980s.

And it's only just begun.

The groundhog decade (or is life too complicated for right decisions any more?)

2012-01-19T10:41:00.002Z

Politicians generally prefer to do stuff to us rather than engage in public service. There are notable exceptions, of course: the MP Dennis Skinner whom Cameron cared to call a dinosaur yesterday (I agree - velociraptor came to my mind) being one national example; many ward councillors without an ounce of ulterior ambition being perfectly admirable and local examples.

But in general, politicians are not the enabling and facilitating bridge (which they could, if they put their collective mind to it, quite easily become) between the technicalities of government and the non-professionals who vote them into power.

They should be - but they aren't.

And as I read that the dreaded credit rating agencies (now they really are modern velociraptors) will be used on the NHS to vet its solvency, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to employ them on our selfsame MPs to examine - with equal and biased thoroughness - their accounts and general expenses.

Out of pique on my part; out of a generalised desire to hurt others I suppose.

What really makes me miserable this morning, however, is the following amazingly perceptive and simple observation:

Cameron seems determined that this will be groundhog decade - reliving the 80's month by month - portsmouth.co.uk/news/local/eas…

And so it looks like it will be. For whilst we can accept more of the same from Cameron & Co, I honestly felt that having got thus far our Labour leaders had learned the value of not blinking in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.

Except that, last weekend, they finally did.

Groundhog day? It's not just the Tories who are repeating themselves. It's also Labour which is unavoidably wrapped up in an unhappy and dangerous cocoon. As Sunny points out, Labour appears to have few political convictions which don't exist in relation to where others choose to stand. Triangulation has become such an instinctive reflex for our "progressive" leaders that it would appear no core belief needs to exist absolutely anywhere.

But ordinary people - and I mean non-professional politicos (you know, the people we call voters who supposedly drive the whole blessed wagon) - do operate their lives in terms of beliefs.

In a sense, then, I suppose when I talked about a "moral democracy" a short while ago on these pages, and then described the "capitalist blame game" that seems to be affecting us most profoundly, I think perhaps I was moving slowly towards an idea that an impulse to relativism in our civilisation - an impulse many people of a religious inflection have been criticising for years - has actually come home to roost in an imperiously negative fashion.

We are suffering the consequences, on all sides of our parliamentary system, of a lack of focus, direction and clarity. No. I'm not tentatively sanctioning pig-headed decisiveness, as Éoin did the other day. I am, however, asking for politicians who know how to match thoughtfulness and patience with an ability to take the right decisions.

And in their apparent absence right now, it does occur to me to wonder if perhaps life has become so very complicated that hindsight, historical awareness and understanding the past are no longer sufficiently effective strategies to deal with the future.

We are therefore condemned to live a future which repeats itself overbearingly - even as it changes key elements sufficiently confusingly.

Bill Murray might indeed have something to say on this matter.

Even as I ask myself whether our politicians are able to realise the issue is out there to be considered.

Jenny, the loan shark - and her 433.4% APR

2012-01-18T16:15:00.000Z

Jenny, our friendly neighbourhood loan shark, paid us a visit today. We weren't in, so she left us a friendly note - with a mobile telephone number too. This is page one and page two of the note.

As you can see, the APR on a loan of between £50 and £500 is 433.4 percent.

Nice, eh?

And when George Osborne talks about getting us all - as a nation - out of the indebted situation we supposedly find ourselves in, I am sure none of the 10 o'clock news audiences thinks he means stuff such as this.

But stuff such as this is the downside of governments which think a crash-landing of pig-headed decisiveness is far better than a soft-landing of thoughtful patience.

Oh, and Jenny's mobile phone number? I discreetly airbrushed it out. I wondered - in these SOPA-ridden days - whether publishing online a telephone number introduced so slyly into a housing-trust property was really rather quite the done thing. For it would seem, these days, in the second decade of this century, that whilst private industry has the right to do anything its lobbyists make nominally legal, private individuals can only shut up, grovel and - in the event - pay through the nose.

Leveson and SOPA: how Rupert Murdoch is both very right and very wrong

2012-01-18T12:23:00.003Z

Compare and contrast the following two positions. First, from Rupert Murdoch's editors at the Times and Sunday Times, giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry:

The editors of the News International-owned Times and Sunday Times have told the Leveson inquiry they were implacably opposed to any form of statutory regulation of newspapers because of the "chilling effect" it may have on the press.

The editor of the Sunday Times even goes so far as to say:

[...] he would have "very serious doubts about some sort of statutory body that's been set up by parliament" because he thinks further down the line "politicians would be tempted to intervene".

So statutory regulation, for Mr Murdoch's editors - and presumably Mr Murdoch himself - is quite out of order.

I agree too.

However, Mr Murdoch - himself - doesn't seem to entirely agree with himself. At least, not in a slightly different context. Witness this story from last year on the subject of his very personal support in favour of far-reaching legislation - SOPA and PIPA - to control what is published, where and how on the worldwide web:

News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch threw his weight behind Congress' attempt to restrict the Internet, personally lobbying leaders on Capitol Hill Wednesday for two measures that purport to combat piracy.

The implications of SOPA and PIPA - if you're not entirely aware - are summarised at EFF's site here:

In addition to going after websites allegedly directly involved in copyright infringement, a proposal in SOPA will allow the government to target sites that simply provide information that could help users get around the bills’ censorship mechanisms. Such a provision would not only amount to an unconstitutional prior restraint against protected speech, but would severely damage online innovation. And contrary to claims by SOPA’s supporters, this provision—at least what’s been proposed so far—applies to all websites, even those in the U.S.

As First Amendment expert Marvin Ammori points out, “The language is pretty vague, but it appears all these companies must monitor their sites for anti-circumvention so they are not subject to court actions ‘enjoining’ them from continuing to provide ‘such product or service.’” That means social media sites like Facebook or YouTube—basically any site with user generated content—would have to police their own sites, forcing huge liability costs onto countless Internet companies. This is exactly why venture capitalists have said en masse they won’t invest in online startups if PIPA and SOPA pass. Websites would be forced to block anything from a user post about browser add-ons like DeSopa, to a simple list of IP addresses of already-blocked sites.

Perhaps worse, EFF has detailed how this provision would also decimate the open source software community. Anyone who writes or distributes Virtual Private Network, proxy, privacy or anonymization software would be negatively affected. This includes organizations that are funded by the State Department to create circumvention software to help democratic activists get around authoritarian regimes’ online censorship mechanisms. Ironically, SOPA would not only institute the same practices as these regimes, but would essentially outlaw the tools used by activists to circumvent censorship in countries like Iran and China as well.

So. On the one hand, in Britain, in the context of the printed press, Mr Murdoch is right about state regulation. Such regulation would inevitably lead, at some time in the future, to governments and individual politicians spreading out from such legislative "beachheads" - as they took lazy intellectual and strategic advantage of the opportunities thus presented.

On the other hand, however, as his adventures in MySpace and other online ventures have indicated, his knowledge and intuitive understanding of the ways of the worldwide web leave much to be desired:

Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer - we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons.

And, unfortunately, the primary lesson he seems to have learned is that whilst the package that is politicians, governments and state regulation is indisputably bad - phone-hacking, Leveson and bizarre print media behaviours notwithstanding - it would seem that he thinks the package that is private businesspeople, content corporations, the Internet and the once again aforementioned thorny state regulation - in the form of massively invasive new laws which give a potentially total control to put the shutters down on freedom of speech everywhere - is actually really rather a jolly good idea.

That is to say, whilst it's bad to pass laws politicians and governments might be tempted to use for their own benefit in an industry which is dying, it's fine to pass laws businesspeople and corporations are aiming to use for their own benefit in an industry which is on the point of flourishing like no other.

Talk about pork-barrel politics. These businesspeople appear to have absolutely no shame whatsoever.

Censored!

2012-01-18T08:52:00.000Z

A blueprint for corruption (or how politicians become unfit for office)

2012-01-17T19:45:00.000Z

I argued back in December that Ed Miliband was not his own man - but, rather, ours, through a dedication and affinity to the democratic cause. Then later the same month, I posted this:

[...] I think most politicians and commentators in modern politics are actually jealous of Ed Miliband. That he has got so far without owing anything to the media of one sort or another must really frustrate them in their own carefully marketed strait-jackets of thought.

Which is why I do say: "Ed, you still have my vote. The power you can take advantage of, channel and mould is as yet largely untested, untried and unseen. But if you manage your opportunities well and effectively from now on in, if you manage to see them exactly for what they are before the rest of us are able to even sense their wisdom, you will be marking out a new territory: a new territory which will change British politics forever.

"It's now your only alternative.

"It's now our only option.

"So understand it for what it is - and take it whilst you still can."

Today, Éoin suggests Ed Balls' blinking in the face of an immoral confluence of financial interests - that is to say, being pig-headedly decisive instead of continuing with thoughtfully patient - is just about the best and most important thing Ed Miliband has sanctioned in his short reign:

You do not have to get people to like you in order to respect you and sometimes when everyone agrees with you it means you are doing the wrong thing. By accepting cuts and pay freezes Ed Miliband has done precisely what the Tories had prayed he would never do. By picking a fight with the Unions Ed Miliband has caused Cameron headaches because it makes the 'red Ed' label harder to pin. Likewise, the 'bandwagon' jibes from the PM and PMQs will now fall flat as Ed grows into his role as leader of the Labour Party. Ed now understands the number 1 rule of politics; always do what your enemy would least like you to do. The media is once more listening to the Labour leader and voters will now take notice. If the price for that was some daft equivocation using Tory language it will have been well worth it.

And so, once again, politics becomes just as sleazy as well as downright unlikeable as - in reality - we always knew it to be.

So let's drag out the emotional and medical metaphors - tough love, respect, economic medicine, diagnosis - and go down that damn awful route of people at the top deciding things on the trot without communicating, consulting, listening or engaging with the ordinary people (that is to say, the non-politicians amongst us) who they are supposed to serve, for goodness sake.

No matter that it's wrong, immoral and unjust.

Such words matter not a jot in the helter-skelter race to get to the top.

Problem is if you get used to trampling on the people when in opposition, because you judge - perhaps, in political terms, quite rightly - this to be the only practical alternative, how on earth will anyone manage to believe that you will resist the temptation to behave in the same manner when you actually have you hands on the real levers of power?

The battle to win power almost inevitably makes you unfit for the office. Ed Miliband and Éoin, I am sad to say, are now showing us exactly how.

Amazing how modern politicians think choice is important for everything except political parties

2012-01-17T09:05:00.001Z

Yesterday, I wondered the following:

[...] I really wouldn't be surprised if the often worthy and positive cuckoo that was the New Labour tendency mightn't end up destroying the heart and soul of the Tory Party over the next two governments in much the same way as it has already manifestly managed to do to what used to be Labour, its class movement and its society-loving instincts.

The truth of the matter is that our "top-flight" politicians - the ones who lead parties and get to the top of greasy poles in a multitude of hierarchies (organisations, institutions and committees various) - are generally, almost without exception in fact, intellectual hypocrites. The meme that currently dominates our Western societies is that of choice: we are no longer patients, parents, students or victims of crime but end-user consumers of services the state provides. And so it is that our "top-flight" politicians - those who run our lives, those who plan how to win us over despite ourselves - structure our needs in terms of socioeconomic McMenus.

Except, of course, in terms of the political parties they lead. There, it would seem, curiously enough, we have blessed little choice at all.

Another example of do what I say and not what I do:

The Labour party's chief union backer has accused Ed Miliband of undermining his own leadership, disenfranchising the party's core support and leaving the country with all three main parties bent on using austerity to save capitalism.

In an article in the Guardian, the Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, launches a strident attack on Miliband and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, prompted by the party leadership's weekend decision to endorse a continuation of the government's public-sector pay freeze.

He suggests that their stance "challenges the whole course Ed Miliband has set for the party, and perhaps his leadership itself". He also claims Blairites will seek to capitalise on their policy coup and come for Miliband himself, a path he says "will lead to the destruction of the Labour party as constituted and certain election defeat". [...]

I hate being manipulated by clever political bods such as these. I really do. And I do seriously wonder if McCluskey isn't right in what he says when he suggests that Blairites might seek to remake Labour in their very own image once again.

In fact, I have to say it wouldn't surprise me if over the next two governments we didn't see a new centrist political party in Britain: based around the most Blairite of triangulations; cementing together the UK out of an artificial fear of the unknown; centralising even more the power bases around strong-arm tactics in Westminster, with a trivial agenda of petty localism as a sop to the decentralisers amongst us ... all this and more would simply confirm that for Blairites Labour was merely a conditional stepping-stone to "better" things.

Never a certain bet nor fundamentally organic relationship of the altruistic.

A shaky foundation, in fact, to be defec(a)ted on when necessary.

What say you?

The big question isn't whether Labour minus Blairites equals the wilderness years ...

2012-01-16T13:51:00.000Z

There have been a flurry of tweets over the past twenty-four hours on the subject of a defection to the Tory Party of one of Labour's most controversial tweeters, Luke Bozier. You may not have heard of Luke, mind - if you want to know more, Mark Ferguson's short and eventually dismissive piece over at Labour List this morning is probably the best place to start.

Meanwhile, I was minded to respond to a tweet from Anthony Painter earlier in the day on this very same subject of how Labour had to learn to deal with different ideas and people and places, when he wrote:

Labour has to learn that people can disagree with it, vote for others, join others, not vote and not be bad people.....

My response being:

@anthonypainter No. It's not Labour that needs to learn this lesson. It's political activism in general.

Something, in fact, we could expand to many relationships and sectors these days.

And then came along this other tweet - which got me thinking further:

Fellow Tories, what are your thoughts on a sudden influx of Blairite/New Labourites into our party?

Two questions immediately arise, of course. The first one, the obvious one, being: could Labour survive as a governing political force? That is to say, would Labour minus the Blairite tendency equal the wilderness years from now on in?

But the second - far more intriguing - one goes as follows: what about the Conservatives? Could the Tories as they currently perceive themselves even survive such a stampede of an influx of potentially overwhelming proportions - if and when, that is, the political dams broke (as they might) and a flood of disaffected triangulators invaded their treasured Etonite playing-field?

In a sense, the right-wing of the Tory Party and the left-wing of the Labour Party are literally mirror images of each other: their relationship with and attachment to much-needed badges of courage - those political markers in the sand they use to auto-define their positions - is a given in both extraordinary cases: signs of tribal loyalty and righteousness, indeed, if there ever were any to behold.

So that's why the more I think about it, the more I do wonder.

And you know, I really wouldn't be surprised if the often worthy and positive cuckoo that was the New Labour tendency mightn't end up destroying the heart and soul of the Tory Party over the next two governments in much the same way as it has already manifestly managed to do to what used to be Labour, its class movement and its society-loving instincts.

Employee share ownership is no solution for these times

2012-01-16T08:28:00.000Z

Nick Clegg appears to have been widely praised for suggesting we should "John Lewis" the economy. This from the Guardian today:

Workers could be given the right to request shares in the companies they work for under proposals put forward on Monday by Nick Clegg, to create what he describes as a "John Lewis" economy.

In a bid to deploy century-old liberal principles to the mounting debate about crony capitalism, the deputy prime minister will argue that the economy is in danger of being "monopolised by a minority" and that wider share ownership among employees could be an answer. "Just as the eighties had been the decade of share ownership, so this decade should become the decade of employee share ownership", he will say in a speech at the Corporation of London and the Centreforum thinktank.

Now far be it from me to criticise such an idea, especially when John Lewis Partnership has laudable financial structures in place such as these:

[...] every partner [that is to say, employee] receives an Annual Bonus, which is a share of the profit. It is calculated as a percentage of the salary, with the same percentage for everyone, from top management down to the shop floor and the storage rooms. The bonus is dependent on the profitability of the partnership each year, varying between 9% and 20% of the partners' annual salaries since 2000. The Annual Partnership Bonus for 2007 was the top end 20%, this is before the recession started. The Annual Partnership Bonus for 2008 was 15% of a partner's gross earnings for the 2007/2008 financial year. The Annual Partnership Bonus for 2009 was 13% of a partner's gross earnings for the 2008/2009 financial year. The Annual Partnership Bonus for 2010 was 15% of a partner's gross earnings for the 2009/2010 financial year.

It is, however, worth noting that there exist other structures in modern-day manufacturing and service-industry Britain which would bring about far more engagement between workforces and management - and even help to constructively blur the lines themselves. As this tweet underlined this morning:

Yep. RT @brylip: @GreenSolitaire Funny how "john lewis" brand evoked not "co-op". Right to request shares long way off industrial democracy.

And to be honest, in a capitalism such as this - a capitalism, remember, we are suffering from - where is the blessed virtue or attraction in investing part of one's financial reserves in the business one may shortly be ejected from? Especially when - in a capitalism such as ours - the reason why businesses may go to the wall could have very little to do with the entities in question and everything to do not only with violently culpable behaviours in the financial services sector but also a wider mismanagement in political and economic institutions.

Knowing how - in the last few years - the world economy has been entirely turned upside down by a few banks, their cronies and other assorted villains, would you really want to spend every penny in negotiating a perfect financial fit between you and your corporation or medium-sized enterprise?

I know I wouldn't.

A rant is naked fear - and this is how frightened I am for my country

2012-01-15T23:24:00.001Z

I reproduce my rant below taken from an exchange with Shuggy at the end of my previous post. But, actually, the exchange goes further back than that as we have crossed swords on Facebook too. His knowledge of history, religion and Scotland in general - as well as many other matters I must assume - is far broader, generous and intellectually resilient than mine. I've been on the losing end of matters ranging from Hari and ethics in journalism to the subject of today's post - that is to say, Scottish independence.

I operate on a visceral level my complex syntax rarely serves to hide. This is not good for any body politic out there.

Maybe it is indeed time to pack my bags.

Anyhow. Here's my rant on democracy - and all my fears in a nutshell.

I really find it very difficult to understand how you can possibly defend the current state of our democracy. You're using the same sort of argument as Darling does in this other context: what we have must be better than what we haven't tried; so let's not try anything else - and, meanwhile, forget the damage that is being persistently exerted on finite lives and perishable human beings.

Our democracy isn't working *already*. Our economy isn't working *already*. Our politics isn't working *already*. We have a one-party state with an unhappy façade of petty pluralism. You may think we have the best of all possible worlds (with the emphasis on possible) but what's absolutely clearly missing in economics and politics is any sense of responsibility for, awareness of or connect to the real pain ordinary people are suffering - as well as that which they are going to suffer.

Let's say you're right in everything you say then Shuggy. You must know what you're talking about. Feelings and fear and worry about the future aren't part of the equation which decides your world. Yours seems to be sense and sensibility - as well as a measured acceptance that nothing must be done for so many in the interests of a wider stability.

But where does such an approach leave families chucked out on the streets because bankers, financial services sector whizzkids, economists and political leaders various, as well as Darling, Brown, Blair and all, have wanted to play at wretched laboratories with our lives?

Where does that leave the young and old people who have no control over their futures because rich people have managed to escape all blame and responsibility for massive mistakes in their ingenious schemes? Schemes, incidentally, which they continue to generate massive personal wealth out of on the backs of very ordinary existences.

Why are you *so* afraid now of potentially upturning the applecart from bottom-up when so many significant players have already upturned every applecart out there except their very own?

Are you that afraid of uncontrollable change? Are you so worried about the potential for occasional disintegration that you far prefer the forceful integration of society which comes via the wealthy over the poor to the small but worthy chances of a more equitable and devolved democracy of everyone working together with everyone?

And why can you not see this as independence for England just as much as a case of independence for Scotland? Personally, I do *not* want to be beholden to a Westminster like the current - a navel-gazing and imperious London of monstrous proportions - for even one more Parliament after this one. They are destroying everything I believe in - and as far as I can see, the only way we can preserve those remnants of a historical civic beauty and tolerance that might have been Great Britain is by ensuring that at least in Scotland (for example) a repository of such political DNA is maintained somewhere for future generations.

Because Cameron most certainly will be eliminating it from the English if given that ten year opportunity.

To summarise my awful rant: I want Scotland independent *whatever the potential consequences* because I want what's currently good about the UK to find a safe hiding-place and haven that will one day allow us to turn the clock back to a better time.

And Westminster under the Tories, I'm sure you'll at least concede me this point, is most certainly not the hiding-place and haven which at least my sort of the left is looking for.

Shuggy's ~~reply~~ replies can now be found at the end of the post I've already linked to. From his perspective, the Scottish independence movement is clearly one of rank brutality. Not something I would be inclined to want to adhere to.

On the other hand, I do believe there have been those today almost suggesting that in order to beat the Tories, Labour has to become as nasty as them.

This is exactly how we will slide towards that awfully poorly named dynamic of civil conflict - anything but civil - which bestrides the world of many modern political experiences.

Nevertheless, at best, capitalism in general is the law of the jungle.

And this Coalition capitalism is the law of the jungle at its very worst.

So what else can we do?

Preserve our quiet and measured dignity even as we lose our shirts?

Tell me if this is our destiny.

Because, for my country of birth, I am now very very frightened.

And all the fear and unhappiness which I suffered on behalf of my other country bubbles up in remembrance of terrible times past.
____________________

Further reading: Paul, as is often the case, is far more sensible and focussed than I ever manage to be on such subjects. If you don't believe me, read this - and see if he isn't.

Darling winks, Balls blinks and politics sinks in all our estimations

2012-01-15T18:23:00.001Z

Alistair Darling says a number of revealing things this weekend. Here's one - with what, for an intelligent man, is a bizarrely total absence of irony in a unmistakeably ironic situation (the bold is mine):

If Scotland retained sterling, as Scottish first minister and SNP leader Alex Salmond has suggested would happen in the event of a vote for independence, Darling said it would find itself in a mini-version of the eurozone, unable to set its own interest rates, tax rates, or spending policies.

"This is precisely the argument that is being engaged in the eurozone at the moment," he said. "If you have a single currency area [for sterling] you come back to having an economic if not a political union [with London].

"So you go through all the trauma and expense of leaving the union, only to come back and discover that because you want to be part of this common currency you are back to where you were. I just don't see the sense of that."

Essentially, what he's saying is if Scotland voted for political independence but retained sterling ... well, then it'd be on a par with joining the clearly toxic euro - something we might right now all believe is unnecessarily risky but also, according to Darling, just as bad - just as toxic - as remaining within the current sterlingzone.

That is to say, again according to Darling, the choice Scotland has ahead of it right now is to remain a part of a relationship he simply doesn't see the sense of because any other alternative is just as impossibly senseless.

And whilst Darling winks at all us from up there on his sophistic throne ("whatever you do, you're up the creek - ha ha ha"), and whilst Ed Balls blinks in a politically monumental Coca-Cola Classic sort of a moment (more here), surely every imaginable bit of our politics begins to sink in all our estimations.

No one but no one at the moment talks about anything but taking heavily postured decisions on behalf of people they don't know, don't really care about and really don't have to face from day to day.

Frankly, I'm getting right sick of representative democracy.

These days, it serves to represent only those who need no representation.

If representative democracy were a machine, it would have been put in a museum long ago. As it is, it weaves evermore imperiously its looming disgracefulnesses over our socioeconomic spaces - all the time claiming a credibility it utterly lost from 2008 onwards.

We need a new machine. And we need it right now. And no one seems prepared enough to forge it.

So what next?

How specialisation is destroying society

2012-01-14T19:24:00.001Z

This has to be the quote of the week:

[...] The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social is corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture.

Everywhere that commerce gets involved in what used to be public spaces, there is the same tendency to make exclusive of each other different products and services supplied by different providers. From software such as Microsoft Office which locks you into proprietary data formats to supermarkets with private malls and parking places which can only be used for a certain time and only for a certain purpose, the desire by powerful companies to own our physical and intellectual spaces only seems, as time goes by, to march unstoppably onwards and upwards.

And yet commerce wouldn't have to be like that if excellence rather than competition were the name of the game. A massive evolutionary step forwards it - indeed - would be, in fact. And perhaps, in a way, we are in the anteroom of such a step forwards: whilst the web is still in its relative infancy, we - even so - are able to perceive on the social horizon many tendencies and tools which might allow for a perfect perception of true excellence - above and beyond the tricks of marketing and persuasion which currently tend to cloud realities.

In times of a relative lack of consumer information, brands were a guarantee of minimum quality - a commercial pact, if you like (maybe a bet of a kind), between supplier and end-user. But in an own- and secondary-brand age it seems now that those famous names of yore - and the whole branding mentality which serves as their backdrop - will manage more to deceive than guarantee.

Most corporations tend to prefer to convey the impression they are champions of openness, community and engagement with society. In their ongoing battle to beat mighty oppositional forces, however, such HR- and comms-driven instincts are in practice destroyed in their day-to-day behaviours. They too, as perhaps our politicos, are at the mercy of much broader systems and processes.

We are all, it would seem, disintegrating morally and economically in the face of structures far more powerful and persistent than almost any of us. Each of us is on the evolutionary end of a process whereby civilisation and its peoples once had a clear overview of procedures and chains of command - a process which has now terminated in an overwhelming specialisation of skills and responsibilities. Yes. With such specialisation, we can do so very much in societies of such massive complexity - but, on the other hand, we have lost the ability to comprehend the nature of another's work.

And thus we have lost the ability to properly work alongside and together with others - except when in the thrall of considerable fears: fears of losing a job or promotion; fears of losing market share or shareholder trust; fears of consumer lawsuits; fears of patent challenges ... the list is fearfully endless - and underlies almost everything we don't do.

From bankers whose complex sums destroy the future economies of whole nation states to politicians unable to channel the vagaries of markets whose only responsibility is to themselves, this is how specialisation is destroying our connective tissue.

And all our company structures are made in this image.

And all our commerce is leading us to finally upend our instincts to cooperation.

In the name of competition, specialisation arose. Through this process of specialisation, disconnection began to spread. Now we only know how to keep a community together by creating as big a sense of distance and difference as possible from those beings we are forced unerringly to compete against. By creating a worldwide web of interconnectedness on the back of such specialisation, we have created an impossibly gigantic circle the squaring of which can surely only break us.

My conclusion? We either stop using, at least as we have done to date, that specialisation I mention to advance our society - or we work out some pretty convincing alternative way of overcoming the Chinese walls that are breaking up our ability to share our evermore uncommon experiences.

Either way, it's going to be an uphill battle for the cooperative instincts at the heart of humanity.

And an example, perhaps, of where a progress measured only empirically distorts a wider understanding of what excellence - and, as a result, our society itself - should really look like.

How the Left's hands are tied just as any wage slave out there

2012-01-14T10:01:00.000Z

This tweet which came my way just now lays bare how corrupting and irrelevant to ordinary people's needs political parties have now become:

As @umairh said the other day "politicians are cowering middle managers for a growing global plutocracy" Politics must change Not the party

Meanwhile, Chris explains clearly what he thinks is wrong on the separate matter of ideology in film funding:

However, when an intelligent man says something so silly, something must be at work. That something is ideology. What we see in Cameron’s remark is an extreme manifestation of managerialism - a belief that something unpredictable (the public’s film tastes) can in fact be foreseen in advance by experts in government.

And he concludes thus:

In this sense, managerialism is a truly powerful ideology, as its blinds its possessors to the fact that it is (to say the least) a partial and contestable view of the world.

I would go further. Managerialism, as thus defined, and I am pleased to stumble across such an understandable definition so unmumblingly phrased, is a prime example of an ideology which claims to be outside ideology. Blair and New Labour's magpie-like Third Way - extraordinary button-pressers who managed to convert us all into robotic responders to the encouragements and even impositions of nudging policy-making and statements - are in this sense true sons and daughters of capitalism: the prime anti-ideological construct in all our societies.

And all, also, clearly prime examples where politicians choose the cowardly road of not taking obvious ownership for re-engineering entire societies. A lesson which Cameron has learned rather well (more on similar lines from myself here).

As the tweet above so significantly indicates: "Politics must change Not the party". If Labour can only win elections by reproducing exactly the same relationships between wealth and poverty the Tories are so astutely pursuing - and in such a coordinated way - we have to decide whether the problem is our political leaders or, actually, the system within which they are obliged to operate.

Don't blame the leaders, then; blame the systemic duties, constructs, processes and procedures those at the very top have become so accustomed to forcing upon us.

For the Left's leaders have their hands tied just as much as any wage slave out there.

Which is why it's now time for politics - not political parties - to be in our intellectual crosshairs.

From punchbag to punchline - whose fault is Labour today?

2012-01-13T13:42:00.001Z

Dan Hodges concludes thus this afternoon:

That is what’s happening to the British Left. No longer hated, nor ignored, we have become figures of fun. Political jesters. Not a movement or a party, but a punchline.

He speaks as a self-defined "Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest". I assume he means the Ed Miliband nest. He also lays claim to being tribal. I can believe it.

And I wonder if this process of becoming a punchline - that is to say, a laughable footnote to the British body politic - wasn't started some time ago during the selfsame Blairite times of New Labour. As members were converted into little more than envelope-stuffing and door-knocking cannon fodder; as policy became the preserve of hidden committees and comfy sofas locked away behind Westminster's closed doors; and as supporter involvement reverted to involving little more than submitting oneself to grandiloquent gesture politics delivered from on high ... well, is it at all surprising that the Left in Britain may now find itself becoming a figure of fun for everyone else who might care to hold an opinion on the matter?

Dan, your Blairite friends turned Labour members into a colossal and monolithic punchbag - obliged to take onboard practically anything and everything that Third Way thinkers could possibly think up.

From punchbag to punchline - the distance is really not very far.

And if the situation is as dire as Hodges would have us believe, and if we do need to work out how to eventually move on, blame will need - one day - to be apportioned fairly and squarely.

Not just self-interestedly, as he does at the moment.

Does Labour really need Scotland to win at Westminster?

2012-01-13T11:38:00.002Z

Here's a fascinating post from Jim Pickard at the Financial Times today. Its thesis runs as follows: Labour would still have won five post-war general elections - even without its Scottish MPs.

The implications? Labour doesn't need a heavy-handed and bullying approach to the tectonic shifts which we can perceive are taking place.

For the downside of believing the Party needs Scotland to win at Westminster has always been that it has made it more centrist and thus politically incoherent than it ought to be - if, that is, we care to understand its socialist aspirations in terms of devolving to real people and voters - to communities of hands-on citizens - their rights to exert full control over shared socioeconomic futures.

Essentially, Labour has become quite Stalinist out of a very real fear that without Scottish MPs, the Tories would rule the roost forever. All those incoherences, then, which surely would threaten to tear the Party apart - at the very least in the eyes of the wider voting public - could be safely set to one side if the statistical analysis presented today can be tested and proven correct. And if the Party goes on to decide, out of stubborn political immobility, not to open up a much more constructive relationship with Scottish (and perhaps future English) aspirations to self-government, the imperial impulses of its Scottish MPs - and presumably some of its English ones too - will be laid all too clearly bare for everyone to see and cogitate to their heart's content.

Or not as the case may be.

The UK was always an imposed kingdom created on the back of violence. And that legacy can never be entirely excised from its DNA. Shouldn't we now be prepared to grasp an opportunity to remake those relationships on the basis of a sensitively forged civic nationalism and an economic necessity which will never go away? After all, Scotland and England would continue to share geographical proximity, whatever their political and constitutional bonds became post-independence. And geography always plays a far greater part in bringing countries sustainably together than any heavy-footed pursuit of false unity from a centre which never really is.

Which is why I strongly believe that England should see the prospect of Scottish independence as the very first step in its own liberation from hundreds of years of a disagreeable acting-out of that role as all-too-inevitable colonials.

As well as a blessed release from all that national angst that such historical behaviours has surely served to generate.

When a Freudian slip resembles a self-inflicted banana skin

2012-01-13T10:06:00.000Z

Ekklesia describes the government's performance in the Lords this week quite perfectly:

Lord Freud, for the government, is generally agreed to have put in a dismal performance - getting his sums confused, admitting lack of evidence on Work Capability Assessments (which have been plagued by misdiagnoses and appeals), and having no response to detailed case studies and well-researched criticisms levelled by opponents.

But this is not only happening in the context that is welfare and disability. The admirable website Sound Off For Justice highlighted - also on Wednesday - the following absurdities in the Coalition's foolish plans to cut Legal Aid:

Yesterday was is the launch my of my long-awaited report on the Government’s legal aid reforms which found that for every ￡1 cut from the legal aid budget less than 42 pence will actually be saved from the public purse.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) will achieve its savings by largely cost shifting to other cash-strapped departments. For example, for every ￡1 saved by removing clinical negligence from legal aid funding it will cost the NHS almost ￡3.

Thus it is that I am unable to decide whether I believe this government to be unbelievably Machiavellian as it proceeds with an unnecessary plan of cuts in order to impose a reign of merciless subjugation on a now hapless voting public or - perhaps worse for us all in such crisis-ridden times as these, where effective leadership is surely required - whether I see it to be simply and quite miserably incompetent in practically everything it does.

Evil or unprepared then? That is the question. What is clear is that Lord Freud's slips were unhappy examples of self-inflicted banana skins; unnecessary but revealing actions of the frankly useless and totally unhelpful.

And what's absolutely patent is that whilst Lord Freud will continue to enjoy a privileged standard of living, distanced from the violences of this socioeconomic disaster which he and his colleagues are visiting upon us, it will be the ordinary people who will suffer the consequences of this Coalition's lack of preparation for the high offices it has aspired to.

As Ekklesia underlined (the bold is mine):

Lord Low hit out at the "draconian" nature of the ESA limits being proposed and called on Lib Dems peers (who had been given a non-whipped vote) to "search their consciences" when it came to voting.

On exempting cancer patients, Lord Patel pointed out that the issue was a reduction in savings, not extra funding. His amendment, he said,was not about adding to expenditure but refusing to take £1.3 billion from the most vulnerable.

He declared: "If you are going to rob the poor to pay the rich we have entered a different form of morality", adding that cancer patients are not "not skivers, not benefit cheats".

Absolutely spot-on.

And absolutely disgraceful.

And still I am not sure if it is true incompetence or utter evil.

On old boys' networks (and Twitter as the virtual 1 percent)

2012-01-12T12:31:00.000Z

A fascinating retweet and comment from Anthony Painter just now:

RT @SamuelCoates: UK social media hit share in 2011: Facebook 51%,YouTube 25%, Twitter 3% http://t.co/EQcHtME4 < Always worth remembering...

And indeed it is worth remembering. Coincidentally, the percentage relating to Twitter's apparent reach is uncomfortably close to the 1 percent which the famous 99 percent so despise. So if Twitter does have an influence disproportionate to its number of active users, we are perhaps - then - reproducing in a virtual context the oligarchical structures that allegedly rule our real world.

Facebook and YouTube, meanwhile, give voice and expression to the ordinary souls out there. Even as their influence is rather more diffuse.

Perhaps in its concentrated nature, Twitter is showing us exactly how old boys' networks grow up. We could argue Twitter users are generally quite assiduous - with the successful tweets and timelines gaining niches, specialisations and followings quite quickly. Its obsessive characteristic - therefore - as a themed social network leads to a greater facility to lever what would, at first sight, appear to be a more limited zone of operation. If Facebook and YouTube form the 75 percent iceberg - invisible to most of us in their spread and amplitude of content - Twitter is at the very tip of that iceberg; clearly visible for miles around as it glints in the sunlight of reflection, reference and massive link love.

Facebook and YouTube as - primarily - echo chambers then?

And Twitter as a starting-point for much longer journeys?

Influence and reach where it matters, in fact.

Perhaps old boys' networks are another of these natural instincts and impulses human beings find it impossible to shrug off, however sophisticated their civilisations seem to make them. A pity and a sadness - but a possible inevitability too.

So will English Toryism mimic Milosevic after all?

2012-01-12T09:43:00.000Z

I wrote this in early September last year:

Whilst the Tories spent years in opposition working out how to recapture England and Wales by hook or by crook, they either neglected to worry about Scotland or - perhaps more likely - discarded its importance to their wider project. Personally, I'm inclined to believe the latter is the case. The analogy would be Slovenia's practically bloodless escape from the imposed union of disparate peoples that was Communist Yugoslavia. Here, instead of a medieval Milosevic bent on unimaginably physical violence, we have a 21st century strategist only a PR background could invent. And the result? Recapture and reaffirm all natural Tory heartlands, enslave and terrorise the rest of England and Wales through a destruction of all its public infrastructures - and, if it so wishes, let a wayward Scotland do its very worst as it decides to bow out of the battleground thus initiated.

If we are to continue with the Balkan analogy, Scotland is Slovenia (when not a nest of Scottish nationalists, a den of all-too-clever Labourists - clearly, then, in the long-term, better out than in); the rest of England and Wales is Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia et al (to be brutally fought over, destroyed and subjugated in the process); whilst the Tory heartlands are the controlling Serbian rump - as well as any other areas of convenient wealth and financial importance (Gibraltar, the Channel Islands - you know, the sort of places we could stash our dough) which might conveniently occur to them to conveniently hang onto.

Oh - and Northern Ireland in all of this?

Who cares about faraway places ... (But did I hear anyone out there mention Kosovo at all?)

In the light of Cameron's recent moves to enforce a timetable on the SNP's desire to hold a referendum on independence, perhaps - in my relative ignorance of these matters - I was righter than, at the time, I could be expected to have been.

Cameron a 21st century Milosevic for the United Kingdom - with all the caveats that hundreds of years of relative democracy and freedom of speech should add to that complex and uncertain statement? Remember: Milosevic found himself at the top of a small empire of the Southern Slavs, whose reign under Tito was generally admired by people who didn't have to live under its rule. Plenty of cases of Communist oppression for those citizens who stumbled under its unhappy weight - whilst to the outside world, this Communist middle way was seen as a blessing in the face of a far more corrupting regime in the USSR.

Whilst only yesterday, I was watching Russian TV reporting on how the English police were stopping black people for no reason.

To ourselves, our own world is always understandable and generally fair. It's only when we step outside our circle of trust that certainties begin to break down.

So is the United Kingdom all that it's cracked up to be? Or will the legacy of repressive New Labour legislation - both socioeconomic as well as public-order related - continue to win its adepts in successive governments?

And will such a process then give us just as many good reasons to recognise Scotland's potential independence - even where this is technically not as legal as we might prefer - in just the same way as Germany gave Croatia the crucial support it needed when facing down the brutality of those centralising Communist instincts of the ex-Yugoslavia?

How Mr Gove gives with one hand but then takes with the other

2012-01-11T09:25:00.000Z

This, at first glance, is very good news:

In his speech later, Mr Gove will say: "Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum.

"Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch.

"By 16, they could have an understanding of formal logic previously covered only in university courses and be writing their own apps for smartphones."

Those of us who are able to imagine anything like the above - in relation to the potential of ICT as a driver for future economic worth, intellectual engagement and general societal progress - can only say "Hallelujah!" at this apparent proclamation of educational virtue. My children, all IT-proficient and intelligent users in their own lives, have without exception (and that's now all three of them who've expressed the same opinion) hated ICT with a virulence other subjects have simply not engendered.

My own thoughts, as a moderately tech-savvy parent, are clear: Britain's education system has been in the thrall of an exclusively proprietorial model of software, hardware and curricular objectives which has meant it is impossible to install - never mind teach - the kind of software that automatically encourages you to get involved with IT in the way Mr Gove appears to wish. I posted this link to a video in 2009 on a European alternative to Microsoft - and it still best inscribes what I believe in this matter.

I do wonder how full an understanding of the matter the man really has, though, when Channel 4 continues its report by underlining what the Department of Education sees as the example to follow:

As examples it cited the British Computing Society and Computing at School which have created a curriculum for secondary schools with support from Microsoft, Google and Cambridge University.

So we've arrived at where we've arrived by installing expensive hardware and unnecessarily costly software licences - and then whose help do we go and enlist? The very same software publisher which encouraged schools to invest in "boring" Word and Excel in the first place. As Paul Clarke points out on Twitter this morning:

I for one am glad to see Microsoft at the heart of revamped schools ICT. So important to build skills in bloated, inferior, doomed software.

An example of how Mr Gove - out of ignorance - gives with one hand but then takes with the other?

No-notice inspections: good enough for schools but not executive boardrooms?

2012-01-10T18:16:00.002Z

On the day that the Guardian announces schools will be seen "as they really are", as they have to endure no-notice Ofsted inspections, I stumble across this introduction to Parent View, a subsite of the Ofsted web (the bold is mine):

Parent View gives you the chance to tell us what you think about your child’s school.

Parent View asks for your opinion on 12 aspects of your child’s school, from the quality of teaching, to dealing with bullying and poor behaviour. We will use the information you provide when making decisions about which schools to inspect, and when.

By sharing your views, you’ll be helping your child’s school to improve. You will also be able to see what other parents have said about your child's school. Or, if you want to, view the results for any school in England.

Interestingly, and quite by the by, it concludes by saying:

Please note that Parent View does not currently include independent schools.

Lucky them, then. But not unusual in a wider context. More of that anon.

Incidentally, I looked up my children's school and at the time of writing this post there have been exactly zero responses.

The idea, however, is worth pursuing. But I do wonder why, in our fascination for achieving transparency, where we have it - that is to say, in social media and other online activity - we are critical of its presence; where we half-do - that is to say, in the public sphere - we can't wait to use it to knock sensible discourse on the head; and where it refuses to exist - that is to say, in the private sector - we are letting our governments give companies (as well as "independent" schools) of all sizes the sorts of freedoms to hide stuff which we don't allow our state education system; don't want to allow our MPs and public sector environments; and now think totally preferable even where of late impossible to maintain when ordinary people take matters into their own tweeting hands.

So what is it really that we want of life and truth?

Why are we so disconcertingly uncertain about whose transparency we want and where we wish to apply it?

And when will we be able to order no-notice inspections of executive boardrooms, CEOs, financial services whizzkids ... in addition to all the other supposedly "private" sector actors whose behaviours impact so fiercely - as well as so clearly - on the wealth and material living standards of a generally blameless public?

For surely if you want to make money out of hapless consumers, you ought to admit the existence of a wider constituency interested in whether you've done it on a level playing-field.

Unless, of course, that's only good for teachers.

The rest of society having absolutely no obligation to anyone.

A View Of Top Executives anyone?

No. I didn't think so.

"So Labour now stands for fair capitalism?" "And how can we manage to be good Party members?"

2012-01-10T13:58:00.002Z

Thus tweeteth Andrew Neil this morning:

@lewis_goodall So Labour now stands for fair capitalism? What happened to socialism. Or even social democracy.

Meanwhile - and I hope Peter doesn't mind me quoting the priceless first paragraph from his latest post - more evidence, if evidence were needed, of Labour's absolute lack of a guiding principle which doesn't depend on what the other side is doing:

If you press a Labour politician hard – and you may have to press very hard – he or she will admit to being a socialist and an internationalist. The reason that the admission is reluctant is because Labour’s most successful attempts to gain and hold power in the last sixty years have relied in downplaying both to the point of invisibility, and their actions when in power have been a denial of both beliefs, the exception being the great Labour Government of 1945-51 that created the welfare state and the NHS. Perhaps only by considering this government’s achievements, it's towering figures and what they stood for can we truly understand how far Labour has fallen since 1951.

Alastair Campbell, as perhaps befits his career trajectory, tries to see a silver lining in all that is being thrown at Labour, as he gives us a fascinating lesson in communication strategy:

I have written here many times about the concept of the ‘prism’, the layering that media conventional wisdom lays over a person or issue, and which then dictates whether something is news or not. The current prism re Ed is negative. So a poll that reflects well on his performance does not get covered. One that reflects badly gets big coverage. Minor errors – the Blackbusters typo is a good example – are turned into major stories. Major interventions are reduced, and dismissed.

So where should we stand? What do we do? Who do we turn to?

And how can we manage to be good Party members?

The thought that occurs to me is that the "fair capitalism" meme - which, according to Campbell, Ed is developing quite successfully (even if he gets no credit for it upfront) - is a classic example of traditional top-down message-forging. You know the sort of thing I mean: where the first lot to find out about new angles on the broader policy brushstrokes and maybe wider political thought are the media outlets the political party in question is trying to cultivate - even as the very last in the queue are the bemused members who either clam up and only ever go so far as to admit, as Peter so cleverly points out, that they're socialists and internationalists, have always been and always will be ... or, alternatively, wonder if they're guilty of cowardice for not saying more; of disloyalty for pointing out how this is the first they've actually heard of it; or - God forbid - of being in the wrong party for not being far more enthusiastic about everything.

Surely, when our leader speaks out, as a listening and consulting socialist grouping of the caring, none of what he ever says should come as any of a surprise. If he truly listened and really consulted - and these verbs were effected in both directions - embarrassed silences of bemused stares would never have space to take place.

I suppose, in a sense, when he tweets what he tweets, Neil is looking to sustain the old two-party dynamics. It makes writing about politics and interpreting its functioning much easier, of course. Imagine, alternatively, if political parties were really like good charities (which is what Ed Miliband might be trying to achieve) - customer focussed; masses of volunteers; low overheads; and capable of continually reinventing themselves as per the real needs of their client base.

What a political party that would be! And how lost most journalists would find themselves ...

So when I ask the question "How can we manage to be good Party members?" in the current circumstances, I suppose what I'm really doing is wondering whether I should change myself, shut up, close down and accept that we live in an imperfect world I can't change - or become evermore vociferous, engaged, critical and active?

What do you think I should do? Should I settle for what there is or believe - as they say - in better?

Preserve the Union?

2012-01-10T11:11:00.002Z

I'm back in Chester now. After a night train from Madrid, the Eurostar from Paris and the coach from London, I arrived safe and sound last night at around 10.30.

But the panorama which presents itself is not very pleasing - nor, indeed, hopeful.

The left is wrangling, the right is imposing itself - it would seem the long-term plan is beginning to emerge. Reassert a big government executed by those who would claim the virtues of small government; terrify the weak in order to control the middle classes; and then give some kind of wearisome sequence of sops to the rest of the country with the intention of making clear that anyone who complains will be left to suppurate in their bitterness, whilst anyone who wants to get on in life must play by the rules of the game they choose to initiate.

The most recent news, that Cameron is attempting to kick the Scottish independence referendum into touch, is no surprise - but when dictators attempt to channel their forces by referring to the importance of legality, those who would deal with them must remember how sovereign nations have been allowed by Western civilisations throughout history to deconstruct all morality and human rights.

Meanwhile, just take a look at this photo of a present I was given for Christmas. A pity it wasn't a raspberry jam, eh? (And paradoxically, it's made by a company called Mrs Bridges ...)

Happy New Year to one and all - and remember that whilst to be free may not be the most important thing of all, it nevertheless comes up pretty high on the list.

And needs to be fought for.

Retail versus faith

2012-01-07T14:19:00.000Z

A break with the past - as well as a look forward to the future. That is - for me - what the first day of the sales and the last day of the holidays both mean.

The sales - everywhere that consumerism rules - signify failure and success in equal degrees. Failure on the part of the retail sector to convince evermore savvy consumers to purchase before their time; success on the part of the consumers themselves as they hold out against all-enticing temptations.

And as holidays come to an end, we have no alternative but to try and look forward to better times. Something is over; it finishes - it absents itself naturally.

There is no avoiding this reality.

But then I remember how the summer will bring a renewal of that family-time I so cherish.

Even as - in the meantime - the structures of obligatory study and work impose their empire of senses over our instincts to a more social and humane integration.

"A tree near us as the fog lifts"

"First day of the sales"

"Coffee break"

"Figures in an alley"

"Retail versus faith"

Diane Abbott, that colonisation of politics and the benefits of crowdsourcing anecdote

2012-01-06T20:55:00.001Z

The Telegraph headlines Ed Miliband's revealing - and surely Freudian - slip on Twitter thus: "Ed Miliband red-faced after 'Blackbuster' Twitter gaffe". It does surprise me, however, in the light of the impact this slip has had today, that they didn't describe him as "white-faced" instead.

Perhaps that would have been just too literal for people to get their heads round.

Colour is a weird matter in politics - and always has been.

Tom has a nice write-up of the issues behind this depressing distraction, which Diane Abbott apparently develops in other tweets here. But I'm not sure "distraction" is the right word here. Diane Abbott is not stupid. Miliband's "gaffe" is surely a mistake - yes, I can accept that. But Abbott is being far more deliberate about a thesis I have personal experience of - in my case, in relation to one of my daughter's teachers.

The story goes something like this: the teacher in question is Asian and the subject of racism came up in one form tutorial. She said to my daughter that whites can be racist but blacks can't. My daughter pointed out quite logically that anyone can be racist - whether white or black. But the teacher insisted with her original argument that only whites could be racist - and my daughter had no alternative but to kowtow to the hierarchy of teacher-pupil relationships.

Fortunately, she has thinking parents to compare notes with and support her in her quite reasonable analysis, wherever, that is, her analysis is reasonable - as indeed it was here.

So why would a professional like my daughter's teacher - or, alternatively, Diane Abbott herself - sustain such manifestly illogical positions in the face of quite clearly different realities? Unless, of course, their own personal experience had blinded them, through miserable encounter after miserable encounter, to any statistical appreciation of British race relations.

Perhaps Abbott, as my daughter's teacher, is operating on the basis of a reality many share despite the number-crunchers out there. For our politics is riven by those who would have us believe their truths despite our own experiences. And those at the top, whatever their political inclinations, would always prefer us to conclude things are getting progressively better - even when they are not.

(Just imagine how bankrupt any political system might get if it was obliged to admit to all and sundry that the future would bring no relative progress or improvement to the vast majority of its participants.)

This, then, would not be a credibility gap on the part of a foolish and wayward loose cannon; neither would it be a case of a weak political leader in the face of deliberate and perverse challenges to his moral authority; nor, even, an example of two massively divided sociocultural groupings living in a country which claimed to have overcome prejudice when this was actually, patently, simply not the truth.

No. If only the above was actually the case. But I fear, instead, that all this is in fact symptomatic of a much wider malaise. Perhaps, in reality, our political classes on all sides have been brushing awful realities under their carefully made-over theses for far too long.

Abbott - like my daughter's teacher - is clearly mistaken, you say? Clearly from what perspective? From our white, relatively middle-class and relatively privileged points of view?

So how am I to know she is wrong when she says what she says? Does my experience have greater value than hers? Do I - as someone of very little importance - have more of a right to operate on the basis of anecdote than she does?

Must we all resort to a conspiracy of silence in the face of statistics - simply because individual examples we experience from day-to-day are of no value?

Isn't, in fact, this mindset and way of understanding the world the biggest Achilles heel of almost all modern politicians - especially for those on the left but inevitably, it would seem, in these days of ever-present button-pushing dynamics, also now for most of those on the right?

That is to say, what we see and feel and perceive in our own lives has absolutely no measurable value when consistently and persistently faced down by the omniscient power of the numbers that politicians of all colours use to rule people of all cultures.

Maybe white-faced Red Ed should sack blackbusting Abbott after all. But if he does, he will be acting as all robotised top-down politicians before him. That is to say, he will comfort himself with the historical infographs which generally demonstrate everything is bound to eventually get better; infographs which consequently allow him to conclude that unhappy anecdote is relatively unimportant and, therefore, reach the easy conclusion that those who make one feel uncomfortable are just looking to stir awkward shit ... without, of course, naturally and commonly, caring to ask himself how it's possible to stir such stuff if it didn't exist in the first place.

So maybe Abbott is as inconsequential as Tom concludes.

And maybe my daughter's teacher is professionally incompetent.

And maybe all our feelings add up to a massive and subconsciously crowdsourced conspiracy against the measured, able and competent actions of political classes everywhere.

Or maybe not.

One final thought. It should now be technically possible to crowdsource massive quantities of anecdote. In which case, the above disjunction between what people actually experience and what politicians say they ought to be feeling should - one day, not so very far in the future - begin to fade away.

If, that is, the political classes are ready to give up the rather more oppressive tools of their historically controlling trade - and finally, ultimately and generously release voting peoples from that erstwhile colonisation of political impulse. That empire of know-it-all mathematically enshrined truths which has ruled so long over the personal that inevitably contains our ordinary but nevertheless all-too-real existences.

On the other hand, that politicians should care to give up so much power is one mighty "if".

One I really cannot predict if they are ready to voluntarily cede.

The sunshine that is family-time

2012-01-06T17:10:00.000Z

A big day today. Distant as I still am from all the encroaching misery which seems to be about to affect my home country, I can only spend today, the day of the Three Kings, which in Spain is the most important day of the year for both children and children at heart, in the company of my family.

A handful of photos of the day as it unfolded.

"Coffee on a terrace in the sunshine"

"Walking back"

"Columns"

"Mother and son"

On a "macho" politics (or how it's "poorism" which rules the Labour Party)

2012-01-05T16:53:00.000Z

As Diane Abbott has discovered to her cost, sweeping generalisations about behaviours don't often go down very well - unless of course those making them happen to be Ed Miliband and Liam Byrne on the subject of the lowest of the low.

It's possible I fell into the same trap myself recently - as, over at Labour Uncut, I accused Rob Marchant's disingenuous attachment to a Darwinism of Ideas as being an example of a "macho" politics. Rob then proceeded to demonstrate I was guilty of sexism. And perhaps I was.

I suppose I should've thought more carefully about exactly where I was trying to come from. The results of this "brain sex test" from the BBC I took quite a while ago, for example, have influenced my thoughts on the subject of men and women for some time now. In reality, when I say "macho", I think I am inclined to believe I am talking about certain behaviours which have often been characterised by society as belonging to belligerent males far more often than their female equivalents.

Which is not to say we cannot laugh at programmes like "Spitting Image" when they define a female politician such as Margaret Thatcher as being the only red-blooded male in the Cabinet.

So if I was inexact in my usage of the term "macho" - and, through so being, allowed Rob to get away with his disingenuousness by avoiding the substance of my inexpertly expressed dissatisfaction - many apologies to those who might understand my argument about the importance of software constitutions and a truly equal access to the reins of discourse.

After all, the blogging hierarchy of original poster versus commenter was never more rigidly defined than by those sites which choose to languidly moderate every comment before a pertinent reply is efficiently posted.

An example of such a site being Labour Uncut itself.

Anyhow. Small beer in the wider universe of politics.

Someone who does use the word "macho" far more usefully than I managed to is Emma Burnell in Labour List today. In it she says the following:

I agree that Ed has not yet properly defined his leadership with the public. The Westminster Press themselves are stumbling from Red Ed to Odd Ed via Dead Ed and Fratricidal Ed along the way. Ed needs a bold moment of definition, he needs a game changer.
But here’s the thing: I don’t think most of the voices calling for Ed to be “bold” actually mean bold. I think they mean macho. They want Ed to adopt some of Blair’s swagger, or Brown’s clunking fist. Even Ed’s admirers talk of his “core of steel” – a pointless hangover from too many comic book, 2D interpretations of what a hero is and can be.

But Ed is not macho. Nor does one have to be macho to lead. In fact the worst thing Ed could do now would be to attempt to adopt a macho pose he could in no way sustain, simply to appease those voices who would then turn around and decry him for being no good at it. It wouldn’t be bold. It would be a facsimile of what a political class has become used to being told is bold. It wouldn’t work.

And she then goes on to conclude:

I’ve said before, that what Ed can most learn from Tony Blair is not his style, but his confidence in his own style. If Ed sticks to his guns, refuses to return to the jibes and point scoring, but merely illuminating the impact of the Government’s programme, does the kind of politics that suit him (and incidentally, do not suit the less serious David Cameron) this could be a Clause IV moment of his own, in his own style.

There's something definitely worth pursuing in all of this. And it would affect how we implemented the Darwinism of Ideas Rob Marchant currently finds himself so attached to. For I agree that a marketplace of concepts and thought - which I think Marchant wants us to believe he aspires to - would be a positive step forward for the entire British body politic. But where I do not agree is in his conclusion that this marketplace doesn't - at the moment - mimic monopolistic capitalism in its hierarchies and concentrations of power.

Does he really think we should believe there isn't a supposedly "progressive" communication elite which is fighting tooth and nail to hang onto its blogging and social-media privileges? An elite which benefits from the kind of top-down blogging he clearly engages in, whilst the hierarchies of his favourite code define who can speak freely - and who may not?

I suspect the only Darwinism Marchant is truly in favour of is a survival of the fittest quite inappropriate for a socialist society of supportive instincts. And any society which is made in the image of such a philosophy will - when its time comes round once again - rapidly serve to copy the behaviours of the most "macho" government in recent British political history: Cameron and Osborne's Coalition of the rankly self-interested.

Capitalists, in fact, whose only long-lasting achievement will be to cast capitalism of all kinds in the very murkiest of lights.

And make those who might have been best-positioned to forge a more inclusive society to turn completely away from all political engagement in understandable disgust.

For when Ed Miliband and Liam Byrne trash "evil scroungers" they are doing nothing more nor less than Abbott in the field of racism - or, indeed, myself in the field of sexism.

Lucky for them - and, I would judge, for many of the Labour right's adherents - that "poorism" still has to be properly defined.

Never mind duly punished.

January 5th, 2012 - Salamanca, Spain (or my antidepressant)

2012-01-05T14:59:00.000Z

It's the equivalent of Christmas Eve here in Spain. The children are getting ready for the annual present-giving splurge. The Three Kings are getting closer to their destination.

This morning, I went with my wife to town and we had a couple of drinks and pinchos each. I took a few photos - here are two of them so you can continue to appreciate why I love Spain so much.

In the first photo, you can see one of Salamanca's two cathedrals as the morning fog lifts to reveal a splendiferous day.

"Cathedral Scene"

In the second photo, you can see part of Salamanca's Plaza Mayor - as they ready the centre of town with security barriers for the procession of the Three Kings.

"Red"

It's strange for me to be walking these streets. The light, the blue of the sky, the warm embrace of the golden stone, the depth of field, the corners you turn, the distances you perceive as layers of activity catch your attention - all these details occupy my busy mind to such an extent that I feel calm and beloved just for occupying these spaces of historical weight.

Concrete urbanity is simply not good for me.

Give me green leaves and golden meadows - or, alternatively, cities like Salamanca.

And as I read that since the economy took a nosedive the prescribing of antidepressants has risen by 26 percent in England, I know where I would like to be - if, that is, I were lucky enough to have the means to choose my fate.

How Alan Turing's pardon would be anything but an apology

2012-01-04T20:10:00.000Z

This call to support an e-petition to debate in Parliament Alan Turing's foul mistreatment at the hands of obscene legislation in 1952 Britain is surely quite misplaced. The petition runs as follows:

We ask the HM Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing for the conviction of 'gross indecency'. In 1952, he was convicted of 'gross indecency' with another man and was forced to undergo so-called 'organo-therapy' - chemical castration. Two years later, he killed himself with cyanide, aged just 41. Alan Turing was driven to a terrible despair and early death by the nation he'd done so much to save. This remains a shame on the UK government and UK history. A pardon can go to some way to healing this damage. It may act as an apology to many of the other gay men, not as well known as Alan Turing, who were subjected to these laws.

In response to a previous petition, Gordon Brown - Prime Minister at the time - had already apologised on behalf of the nation thus:

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him ... So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

Now I do realise the pardon in question is probably a legal figure and as a concept has quite a different meaning to its normal day-to-day currency - but, at least for my inexperienced soul and ears, to request that a man be pardoned for something none of us on the right side of progressive politics these days would care to see anyone punished in relation to seems, to say the least, morally inappropriate - even if it is, in judicial terms, technically exact.

If we should be seeking to pardon anyone, it is surely that state and legal system which - after six long years of worldwide war, fighting a regime which despised Jews, ethnic minorities and homosexuals with an awful and similar vigour - continued to persecute in the name of Western civilisation the very human instinct of people everywhere to freely express their sexuality.

So I'm sorry but - unless someone can show me the error of my ways - I don't think I'll be signing this e-petition on the terms it has currently chosen to sustain.

Even though its heart is clearly in the very best of places.

And the wider cause it aims to support is something we should defend without exception in all legislations and nation states.

The capitalist blame game

2012-01-04T15:47:00.002Z

I've been thinking about this for a couple of days - but really didn't know how to verbalise what I was thinking. So Chris does it for us thus:

[...] Whilst some of us are suggesting that the behaviour of capitalists is damaging the economy, Liam Byrne is obsessing about the need for a “responsible workforce”. Rather than challenge the behaviour of capital, he is propagating the ridiculous myth that the workshy are a significant economic problem. In this sense, he is way to the right not just of me, but of the Bank of England.

Whilst, by the by, he goes on to say:

Which poses the question: is he an abominable and idiotic disgrace to the Labour party or is he instead its true face?

Now this latter point is not my primary reason for blogging today - but it's worth keeping in mind as we examine exactly what's happening here. For this is how the capitalist blame game works:

When large corporations and the people who own them set themselves up in business, they limit their responsibility if everything goes belly-up to the very minimum they can manage to get away with;
When everything goes belly-up, which it almost always does at least once in the history of such companies, the ones at the very top manage to hide behind Chinese walls that reduce their legal responsibility to a very minimum;
When companies' profits do not achieve expectations, the fault is first and foremost due to the costs of labour - the term "labour" being understood to mean those at the most humble levels in a company and not the (mainly) ever-so-red-blooded gentlemen at the top;
If companies suffer excessively from declining profit margins, people at the top get paid enormous amounts of money to take immediate decisions to fire massive percentages of their workforces - even where such decisions show absolutely no degree of imagination or added value;
If the wider economy falls completely apart, the taxpayer will be obliged to bail out the failing private sector but compelled to destroy the public;
When the wider economy stops functioning in any meaningful way, the workers who lose their jobs will carry both the moral and economic can for not wanting to find new jobs - even where these new jobs don't exist;
When the economy finally recovers, the workers will have to continue to accept wage cuts for two reasons: firstly, automation might price them out of the market if they don't watch their demands; secondly, only the rich work harder for more money - the poor, on the other hand, tend to slacken off their labour when not sufficiently terrified;

To summarise, when things go well the capitalist takes the credit - and the dosh. When things go poorly the worker is to blame - and pays for their sins. And whether companies function correctly or not, in that entirely objective sense so beloved of businesspeople, the state will always serve to save bad leaders from the implications and pain of such widely ham-fisted decision-making processes.

Meanwhile, workforces the world over will suffer the consequences from here to eternity.

As well as, of course, the morally massive disapprobation of the (coincidentally) capitalist-dependent mainstream media - and precisely for not wanting to get more often on their sadly iconic bikes.

Even as the failed and failing aficionados of capitalism continue to fly the world in their business-class toys of privilege and social distance.

How light and shade and holidays all add up to so much

2012-01-04T14:41:00.000Z

A couple of photos I took today in the centre of Salamanca. This is how light and shade and holidays add up to so much.

First the Plaza Mayor.


"Light"

Then three happy but almost Goya-like silhouettes.

"Three Spaniards"

Over the years, I've taken many hundreds of photos of Salamanca. I find it unendingly fascinating - so many planes of light, colour, distance and proximity.

A treasure hidden to most visitors to Spain.

Catch it if you can.

I do.

Often.

"What's wrong with Labour?" Quora board

2012-01-03T22:20:00.002Z

I've just created a "What's wrong with Labour?" board over at Quora. I suggest you read Paul Evans' blogpost of the same title, which has served to frame the starting-point for the board.

I'm still working out how the system works and have already invited a few authors. If you'd also like to contribute to the board in such a capacity, why not post a comment at the foot of this post requesting I add you - or, alternatively, if you prefer, you can send me an email to mil@pobox.com.

You can of course simply follow the board - and although as owner it would appear I can actually add followers without their permission, I assume it's also possible for you to follow the board without my permission!

In which case, please do feel free to do exactly that.

Oh ... and Happy Quora-boarding ...

Do left-wing politicians need to learn how to be shameless?

2012-01-03T18:17:00.000Z

Paul has just posted an excellent piece called "What's wrong with Labour?" - well worth reading in full. I wonder as a result whether the problem with our left-wing politicians is that they are too ashamed of what they do - of the mistakes they have made and will continue, as ordinary human beings, to inevitably be responsible for.

Let's look at it from a broader progressive perspective. Do we go into politics to do good and make the world better? If so, does going into politics to make the world better require us to be better people than the people who vote for us?

I note the Spanish experience. The losing candidate in the latest Spanish general election, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, is already reappearing on Spanish radio and TV with all guns blazing. Compare this behaviour with Gordon Brown's post-election disappearance without a trace - and even the Shadow Cabinet's relative restraint since then in the face of the biggest deconstruction of a body politic since World War Two - and we surely must ask ourselves why this is happening.

Is it, perhaps, because the UK Labour Party is far closer to the politicised Christian beliefs of Northern European Calvinism - and finds itself unable to accept the relief of redemption and repeated renewal which Catholicism unconsciously offers those peoples who still claim to be a part of its philosophy?

We must, it would seem, as British progressives, pay publicly for our sins and suffer for a respectable period in silence and political mourning.

So whilst the Coalition government has been getting away with figurative murder, the Labour Party and its followers have been affording themselves the luxury of repentance - at the expense of a hugely important minority of defenceless voters who neither have a ready-made voice nor the means to fashion one.

Perhaps it is time that those who would describe themselves progressives choose whether they are in politics to do right or be good.

For it would appear that - at least for now - any attempt to act out both sides of the coin is simply incompatible with the aim of forging a generation which might one day win an election.

There is one final thought which serves only to depress me even further: whilst some might effectively choose between doing right or being good, and still manage to serve a constructive purpose on the planet, others - on a quite different moral plane - might decide quite the opposite: that is to say, choose either to do wrong or be bad.

With the added advantage that it's probably quite seamlessly easy to manage to do wrong and be bad at exactly the same time.

Do we really want more macho Darwinism in left-wing blogging?

2012-01-03T12:46:00.000Z

This piece by Rob Marchant over at Labour Uncut - on why we must continue with our critically, and sometimes apparently internecine, political blogging - has many things going for it. But I am inclined to take issue with the following argument:

LabourList and Labour Uncut, started more recently, have been doing a sterling job in taking back the internet agenda for Labour, but we still see much apparent discomfort in the comments sections. We fall into easy habits, talking of “loyalty” and “unity”, in order to try and keep party thinking aligned. It is easy to confuse “unhelpful comment” and “comment that I disagree with”. But all comment, in the end, is helpful. Robust debate is, on the contrary, an overwhelming positive, and it is precisely this Darwinism of ideas that can lead us all to arrive at a decent, defensible common view of where the party is at and where it needs to be. The wisdom, in the words of James Surowiecki, of crowds.

This was my response:

The Darwinism of Ideas is all well and good in theory. But I have two reservations: firstly, in terms of the intellectual debate that should be conducted, it closely mirrors in its dynamics precisely the kind of capitalism which is currently being imposed on us. And secondly, precisely because this capitalism - and its analogous debate - does not take place on a level killing-field, the ideas which will win out will proceed from those with the biggest clout (the biggest virtual networks, the largest number of real-world followers etc.) and not necessarily because the ideas themselves have intrinsic virtue - or are of intrinsic value to the Labour Party as a whole, and by extension those who might wish to vote for it in general elections.

Less macho Darwinism, more humane communication I think might be the order of *my* day.

Crowdsourcing ideas is - of course - an undeniable positive of many modern virtual environments. But we shouldn't conflate "robust" with "trolling" - nor argue in a rank relativism that "all comment is helpful": much of what Marchant describes that takes place on the Internet is clearly so unhelpful as to impede an effective crowdsourcing of absolutely any procedure or process.

The million eyes of interested participants that good crowdsourcing environments coordinate are of course grand pluses we should observe and learn from in the way that Marchant suggests. But as in the politics he so clearly understands, the constitutional structure of the environment you are dealing with is key to ensuring those million eyes act with either intelligence or a wasteful energy.

And it does so happen that on the few occasions I have commented on the Labour Uncut website, comment moderation has always been in place.

Hardly an inspiring example of where the crowd is shown to be in the driving-seat.

So before we go down the lazy route of justifying the tool of Darwinism in the very hub of all our debate, let us be accurate about the systems we use to give precedent and priority to some choice thinkers over that crowd.

And if we are truly interested in giving the crowd its head of steam, let us be consequential and act in good faith when we create the environments in which such a crowd should be allowed to perform.

Not for the first time in history does being right mean being wrong

2012-01-03T11:10:00.000Z

There are some quite superlatively excellent evidence-based blogs out there. From the precise idiosyncrasies of Though Cowards Flinch to the focussed pedagogy of Stumbling and Mumbling; from the persistent ideologies of Norman to the breadth of vision of Liberal Conspiracy; from the self-proclaimed champion of the genre Left Foot Forward to the occasionally explosive but always clearly fashioned coherences of Shuggy ... all in all, these bloggers and many more I have neglected to mention this morning strive to pursue logical trains of thoughts with evidence clearly to hand.

Yet one of the plagues of our modern society and Western civilisation - a plague which has led to recent white-collar crime, economic misery and an emptying of the public coffers in the interests of a painful socialism for the rich and already wealthy (a socialism which I am afraid a lost generation will have to end up paying for) - is precisely the kind of Chinese walls of specialisation which evidence-based blogging is simply one more unhappy example of.

The whole financial services sector, built as it is on the backs of heavily corporate structures (and their corresponding intensely separate divisions of labour), failed to have that keen overview of its highly specialised areas of functioning which might otherwise have avoided the disastrous decline of its solvency and effectiveness. And the very fact that this is a paradigm for the rest of Western civilisation - those fragile links between complex machines which serve to make our society function so tenuously - doesn't seem to have struck anyone usefully in power for the moment: everyone continues blithely on in their corresponding silos of ingenuity, as if nothing untoward had happened in the last five years - or, perhaps, as if anything that might have happened was nothing more than a simply unpredictable and unpreventable Act of God.

And so to our dearly beloved evidence-based blogging. Whilst incredibly perceptive, accurate and effective on the terms it cares to perform, no one can argue with the following reality: all the time, it is operating in the context of the agenda the right has been setting for years. In specialising in the process of rebutting any and every right-wing incoherence, it leaves little time to re-imagine the future in any other way.

What we are missing, then, from the modern didactic left-wing landscape, is a space where the futile and barren puerilities of our political right are left to suppurate in their own sour juices; for by choosing to rebut each and every one of them, and by a contamination and pollution through an almost physical contact, we have become as futile, barren and sour as they have shown themselves to be.

And if we continue to specialise in a detailed deconstructing of the enemy, whilst this will allow us to have the intellectual satisfaction of preaching the truth to our converted, the future which should surely belong to the imagineers in society will revert to the conservatives and their capacity to set a course of inimitable and tragic thought.

However two-dimensional, lacking in creativity and ingenuity that course might be.

Perhaps it is not time to discard evidence-based blogging entirely. But what we do need to add to the mix is an editorial mission to combine reactivity with pro-activity; reaction with action.

Not a hoary old desire or instinct to triangulate the opposition out of existence but a truly intellectual impulse to pursue a series of better truths: a mission to make the world a better place for everyone who treasures coexistence; an ideology which consciously accepts that to progress, certain ways of thinking must be visibly disregarded.

Not for the first time in history does being right mean being wrong.

It's time for us now to recognise and accept this reality. As well as, in the light of such recognition, act in a coherent consequence.

Even as our moral philosophies have - to date - encouraged us to respect almost everyone.

I saw Brian de Palma's "The Untouchables" last night - and wonder if its message is weighing heavily on my soul today. Chicago in the Thirties was an evil place of physical danger. Western civilisation in the early 21st century is simply an awful place of morally unacceptable decisions.

No comparison, right?

No comparison.

On conflating the old and the new

2012-01-03T09:32:00.000Z

I caught this modern manger yesterday in the centre of Salamanca's main square.

A beautiful example of how the old and the modern can inform and support each other in appropriate consonance.

And it makes me wonder if I am in the right business. Talking about a politics which makes me feel bitter and sad - anything but consonance, in fact; a politics I cannot change; a politics my words have no impact on. What is the point? Far better to walk around my wife's hometown in the pleasurable company of the two women in my life; watch the groups of people congregating and discussing their personal problems and occurrences; look forward to a warming cup of coffee and churros; take in the sharpening evening air as the Christmas lights embrace the golden streets ...

All the latter is so much more personally gratifying than getting unhappy with and underlining the cruelty of people who have so much more real power than myself.

The Spanish have a saying: "Hay que aportar tu granito de arena" - in English "You have to add your grain of sand"; but I am inclined more and more to believe that in the grand scheme of universal matters, neoliberal technocratic instances of rank and outright foolishnesses mean less to us than our very social need to continue walking the streets of our hometowns in the company of our nearest and dearest.

And this blog, while wishing to sustain the mission of exemplifying a position on the critical left of political thought, can't really do very much in the face of the massed forces of the self-interested rich and wealthy.

This may be a kind of mental hangover from a holiday where I have had more time to think than is perhaps useful. But I don't think so.

In any case, and however I try and deal with my quandaries, I am a writer by nature and cannot avoid the process of putting word to electronic paper. So I will continue to blog here as much as I am able to; but if you do notice a change of topic, and feel you need to desert me, please try and understand the personal thoughts I have laid out before you today.

For there comes a time when the personal ends up overriding the political, even as the political is always going to be personal.

And I'd much rather post a picture of a Christmas scene which shows how we might conflate the old and the new than complain for a millionth time how our politicians don't even comprehend the option exists.

Wouldn't you?

So Should We Fear The Real Rupert Murdoch?

2012-01-01T19:01:00.003Z

How do you know when someone really is who they claim to be? This account, for example - the image below is from Twitter today - certainly begs the question:

Several thoughts come to my mind on discovering this feed. Firstly, when Twitter says it's verified someone's account, does that mean what's tweeted is done by the person it has confirmed the account belongs to or, alternatively, simply on the authority of that person? Secondly, if only the latter, then what is the point of verifying anything?

To be honest, I am inclined to believe one of the virtues of social media is that medium-term it doesn't matter whether verification is used or not - the truth and reality behind the persons or group of people actually responsible for the tweeting will eventually emerge.

As you can see from the image, for the first few tweets we had the standard Twitter avatar of an egg accompanying some pretty banal and inconsequential words. And then coincidentally, the first tweet which includes Mr Murdoch's face is the first one which begins to ring true:

Maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!

Cheeky, mischievous, impish ... insensitive, inappropriate, unacceptable in public society. Depending on your point of view, this is much more like the real Murdoch than any verification system by Twitter could prove.

Mark my words. Murdoch will be buying up Twitter very shortly.

Just in time to see it all collapse under its all-too-obvious software-engineering and business-model shortcomings?

Or, alternatively, just in time to properly invest in a tool which - in the burgeoning field of social networks - still maintains the virtue of relative conceptual simplicity and brevity of content?

Will this in fact mark Murdoch's successful leap into the 21st century as he gains first-hand experience of what the social-media nexus is really all about? Or will he make the same mistakes in this venture as - over the past decade or so - he has made in his wider publishing empire?

That is to say, surround himself by cleverly persuasive yes-men and women - who tell him what he prefers to hear - instead of getting properly involved in the day-to-day dirty dirty of his businesses.

From the tenor of his first few tweets, I fear - or perhaps hope - the latter will be the case.

But never underestimate an old hand's ability to learn by doing it himself.

Corporate structures tend to distance geniuses from the environments they first flourished in.

Murdoch was - and perhaps still is - a genius in publishing.

And Twitter - at its very best - is the most concise and genius-generating form of interactive publishing the world has seen.

Don't write him off.

At least, not yet.

The Real Rupert Murdoch - given the chance to reveal itself once more in public - may yet manage to charm us; even despite ourselves.

And so I end up following him, quite despite myself.

Quite despite his cruelty.

Quite despite his dictatorial instincts.

Quite despite the impact he had on British politics.

And precisely because I have been trained as an editor - and cannot fail to admit all the above are signs he could still be a good one.

Even where this also makes him a perfectly noxious influence.

The neoliberal alternatives: manage decline for everyone or engineer success for the few

2012-01-01T09:42:00.002Z

Recently, I've been buffeted by contradictory waves of thought. I've posted on hating august professions as a result of their proclivity to self-interest above wider responsibilities. Then I read Norman on how cold concepts such as egalitarian justice, not love, should drive our socialist instincts.

I've also wondered if politicians should spend more time imagining and being creative (more here) than managing and administering our futures - the latter link being a highly considered post from Paul over at Never Trust a Hippy.

And then, via Andrew on Facebook, this piece on economists being imagineers of the future has finally come my way. It's quite a long piece - and deserves to be read in full. Essentially, it would seem that to date many economists have predicted the future on the basis of what has happened in the past - without taking into account the variable that is human behaviour and its ability to change how it reacts to (mainly) government diktats:

To understand the critique, suppose that the government is considering imposing a new tax on a particular industry. Based upon the government’s estimate of profits in the industry, it expects to collect a large amount of taxes and solve its revenue problems.

But when the tax is actually imposed, profits do not turn out to be as large as expected and tax revenues come in far short of projections. What happened? The firms took steps to reduce their tax exposure, e.g. they used the usual accounting tricks to inflate costs and lower reported revenues to reduce taxable profit. To the extent they were successful, tax collections were lower than expected.

The lesson from this example is that people change their behavior in response to changes in the conditions they face. And this is one of the things that separate what researchers in the hard sciences do from the work of economists. If I tell my TV set that I am going to smash the screen with a baseball bat, it will just sit there. It won’t take evasive action. But a human in the same situation will do their best to get out of the way and avoid harm. When harm is expected, whether it’s physical harm, higher taxes, more work for less pay — whatever — people try to avoid it.

In conclusion, the post argues:

The end of the second essay calls for “attempts to create a future that does not now exist, rather than mindlessly crunching the numbers that do exist.” There are plenty of number crunchers in the profession, and as an applied econometrician I’ll certainly defend their value in grounding theorists in real world data. But there are also plenty of “imagineers” — people who play with toy models and toy ideas to envision worlds that do not now exist, but could — and perhaps one of them will discover the “blueprint for a better way” that Roger Martin hopes will emerge from the broader conception of science he writes about in his essay.

And whilst, as someone fascinated by the act of following trains of thought, I would be inclined to believe that society needs more imagineers than managers, a saddening and depressing thought does - after all the above - come furiously to mind: imagineers tend to find an intellectual driver in following such trains of thought whatever their potential impact on the outside world. Like engineers and designers of weapons of mass destruction, they become isolated from the reality they manage to change as they become capable of effecting massively significant alterations in our environments.

On the back of some of my recent posts, a couple of people have commented that it is when the politicians get their grubby hands on incompletely understood economic concepts that everything - and everyone - tends to go belly-up. But I would find myself arguing that where economists have already gone down the route of imagineers - Milton Friedman is one case which comes immediately to mind - they have succeeded all on their lonesome in occupying the role of engineers of society.

Cheap and nasty second-hand car salespeople who slide into political activity for their very own benefit will always use the hand-me-down ideas of semi-popular science to support their already existing prejudices of how the world should be organised.

But if truth be told, the only profession which has a moral right to imagine the future should be our political class - and that class alone. Scientists should resist the temptation to create social empires on the back of empirical research - it is not their business to recreate the world but - simply and plainly - observe it.

Even where this observation may influence the result on more occasions than we might care to admit.

And yet, given our experience in three successive regimes - Thatcher's painful epoch of industrial deconstruction; Blair's influential, and influenced, three terms of compensatory socialism by stealth; and Cameron's quite evil and savage imposition of a British Year Zero that aims only to fill the pockets of the already rich and wealthy - I do wonder if we really want, or need, another generation of politicians who want to engineer societies.

Manage decline for everyone or engineer success for the few? Are these the only alternatives that neoliberalism has driven us to?

If so, I now find myself thrashing about as to whom I should blame.

Even as I wonder if I am right to want to blame anyone ...

"Morning of fog, afternoon of walking"

2012-01-01T08:43:00.000Z

That's what the Spanish say, anyhow. One of the many wisdoms my wife frequently peppers her language with.

I've read a number of apocalyptic posts recently preparing us for doom in 2012. Now I can't predict or imagine the future any more than you can - but neither does my mindset allow me to proceed towards that future thinking that doom is our destiny. I would, if truth be told, prefer to believe that a morning of fog leads to an afternoon of walking.

Happy New Year to everyone who reads this humble blog - whether you agree with some of the foolishnesses I lay out for you to read or not. And if - on occasions - I have gone too far and, in inappropriate anger, have hurt you in some way, please accept my apologies for having done so.

It is not my intention - nor my desire.

There is plenty enough of all of that elsewhere in the world.

Here, I simply look to fashion a better world for everyone - even where this leads me to slip between the cracks of monolithic oppositions.

So as I look forward to spending some of our time together in the near future, this is me saying welcome to a 2012 which I hope will serve to put better things in place than 2011 has brought us.

Time for a coffee.

And maybe - later on - a walk; to clear the air, that is.

Morning to you all.

And smiley time I think!

:-)

How copyright can (really) damage your health

2011-12-31T09:18:00.000Z

This came my way via Charlie on Facebook yesterday:

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, after thirty years of silence, authors of a standard clinical psychiatric bedside test have issued take down orders of new medical research. Doctors who use copies of the bedside test which will have been printed in some of their oldest medical textbooks are liable to be sued for up to $150,000. [...]

That is to say, after a third of a century of silence, someone has responded to legal advice and decided they'd like to take a whole profession to the cleaners for using a medical checklist to assess the mental health of its patients.

The result?

This news is highly relevant in light of the ongoing SOPA scandal that is currently threatening the internet as we know it. Many fail to realise that copyright is valid 70 years after the death of the author and up to 120 years after the creation of the work. The use of copyright law to prevent the clinical use of medical tests and to prevent new medical tests being developed is something many of us would only expect to really happen in dystopian fiction. The fact of the matter is that it is happening in real life.

This, then, is truly an example of how copyright can (really) damage your health. And if every time I mention the term you decide (as the stats would seem to indicate) to turn off - as if the matter had little to do with your real-life existences - I suggest you keep today's post close to your heart for when you might dust it off the next time I bring the matter to your attention.

Copyright shouldn't be so important, it is true. But wicked men and women are abusing its power to make sitting on piles of cash an easier objective to achieve.

And whether this is at the cost of freedom of speech on the Internet or - alternatively - the mental wellbeing of millions of patients across the world, they care very little for the consequences on the rest of society as they proceed to gather together and concentrate more and more of our finite resources for their own individual benefit.

Who should we hate the most - lawyers, bankers or economists?

2011-12-30T19:06:00.000Z

Jack of Kent has a revealing piece about why it's socially acceptable to hate lawyers. This, in particular, lays bare the whys and wherefores of this prejudice:

The reason why lawyers are generally disliked may not be down to their actual conduct or their personal qualities.

It is instead because law is both powerful and – in the main – invisible.

Law leaves traces in certain documents and speech acts, and it can manifest itself in the coercive actions of hard-faced individuals; but generally law is equally threatening and elusive.

It is perhaps not so much that lawyers are hated, but that law itself is feared and mysterious.

I think, in the main, from my limited contact with the profession, an essential element of our shared inability to like lawyers lies in the fact that lawyers tend to be right.

Even when they are found wrong, in some court case or another, everything is apparently a question of debate - and might easily have turned out quite differently.

When we pay lawyers, we pay them to interpret law - and in that interpretation they have a get-out clause which covers all eventualities.

Thus it is that we hate lawyers because - inevitably - they are always right.

Even when, from the client's emotional standpoint, they end up being incomprehensibly wrong.

And so it is I then ask myself the question at the top of this post: who should we hate the most - lawyers, bankers or economists?

For I do wonder whether the current salvoes broadly directed towards the banking fraternity are - at the same time - misdirected out of ignorance. In reality, who is to blame for the economic misery ordinary people are being exposed to? Bankers were - and are - almost certainly simple pawns in a wider systemic set of failings they chose to discretely operate within: so yes, to an extent they were to blame; but no, to a degree they were hardly capable of seeing beyond the careful Chinese walls that all corporate agents are inevitably surrounded by.

Surely we should really blame the artifices themselves of the systems that failed - and not the perhaps relatively helpless and rather more visible frontline protagonists. That is to say, instead of looking to fault the bankers simply out to make a quick buck, our ire should really have focussed on the economists who devised the technical and ideological infrastructures which stumbled and trembled us to essential long-term oblivion - as all the time they encouraged the economic players to employ their very basest and most disagreeable instincts.

To recapitulate, then: if we hate lawyers because their professional structures mean they are always going to be right, even when they are wrong; and if we currently despise bankers because - in truth - it is easy to understand the idea of modern money-grabbing Scrooges who act out of a cold-hearted self-interest ... shouldn't we also contemplate lining up against the revolutionary wall the economists who have so heavy-handedly failed us? For in their light-touch regulatory instincts, in their inability to agree productively in public, in their tendency to distort a social science with the tainting instincts of ideological coat-hangers, in their massive desire to test out their theories on real human beings and use the poverty of the 99 percent as a laboratory for personal glory ... in all of the above - and much much more I am sure - there is plenty to find at the very least resistible in the profession of the economist.

And yet, curiously, it would seem, they have escaped relatively unscathed the storms and travails of recent times.

Perhaps they are, in fact, for most of us on the planet, quite the opposite of lawyers as described above: where we hate lawyers for always being right, even when we feel they are all very very wrong, the very fact that no economist can ever agree with another surely leads us to conclude that it would be quite unjust to find fault with such an uneven profession.

Perhaps, in truth, as we pity ourselves - and our own medium-term futures under a system which has so manifestly failed to deliver - we can only find it in ourselves to summon up a sadness that a science so central to so much of what we do these days has proved itself so selfish in how it has cared to practise its wisdoms.

What is there to hate in something so imprecise? Much easier to see the Devil and all His works in the pawns which do the dirty work that such systems allow.

Though there is, of course, an alternative to making diabolic the entire financial services sector: hate the lawyer as suggested; envy the banker just in case; and commiserate with the poor economist for the impossible task he or she has always faced.

On combining ego, philosophy and the pulsatingly clever Pep in the beautiful game we call politics

2011-12-30T16:15:00.000Z

I read somewhere yesterday that more 18-year-olds use Facebook than are registered to vote.

If I were an 18-year-old I would probably find myself in the same position.

In my generation, we outgrew theatre and film and fell in love with TV and then the web. In my children's generation, they've outgrown TV and even the web - and fallen in love with Facebook and other social networks.

But in all these cases, little by little, and with notable exceptions such as Blair's 1997 general election victory, we have begun to outgrow quite clearly what was once a fundamental glue of our society: that is to say, politics.

Today, Chris explains how politics fails. On the back of a piece by Sean McHale, he suggests politics is in possession of the worst of all possible worlds:

[...] It has neither the body of experience, evidence base and precedent that sportsmen, engineers, bureaucrats, lawyers or some artists can draw upon. Nor does it permit the ruthless natural selection that well-functioning markets do. It is, then, small wonder that, as Enoch Powell said, “all political lives end in failure.”

Sean, meanwhile, suggests that Ed Miliband should learn from the experiences of Barcelona and its football team. I think Sean, whilst perceptive in his comparison, doesn't however go far enough. Barcelona has made an impact on football for one reason - and it's the oldest challenge in footballing lore: how to provide spaces for individual genius within a system which sustains a team's challenge through the length and breadth of successive bruising seasons and competitions. What Guardiola has done, though, is not only simply this - an achievement which in itself would have been enough to generate considerable success. Winning thirteen out of a possible sixteen trophies in barely four years requires much more than this: it requires true innovation in the systems employed.

Guardiola not only set himself the goal of combining ego and philosophy - he aimed also to create new systems no one had ever before contemplated. Making the goalkeeper an eleventh man; forcing the opposition to run ragged in triangular circles; even, of late, if I have understood correctly, playing odd numbers at the back and upfront ... everything that Guardiola has attempted smacks more of innovatory ingenuity than what I understood to be a more traditional managerialist approach.

Yes. Perhaps Ed does need to learn from Guardiola after all. But not in the question of sticking to his guns - it's, rather, far more important for him to acquire the ability to do for the beautiful game of politics what our Barcelona champion has done for football: perceive accurately the landscape before one; understand usefully the egos in play; and create a system which doesn't only borrow from the past but actually serves to create a brand new future ...

Valdes the eleventh man, for example: so how about forging with Labour Party members a grassroots alliance which actually employs them as frontline leaders instead of hiding them away in the background in mundane and uninspiring envelope-stuffing and door-knocking roles?

Or giving local political communities their head of steam to create local manifestos made to fit the needs of the people around them?

If more of our 18-year-olds care to communicate socially and intellectually via Facebook than intend to register to participate in a five-yearly political exercise of increasing irrelevance, any political party which is looking to have a life beyond the four walnut-lined boardrooms of the corporate megaliths that currently fund their activities is going to have to contemplate fundamentally changing the system of organisation they use. And if they don't, someone else will. And that someone else will one day take off with a virulent violence of astonishing power.

And if we are lucky, we will live to embrace it. And if we are unlucky, we will live to regret it.

For right now, all I can see is that it is much worse than Chris paints it: it's not so much that politics fails but - rather - that we are all outgrowing politics as an institution and tool.

The consumerism Carl talks about is - before our very eyes - displacing the centre of gravity that politics once represented.

Those of us who love politics have very little time to act.

Perhaps it is already too late.

But we need to do our very best - even so; and even without too much real hope.

The beautiful game that is football shows us that massive renovation is possible. The question, I suppose, really is whether there are any managerialist folk as imaginative, creative and pulsatingly clever as Pep.

And that is a question I fear has only one answer.

Nor is it the answer we might be looking to hear.
____________________

Further reading: Paul has just posted a beautiful article on thinking intelligently, honestly and sincerely. The article and its comments are well worth your time. Please read it.

Is there any alternative to more for the rich and less for the poor?

2011-12-30T10:09:00.001Z

I was debating yesterday in two posts why anyone should care to support Ed Miliband. Today I'd like to analyse more closely why my support for him has increased since he was voted Labour leader.

Before I start, I'd like to say I didn't vote for him at all.

Mine are not the ravings of unconditional admiration but - rather - an attempt to understand whether a relative innocent can make it to the very top of UK pyramidal politics.

Chris criticises Miliband for a lack of self-awareness. Myself, I am inclined more to agree with Eoin's perception of the forces ranged widely against the Labour leader, when he says things like this:

Peter Mandleson has not been quiet either. Well actually strike that, he's been very quiet. But, that's because he now has people to do his work for him. Through his 'Policy Exchange' vehicle he has commissioned several pieces that are about as predictable as is humanly possible from the uber-Blairite. I won't give his pieces any more air time than they deserve but suffice to say if you get a chance, wander over to their site and view the ideas of Giles, Radice, Byrne, McClymont and others. The point I am making is that powerful forces are working consistently against the Ed Miliband undermining the direction he wishes to take the party and it's all happening under your very noses.

Yes. It's true. Ed Miliband may never deliver the political party some of us hope deep down he really wants to create, essentially because either his relative innocence or the more experienced forces ranged against him - or maybe a combination of the two - will simply impede him from fulfilling this unspoken promise.

A Twitter friend of mine yesterday pointed out that any Labour government is better than a Tory government - and I am inclined to agree that it is so. But I reminded this friend that beyond such hoary comparisons - used by those with unimaginative neoliberal economic inclinations to justify the current poverty of both politics and the material world for the majority - there is also the following truth: whilst any Labour government is better than its Tory equivalent, a humane Labour government is better than both.

His arguments focussed around the fact that Ed was unelectable. Mine focussed around his (ie my Twitter friend's) excessive lack of ambition: the fact that he was settling for a relative carbon copy future where the only difference between Labour and the Tories was the degree to which wealth continued to be concentrated on those who already owned the world, as the poor were obliged to accept the maxim that the workers always need less in order to want to work more.

Which is why I ask the question in the title of today's post: is there any alternative to more for the rich and less for the poor? Most modern politicians are so in thrall to the demonstrable failures of our current economic system that they are incapable of imagining any alternatives. It's not a coherent narrative we're missing - narrators out there we have millions. Rather, it's a coherent plot, a synopsis which contains a grain of truth, a story which has a beginning, a middle and an end that we find ourselves without - it's the trains of thought which create structure and meaning and contain and circumscribe our realities that we really find ourselves wanting.

Our politicians got so used to writing best-sellers through those dark arts of marketing that they forgot how to create leading characters which were anything but cardboard and plastic. Our politics is, thus, now the political equivalent of the cheaper and bulkier end of the literary industry: zero imagination, zero creativity, zero ingenuity, zero understanding of reality.

And why I hang on to Ed Miliband - even at this late stage - is because I see in him the potential to break away from the above dynamic. His relative innocence, his relative freedom from self-interested parties, his apparent desire to be good for goodness's sake ... all these things attract me precisely because all his contemporaries only promise more of what has already bankrupted us.

If you have plenty of reasons not to support Ed Miliband for at least a year more, give me just one solvent reason to support any of his contemporaries instead.

And don't tell me the reason I should break my intellectual back is because electing a carbon copy Labour government to do the dirty work of the rich and wealthy everywhere is sufficient reason in itself.

So whether on the alleged left or the more scurrilous right, is there anyone out there who doesn't promise more public resource to prop up the greedy banking industry and less public resource to fund the welfare state; more money for the private health corporations and less for the minimum-waged workforces; more tax breaks and opportunities for the 1 percent and fewer life-generating alternatives for the remaining 99 percent; and more sponsored lies hiding the acts of the sly transnationals - organisations which take advantage of the developing poor in the interests of their selfish and uncaring shareholders?

Anyone at all? Even just a little?

Anyone with half a chance of getting into power who isn't - in the end - going to give it all away as they find themselves obliged to work on behalf of the already wealthy?

Myself, I do wonder if it is time to jettison our attachment to traditional politics and - via parallel structures such as globalised virtual communities - sidestep ourselves what our politicians refuse to re-contemplate.

That is to say, make our own politics outside the current as we decide exactly what we are looking to achieve.

The other alternative is to identify - as in my last few posts I think I have been trying to - existing politicians who might be convinced to both understand our thesis as well as grasp wholeheartedly the potential opportunities.

You may fairly argue that Ed Miliband is not that politician.

So tell me then: who is?

Brainstorming versus brainwashing - what do we really want from our politics?

2011-12-29T19:15:00.000Z

I've always tried to explore ideas on these pages. Some people have cared to follow such trains of thought - many others have simply ignored them. As Paul currently says over at Never Trust a Hippy:

[...] I write this mainly to develop my own thinking - I don't know what I think until I read what I've written. It's a scratchpad - not a collection of short articles intended for an audience.

I think that probably fairly sums up what I am doing here. It certainly explains how I feel sufficiently motivated enough to continue exploring.

Today I wrote a piece on Ed Miliband's future. Plenty of retweets on Twitter resulted - it has been easily the most read of all my posts today. Most read doesn't of course mean best written. But whether well written or not, the intention was to brainstorm a position few people care to sustain right now: that out of Ed Miliband's leadership something good could still be achieved. In fact, as Eoin points out over at the Green Benches blog, those who are most against his leadership are most likely to subscribe in some way or another to the agenda which brought us finally to the hole we find ourselves in at this moment in time.

And so it is that I ask myself: what do we really want from our politics? Do we want a preformed discussion on opposingly monolithic sides along the lines that Eoin describes? This kind of thing, for example:

Peter Mandleson has not been quiet either. Well actually strike that, he's been very quiet. But, that's because he now has people to do his work for him. Through his 'Policy Exchange' vehicle he has commissioned several pieces that are about as predictable as is humanly possible from the uber-Blairite. I won't give his pieces any more air time than they deserve but suffice to say if you get a chance, wander over to their site and view the ideas of Giles, Radice, Byrne, McClymont and others. The point I am making is that powerful forces are working consistently against the Ed Miliband undermining the direction he wishes to take the party and it's all happening under your very noses.

Or do we want a real, open and free-minded investigation of the real alternatives to the neoliberalism that few politicians out there currently seem to know how to sidestep? A neoliberalism which only promises increasing concentrations of income on the one wealthy hand as - on the other absolutely disempowered rest - it savagely and unremittingly expands a poverty of both resources and wider life experience.

To sum up in two ideas then:

Do we want our politics to consist of major players stepping beyond the intellectual minimum as they brainstorm society's development in all sincerity and in all good faith?
Or, alternatively, do we expect and hope for them to do little more than brainwash the public as they have done to date - and as they themselves presumably intend to continue doing so in the future?

I know which I prefer - as the history of these pages will surely indicate. Does Ed Miliband promise historically to deliver the virtues of the first instead of settle - like all his contemporaries - for the sadnesses of the second? That, I do have to admit, I really don't know. But then neither can you know the reverse.

And if people despair right now of those who wish to support Miliband as leader of a still nascent Labour Party, I tell you I despair a thousand times more of any proposed alternatives.

Especially where their proponents believe the future lies in paying the rich more in order to improve the economy of everyone whilst, at the same time, choosing self-interestedly to line up the hoary old arguments which say the poor must be paid less in order to convince them to get off their lazy and miserable backsides.

I spoke in a previous post of achieving a "moral democracy". Someone on Twitter picked this up as an unhappy turn of phrase. It was. But - really - what I was looking for was an alternative to "social democracy"; that is to say, something which wasn't tainted by historically negative connotations. Something which spoke of putting people before numbers and reminded us of the importance of doing a humane good - above all.

A politics, that is, which chose to explore - rather than impose - a better future for everyone.

Brainstorming versus brainwashing - that's the crossroads we currently stand at.

So where do you stand?

And which direction do you want us to take?

Why so many people must be jealous of Ed Miliband's future

2011-12-29T09:15:00.000Z

What would New Labour have looked like if the News of the World had closed in 1997 - instead of collapsing ignominiously in 2011?

This thought comes to mind on the back of a comment of mine which came out of an exchange with Brian at the foot of a previous post:

Yes. That's true. That the debate [on neoliberalism] wasn't conducted *was* a serious failing of Blair and New Labour. But Murdoch still ruled the roost. A thought experiment then. What would New Labour's regime have looked like if the News of the World had collapsed in 1997 instead of 2011? Think that one through and perhaps contextualising Blair might be easier for us all.

Just imagine what might have happened if Blair - suddenly released from his obligations to the man who had helped crown him - could have moved Labour forward in exactly the way he must only have ever dreamt about.

This was before tuition fees had splintered Labour's faithful; before Iraq had broken the back of the patient church that still constituted the Party, even in 2003; before a whole host of concessions to the rancid right of British politics had distorted and fatally damaged his ability to perceive the real opportunities for a moral democracy.

For it is the strangest matter that the more moral become the discourses of those who would lead nations, the more violent and militaristic become the realities they proceed to deliver.

But let's imagine that Murdoch & Co were vanquished as now: temporarily at least, without too much room to regroup. Blair could have created a government of an easy three terms - not doing God; not doing triangulation; not doing the Daily Mail or the Sun. Just being what became him most naturally: listening to the wider people and reinterpreting their discourse for the good of a wider voting constituency.

Politics has always produced leaders who know how to crystallise and exemplify the desires of a generation. And where this has not happened, we have had lost generations thrashing about wildly. It would seem, right now, that we are awaiting that moment again. And the generation we form a part of has a grand opportunity to remake the future - with or without the help of the commentariat. As already pointed out:

[...] what if a politician was wise enough to propose pulling - first of all - the wool over the eyes of the commentariat itself? That is to say: let's imagine that Miliband, in this case, intended not to give too many gobbets of psychological stroking in the direction of self-important observers - observers who had become so used to being seen as astonishing crystal-ball gazers, by virtue of a privileged connection and control over the people we actually wanted to vote into power, that they found it absolutely impossible to contemplate that any politician might wish to play a different more solidly democratic game and at the same time be half-competent.

And so they interpret, supposedly on our behalf but surely far more in their own rank interests, that Ed Miliband can't communicate; Ed Miliband doesn't know how to fight; Ed Miliband is in hock to big trades union interests; and Ed Miliband is plain and simply the wrong man.

Plain and simply the wrong man not because he's wrong for us, the voting public, but - rather - because he's very wrong for the commentariat.

You know what I think? I think most politicians and commentators in modern politics are actually jealous of Ed Miliband. That he has got so far without owing anything to the media of one sort or another must really frustrate them in their own carefully marketed strait-jackets of thought.

Which is why I do say: "Ed, you still have my vote. The power you can take advantage of, channel and mould is as yet largely untested, untried and unseen. But if you manage your opportunities well and effectively from now on in, if you manage to see them exactly for what they are before the rest of us are able to even sense their wisdom, you will be marking out a new territory: a new territory which will change British politics forever.

"It's now your only alternative.

"It's now our only option.

"So understand it for what it is - and take it whilst you still can."

Maybe PFI wasn't such a bad idea after all (or understanding Blair the pragmatist)

2011-12-28T10:50:00.000Z

Wikipedia describes PFI and its effects thus:

The private finance initiative (PFI) is a way of creating "public–private partnerships" (PPPs) by funding public infrastructure projects with private capital. Developed initially by the Australian and United Kingdom governments, PFI and its variants have now been adopted in many countries as part of the wider neo-liberal programme of privatisation and financialisation driven by an increased need for accountability and efficiency for public spending, national governments, and international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. PFI has been controversial in the UK; the National Audit Office felt that it provided good value for money overall.^[1] however more recently the Parliamentary Treasury Select Committee found that "Higher borrowing costs since the credit crisis mean that PFI is now an ‘extremely inefficient’ method of financing projects".^[2]

Extremely inefficient, perhaps. But it does, of course, depend on how you measure efficiency. As I said yesterday, the current Coalition government appears to have lost all its moral compass as it destroys all sense of interdependence between rich and poor; owners and owned; possessing and dispossessed.

If we care, however, to measure efficiency in terms of how moral and caring society is able to manifest itself in its dealings with the divide between rich and poor, then I propose we might see PFI - a child of the crossover politics of Blairite triangulation - in a completely different light: instead of a tool to fill the deep pockets of the already rich and powerful, PFI was actually a strategy to ensure the private-sector interests of profit and loss were intrinsically wrapped up in the public dynamics of social benefit and exchange.

We saw and interpreted that companies which grew up and rewarded shareholders on the backs of state concerns were leeching the state of valuable resources. But how about - in the light of the last year and a half of Coalition greed - we gave Blairites their due? How about we admitted they were far cleverer and more astute in their long-term defence of the NHS, and indeed a wider state, in the face of forces which - to all intents and purposes - should have won the battle to take over our society a long long time ago?

Maybe instead of slapping Blairites around the face we should now revise our opinion of where their loyalties really lay.

Maybe Blair wasn't out to defend neoliberalism but - instead - fool the neoliberal forces into giving him, and therefore the rest of us, a breathing space to construct a decade of relative social justice which perhaps any other approach would have been unable to gain.

It's just a thought, of course - and I'm no expert in these matters. But a thought is a thought is a thought is a thought.

And following - in such a way - such a train of thoughts to their ultimate conclusion might just make it easier for the wider Labour Party to reconcile itself once and for all.

Perhaps, after all, Blair wasn't an ideologue but, rather, the ultimate pragmatist. He gained us valuable time we should treasure and - finally - find it in ourselves to thank him for.

And he provided, in his all-encompassing vision of the forces that really operate in Western civilisation, a once-in-a-generation solution to the circles we needed to square.

Something we might care - pretty sharpish - to copy and learn from as we see what unbridled neoliberalism is really prepared to go ahead with.

How Andrew Lansley aims to buy off even the Hippocratic Oath

2011-12-27T20:50:00.001Z

The Guardian currently has this poll up on the news that English NHS hospitals will be able to earn up to 49 percent of their income from private patients. The usual spin is being spread around that this will be done in order to benefit the public:

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley insisted NHS reforms would benefit patients, saying: "Lifting the private income cap for foundation hospitals will directly benefit NHS patients. If these hospitals earn additional income from private work that means there will be more money available to invest in NHS services. Furthermore services for NHS patients will be safeguarded because foundation hospitals' core legal duty will be to care for them."

Two observations occur to me on hearing this despicable and weasel-like news. The first is: why only 49 percent? For this really does sound as if it has come out of the mindset of the rankest form of private industry where shareholder power is defined in terms of who has 50 percent plus one - as if the 49 percent cap put in place were supposed and able to calm our understandable fears.

Broadening the right of an NHS hospital to raise 49 percent of its income from private patients will lead to a hefty percentage of the most expensive and up-to-date resources being reserved for the richest in society - willing and prepared to pay only for the best. In the meantime, if you do not have such incomes, you will find yourself at the front of the queue for the easy stuff nobody wants to pay extra for and right at the very back for the stuff that might just save your life.

Let us be clear: it's not just percentages that count here - it's also which machines and high-tech procedures are used for whom, when and why. As well as how hospitals which learn to depend on the rich for their very survival will begin to prioritise who gets the access they need and deserve.

But there is another far more profound and philosophically upsetting thought which comes to my mind as I cogitate further the implications of this selfish and demonstrably retrograde step: that is to say, one important clause of the modern Hippocratic Oath which defines the relationship between doctor and patient in this absolutely clear and unequivocal way:

I will remember that I remain a member of society with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

All my fellow human beings? How so? If 49 percent of my income will soon proceed from 11 percent of my patients, how can I possibly attend to the needs of all those people the Hippocratic Oath so manifestly defines as forming part of my constituency?

Andrew Lansley is a man of money and little more. And as such he is in consonance with so many unhappy members of his political party. What he will achieve with such a miserable and evil mindset - at least, that is, in England - is subvert and destroy the very base of ethical English medicine, as he makes it virtually impossible for its practitioners to comply with the historical tenets of their profession.

In the meantime, through such a corruption of the noble at heart, he is bringing to the English NHS the same yardsticks, thought patterns and ways of seeing which have already brought our banking industry to its moral knees.

Whilst our economy - infirm as it is - stumbles because of people who act in other industries just as Lansley chooses to in health, we witness - apparently unable to react or do anything effective to prevent their imposition - the application of the same bankrupt processes and procedures to an institution such as the NHS.

Who would wish to live in a land such as Lansley's? A land once allegedly fit for heroes is fast becoming a moral vacuum of impossible sadnesses.

I mean for God's sake, where on earth is Lansley's moral compass to be found? Where on earth is Cameron allowing this nation of brave souls to be led? Where on earth lies the gentleness of those gentlemen and women of old who brought up generations of young people in the principles of tolerance, justice and solidarity?

What has happened to that once prevalent society of the good and generous English?

Where ... where ... where has it gone?

When did we lose it?

And why?

We three films of Orient are

2011-12-27T10:31:00.000Z

It used to be the Three Kings. In Spain it still is. We have given all our presents in our nuclear family already - but the extended family is waiting on the 6th January; what in England we call Christmas Day, at least as far as gifting is concerned, is celebrated in Spain on the occasion of the Wise Men's arrival at that mythical manger.

The children have very little time to enjoy their toys. But it is in many ways far more appropriate and fitting to gift on such a day.

Meanwhile, I have watched three films in the past two days which - in some way or another - have made a difference to me. "Super 8", "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2" and "Finale", the final feature-length back-to-back episodes of "Smallville", all speak - in one way or another - of powers greater than ourselves. And it strikes me, in this holiday period, how strange it is that as God retreats from our daily lives we pursue evermore vigorously tales of overwhelming forces.

I wonder if in such story-telling behaviours we find more than one considerable truth: man is not made in the image of God but - rather - the other way round; and when we turn our back on such an image we need to replace it with another.

We need God not because we are weak and unable to face reality as it is but, instead, because God is a mirror of our very own selves - a mirror which allows us to understand ourselves far better than otherwise we might.

Without the concept of God - or some supernatural entity - we are simply unable to get the distance we need to better comprehend our curious natures.

Without God we are lost - but not because we need Him or Her as a crutch. It is, rather, as a kind of mystical magnetic resonance that we have grown accustomed to His or Her presence. We see further through the detachment God brings to our perceptions.

And so, when we turn our back on such ideas, dismissing them as irrelevant because they do not correspond to our mechanistically accurate views of the universe, we turn our back on a tool of wisdom. And so it is we need to substitute this tool with another - and so it is we tell the tales we tell.

In all three of the films I mention above, the extraordinary imposes its will. As my daughter has pointed out on more than one occasion, the concept of "extraordinary" is a curious one: the word now means something which is "out of the ordinary" but it could just as easily signify the "especially ordinary". For human beings are at their best when they ask for nothing in exchange as they commit their acts of often astonishing kindnesses. So it is in these three films. The young children in "Super 8", the forever gentle Harry Potter in the final film of the series which bears his name, the forever battling Clark Kent in the most Walton-like supernatural sequence of them all - children at heart who have preserved their innocence and their ability to choose right from wrong ...

No, we have not left God behind as we continue to analyse ourselves profoundly. God is still with us, even as we must change His or Her name and process.

We change His or Her name but not His or Her purpose.

God helps us to understand better what we must do.

And overriding it all, overarching our everything, we see that we are truer to that good side He or She is there to remind us of than any of our constructs will ever request us to be.

Capitalism may claim to substitute God. But in our stories, in the tales we tell, in the narratives we choose to popularise, we can see that our instincts and impulses lead us elsewhere.

Above all, we human beings are as good as our God would have us be.

How we have no right to pursue happiness and every obligation to spread it

2011-12-26T19:06:00.001Z

I am happy at the moment. I am in a country which suits my temperament. It is sometimes illogical, often irrational - frequently exhibiting impractical solidarity to such a heart-warming degree that I cannot but realise how social we as human beings must be allowed to become.

I wrote about a good man a couple of months ago. I didn't realise how good. His name is Emilio. As I said in that post, he was a good friend of mine. The sort of good man a person in a strange land very rarely is lucky to encounter.

But I was lucky enough to do so.

And I never forgot him.

A few days ago I wrote about how - by massive chance - I stumbled across his trail all over again. My father-in-law's illnesses took my wife and me to the local hospital - and there I saw a photocopy pinned to a noticeboard which mentioned my above-mentioned friend.

I was so surprised. It seemed so right. To be in a hospital and come across his presence after almost a decade. He was speaking on behalf of the foundation he is president of, and it was as if I had come across a modern Albert Schweitzer.

For that, I feel, in a way, is what he is. A good man who can work wonders within structures that often impose bad ways of working on the rest - and best - of us.

And so it is that I wonder not what gives us a right to pursue happiness but - rather - what prevents us from spreading more of it around. On the Christmas Day Spanish news we got, of course, the atrocities in Nigeria - but also a broad and kind handful of small stories about ordinary people trying to make life for the dispossessed a little less harsh during these holidays than might have been otherwise the case.

To make a better world is in our hands. If only we decide to do so without any thought for recompense or public recognition.

That is the key.

And that is where we must start.

Happy Christmas one and all (even where this is also sad)

2011-12-25T07:25:00.000Z

The whispering started at 5.30 am. The night was still sharp. The black and white cat hadn't, as yet, settled on the round white plastic table outside our sitting-room window.

Our children are either adults or well into adolescence but - at Christmas - this matters little.

At Christmas, where our Christmasses allow, we are all children again.

I was playing Christmas songs via the Google+ YouTube button yesterday. One of my favourites is - as you might imagine - "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". It came with a heart-rending video of images of war, which served to confirm absolutely the contrary.

Even so, the thought was well pitched. Like many moments of grand celebration in times of economic and social inequality and injustice, feelings of both sadness and joy assail one in equal measure.

6.30 am was the agreed present-opening time. The upstairs clock was running five minutes fast. They came down five minutes early. Back they went - dutifully if a little grumblingly.

In that five minutes I opened my bleary eyes.

My wife was still fast asleep.

I woke her with a gentle "Feliz Navidad".

By 6.45 am the presents were all open.

The children were happy and grateful.

The parents were smiling.

This was a good Christmas for us. Even as in the days leading up arguments of all unhappy kinds had proliferated, so the miracle of the day itself had led to a flowering of kindnesses and gentlenesses.

Just as all hope had been lost, so all people came together.

I just wish it were as good a Christmas for everyone else. For as the video indicates, it is possible to both talk of Christmas and war in the same breath. And still not understand how either can exist in the presence of the other.

http://youtu.be/yN4Uu0OlmTg

The Internet Itch (or a virtual psoriasis of awful proportions)

2011-12-23T18:15:00.000Z

I've noticed it in myself - but now I notice it in my nearest and dearest.

I spent the last seven years working for a bank. For the last three years, it was mainly data entry. I acquired the condition of frozen shoulder - first the right, then the left - as well as proceeding to lose my 20/20 vision.

For the last two of those three years, I had a smartphone. Not only did I get into the habit of checking my work emails on my work's computer every other minute, I also did the same with my non-work emails via my phone whenever I reasonably could.

It became an itch which needed to be scratched.

A mental itch of incredible proportions.

Speaking with one of my offspring today, I realise for the younger generation the deadly combination of smartphones, mobile Internet and social media has led them to a virtual psoriasis of awful proportions. They do not even conceive of a time before Google, blogging or Facebook - and when they do, it's simply because they read it up in what have now become the history books!

And when you modify that access, and when the computer is no longer personal, and when sharing needs to be factored into the First World equation as is still the case in the Third, then all kinds of issues arise as people find that itch cannot be scratched at will.

It's not only an Internet connection we are taught to need - it's a mode of access which satisfies our hands and eyes.

We are tactile beings, after all.

We need to touch something - even when that something is a man-made object of technological prowess.

And when that itch cannot be scratched, all kinds of residual tensions may surface and explode.

The personal computer - along with its latterday cousin the Internet-connected phone - both have a great deal to answer for as they increase our ability to find what we are looking for.

They can find almost anything - it is true.

But not everything.

There are skills such as kindness, patience and gentleness which the Internet-connected phone, and the personal computer before it, do not necessarily inculcate in their bravura of almost instantaneous communication.

I'm not saying that we cannot do these things using such devices.

I'm simply saying such devices do not naturally lead us to practise and exhibit such skills.

And where it will end, I really do not know.

But explosions of impatience from brains which are used to instant and accurate responses are not necessarily the most effective way of reconstructing a healthy non-virtual world.

At least, I can say, not in my limited experience.

On Nativity Scenes and Merry Christmasses

2011-12-23T09:16:00.001Z

Yesterday, my wife and I went to town. We did a couple of things which needed doing. Then we had a quick coffee and pincho. I had a paloma. She had chanfaina.

She didn't really like hers. Mine was fine.

It hasn't been cold these past few days. Yesterday, it began to get colder. By the time we finished our coffees, and headed out back onto the pedestrianised streets, the early morning fog was lifting. The sun was beginning to show again. It's a beautiful city, where we find ourselves.

All the family loves being in Spain - even when being in Spain means arguments and discussions.

Before we went on to do some last-minute food shopping, we dropped in at the San Eloy school where my eldest son used to study drawing. They had a wonderful exhibition - structured almost like stations of the cross - of a seven-month-long project to create a series of chronological nativity scenes, telling the age-old story of Jesus's birth.

It was a beautiful exhibition. It brought home to me how much the rough stones, olive and cypress trees, agavas, bright sunshine, cutting blues of the cloudless skies, camels of the adoring kings, the mercadillos, the animals, the impossible angels, the flickering fires and the light and dark of Herod's evil and fear are all an undeniable part of my heritage - and possibly my legacy.

I wish I could wrap myself up in these nativity scenes and admire them from within as well as without.

My life would be easier if I could return to the securities of my childhood.

In the meantime, my own children are losing the veils that protected them against a harder world.

What is this growing-up which thickens our skins so painfully in the face of the realities that eat away at our sense of wellbeing and kindness?

Why does disillusion have to be such a significant part of spreading one's wings?

Why does leaving the nest necessarily mean hurting what created it?

Nativity scenes contain the seeds of their own sadness - but even so, I wish I could believe unconditionally again.

Merry Christmas to you all - if merry is precisely the right term.

And please do all continue to bear witness to that rebirth we seek so very anxiously - and so very universally.

How Ed Miliband is clearly not his own man (and why this is actually a Good Thing)

2011-12-21T20:16:00.001Z

Whilst I'm on holiday, whilst I have my family around me, whilst I remember a whole host of happenstances which are important to me even as their relevance to the outside world is limited ... this is when I make connections between the personal and the public.

My previous post focussed on how my friends and family are clearly getting older - though to different effect in each case. That march of time is something we acknowledge only when we have time to examine and perceive its movement. And this only takes place when we are at relative rest - something our agitated civilisation really doesn't care to permit.

More phantoms from the past then? And to what result? This time, a perceptive piece which mirrors my thoughts on Ed Miliband at the end of September, where I suggested that in the initial critical reception to Hitchcock's "Psycho" there was a lesson we could learn about that famously discursive and apparently unfocussed speech by Miliband at Labour Party Conference this year.

Anyhow. What leads me to reflect once more on this subject is the perceptive piece I mention above and which contains the following paragraphs:

Miliband is doing well at the polls because he's shifting - albeit very slowly - away from the elite consensus towards a more social democratic position which is more in tune with public opinion. His party has rigorously opposed Andrew Lansley's unpopular health reforms, which mean the end of the NHS in all but name. And they have unequivocally opposed the coalition's plans to sell-off the Royal Mail.

What's more:

But the main thing is that Ed is heading in the right direction, even if media commentators, still wedded to a political model forged in 1979, don't like this deviation from the script.

As a consequence, Miliband's Labour Party has become the political equivalent of Stoke City football club. Tony Pulis's team are continually criticised for their style - or rather their lack of it - yet they keep on winning. "They are doing much better than people think," Match of the Day pundit Alan Hansen admitted after Stokes's latest win, their fourth on the bounce. The same could be said of Labour under Ed Miliband.

The article also underlines the important fact that exactly where we should believe it must count - elections themselves - Ed Miliband's Labour has won five out of five by-elections: the most recent, with an increase in share.

So how do we explain this curious circumstance on the one hand and - on the other - the fact that the media don't really warm to him? Although clearly an insider in politics, as far as family legacy is concerned, is he really quite deliberately playing the role of outsider - a "High Noon" kind of lonesome gunfighter ... and is it this which means that distances are being maintained?

Look at it rationally. Thatcher with gusto, Blair with considerable flair, Brown in his own way and Cameron and Osborne with a determined political guile have all collaborated in one way or another to the same kind of political adventure: pulling the wool most definitely over the eyes of the voting public with their various discourses and triangulations.

But what if a politician was wise enough to propose pulling - first of all - the wool over the eyes of the commentariat itself? That is to say: let's imagine that Miliband, in this case, intended not to give too many gobbets of psychological stroking in the direction of self-important observers - observers who had become so used to being seen as astonishing crystal-ball gazers, by virtue of a privileged connection and control over the people we actually wanted to vote into power, that they found it absolutely impossible to contemplate that any politician might wish to play a different more solidly democratic game and at the same time be half-competent.

And so they interpret, supposedly on our behalf but surely far more in their own rank interests, that Ed Miliband can't communicate; Ed Miliband doesn't know how to fight; Ed Miliband is in hock to big trades union interests; and Ed Miliband is plain and simply the wrong man.

Plain and simply the wrong man not because he's wrong for us, the voting public, but - rather - because he's very wrong for the commentariat.

So although I do agree that Ed Miliband is not his own man, it's not because I think he is a conniving manipulator of dark interests.

Rather, I believe quite sincerely that he believes a dedication to the democratic cause requires him to be our man.

And that, if I am right, will one day be a most refreshing place for us all to be.

Except, of course, for our real phantoms of the past: the commentariat of old.