Fat Man on a Keyboard

Interesting times

2012-01-31T14:31:00.000Z

They have their 'Fiscal Compact' now, imposing and enforcing strict budgetary disciplines on the signatories, though Britain and the Czech Republic have stayed out. Mind you, the ratification process has yet to begin and I doubt whether it will be plain sailing as events continue to threaten storms.

The whole Euro crisis has prompted a debate about there being a democratic deficit within the European Union. The usual talking points are around the unelected technocrats leading the Greek and Italian governments and the issue of national sovereignty. But this treaty shows where the main threat to democratic government lies. Democracy is more than a process of swapping the people or parties in power. It is about changing public policy and priorities and, above all, about alternative political economies. The response to the Euro crisis is not just a question of dealing with the technicalities of trade imbalances, sovereign debt and the institutional architecture of monetary union; it is ideological, in the sense that the attempts to resolve the crisis are informed by a particular model of political economy. And a single model is now to be legally embedded as the only one permissible. Where then is the possibility of democratic change?

You hear the cry everywhere, 'they are all the same'. This treaty means that they have to be. A blanket of orthodoxy has been thrown over the continent of Europe and, even if it is smothering the people, international institutions are doing their best to fasten it in place. The trouble with sameness when people are crying out for difference, is that it opens the door to those that really are different, if eerily familiar to anyone who knows about the dark corners of the 20th Century.

And in that way, the real European crisis is not taking place in Greece, Ireland, Spain or Portugal - yet. It is in Hungary. And if you need to be convinced of the ugliness of the events there, watch this video, think back to those earlier, faded photographs of people dressed in black shirts, wearing those same thuggish smiles, and remember what they brought to an earlier Europe, one that was also facing an economic crisis.

Thanks to George for the Hungarian links, keep an eye his blog for more links and updates.

Surrealism

2012-01-27T22:13:00.001Z

What to make of this?

The German government wants Greece to cede sovereignty over tax and spending decisions to a eurozone “budget commissioner” to secure a second €130bn bail-out, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by the Financial Times.

In what would amount to an extraordinary extension of European Union control over a member state, the new commissioner would have the power to veto budget decisions taken by the Greek government if they were not in line with targets set by international lenders. The new administrator, appointed by other eurozone finance ministers, would take responsibility for overseeing “all major blocks of expenditure” by the Greek government.

... Athens would also be forced to adopt a law permanently committing state revenues to debt service “first and foremost”.

What next? Gunboats?

Hat tip Shuggy

A loss

2012-01-24T23:19:00.000Z

The film director Thodoros Angelopoulos has died after being hit by a motor cycle in Athens. Those who haven't come across his languorous, elegiac films on Greek life and history should seek them out. You will be in for a treat.

Outrageous

2012-01-23T23:41:00.000Z

This is a nice piece by Kenan Malik on the free market in outrage, prompted by the latest threat to Salman Rushdie and his resultant non-appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

The consequence of all this has been the creation not of a less conflicted world, but of one that is more sectarian, fragmented and tribal. As the novelist Monica Ali has put it, ‘If you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, “My feelings are more hurt than yours”.’ The more that policy makers give licence for people to be offended, the more that people will seize the opportunity to feel offended. It leads to the encouragement of interest groups and the growth of sectarian conflict.

The whole article is a fine defence of free speech, but I wonder about he way he handles outrage. It is a weird concept. I blame my age, but these days I am outraged by nearly everything. That doesn't mean I want to shoot the outrageous (oh, hang on a second, sometimes it is a bit too attractive an idea for comfort - never mind I can usually manage to control it by some fantasies when I'm cutting firewood with a chainsaw; marvellous therapy, I recommend it). Actually, what we are talking about here is only religion. I have never quite understood why religion outranks world poverty, genocide, mass starvation and the like in the outrage stakes, but apparently it does. Then this isn't really about feeling hurt and offended, it is about power. The manufacture of outrage is how groups wangle themselves into a position where they can 'represent' their communities, seemingly united into a single identity group against their wills, mobilise others and make a play for power. This is a political tactic. And we are blind to it as we would rather it all just went away.

So this is good.

The avoidance of cultural pain has, therefore, come to be regarded as more important than the abstract right to freedom of expression. As the British sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, ‘If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism.’ What the anti-Baals of today most fear is starting arguments. What they most want is for the world to go to sleep.

Ah yes, sleep. We do sleep. And while we sleep others act. This is very reminiscent of Orwell at the end of Homage to Catalonia, "... the deep, deep sleep ofEngland, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerkedout of it by the roar of bombs". It is all so middle class, so respectable; the stifling politeness of conventional life and the fear of being seen insensitive, racist even. Then there is the nervous embarrassment at the thought of saying something controversial and the submerged fear of violence that leads us to betray those who would rather not be yoked to the heavy burden of outrage.

And who better than the English to succumb - after all, we are always anxious to avoid offence.

Come from the Shadows

2012-01-20T13:41:00.000Z

There are two things that will strike any reader of Come from the Shadows, Terry Glavin'snew book on Afghanistan. The first is his optimism about the future of the country, though only if the Taliban are defeated and the international intervention maintained until they are. The second is his affection and respect for the Afghan people and hisdesire to give them a voice. Both combine to make this an impressive book, angry, passionate andpartisan. And it is whollyconvincing.

Terry's main literary device is to show how the conventionalwisdom on Afghanistan describes another place, a fictional Absurdistan. As apicture of the real country, it is wrong in almost every respect. Afghanistanis not a mediaeval, ungovernable throwback, it is a modern developing country wrecked bywar and only just recovering from an imposed, ultra-violent theocracy. Nor isthe Taliban some form of anti-imperialist resistance movement. It is apsychotic organisation, with little internal support, trying to regain powerthrough uninhibited violence with the help of external powers pursuing theirown agendas.

To counter the media mood music of quagmires and unwinnablewars, Terry blitzes us with history, including the extraordinary tale of thelinks between Pashtun chauvinism and Nazi Aryan fantasies, demolishes myths,shows patronising and racist assumptions about Afghanistan's people for whatthey are and, most important of all, allows Afghans to speak for themselves.And what stories they have to tell.

Looking at what has been achieved since the fall of theTaliban, one gets a glimpse of what is beginning to emerge. This is not simply apolitical, institutional democracy, certainly compromised by Karzai'scorruption though still an achievement, but a democratic society, in whichordinary people are starting to take control of their own lives and reshape theirculture, rejecting oppression and embracing freedom.

Yet there is more to it than this. As I read on, I became more and more convinced that thestruggle for a democratic Afghanistan is also our struggle. The problems are deeper, the violencemore extreme, yet the underlying themes Terry explores have something universalabout them, something shared. And this is what I want to look at here. I wantto highlight the lessons we can take from the book. God knows, we need to know more aboutAfghanistan, but there is also much that we can learn from it.

My starting point is where we actually have a difference ofemphasis. Terry asks seriousquestions about the ubiquity of the Absurdistan analysis amongst the politicalleft and the damage it has done in Canadian politics. The phenomenon hedescribes is of an unthinking, reflexive left that sees surrender as 'peace'and wishes to abandon the Afghan people to whatever emerges through a deal withthe Taliban. He writes of a left that has the inability to see that in a fightbetween their own country and fascists, their own side might be in the rightfor once and of one that is deaf to the urgent appeals of the Afghan peoplethemselves.

There are two broad models of explanation for why this mightbe so. The first is 'left betrayal', the idea that something went terribly wrongduring the post-war period and caused the left to abandon its principles andbreak with an honourable past. The other sees all the currents of apologism,relativism, anti-Semitism and frank admiration for tyrannies as things thathave always existed within the left. From this perspective, Afghanistan issymbolic of a broader intellectual struggle that has always needed to befought. I come from the longer, historical view (neatly described by Norm Gerashere and here). Terry predominantly argues that there was a breach with earliersocialist and social democratic discourses; that the left abandoned classorganisation in favour of 'counterculture'.

Terry's exasperation with counterculture is not confined todippy hippy pacifism, he also includes paranoid leftist 'anti-imperialism',fashionable cynicism and a self-indulgent, narcissistic and, ironically,heavily commercialised and conformist 'alternative society' in his catalogue of despair. Whocould demur? Yet reading his book also convinced me of the importance ofcountercultural action and the need to rescue the term. After all, the socialchange that it has brought in my lifetime is pretty dramatic and whollywelcome.

Two reasons why we should not casually discard the notionstand out. The first is that counterculture stands in direct opposition tocultural relativism. Relativism is a conservative doctrine. It urges acceptanceof other cultures as they are, often asserts that they are unchangeable,eternal and somehow 'authentic' and refuses to pass judgement on even thegrossest cultural practice. Counterculture argues that culture can and mustchange if people are to be free from the tyranny of convention.

Secondly, countercultural action is an explicit recognitionthat political and economic liberation can still leave sections of a societyentrapped in webs of prejudice, enslaved by gender and oppressed due to theirsexuality. The right have recognised that culture is a critical battlefield, from Islamism, through the Tea Party to the Fidesz government in Hungary today. The left needs to doso as well and to fight back.

Counterculture may be hip in western democracies, outsidethem it can be dangerous, involving what Christopher Hitchens has called, "living 'asif'".

Vaclav Havel, thenworking as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that trulymerited the title of Absurd, realised that "resistance" in itsoriginal insurgent and militant sense was impossible in the central Europe ofthe day. He therefore proposed living "as if" he were a citizen of afree society, "as if" lying and cowardice were not mandatorypatriotic duties … In the late Victorian period, Oscar Wilde - master of thepose but not a mere poseur - decided to live and act "as if" moralhypocrisy were not regnant. In the deep south in the early 1960s, Rosa Parksdecided to act "as if" a hardworking black woman could sit down on abus at the end of the day's labour. In Moscow in the 1970s, AleksandrSolzhenitsyn resolved to write "as if" an individual scholar couldinvestigate the history of his own country and publish his findings.

Now read about the Afghan women whose stories Terry tells.In the days of the Taliban they tried to live 'as if' they were not in adystopian misogyny and today, after the end of Taliban rule, they aredetermined to live 'as if' their new freedoms were not fragile and constrainedby cultural conservatism. Take a woman like Shamisa Sharifi who ran anunderground organisation under the Taliban teaching poor women to read andwrite. Now her new organisation, Negeen, has combined women's literacy withcraft skills, rights education, textile workshops and micro-banking. It isstill hard and risky work. It still means living and working 'as if'. Women'seducation, organisation, political activity and even taking part in sport are examplesof the counterculture we should be promoting. After all, as Terry puts it,"in Afghanistan, if you're a girl,to play soccer is a revolutionary act".

Whatever its sources, it has to be said that the alliance ofparts of the left with a deeply reactionary totalitarianism is pretty weird,probably the strangest thing since, well, the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Ultimately, Ican only see it as a colossal moral failure and an historic misjudgement. TheAfghan Hazara Lacanian, Buddah Ahmedy, whom Terry met on his travels, bestsummed it up:

… it comes from thetragic incapacity at the core of liberalism itself to comprehend what we usedto call "evil".

I find this embrace well nigh unforgiveable. But a general acceptanceof the Absurdistan myth is more understandable; it is couched in progressivelanguage, uses nice words like 'peace', recoils against what Wilfred Owencalled "the pity of war" and is suspicious of American intentions.For those who grew up in the left, it is a position that need not disturb ouruniverse. To reject it means a re-examination of beliefs held for decades. Itis a difficult thing to do. I know. I have done it; too slowly and too late. Butthe purposeful maintenance of the myth is more contemptible. It relies on constant reinforcementby a flow of lazy, selective reporting and dubious opinion pieces, often bypeople who have access to far better information. And this points to the seconduniversal point that Terry makes; the need to confront prejudice with truth. Andthe only real way to do this in Afghanistan is to let the Afghan people speak. Even so, this isn't enough on its own. Peoplealso have to listen.

A perfect example of wilful deafness is the story of CodePink, an American feminist 'peace' organisation that makes the fashionable callfor troops out. They went on asponsored visit to Afghanistan, met with women activists who universally saidthat it was essential for women that the troops remain. After this, theyreturned the USA to write a report calling for the troops to be withdrawn. Whydid they bother?

And you have to be discriminating about who you listen to as well. There areplenty of apologists and pessimists out there. Absurdistan has its much-toutedchampions like Malalai Joya, whom, Terry writes, is remembered in Afghanistan by "human rights activists and women'srights leaders … with a mix of pity and contempt". Terry isunapologetic about choosing sides rather than producing a book that aims tostrike a spurious balance. As he writes, "I'vewritten this book as a partisan in the cause of Afghanistan's democrats. That'smy bias." It's also the biasof the left, of liberty, of our common cause.

Terry noticed something else too,

"… the greater emancipation was occurring with the help ofprojects that were diffuse, small-scale and nimble … At that level, when Afghanwomen were running their own show, you could pretty well sit back and watchthem change the world before your eyes."

This will sound familiar toanyone who has ever worked in community development. Rather than indulge in theexpensive temptation to impose grandiose schemes, often informed by fashionrather than expertise, development is far more effective if it is shaped andrun by the people themselves, those who have been at the sharp end ofoppression and poverty. They are the experts. And Terry shows just how wellthis can work in Afghanistan, giving us moving accounts of community action;organisations such as Aschiana, a children's outreach programme and itsassociated Children's Development Bank, small-scale agricultural developmentssuch as the Garden Gate project, through to the Afghan women's football team; anotherblow to the condescension of the cynics.

These examples of people building their own lives andcommunities through direct action could not have happened if the social spacehad not been opened for them by the defeat of the Taliban. This leads us to thefinal lesson of Afghanistan. Freedom cannot be exercised without security. Inthe developed world we tend to think of this as the need for economic security,in Afghanistan it is something more visceral. It is security from beingkidnapped, beheaded, dismembered by a suicide bomb, raped and beaten byreligious extremists, mutilated with acid for the crime of seeking an educationand all the myriad horrors that can be invented by disturbed minds and malignideologies. In this case, security can only come from one source; troops.

Reading this book, one is struck by the extraordinary institutionalisedsadism of the Taliban, the systematic cruelty of their war and of theirtargets, women especially but also their attempt to eradicate education. Terrypoints out that "between May 2007and February 2008 the Taliban attacked and burnt 98 schools, killing 147teachers and students". Now the provision and demand for education isbooming, yet all that stands between it and its destruction is the militaryforce that is deployed to protect the country from the return of the Taliban.

All the Afghan democrats are united on two points: it will be adisaster if the troops leave and a deal with the Taliban would be a catastrophefor the future of the country:

Maboob Shah – "Peoplewho say the foreign soldiers should go away, they do not know what they aresaying". Shamsia Sharifi – "Weneed to have the troops in Afghanistan. If the Taliban come back, the targetwill be us again." Fawzia Koofi – "Thereis a lack of proper communication in your country about Afghanistan. They don'tsee all the progress. For me, the hope is for the younger generation. Young menare voting for women. The society is under a big transformation, and there arepeople who don't want to see this." Amrullah Saleh – "The human cost in this country [of adeal with the Taliban] will easily be up to two million people killed, atleast. It will not be big news for Afghanistan. We are used to tragedies,throughout our history. But the cost for you will be bigger".

Still the noises emanating from both governments andthe commentariat say the same thing; there needs to be an exit strategy basednot on the defeat of the Taliban, but on their accommodation.

Come from The Shadowsbegins with the Battle of Marefat High School, a fully co-educational schoolwith an intellectually open curriculum, elected class councils and an independent student parliament. The Talibanhated it and rioters tried to smash it. They were beaten back by students whowould not run away. They were not about to relinquish their future to a bunchof marauding bigots.

And there in a single example are both the hopes and fearsof a nation. Self-help and education; the need to defend every gain, by forceif necessary, as it so often is; direct action to change a misogynist culture;and, above all, the lesson the west needs to learn most, to listen to the people, tohear their voices and to choose to stand with them in an act of principledinternationalism.

And this applies not only to Afghanistan. Think of how thepoor, for example, are to come from the shadows in any European country, howother than by listening to their voices are they to escape the stigma of theword 'scrounger' or the more respectable condescension bestowed by the conceptof 'dependency culture', think of how they too can build their own communities,organise and, when necessary, protest. Yes, Afghanistan is our struggle too.

I am certain that Terry would have loved to have written acelebratory book, one that looked forward to a new country being created bythe fall of the Taliban and one that heralded the triumph of an Afghandemocracy, forged by some remarkable people. Instead the book is troubled. Courageand hope are offset by anger and anxiety at the prospect of a loomingbetrayal. Come from the Shadowsshould be a milestone on the road to the creation of a free Afghan nation, letus hope that it does not stand as its epitaph.

Something rotten

2012-01-18T18:23:00.000Z

I know little about Hungary and coverage of recent events is hardly flooding the media. But news is seeping through, as is the unmistakable, nauseous stench of fascism. In teaching history I spend much time explaining and analysing what fascism is and where it comes from, but this isn't to know it. It is something that assaults the senses. The mixture of tawdry stupidity, sadism, utterly humourless self-importance and an attitude that despises the intellect and revels in kitsch, is the same wherever it is to be found. All the while it insinuates that this or that group of people are inferior and, despite their sub-humanity, are surely dangerous and must be eradicated. The highest virtue is cruelty and the deepest pleasure is the creation of misery. It stinks and by that you will always know it.

George Szirtes has been posting information on recent events both on his blog and on Facebook. Here are a few links to read, all of which came from him:

The excellent site Hungarian Watch; reports on European action here and here; student protests; an interesting independent blog; three more posts by George.

And finally here, the poet Orbán in translation by George. The concluding lines:

the spirit’s armour is new, but it’s the same old method
as is the outcome
corpses everywhere, orange peel, dogshit, pages of burned books.

Don't turn your back or avert your eyes, you will still smell it.

Morality

2012-01-12T13:00:00.000Z

I liked this piece on the Euro debt crisis by Aditya Chakrabortty, not least because he argues that the human consequences of austerity"are not merely coincidental to those discussions about how to tackle the debt; they are integral to it." Whilst it is easy to read all sorts of guff about the 'moral risk' of debt forgiveness, there is far less, other than in the pages of literature where it has been a common theme for centuries, about the immoral consequences of the extraction of repayment from those who no longer have the means to pay.

Chakrabortty has been reading David Graeber's new book and it shows.

Strip away the technicalities and you are left with two ways to think about the debt crisis. One is as a battle between the past and the future ... the second way to think about any argument over debt [is] as a fight between creditors and borrowers, or the haves and the have-nots.

He argues that the current austerity programme sacrifices the future of the individual citizens of debtor countries, who bear little responsibility for the crisis, in a vain attempt to repay debts acquired in the past through the actions of previous governments; whilst the creditors use their power to extract as much as possible from the borrowers to avoid facing the consequences of their own poor investment decisions. It is almost as if we have reinvented the old debtors' prisons, on an international scale. The borrowers are punished by endless austerity, whilst the creditors are protected, even rewarded, whatever responsibility they share for the creation of the crisis.

The 1869 Bankruptcy Act abolished imprisonment for debt in Britain and, in effect, allowed for an orderly debt default and debt forgiveness. This is a lesson seemingly lost to the EU as it seeks to bind the recalcitrant nations with perpetual fiscal restraints.

Chakraborrty concludes:

In his recent, brilliant history Debt: the First 5,000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber calls for a modern-day debt jubilee, a cancellation of all debts, just as they had in Mesopotamia. His suggestion is provocative, but it should be taken seriously. Because the longer we keep protecting the haves over the have-nots and honouring the past while destroying the future, the worse this debt crisis will get.

Greece's new place in Europe

Economics

2012-01-09T11:17:00.000Z

"Mario, you have allowed the Italian budget deficit to rise above 3% of gross domestic product." "Yes, mistress Angela, I deserve to be punished for my lack of fiscal discipline. Please do not spare me."

Larry Elliott on form:

Perhaps a Freud or a Jung could explain what is happening: it certainly defies rational economic analysis.

Another season

2012-01-08T22:57:00.000Z

And another ground. Swinton's peripatetic existence continues with them now playing at Leigh Sports Village, one of the clutch of modern, multi-use stadia that are springing up to replace the crumbling terraces of grounds that may bring a tear to the eye of nostalgics, but were bloody awful if you needed a pee or to get a decent view of the game. This will be the sixth ground they have played at since the demise of Station Road. Hopefully, there will be just one more move; to the planned new ground of their own in Agecroft.

Today's game was a pre-season friendly against Widnes, newly elevated to Super League. It was the expected defeat to a full-strength higher division team, but really impressive defence was only partly off-set by a rusty attack. The season looks promising. We just need that ground.

Sundry thoughts on return

2012-01-07T17:53:00.000Z

Delight and the mundane

Here I am back in Manchester, culturally and linguistically at home, but thinking of another place where I am a cultural and linguistic outsider and feel happy.

Worries

Of course, Greece is not a happy country right now. People are obsessing about the crisis, stressed and anxious, reacting with a mixture of anger, resignation and hysteria to their sudden impoverishment as the result of an imposed, ideologically driven, political economy. Passing a piece of graffiti on the way back and reading the words, "resist the new Fourth Reich", I couldn't help feeling that the policies of the EU could hardly be better designed to undermine any sense of European identity in a nation that had embraced it so whole-heartedly.

Perspective

The death of Kim Jong-il gave us a glimpse of something far worse; militarised expressions of ludicrous grief, driven by fear, expressed with a disciplined precision, orchestrated under brooding snow-laden skies that seemed symbolic of this dystopian repression. Greece's undisciplined vibrancy, even in today's economic troubles, is a wonderful reminder of the importance of freedom, especially if it can be found in a benign climate.

Intervention

As I boarded my connection in Frankfurt a lively group of South Korean students, returning to universities in the UK after the break, were laughing and joking, constantly checking their mobiles and listening to their iPods. Watching them, I couldn't help thinking, 'what sort of life would they be leading now if the North had won the Korean War, if there had not been an American-led UN intervention and if the country had been reunited under Kim Il-sung'?

Open education

2012-01-03T17:56:00.000Z

There is a decent piece from Peter Scott here about higher education policy that gets to the nub of the problem with the reforms to university funding.

The interesting thing about policy is not the measures themselves, but the assumptions underlying them. Applying that test, the government's higher education reforms are anything but. They are rooted in a view of a university education common no doubt in prosperous London-land, but profoundly reactionary – as a bourgeois lifestyle choice rather than career-changing improvement, as validation rather than aspiration.

Scott's critique, though, is not a very radical one either. His argument for state funding through general taxation, rather than the hypothecated graduate tax, which the loan and repayment scheme really is, is based on the utility of higher education as an instrument of national prosperity. In making this case, he is also engaging with a limited, and somewhat conservative, model of higher education.

The one strength in the Government's case for the new fees regime for universities is that there is an inequity in asking those who never benefit as individuals to pay, through general taxation, for a middle class perk that would, in turn, give real individual rewards to those who get qualifications. A similar argument has been used about state funding for the arts. Why should the private pleasures of the elite receive public funding? The counter argument usually made centres on the collateral benefits of elite activities, both in culture and economics. For instance, the defence of a publicly funded higher education is that there is a collective economic gain in having an educated workforce. There is obviously some truth in this, but try asking an unemployed person whether they benefit from the fact that the clerk processing their claim has a 2.2 in sociology. I find more than a hint of sophistry here; what exists is of value simply because it exists.

In both cases, the wrong question is being asked. Instead we should be asking why these are elite pursuits in the first place, rather than being open and accessible to everyone. And this leads me to a tediously familiar subject, adult education. Adult education in universities was one way in which the university could be something other than a middle class diploma factory and instead become a resource for the entire community. It was different and, in lots of ways, pointed to another possibility, universities open to all; comprehensive rather than selective institutions. High level research and top class professional training could easily co-exist with an open campus, short courses, community outreach and part-time delivery. And the same applies to the arts. If there was one thing running through the rather earnest mission of the adult education movement from its earliest days, it was the notion that excellence was available to all, that high art could be popular art. The assumption behind current policy is that neither are capable of change from being a permanent elite ghetto.

This is what a genuinely radical reform could look like, moving lifelong learning from the margins to the centre of the university mission, not bringing in another formula based on a complacent acceptance of the status quo, with bureaucratised plans for wider access floating around at the margins. It would mean profound institutional change and, if the university was an open door instead of a gated community, its pleas about funding would have far greater purchase.

Instead, we are witnessing adult education's lingering death and with it goes hopes for something more inspiring for our universities.

Solidarity

2012-01-02T15:34:00.000Z

We are all Greek now.

A New Year

2012-01-02T15:19:00.003Z

And at last the sun shone after a grey, wet holiday period. The views from the Lafkos road were slightly hazy and snow could be seen on the mountains in the distance. Clear skies means frosty nights, though the sun is warm even if the air is cool. A sunny 2012 in the offing? Wait and see, but all the best to my select band of readers.

Horrifying

2011-12-31T16:41:00.000Z

I had my suspicions before, now I have the proof. Santa is a Nazi.

UPDATE for Mikeovswintonneedstogotospecsavers.Another angle - open palm, short fingers. Even more suspicious.

Peace and goodwill

2011-12-29T22:35:00.002Z

Festive greetings ...

2011-12-25T00:05:00.000Z

... to most of those who pass by this obscure corner of the internet.

Getting away from it all

2011-12-23T13:30:00.000Z

... snow and gale-force winds knocked out the power lines in over 50 villages in northern Greece, with electricity crews still working on repairing them on Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile, back in the UK:

A Christmas with unseasonably mild temperatures and strong winds is expected in much of Britain.

Oh well.

Latins and Teutons

2011-12-21T18:32:00.000Z

So why can't the Greeks be more like the Germans? That should sort all the problems out, surely.

Matthew Iglesias writes in Slate:

Blaming the whole mess on the comparative torpor of Latins places a convenient moral framework around complicated economic questions, and affirms prior beliefs about who does and doesn’t work hard ...It’s true that Germans and Greeks work very different amounts, but not in the way you expect. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average German worker put in 1,429 hours on the job in 2008. The average Greek worker put in 2,120 hours. In Spain, the average worker puts in 1,647 hours. In Italy, 1,802. The Dutch, by contrast, outdo even their Teutonic brethren in laziness, working a staggeringly low 1,389 hours per year.

He continues with an old truth:

... countries aren’t rich because their people work hard. When people are poor, that’s when they work hard.

As Amartya Sen has written

... cultural generalizations ... can ... present astonishingly limited and bleak understandings of the characteristics of the human beings involved. When a hazy perception of culture is combined with fatalism about the dominating power of culture, we are, in effect, asked to be the slaves of an illusory force.

Hat tip John

In Greece

2011-12-18T23:18:00.000Z

It is good to be back in Greece. After months of disaster stories in the press, it is reassuring to see that it still exists and that the village has splashed out on a new public Christmas decoration. The old metal tree-shaped frame on the jetty has given way to a wooden boat draped with sailcloth and illuminated by fairy lights. Village gossip persists, the people are still here, the winter is mild and pleasant, even if the skies are grey and the sea is splashing over the paraleia as the weather gets cooler. The lane is still firm under foot, the legacy of a warm, dry autumn, the grass has hardly grown and only the clover has flourished. The citrus trees are in fruit, the bright colours of the pitted skins contrasting with their dark green leaves.

Yet the crisis is real enough and it continues unresolved, consuming its human sacrifices that signally fail to propitiate the gods of the markets. The sigh of relief at a half-formed and ill-constructed non-solution will soon give way to the inevitable failure and then ... ? Who knows? All I can say is that this is a country that deserves better and that for some unfathomable reason the stillness of a mild winter's night, broken only by the crackling of olive wood burning in the grate, brings me happiness.

The world has lost two fine democratic voices this week in Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens, both exceptional writers, both intolerant of stupidity and totalitarianism. The contrast between their vigorous and thoughtful urgency with the stumbling, indecisive ideological orthodoxy of the EU is disturbing. Watching European leaders in action reminds me that it is not just evil that is banal, so is banality and it too carries its own dangers. There is nothing barbaric about our European elites, but they are careless. And European democracy is one thing not to be careless with.

One hell of a writer

2011-12-16T10:59:00.000Z

May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

The year of the dog

2011-12-15T12:03:00.000Z

Hitler, Stalin (twice), Gandhi, Churchill, Nixon, Mark Zukerberg - all have been Time magazine's Person of the Year. Now they are joined by ... Loukanikos the Greek riot dog.

Well, this year's award is really a collective one to all the protesters who have challenged the established order all over the world, but Loukanikos gets an honourable mention and a picture spread.

Starting with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia that kicked off the Arab Spring and ending with the protests against the fraudulent elections in Russia, this has been an extraordinary year when the quiescence of a population cowed by fear or sated by the excesses of consumerism can no longer be taken for granted. Time's decision not to nominate a single person is down to their view that this year "leadership has come from the bottom of the pyramid, not the top". Perhaps, given the quality of political leadership we have seen lately, the selection of a dog in preference to any of this uninspiring bunch of presidents and prime ministers is all that needs to be said.

Hat tip KTG

Eurodoom

2011-12-12T10:07:00.001Z

There is a superb, angry summary of the Erozone summit agreement by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Torygraph of all places.

Europe will now have its austerity union, a revamped Stability Pact. Budgets will be vetted "ex ante". Structural deficits will be capped at 0.5pc of GDP. Sinners will be punished automatically once they break the 3pc limit, and submit to suzerainty. Commissars will tell them how to treat trade unions, what to tax, and what to spend.

It is not remotely a fiscal union. There will be no joint debt issuance, no EU treasury, no shared budgets, and no fiscal transfers to regions in trouble.

And, making the obvious point that this non-union is the flawed solution to the wrong problem:

This is not at root a debt crisis. By endorsing fiscal fetishism, EU leaders are silently colluding in the Neo-Calvinist illusion that budget excess caused the debacle. They know this to be untrue. Ireland ran surpluses for years, reducing its public debt to 12pc of GDP at one stage (Germany is 82pc). Spain ran a surplus of 2pc of GDP. Italy has long had a primary surplus.

It is a trade and capital flow crisis, a regional variant of the US-China imbalance. The damage was hidden during the boom by cheap German, Dutch, and French capital -- and cheap Asian and Mid-East capital rotated through London banks -- flowing into southern Europe. It was cruelly exposed as soon as creditors shut off credit.

In other words, debts and deficits are the symptoms of a systemic crisis, not its cause.

So what is going on? A rehashing of Herbert Hoover, the rediscovery of the economics of Pierre Laval or a "Medieval leech-cure treatment" that "can only drain the lifeblood from large parts of wasted Euroland"? This will not end well.

Thanks to Alan

Winter

2011-12-10T19:26:00.001Z

So Britain is out in the cold as it stands aside from a deal to impose a permanent winter of austerity on a Europe that craves summer. Cameron has upset everybody by vetoing a treaty imposing the wrong remedy on the basis of a wrong diagnosis even though he agrees with the diagnosis and is busy applying the same wrong remedy to the British economy.

Here is Paul Krugman:

Maybe it was always thus, but the relentless wrong-headedness of the Europeans, their insistence on seeing their crisis as something it isn’t, and responding with actions that deepen the real crisis, has been a wonder to behold.

Literature, history and conflict

2011-12-07T00:00:00.000Z

I found this fascinating interview with the Israeli novelist, David Grossman, on Normblog. Grossman is a writer whom I admire and I found his latest novel, To the End of the Land, memorable and haunting. Its structure is irregular, it does not offer any type of conclusive ending, instead it is a picture of relationships on a journey, falling through space and time. It is a meditation on ordinary lives shaped by conflict, uneasily escaping from and reconciling with reality by turn.

Norm highlights the concluding paragraph:

There is something in literature so contrary to the general dimension of war. War is all about effacing the other and self-effacement; it’s all about generalizations and sweeping definitions and demonizations. Writing is about specifying individuals, being very attentive to them and caring for them. It insists on nuances.

This is interesting enough, but, I was drawn to something he said earlier:

We live in a very violent region, which makes people react sometimes in a terrible way ... We are all prisoners and imprisoned. The difficulty of being a human being, being a mentsch even, in such an inhumane and anti-mentsch reality, it’s an environment that is so poisoned with hatred and fears and prejudices and racism that one fights hard in order not to surrender to [these poisons]. It is so tempting to surrender to this way of thinking: demonizing the other, idealizing ourselves, believing the other understands only the language of power and therefore we have to, against our will of course, treat them only with vigor—all of these unbearable ways of seeing reality, which in a way are realizing themselves, it’s a kind of self-fulfilling way of looking at the world.

...It’s not only an abstract thought here; it’s very practical. People are challenged to make sharp, immediate decisions in order to stay alive, especially when they serve in the army. All these extreme dilemmas, which are really dilemmas for Greek tragedies, they are our daily bread, ours and the Palestinians. It is so hard to mitigate all these contrary urges and pressures and yearnings to remain human. Sometimes I compare it to walking in the middle of a huge storm with only one candle in your hand. How do you keep it lit? How do you protect it?

The importance of history as a discipline stands out, developing a narrative that expresses and explains the collective experience of both peoples. On all sides it is assailed by pseudo-history as propaganda, selecting and distorting to support one side or another, to provide a narrative that comforts prejudice, feeds contempt and breeds hatred.

But the drama of conflict, the instinct for survival, the choices that each individual makes with all the consequences that flow from them, what has the historian to say? Yes, it is possible to write about ironies, coincidences, misunderstandings; but fear and grief, or, what Grossman builds his novel on, the absolute terror of the possibility of grief? It is there that we need our artists, maybe walking hand-in-hand with historians, for what they can do is explain the reality of individual experience. Both explore a different dimension of truth and, at its best, history is a profoundly literary subject.

Does it make a difference? Here is the conclusion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1970 Nobel Prize Lecture:

We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

Grossman is more cautious:

Stories today cannot change reality; they unfortunately cannot change the world. Literature doesn’t have representatives in power centers, or financial markets, or parliament, or army headquarters. But maybe it can help us so that this world cannot change us.

If Solzhenitsyn is too bombastic, Grossman is too bashful. Totalitarian regimes have long understood that they need to suppress art in favour of kitsch, one of the great achievements of humanity is that they have always failed.

Capitalism is doomed (perhaps)

2011-12-06T15:42:00.001Z

The tide has turned, Tunbridge Wells is now in occupation:

"We met the Church Warden last night, who happened to be a very convivial chap, the following morning we met the Vicar, who seemed to somewhat sympathy with our cause, however in the last hour, at apprx 12:30 midday today (being Thursday) the Police have shown up, although the Police have been wonderfully friendly, I do believe that they perceive that there may be an issue with regards to us remaining on this site."

Via Wealden Progressive Movement

Sunday sanity

2011-12-04T11:38:00.001Z

Why the public sector also pays for the private sector - in a neat dialogue from Tim Harford:

This is a modern economy. Everybody pays for everybody else’s salary, except the subsistence farmers and survivalists, who look after themselves

Nice, read it all.

In trouble

2011-11-28T00:36:00.001Z

Funny how the idea of paying more for longer to get less hasn't been the most successful of sales pitches. But you know it is failing badly when things like this happen:

A head teacher praised by David Cameron in June for not closing her school during industrial action says she will strike for the first time in her life.

Hat tip to John

The season's over

2011-11-25T00:26:00.001Z

So what better way to review it than by using Lego (er, are you quite sure about that?).

Censorship

2011-11-24T13:10:00.001Z

According to this report, The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority is taking in hand (oo er missus) the dreadful, subversive crime of sending sexy texts. It is intending to filter out rude words and phrases such as "monkey crotch" and "flogging the dolphin". I know I am getting old, but am I missing something here? Do you know anyone who has used these terms to inflame the desire of someone they fancy?

They have also banned the phrase "athlete's foot". The erotic possibilities of a crusty fungus between the toes have been lost to me up until now. All explanations will be gratefully (perhaps) received.

Thanks to Steve

The customer is always ...

2011-11-21T01:10:00.001Z

Customers review the gripping A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.

Thanks to John

A night at the opera

2011-11-20T20:30:00.000Z

No, not this:

It was this one instead:

Both are magic in their own ways, but they aren't quite the same.

On Friday night I saw Northern Opera's production of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades (or Pique Dame) at The Lowry in Salford. It is a dark tale of obsession and passion, where love brings nothing but torment for the lovers. From the moment the curtain goes up, showing Herman on stage alone, the ominous overture fades and we see a condemned man. At each turn of the plot he is offered a choice to back down and choose happiness, yet every time he obeys the instinct of a gambler and risks all to gain all. Death wins.

It was a decent enough production with some strong performances and did justice to such a powerful melodrama. But the highlight for me was the youth of the audience. There were plenty of grey hairs there (such as mine), but also younger people and a couple of school trips in the near full-house. So the best moment for me was walking out of the theatre, feeling breathless from the emotion of the experience, and seeing a scruffy young lad of about thirteen or fourteen, his eyes shining, turn round to his mates and say in a thick Salford accent, "That was OK that was. Especially at the end where he dies". High culture (to use that dreadful phrase), is only elitist in that the elite confine it to themselves. Beauty is impervious to class.

Apologia

2011-11-18T14:44:00.001Z

Two classics on one day from the pages of The Dictators' Friend, sometimes known as the Guardian comments pages.

First up, Mehdi Hasan finds it oh so reasonable that with everyone being really nasty to Iran (I wonder why that is), it is no wonder that they want nuclear weapons. Well who wouldn't? Not that there is any evidence of them actually trying to get them, perish the thought. Of course, he doesn't mention that the nature of the regime might just give a few causes for concern. The classic is when he writes, without even a hint of irony,

On Tuesday, around 1,000 Iranian students formed a human chain around the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel".

Hmm ... if I were American or Israeli I think I would be feeling a bit queasy about that and conceivably I might think that it is rather a good idea to stop Iran acquiring the means of actually delivering that death.

Another who is feeling got at is that reasonable chap Mr Assad. Those bullies in the Arab League have turned on him, but at least he has got Jonathan Steele to stick up for him by telling them to desist and to proffer mediation instead of condemnation and isolation. Of course he is duly critical of Syria:

The Assad regime has made mistake after mistake. Stunned by the first protests this spring, it turned too quickly to force.

Erm, "too quickly"? Does that mean that it would have been OK if they waited a bit before shooting thousands of people? And of course it was a "mistake", not a crime.

Whatever you think the right response should be and even if you think that the current policy is wrong, it is perfectly possible to to argue the case without throwing your moral compass in the bin and turning a blind eye to murder. The question is how we deal with repression, tyranny and vile ideologies, not how we minimise their crimes.

Crime without punishment

2011-11-14T00:02:00.000Z

Misha Glenny puts up a defence of Papandreou from a different angle and hints that his downfall may have had something to with the actions of a corrupt Greek oligarchy that "have mobilised hysterical media outlets which they own in order to denounce and undermine Mr Papandreou at every opportunity, aware he is the least pliable among Greece’s political elite".

His description of an elite that has dodged taxation, salted big money abroad and hovers ready to pick up bargains in the sale of assets, in part enforced by the results of their own corruption, gives another reason why the Channel 4 programme, Go Greek for a Week, was so misjudged. Glenny is simply pointing out that the actions of bus drivers might be a tad less important than those of the super-rich.

Glenny is coruscating about the EU's toleration of corruption, but now that seems to be matched by an intolerance of democracy. Governments headed by unelected bankers, including members of the far right, seem all the rage. Heather Stewart is not impressed:

Of course, the fig leaf is that Berlusconi's Yale-trained successor, Mario Monti, will lead a "technocratic" government that will implement drastic spending cuts and necessary structural reforms to nurse the economy back to health. Exactly the same story is being told about ex-central banker Lucas Papademos in Greece. But there are two major flaws in this argument. First, there's no such thing as a harmless, neutral technocrat; and second, the plan they are toting won't work.

She uses a new report from Research on Money and Finance to, yet again, reiterate the points that seem lost on policy makers.

Greece has offered up the scalps of 30,000 civil servants, raised taxes, cut public sector salaries and put a cornucopia of state assets up for sale. The result? A cumulative 10% decline in output through 2010 and 2011, and an unemployment rate of 18.4%. Greece's debt-to-GDP ratio has actually risen, not fallen, since the "rescue" package was implemented, and forecasts from the commission show debt hitting a Japanese-style 198% of GDP by 2013. On its own terms, the programme has been self-defeating.

And still they persist. Careless about democracy, blind to evidence and turning their backs on evident corruption, they carry on regardless in a self-congratulatory way until the next inevitable failure. As to the consequences, the only thing that is sure is that the oligarchs will not be the ones suffering.

History lessons

2011-11-12T11:57:00.001Z

One piece of commentary on the Euro crisis is getting rather tiresome. The obsession of the German Bundesbank with fiscal constraint is constantly being put down to the memory of the hyper-inflation of 1923, which we are then swiftly told led to the rise of Hitler.

This is bad history. Not only is the economic position of Germany today completely different from the Germany that emerged from defeat in the First World War, making the analogy ridiculous, but it was not the inflation crisis that lead to Hitler's accession to power ten years after it ended. Hitler came to power at the peak of an unemployment crisis, precipitated by a deflationary global recession, exacerbated by the very orthodox policies that are being imposed throughout the Eurozone.

I dislike the use of historical analogies as a substitute for proper analysis. But if you are going to use them, please pick the right one.

Racism

2011-11-08T20:23:00.000Z

I expected to be irritated by Channel 4's Go Greek for a Week. I wasn't disappointed. Actually, there were a few fleeting moments of decent analysis from good commentators, but they were buried in the cliché and stereotyping of the rest. The programme became an attempt to use some of the more dismal tricks of reality TV to lay the blame for the whole of the Greek budgetary crisis on malpractice, rather than trade imbalances, exchange rate inflexibility and austerity programmes (OK, not quite as easy as to dramatise with a hairdresser and bus driver, I'll give them that. Though I seem to remember Robert Tressell doing it rather well with house painters). I also grimaced at the way good old fashioned Anglo-Saxon honesty was compared to the cunning, underhand practices of those pesky Mediterranean types. But the most egregious part was the statistical trick they played.

You would have thought that if you wanted to compare the earnings of a bus driver in Greece with a bus driver in the UK you would, er, compare the earnings of a bus driver in Greece with a bus driver in the UK. No. That's not the way they did it. Instead, they took the bonuses and allowances of a Greek bus driver and calculated them as a percentage of the Greek average wage. They then worked out what that percentage would amount to if it was calculated against UK average earnings (they are higher than Greek ones). They then took that amount in cash, handed it to our bus driver and said to him that was the extra weekly earnings he would get under the Greek system. At no stage did they say what the respective figures for average earnings are, nor did they say what the Greek bus driver's basic salary was before the additions. Ben Goldacre would be having fits.

There was no need for this distortion, Greeks themselves are as critical of the abuses mentioned. But you came away with the impression of Greeks living a life of idle luxury; lazy, over-paid and dishonest as well as being the main cause of the economic crisis. Needless to say it hasn't gone down well in Greece itself and so they have made a version of their own:

Hat Tip KTG

Greece is the word

2011-11-04T12:35:00.000Z

And it is on everyone's lips at the moment. I got the conclusion to my last post on the crisis spectacularly wrong, so here are three links to articles that are worth reading, though they may be no more reliable.

First up is a post on Naked Capitalism, not one of my regular sources, by investment analysts Marshall Auerback and Rob Parenteau. It takes on the conventional wisdom about Greece with gusto:

Historically, Greeks have been very good at constructing myths. The rest of the world? Not so great, if the current burst of commentary on the country is anything to go by. Reading the press, one gets the impression of a bunch of lazy Mediterranean scroungers, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in Europe while making the frugal Germans pick up the tab. This is a nonsensical propaganda.

And, after an assault on 'faith-based economics' and 'Fiscal Austerians', they make a clear point about economic union:

What is most remarkable to us is that the largest net exporter, Germany, does not appear to recognize that its insistence on fiscal austerity for all of its neighbors will cook its own golden egg-laying goose. If Germany wants to run a perpetual current account surplus in order to pursue their Asian-like mercantilist, export-led growth strategy, then some other nation, or group of nations must be prepared to run current account deficits ad infinitum. Which means issuing liabilities ad infinitum to the current account surplus nation in order for the current account deficit nations to spend more than they earn on tradeable goods and services. What this means is that default is inevitable unless there is a policy or price mechanism that encourages the current account surplus nation to reinvest the reserves they earn in foreign trade back into productive, income generating capital equipment in the trade deficit nations. This much is elementary international economics, but somehow it completely eludes Berlin.

The German Chancellor and her Finance Minister like to say that no real economic union is possible if one party to the union (Greece) works shorter hours and takes longer holidays than another (Germany). What she should say is that no real economic union is possible if the governing plutocrats of ALL nations ... consistently evade their fair share of the cost of that party’s own state expenditure, expecting the union either to pay the bill itself, or to force the bottom 90% to pay it. And there is no real economic union (or any hope of a future political union) if current account surpluses are not properly and sustainably recycled into the trade deficit nations. It would be as absurd as Texas perpetually insisting on running trade surpluses with the other 49 American states.

Then, from the other wing of the political spectrum, Anthony Barnett defends Papandreou and his attempt to hold a referendum (well someone has to I suppose) in Open Democracy. He was shocked by the vitriolic language used about the referendum plan and the tactics used to undermine it:

According to the BBC, after "MrPapandreou told reporters in Cannes his referendum would in effect be a vote onwhether Greece should remain in the euro... the European Commission said if Greece left the European single currency, itwould have to leave the European Union as well: "Thetreaty doesn't foresee an exit from the eurozone without exiting the EU,"spokeswoman Karolina Kottova told a briefing in Brussels.

Since when was it that you could be in the EU like Denmark or the UK and not in the Euro but that if you left the Euro you would have to exit the EU as well? This was heavy duty blackmail.

Finally, The Economist makes an astute point:

Mr Papandreou has created an almighty mess, but he is better cast as the messenger than the villain. He was not to blame for the summit’s shortcomings.

It too is critical of austerity,

The euro zone’s emphasis on austerity rather than structural reforms has aggravated Greece’s political woes. Instead it should favour medium-term fiscal consolidation. The creditor nations could boost domestic demand, to provide a bigger market for debtors’ exports. Most of all, they should dispel the threat of contagion by putting the ECB’s balance-sheet behind the debt of solvent governments, like Italy and Spain. Throughout this crisis, creditors—particularly Germany—have worried about being too soft on the euro zone’s weaklings, for fear that they would go slow on reform. Mr Papandreou has shown that they also need to worry about being too austere.

Auerback and Parenteau use far less measured tones:

Myth-making at the expense of the Greeks does not serve anybody’s interests, as there will be a cascade of defaults everywhere, and a Soviet style collapse in incomes, hardly an enticing prospect for the global economy. Not an attractive ending, but this is the kind of outcome which the troika’s self-serving, immoral and cruel policies could lead to before long. The Greeks, and the vast majority of Europe’s citizens, can surely do better than this. The existing policy path is literally bankrupt and bankrupting, and this game of chicken cannot go on for much longer.

"Self-serving, immoral and cruel"? "Bankrupt and bankrupting"? These words from a hedge fund manager and an investment analyst, the heart and soul of the market that must be appeased through blood sacrifice? If ever there was a sign of something seriously wrong, this is it.

What will happen is anyone's guess, but if you want a better illustration of Andrew Rawnsley's comment about the Occupy protests, "The protesters shun formal leaders and hierarchies – and I also don't see why they should be criticised for this at a time when conventional leaders and hierarchies have been so conspicuously useless", then I would like to see one.

Not anonymous

2011-11-03T09:30:00.000Z

I wasn't expecting the non-controversy of the Shakespeare authorship question to impinge on me, but I have been researching the life of an English individualist anarchist, Henry Seymour, with my friend Dan (who does nearly all the work). The final phase of Seymour's active life was spent as the editor of Baconiana, a publication of the Francis Bacon Society, predominantly devoted to proving that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. So we have to deal with it and discuss it in whatever we end up writing.

At least it is fashionable now that Hollywood has joined the fray with the new film Anonymous, rehashing another theory, first proposed by J. Thomas Looney (really), that it was the Earl of Oxford who wrote the plays, despite him dying before some were written. A minor point like that does little to dissuade determined advocates and I suppose that the one thing going for Seymour and his ilk is that Francis Bacon was actually alive at the time. Though that is about all, mind you.

The definitive debunking of the anti-Stratfordians, as they have become known, is James Shapiro's Contested Will, but for a good condensed read here is a splendid despairing review by Stephen Marche in the New York Times. It is full of great lines like, "The movie is certainly overflowing with those superactorly British actors who tend to make you feel that you should be enjoying their performances even when you’re not." And this one, "Let me assure everybody that Shakespeare professors are absolutely incapable of operating a conspiracy of any size whatsoever. They can’t agree on who gets which parking spot. That’s what they spend most of their time intriguing about." And Marche goes into battle for more than Shakespeare.

Counternarratives have an inevitable appeal: wouldn’t it be cool if there were yetis? If the United States Army were keeping extraterrestrial remains in the Nevada desert? If aliens with powers beyond our imagination built the pyramids? If Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare but actually this, like, lord who had to keep his identity secret?

You don’t have to be a truther or a birther to enjoy a conspiracy theory. We all, at one point or another, indulge fantasies that make the world seem more dangerous, more glamorous and, simultaneously, much more simple than it actually is. But then most of us grow up. Or put down the bong. Or read a book by somebody who is familiar with both proper historical methodology and the facts.

This attraction to the outlandish is relatively harmless when confined to the outer reaches of the Internet or self-reinforcing societies. The real damage occurs when it begins to enter the mainstream, as Marche makes abundantly clear.

We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” Of all the candidates with their various rejections of the scientific establishment, how many could name the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that students learn in high school? Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

... Along with a right-wing antielitism, an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness and relativism have also given lunatic ideas soil to grow in. Our politeness has actually led us to believe that everybody deserves a say. The problem is that not everybody does deserve a say. Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some people deserve to be marginalized and excluded.

What is remarkable is the resilience of these fantasies. For example, October hasn't been a good month for the legion of obsessive climate change sceptics. It saw the publication of the report of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project (BEST). There was no shock at all in the findings, they confirmed the accuracy of the temperature data showing the increasing warming of the planet, including the much abused "hockey stick", that climate scientists have been producing for decades. What was missing from the TV reports in this country is the most important point of all. The study had been set up by a scientist, though not a climatologist, who brought some expertise and respectability to global warming denial, Richard Muller. He was a climate change sceptic. And he has proved to be a good scientist. When faced with the evidence he changed his mind.

As for the die-hards, one of them made a big mistake. Anthony Watts came out with this widely reported statement about BEST when it started. "I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong". Well it did and did he? Don't be silly, of course not.* That isn't what happens. People hold fast to their ideas and try and rationalise away the reality. And it will be the same with anti-Stratfordians and all the other advocates of crazy, convoluted, if superficially attractive ideas. What may be consoling or even just fun is still wrong if it is actually, well, wrong. But once there is a congruence between conspiracy thinking, economic interests and political power, what passes as harmless idiocy can become very dangerous indeed. And that, simply, is why truth matters. And Shakespeare's authorship matters too, especially to people like me who believe that talent, even genius, is not the sole preserve of the upper classes.

*For a full account see here and there is a neat video here.
The Marche review is via here

Changing times

2011-11-02T12:52:00.001Z

Sarkozy and Merkel are not overjoyed, the markets are panicking, the Greek reaction is uncertain, but the decision of Papandreou to put the bailout plan to a referendum is the first real challenge to the assumptions of the European policy-making elite arising from somewhere other than the streets. Amongst the prognostications of doom, Larry Elliott stands out as a voice of optimism, though not about austerity.

There is not the remotest possibility of austerity working, because the impact of such savage cuts is to depress the economy, increasing the deficit rather than cutting it, adding to pressure for still further austerity.

It is certainly risky, but suddenly, from being the supplicant subject to the control of the Troika, Greece has remembered the old adage about debt. If you owe the bank a hundred thousand pounds you have a problem; if you owe the bank a hundred million pounds, the bank has a problem.

Larry Elliott again:

Greece is now a bigger problem for Europe than Europe is for Greece. The short-term outlook for Greece is going to be bad inside or outside the single currency, but the balance of risks is different for the other 16 members of monetary union. For them, the calculation is simple: would it be better to cut the Greeks some slack in order to prevent a disorderly default creating a domino effect across the eurozone? Or should they take a tough line, threatening to cut off all support in the event of a no vote? That is what is known as a no-brainer.

... All this is pretty obvious. What is perhaps less obvious is that Greece now has immense power as a result of its predicament. It has the rest of the world by the short and curlies.

Is this the moment that reality finally forces a change of policy?

UPDATE

In answer to my question, no.

The ostrich dies for nothing

2011-10-31T20:02:00.000Z

In 1806 Pfhul had been one of those responsible for the plan of campaign that culminated in Jena and Austerstadt; but in the outcome of that war he did not see the slightest evidence of the fallibility of his theory. On, the contrary, to his mind the disaster was entirely due to the deviations that were made from his theory ... Pfhul was one of those theoreticians who are so fond of their theory that they lose sight of the object of that theory - its application in practice. His passion for theory made him hate all practical considerations, and he would not hear of them. He even rejoiced in failure, for failures resulting from departures in practice from abstract theory only proved to him the accuracy of his theory.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.

And so to the Eurozone. Will Hutton writes:

... last Wednesday was a watershed moment – when the euro's future looked more certain and the Europeans began to reshape their continent, in particular the financial and political architecture in which their economies will function. They are leaving the 19th-century nation state behind and creating something new. It is a political construct that operates as a self-help club so that each member is stronger and has more freedom of action than it would outside, but for which membership is going to require tough and well-policed terms.

Tough and well-policed eh? I rather think that Hutton's enthusiasm gets the better of him, mistaking centralisation of power for federal integration. The view from much of Greece is of an economic dictat that will impose endless austerity. Maybe this is overstated and the debt write down certainly gives some breathing space. But what this deal does not seem to do is to reform the structural problems of monetary union and redistribute trade imbalances (as Yanis Varoufakis argues here). Instead it still suggests that the cause of the crisis lies in the moral failures of the peripheral states, requiring the constant supervision of the enlightened technocrats at the centre, whatever their previous record.

Even that would be acceptable if it were not for one thing. The theory - austerity and orthodoxy. Faced with the incontrovertible evidence of failure, they are insisting on implementing their plan with a renewed intensity, even as the social fabric of the indebted nations tears apart. A sustained recovery in Europe requires more than wishful thinking that this time the plan must surely work, especially if properly enforced. The elite economic consensus is running on to the rocks of reality. Will they change course?

Mystic Plump

2011-10-30T23:48:00.000Z

I feel that I can now go public with the amazing prediction given to me by my spirit guide who has been chatting to the late Eddie Waring. England will not win the Four Nations Rugby League competition. I hope I am wrong, but ...

The first round of matches was this weekend and I was at both. Australia comfortably beat New Zealand in a frighteningly tough match at Warrington on Friday. The game was not much of a spectacle. Australia's tactics were dour, grinding out their win without ever displaying the skills that they have in abundance. The most depressing aspect was the use of the latest fad down under, wrestling your opponent in the tackle and on the ground to slow the play-the-ball. This is, obviously, against both the laws and the spirit of the game and negates the speed and skill of backs, rewarding power and strength instead. Disappointingly, it was tolerated throughout by the English referee who let the game slow down to a brutal crawl. Even so, Australia looked awesomely strong and will only get better.

On Saturday, England played the far weaker Welsh side and won comfortably without convincing. The latest move to try and beat the Australians by picking Australians for the English side doesn't seem to have made much difference, even with addition of a scrum half who had previously played internationally for the New Zealand Maoris, but has now convinced the International Board that he is a West Yorkshire Maori. The big test will be Wembley next week, though I won't be going.

The public has supported the games well, both were sell-outs. A full Warrington usually rocks with noise, but it was eerily quiet as the fans were nearly all neutrals. Leigh had their reward for building a smart new stadium, which will also host Swinton's matches next season until our new ground is finally built. They haven't got the traffic management sorted out for big attendances though. I managed to get in to the ground seconds after kick off after taking ninety minutes to travel the ten miles from my home. The Rugby League is hoping for a respectable turn out at Wembley too for a double header and even if England lose they can still make the final by beating New Zealand at Hull. It would be great to get that far, but winning the trophy? If that happens I will eat my ouija board.

Good is better than good

2011-10-29T00:59:00.000+01:00

What would you expect if you went to see a play written by someone who died early of pneumonia, probably as a result of his habit of writing naked in a polystyrene lined garden shed? I hoped for something special and that's what I saw on Monday night. It was the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre's fine production of C P Taylor's Good.

The play is thirty years old now, but is still fresh, entertaining too, even if it is about such uncompromising material as the Holocaust. On the surface, the device of rewriting Faust, with a literature professor as the main protagonist, and then charting his slow entrapment by the Nazis from opportunism to complicity could be banal. But not when it is written as a tragicomedy. Nor when it is also an examination of friendship, neuroses and a unique psychosis where, instead of hearing voices, the professor is haunted by snatches of popular tunes.

Of course that is just a device for telling the story. The real theme is the human complexity of what we call inhumanity. It is about how the good become evil whilst still remaining good, at least in their own minds, sustaining their self-image through sophistries. The central theme of the play is that there is an objective reality, one that is tangible, observable and knowable. Experience is not a fiction or a dream, let alone a discourse. The phenomenon that it explores is that when faced with clear and unambiguous evil, good people set out to deceive themselves.

The process starts with incomprehension; 'It isn't as bad as all that, they don't really mean it, it is only for show'. It is painfully hard for any sane human being to immediately grasp the nature of evil. But then, as reality becomes ever more unavoidable, people hide from the truth and with each twist and turn of the path leading to horror, evasion requires greater sophistication, convoluted argument and dense clouds of verbiage. More chillingly, self-deception can lead to complicity, drawing people in ever more deeply through both self-interest and moral cowardice until that instant when the real cannot be dodged and the truth becomes utterly, unavoidably clear. This is the moment of damnation.

At the heart of the play is a lecture delivered by the professor that is Taylor's statement of purpose, except that it is a negative image, a reversal of all he is writing about. It is a soliloquy on the need to remove 'Jewish humanism' from literature, to break with the idea of the novel as an exploration of individual experience, to replace it with a glorification of the collective – to subjugate a person's life to the margins, to render a person meaningless. Taylor is the 'Jewish humanist' par excellence, his drama explores and explains through the lives of ordinary people caught up in a demonic regime.

And he is so apposite about the sophistries, the apologetics and the evasions – how we drown in the stuff! Elaborately written shit. Elegant exhortations to murder – historical necessity, race survival, the will of god, eliminate this or that group of persons and we will have the perfect world. There is no objective truth, everything is relative. It wasn't my fault, they didn't suffer, there was no alternative, I was only obeying orders. And, above all, - it was all their fault, they brought it on themselves. And some of the most noisome ordure emanates from the phalanxes of tame academics, writing in impenetrable prose posing as profundity, making barbarity seem reasonable. How many graves have been filled by this stuff?

Good is a memorable play, a fine piece of drama, but when I got home there was a final piece of irony. I glanced at the programme where there was an interview with the director ending with a discussion of the play's contemporary relevance. She is quoted as saying,

"Someone once said that GOOD is a play about moral compromise in a political fog, which I think is a reasonably good description of the series of actions following 9/11 that led us to go to war in Iraq. And the fostering of a largely irrational fear targeted at lazily identified ethnic groups in the wake of that event goes to the heart of what the play is about."

Actually, I think that is a lousy description of the play. It isn't about moral compromise, it is about the abandonment of morality, and the fog is not "political", it is one invented to conceal an only too clear political reality. But it is the rest that struck me. The sentiment is manifest; Muslims are the new Jews. Except they aren't.

The "War on Terror" is not an attack on all Muslims because they are brown-skinned or because of an abstract hatred derived from some seriously weird racist pathology. It isn't an attack on Muslims at all. Instead it is aimed at a particular theocratic political movement that sees mass murder as a religious duty, is violently misogynistic, calls for the execution of homosexuals, has embraced every genocidal anti-Semitic trope that the Nazis adopted (except, for obvious reasons, the myth of the Aryan race) and now denies the Holocaust, despite showing some apparent relish at the though of killing Jews.

I have no doubt she is a good person. I have seen concrete evidence that she is a damn fine theatrical director. It is just that she too has taken the Guardianista route of apologia, averting her eyes to the reality of evil – to the horrors of the decapitations, the stonings, the public hangings and of the suicide bombs – to the hatred and dehumanisation of Jews – just what Taylor was writing about. Yes indeed, the play is more than relevant to today.

Good is brilliant. Go and see it.

No shit Sherlock

2011-10-22T16:39:00.000+01:00

Robert Peston has come up with the least surprising opening paragraph of the year.

The current European Union and International Monetary Fund plan to revive the Greek economy and its finances has failed.

Well I never. Who would have thought it?

As the Financial Times writes that the write down on Greek debt may need to be as high as 60%, Peston quotes from a report by international lenders:

The situation in Greece has taken a turn for the worse, with the economy increasingly adjusting through recession and related wage-price channels, rather than through structural reform-driven increases in productivity.

Thankfully, Peston provides a translation:

Greece's austerity programme is succeeding in impoverishing Greek people with little in the way of discernible benefits to the Greek private sector and the capacity of Greece to start earning its way in the world.

Or as Larry Elliott puts it:

The insistence that the remedy for a depression caused by austerity is yet more austerity explains why people are taking to the streets. In Athens, if not in Brussels, Frankfurt or Berlin, they understand that this is the economics of the madhouse.

Pensioners

2011-10-21T18:55:00.000+01:00

It is one of my catchphrases. Since my early retirement I keep telling people in a quavering voice, "I'm a pensioner, y' know". Being a pensioner isn't quite the same as sinking back into senility, gazing at a blank TV screen. It can be rather active; somewhat more active and less lucrative if you are a Greek pensioner. There was more disturbing violence in Athens yesterday as the crisis drags on, with Eurozone leaders paralysed through disagreement, whilst the anger on the streets at yet more austerity measures continues and the increasing anxieties about the seriousness of the situation spread throughout governments and financial institutions alike. Martin Wolf makes the most pertinent point in the Financial Times:

What, after all, is the incentive for the Greeks to reform their government and economy if the benefits accrue to creditors indefinitely? Next to none.

Fools who lent money, without asking questions, deserve to share in the pain. They should not expect Greeks to rescue them from their folly, after the fact.

Meanwhile, Keep Talking Greece agonises over the violence and some irritating comments submitted on her site. Her conclusion:

What do you do if you have no income? You go and demonstrate, you raise your voice against the laws and parliament bills that delete you from the list of living human beings. Or you sit at home and count your cups in the board, deeply depressed. Or you fight with your wife and beat your children. Or if you live in a social state, you sit on your couch and enjoy social benefits. Until the time the doctors declare you’re officially dead. Physically. Then metaphorically, you’ve been dead for many years, because you never left your couch, raised your voice and fought for your rights.

In the meantime, as a result of my less arduous retirement activity of combining a rather a large amount of part-time teaching at the moment with some research, I stumbled across this wonderful post from Andrew Whitehead about the old political anthem, The Land Song. You should take the time to listen to the unique recording from 1910 embedded on both his site and in the piece he wrote for History Workshop Online.

Hark the sound is spreading from the East and from the West,
Why should we work hard and let the landlords take the best?
Make them pay their taxes on the land just like the rest,
The land was meant for the people.

There is something touching about these old political songs. Is it simply the poignancy of their naivety, the enormous faith they have in the marvels to be worked by their chosen reform? I am not sure, I think that there is more than that. Popular song, and particularly marching tunes, are the accompaniment to action. They are the demotic art form of people shaping their own lives and destinies. The optimism is palpable.

The Land Song became a Liberal Party anthem, but it's provenance is earlier and lies in 19th Century Radical Liberalism, specifically in the Single Tax campaign of Henry George, part of the radical milieu of the time that brought together socialists, liberals, individualists and anarchists amongst others. It was an enormously creative period and I never lose my fascination with the intellectual ferment of the era. (I have posted before on radical liberalism here and here.)

I suppose it is the refrain that reminds me most of Greece today:

Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?

Why indeed? And this points to the fact that the Euro crisis is not just a financial crisis, but one of democracy. One where the vote seems to be powerless against the institutional might of the Troika*. I despair that political leaders seem oblivious to this danger as the indecision persists. And so the demonstrations and strikes continue, not only as a reminder of deep discontents caused by the crisis, but also of an expression of something more, life itself. To be active not passive. To not stand by. To be human.

Here is Paul Berman writing about Occupy Wall Street:

Yes, yes, at Occupy Wall Street the madmen, the madwomen, the Groaners and the neo-Muggletonians will eventually have their day, and the movement will be ruined ... So the movement will stumble and fall, and a lot of young people will feel a little embittered and distraught.

Yet he continues:

That day will come. But not yet! Meanwhile there are realities to proclaim and feelings to vent. Occupy Wall Street and its sleeping-bag neo-hippies and its costumed street thespians and the touchingly hand-written placards and generally the display of eccentricity and impudence have focused America’s attention for a fleeting moment on economic wrongs and inequalities. How wonderful!

Wonderful indeed. And the thread that joins the Georgists to Greece is one of optimism, the assertion of popular pride and the profound hope that something better will emerge from the ruins of today.

The army now is marching on, the battle to begin,
The standard now is raised on high to face the battle din,
We’ll never cease from fighting ‘til victory we win,
And the land is free for the people.

*The European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB)
Hat tip to Dan for the Whitehead link.

Quack!

2011-10-21T14:44:00.004+01:00

Once of Steve Job's worst ideas.

Kindness

2011-10-12T19:04:00.000+01:00

When I worked in adult education in Manchester, over twenty years ago now, we had a number of students with mental health problems. Occasionally they were difficult people, but mostly they were delightful. One, who became a member of our pub quiz team, used to write letters to politicians and anyone in authority, all of which could be tactfully described as odd. I learnt to judge a politician by the replies that were sent. Most were of the standard 'thank you now go away' variety. Yet there were many more that were kind, supportive and simply nice. Only once did a single prominent politician take a letter seriously and sent a reply that was almost indistinguishable from the original.

I often think of that and of the time taken out of a busy life to simply be kind. It is a corrective to our overly cynical view of politicians. What they could never know is how much it meant to my student to be treated with respect and dignified with a proper reply. He was always proud and delighted. Whatever political differences I may have with them, I will always think back to those letters and recognise the decency that remains.

This was brought to mind by this lovely story, now all over the internet, about Christopher Hitchens, an eight-year-old aspiring freethinker and her request for recommended reading. It is more commonplace to be nice to a child, especially such a precociously intelligent one, than to an adult with mental health issues, but how much easier it would be for a celebrity to be either patronising or dismissive. Now, assailed by Christians because of her new found celebrity, she has found her own voice:

I've read the Bible and frankly it's ALL scary!!! You have to learn that sometimes kids need to boost their intellectual capability and look beyond God!

In all, I take heart that the cause of freethought is alive and well in Texas and I have learnt something else, that one of the authors I admire can be added to my roll call of politicians as someone prepared to take the time to be kind. It is a special type of decency.

Simply grand

2011-10-09T18:51:00.000+01:00

Manchester has an unjust (well, partially anyway) reputation for rain. Yesterday it lived up to its stereotype as a solid, persistent drizzle seeped down from dismal skies. The worst weather for running rugby and on the day of Rugby League's Grand Final at Old Trafford as well. Still, I was there with 69,000 others in a noisy crowd of families and drunks (and occasionally drunk families) for the annual occasion that decides the Super League champions.

It looked like it would be a close game, the top two teams had been knocked out at the semi-final stage, so third played fifth. And it was fifth placed Leeds who won it by playing exciting rugby in wet conditions, blitzing the more conservative St Helens in the last ten minutes of a high quality encounter.

I had mixed feelings about the result, a win for Leeds is never popular in these parts. Also, this was St Helens' fifth consecutive Grand Final defeat, a painful record for some fine players and for the fans an ordeal of dashed hopes. However, there were big pluses. The match was won by scintillating attack as well as awesome defence, something that used to be a Saints trademark. Most of all, it was won by a British coach. Australian coaches have raised the standard of the game over the years, but now there is a tendency not even to look at good British coaches and instead to farm out jobs to untried Australian assistant coaches on the grounds of their nationality alone. Occasionally the decision comes up trumps with the likes of Tony Smith or Ian Millward, but often it produces an identikit unimaginative approach of power and defence at the expense of the flair that was typical of the British game. So for the game to be decided by two moments of sublime skill and speed by a 5' 5" British scrum half, Rob Burrow, made the day for me. All the tries are here - enjoy.

What a mess

2011-10-04T11:47:00.000+01:00

Larry Elliot finds the only possible explanation for the Euro crisis in Lewis Carroll.

The climax of Alice in Wonderland is the courtroom scene in which the issue is "Who stole the tarts?" In the case of the eurozone, the easy answer is that it is Greece, which failed to play by the rules, borrowing too much and cooking the books so that the rest of the members of the single currency club were ignorant of the dire state of the Hellenic public finances. In fact, the real culprit is Germany, which has failed to appreciate that for monetary union to work, the big creditor nations have a responsibility to help the debtor nations by expanding domestic demand. The German political class appears to believe both that every country in the euro area can be as competitive as Germany and that Germany, in those circumstances, will continue to run a massive trade surplus. That's a logical absurdity the Reverend Dodgson would certainly have appreciated.

In the meantime, faced with the need for action, finance ministers have, once again, decided to dither.

What of the people caught up in this? Well, never underestimate their resourcefulness or their sense of justice. But for every positive action there are also the consequences of despair. Then again, where does the welfare of people fit into the world view of the technocrats trying to fix the economy of Wonderland?

UPDATE
More through the looking glass here.

(G'day)

Vampires

2011-09-30T16:23:00.000+01:00

Back from a fascinating trip to that well-known centre of anarchist agitation - Tunbridge Wells. Well, in the late Nineteenth Century it was the place where the first British anarchist newspaper was produced. These days perhaps it isn't quite as lively. I am tired, so my thoughts turn to garlic ... seriously they do. Watch this:

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

No alternatives?

2011-09-25T15:49:00.000+01:00

Let’s get this straight. The Greek economy — and with it the Euro — is disintegrating because Greek politicians are implementing austerity, not because they are failing to.

Ann Pettifor

Despite all this, we should remember that Greece represents a mere 2% of the European economy. It is just not worth this huge polarising crisis or incredible psychodrama. The Germans and the European Central Bank are treating this not as a straightforward economic issue of indebtedness and default but as a morality play in which the Greeks must be punished.

Susan George

Greece's great economic crisis has been a gradual war of attrition. Massive job losses, tax increases and galloping inflation have sapped the nation's energy and, increasingly, Greeks no longer believe what their politicians say. With cuts instead being blamed for slashing consumption, deepening recession and missing deficit-reducing goals, austerity is seen as a pointless exercise that far from exiting the country from crisis has exacerbated its plight.

Helena Smith

Austerity is not the only option, it is a choice to make the poor pay for a crisis they did not cause.

Owen Tudor

The problem has been the unwillingness to refinance first Greece, then Ireland, then Portugal. Their share in the euro area public debt to GDP ratio is ridiculously low: cancelling the debt would have been less painful.

Riccardo Bellofiore

There are choices, but they are not easy.

Pride

2011-09-23T00:21:00.000+01:00

This is a revealing report about football's attempt to try and deal with homophobia.

The makers of an educational DVD that aims to raise awareness of homophobia in football have expressed their frustration at not being able to secure the support of a gay Premier League player they asked to take part in the film ...

"We approached him thorough a third party and felt quite confident of getting him involved [in the DVD]. But he ultimately refused. There is a log jam in regards to this issue, a final taboo which, in the short term at least, does not appear close to breaking. We're certainly not going to out anyone against their will but, at the same time, getting gay footballers involved would make a big difference in tackling this issue."

The film makers couldn't even get a straight footballer to appear, whilst the Professional Footballer's Association indulged in the sort of sophistry that prevents change, blaming the crowds rather than taking any responsibility for giving a lead themselves.

... the PFA chief executive, Gordon Taylor, suggested that post-Fashanu, and despite its increasingly diverse nature, British football remains too hostile a territory for players to even associate themselves with homosexuality. "It would be unfair to ask an individual to back a campaign like this in case they got targeted by crowds," Taylor said. "It's a macho environment and we believe the time would be more appropriate when crowds are more civilised."

Now if football is macho, what about Rugby League? Footballers roll around on the floor for hours when they break a fingernail, whilst in last month's Rugby League Challenge Cup Final one player played most of the game with a badly broken finger where the bone was sticking out through the flesh (in a handling game!) and another came back on to finish the match after dislocating his shoulder. Tough - you bet.

So when Gareth Thomas, the openly gay Welsh Rugby player, switched to play League he got loads of stick in the dressing room - not for being gay, but for having played Union. And when Castleford fans gave him homophobic abuse, the club was instantly fined. It wasn't all plain sailing, Thomas was still prepared to be a pioneer and he talks about it superbly in this marvellous profile. But both he (and other players who have come out), together with the Rugby League were not prepared to hide and have taken a stand against prejudice.

And if that is admirable, then what about Sheffield Eagles? They had a float at the Manchester Gay Pride parade. They also backed the Rugby League's "Homophobia - Tackle it!" campaign by wearing a special shirt with the slogan on it in their home game against Widnes. Tonight they got their just reward, beating Leigh to win a place in the Championship Grand Final from fourth place.

Football's global reach gives it a unique possibility to act as an agent for change. It is able to reach into societies where rampant homophobia is supported by government legislation, yet is reluctant to take a stand on an issue that matters to millions of players and fans world-wide. Not for the first time, it has a lot to learn from Rugby League.

Milking blood

2011-09-20T09:30:00.000+01:00

What is going to happen to Greece? When austerity was embarked upon as a response to the horrendous deficit, critics didn't demur about the need for reform and the reduction of the Greek sovereign debt. However, they argued that austerity at a time of recession was not the way to do it and that the social and economic consequences of austerity programmes in a contracting economy could be dire. Without investment, measures to promote growth and with Greece lacking the ability to adjust their exchange rate, a policy of increasing competitiveness through 'internal devaluation' (reducing living standards) would shrink demand in a time of recession thereby, they argued, raising costs and lowering the income of the Greek state. The resulting sharp economic downturn would end up increasing the deficit. David Blanchflower has called this a "death spiral". Guess what has happened? Spot on. The response - more of the same? Yep, you got that right too.

Why should that be so? Chris Dillow sees moral and political pressures preventing a number of perfectly feasible solutions, leading to the horrible indecision of European policy makers. I would highlight the extraordinary strength of the ideological belief in the economic consensus in the face of its failure. Larry Elliott, who had long predicted the implosion of both the banking system and the Euro from a social democratic perspective, echoing Vince Cable's war-time rhetoric, remembers Beveridge and calls for a rejection of the dominant model of political economy, something that Cable eschews:

Our political masters should look at the current benighted state of Britain and conclude that it is time to start planning for a post-crisis world. They need to accept that the model of the past quarter-century was unfit for purpose. That's what Beveridge concluded in 1942. He would come to the same conclusion today.

Across Europe, the mainstream left has conspicuously failed to construct and articulate alternatives, offering little hope for change. They have failed the most important political challenge presented to them for a generation. In the meantime, ordinary Greeks are in despair and social pressures mount.

I think back to the 80s. Then the debt crisis belonged to the developing world. It didn't seem to matter so much to the wealthy nations in those days and rarely found its way to the front pages or produced embarassing political rhetoric at party conference time. The solutions that the IMF imposed were the same as the ECB are insisting on today. The writer, Susan George, published a powerful book on it, A Fate Worse than Debt, and made a TV documentary of the same name. I remember the end of the film. It featured an interview with Julius Nyerere.* He concluded,

You know, there is a limit to the cow. The cow only has so much milk. You can't go on milking the blood, you'll be in trouble. And at present, they're really milking blood from the South. These countries can't pay it - so they'll collapse.

Just how much milk is left in the Greek economy?

*Transcript here

Today

2011-09-19T12:45:00.001+01:00

It's that time of year again.

Decline and fall

2011-09-16T16:54:00.001+01:00

When I was younger I remember reading the journalism of John Pilger with some admiration. His style was exemplary and I was particularly taken with his work on Cambodia. This was the time when the UN refused to recognise the government installed by Vietnam after the invasion that ended the genocide. Instead, they gave the Cambodian seat to the representatives of the Khmer Rouge, then busy mounting a terrorist campaign from the border with Thailand with covert support from the West and China. Pilger's exposure of the horrors of Pol Pot's regime and his support for the intervention that brought it down made an impression. Even if he was too uncritical of the Vietnamese, he was an eloquent advocate of a successful humanitarian intervention that was being opposed by powers locked into a cynical foreign policy. Then something began to go wrong.

It really started with the civil war in Yugoslavia and his opposition to Western action against Serbia. Where now was his belief in humanitarian intervention? The only way he could maintain consistency was to distort the evidence in order to say that this intervention was somehow not the same as Vietnam's, not merely mistaken or inauthentic, but in some way duplicitous. Instead of exposing massacres and human rights abuses, as he had in Cambodia, he indulged in denying them in the teeth of overwhelming evidence. In doing so, he started down a dark path that leads away from evidence, truth and a commitment to expose the evils of the malign, to a place of mirrors where the crimes of those you are inclined to support are miraculously transformed to become all the fault of those that you oppose. It is the paranoia of partisanship. He was not alone on this journey and his descent continued through international crisis after crisis until we reach Libya. Even the UN decision to support the revolution against a gruesome dictatorship could not disturb this mindset and when I read a piece he published on the Stop the War Coalition's site, I knew he was lost. Even by the baleful standards of that organisation, it slumps into the gutter.

For Pilger, the Libyan revolution "is a coup by a gang of Muammar Gaddafi's ex cronies and spooks in collusion with Nato", who "told journalists what they needed to know: that Gaddafi was about to commit "genocide", of which there was no evidence" (apart from the thousands of unarmed demonstrators killed already, Gaddafi's direct threat, the aircraft bombing rebel areas indiscriminately and the tanks rolling into Beghazi, together with the impassioned pleas of those about to die - but then that's what happens when you abandon truth in favour of prejudice). But it gets worse. The revolution - oops, sorry - "revolution", was down to "Nicholas Sarkozy, a Napoleonic Islamophobe whose intelligence services almost certainly set up the coup against Gaddafi". Why? No prizes for guessing.

"Nato attacked Libya to counter and manipulate a general Arab uprising that took the rulers of the world by surprise. Unlike his neighbours, Gaddafi had come to power by denying western control of his country's natural wealth. For this, he was never forgiven, and the opportunity for his demise was seized in the usual manner, as history shows".

Of course, there are a few inconvenient facts glossed over here, like the fact that Gaddafi was gleefully handing control of his country's natural wealth to the West in return for rehabilitation and that the UN (it was a legal intervention led by NATO and mandated by a UN resolution) dithered for ages about whether to do what the increasingly desperate revolutionaries were asking for. Rather than manipulating the revolution, they saved it from certain defeat. For those of us with longer memories, this makes a refreshing change.

All this would be bad enough, yet there is something worse lurking underneath. Missing voices. The voices of ordinary Libyans. Certain that the reason why the UN provided air support for the Libyan revolution is counterfeit, the likes of Pilger have to dismiss the explosions of joy at the end of Gaddafi's regime. And, ironically, by doing so they are infantalising the people, seeing them as manipulable subjects of the imperial powers, incapable of expressing their own feelings and taking action for themselves. And it makes me wonder just who are the imperialists now.

It is a curious journey that Pilger has undertaken. But it is one that shows what happens when you abandon critical thought to allow a predetermined narrative to overcome any commitment to principle you might have once had and try to shoehorn a messy reality into a tidy explanation that suits your prejudices. Thinking back to my early admiration, I can only see it as a tragedy, not a farce.

Thirteen

2011-09-14T10:59:00.000+01:00

I left Greece on the thirteenth, arriving back in Manchester the temperature was 13C. I am certain that those numbers should be the other way round. A cheery weather man on the TV said it would go up to 18C tomorrow. That was the temperature at night when I started to feel a bit chilly. I am cold.

Taking a charter flight from Skiathos to Manchester is an easy way to travel. I caught a tourist boat one-way to the island, with the captain's wife being very jolly and welcoming after she had phoned me the night before to say that a party had booked and that it would be running. There weren't many of them. A small group of Eastern Europeans were swaying in time to the Lady Ga Ga CD playing over the boat's loudspeakers on a blazingly hot day as we swayed past some gorgeous island scenery before pulling into the main town's harbour. Then to the airport.

As we sat on the tarmac with the cabin doors open, hot air flooding in, a fly buzzed into the aircraft and settled on a single hair of a balding man's head. The doors closed and the fly spent the journey going up and down the plane. There seemed to be something utterly tragic about it. Its short life, instead of being spent in heat and a surfeit of rapidly decaying organic material, perfect for a satisfactory insect existence, was going to end on a dismally cold runway in Manchester. At least I knew what I was doing.

Thirteen looks like a distant aspiration today as the drizzle falls and the skies lower. The forecast for tonight is for it to drop to five. My liking for Greece is not solely based on the weather, though it doesn't half help. I just can't help wondering why, when the great human migration out of Africa took place, they didn't stop at the Mediterranean and think, 'this will do fine'.

The Greek view

2011-09-12T21:52:00.000+01:00

And tomorrow I head off for George Michael land. Oh bugger.

Via and HT to

Cat on windowsill

2011-09-11T20:49:00.000+01:00

Here is a picture of a Greek cat on a windowsill.

Doesn't look much like Hitler, or Stalin, nor even Pol Pot. Do you think it will catch on?

September

2011-09-11T13:26:00.000+01:00

It is a glorious September here. The skies are cloudless, the fruit trees are laden. Though the temperature is in the 30s there is an autumnal softness to the heat. Now the holidays are over, the crisis can resume.

There are threats that the next tranche of the bailout will not be paid (meaning that the government could run out of money in October), strikes and demonstrations are starting again, there have been riots in Thessaloniki - by both protesters and football hooligans - whilst the perversity of EU trade imbalances are shown by the strangest story of the week, Greece spent €1.5 million importing olive oil from Germany!

The Euro crisis has neither gone away, nor has it been solved. Policy makers' extraordinary faith in austerity is being challenged by those who are expected to be austere. And still the sums don't add up.

Looking out at the tranquillity of late summer in Pelion it is hard to see the economic storm brewing, but the dénouement is looming. The Cheshire Cat has posted a good analytical piece on the black comedy of orthodoxy. His conclusion?

The Euro is a badly built road on an impossible terrain. Flattening everything may succeed in forcing Euro economies to converge towards a desolate landscape of abandoned businesses. The strength of Europe has been its rich diversity; its weakness its inability to accept diversity.

Principles

2011-09-10T11:57:00.000+01:00

So now we know what 'bringing Gaddafi in from the cold' really meant. Not just nice profitable deals, the renouncing of weapons of mass destruction and the dubious enrichment of academic institutions, it also meant rendition, torture and chummy communications and collaboration with some of the worst criminals of the regime.

It is called 'realism' in the jargon, the pursuit of interests at the expense of principles. It used to be called appeasement and generally ended in things like the Second World War, but we don't use words like that any more for anything other than propaganda purposes. Nowadays it is seen in things like the attempt to talk with the Taliban as part of a strategy of withdrawal - I think 'reconciliation' is the preferred word here.

The opposition to this is principled internationalism, supporting people against oppression, even if there are short-term costs and considerable risks. In Libya, the popular revolution forced a choice between the two and, to the credit of the governments who enabled the UN resolution, the old policy of accommodation fell. The regime's defeat became inevitable, even if the future of Libya remains uncertain.

One of the things that this whole affair shows is just what is possible if you give a tyrant the gift of secure and supported tyranny. This raises questions about those who accuse Western interventions of bad intention, such as being 'all about oil'. Compare the benefits of cosying up to amenable dictators with the risks you run trying to overthrow them. Even if naked self-interest is part of the mix of motivations when making the choice to intervene, so too is a sense of principle, without which governments would have let Gaddafi crush the revolution with public hand-wringing and the continuation of private deal-making. And when that principle is absent, all we are left with is the acceptance of cash and the awarding of degrees, played out to the distant echo of the screams of the tortured.

A fine cause

2011-09-08T13:38:00.000+01:00

Any support for my friends and former colleagues will be appreciated. My old, and much loved, adult education department is threatened with closure. The campaign has just begun. A brand new Facebook page is here.

UPDATE

And one of our former students has just posted this to the page, which says it all:

Please, please, PLEASE like this page to help save the fantastic Centre for Lifelong Learning. It's where I got my degree. It's where I learned to love learning. It's where I learned to be my own person and stop following the crowd. It changed my life and I often feel it's where my real life actually began. The knowledge and skills I learned there have not only helped me, I use them (probably on a daily basis) to help others too - family, 'real-life' friends and Facebook friends. This place means so much to me, I will be heartbroken if others are denied the same opportunity I had.

Doom

2011-09-06T13:11:00.000+01:00

As us educators settle in the hollow, we scan the ridges of the hills all around us and we see the enemy on the horizon, gathering strength, adding new recruits by the minute, darkening the skies. Words. Jargon words. Thousands of them. All are waiting to swoop down and smother us with meaningless verbiage, each with their own bureaucratic tasks and performance indicators. We look up and know our fate.

In dank offices, chained bureaucrats craft and polish their latest phrases, garlanding them with ugliness, removing any connection to reality. They hand them to their superiors who trail obsequiously to the dark lords whose malicious eyes gleam with delight as they carefully select the ones that serve their fiendish purpose – the eradication of joy. A sinister smile plays on their lips and they croak with a scarcely concealed delight, "issue a policy statement".

At least that is how it seemed to me when I found out that an institution I know and like had renamed its reading week, employability week.

And right on cue comes this splendid defence of educational values from Alan Smith, not as an expression of the decadent pursuits of an elite of aesthetes, but for those outcasts at the bottom of our list of social priorities. Prisoners.

Why would they want a job at all? Most of us don't want the jobs we have; we wouldn't turn up for work were we not bribed to do so. People tend to live for the weekend, for holidays; most of us skive and take sickies when we can. Anything but work. It is simply not convincing to offer work to men in prison as if it were the answer to their ills. I have found work to be the source of most of my ills and when I look at the faces travelling to work in the morning I see that most of you feel the same way. On top of that, many prisoners expect that the jobs on offer to them on release will be unpleasant and badly paid.

Not many people are tempted by work and yet education is fading away in favour of employability. Employability has a robust, commonsense vigour about it that is lacking in philosophy, art, history, literature, but it is a delusion. I don't think that it does any harm to put schemes of training in place, in fact for people like the vacuum cleaner guy they provide opportunities for harmless fun, but don't expect them to do much good. Education always does some good; it opens the way for curiosity, delight and self-esteem. Most people are in prison because of neglect, damage and abuse; they do not need to know how to do a bit of vacuuming, they need to know what it is to be human.

Those of us who have worked in adult education know this only too well and see it as universally applicable. Mind you, it is wrong to sneer at vocational training, this can be brilliant for lots of people. So, for example, a good shop steward's training course can be as liberating as the history that I used to teach. Both are education in the broadest sense of the term. It is all down to the quality of the course and ultimately what the student wants to get out of it. The problem is a narrowing of education and its bureaucratisation, an attempt to turn it into a controllable process with pre-determined outcomes. My experience is that, like most human activities, education is unpredictable, open-ended and lifelong. It ails when it is not free.

Even so, in our beleaguered state, it is great to see people like Alan Smith handing us some powder so that we can prime our rusting muskets as we prepare to make our stand.

Triumph and tragedy

2011-09-05T14:12:00.001+01:00

Victory

Overshadowed

Simplicity

2011-09-05T11:04:00.000+01:00

We are in for a week or so of tenth anniversary pieces about 9/11 (was it really ten years ago?). There will be undoubtedly much sophistry and casuistry, whilst the conspiracy theorists will hang around, lurking in the shadows and still doing real harm. So it was nice to read Christopher Hitchens in praise of the obvious. He concludes:

But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and "free speech fundamentalism." The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of "ancient hatreds" but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

RIP

2011-09-04T20:54:00.000+01:00

Dana Wilson - a real Lion

Sporting news

2011-09-03T15:10:00.000+01:00

As Swinton lift the Championship Division One trophy despite losing to Rochdale in their final game, it is pleasing to read that there is a worse run sport than Rugby League. The Greek football season has kicked off. This is despite the fact that only thirteen of the sides that make up the sixteen-team top division are known.

The story goes like this. Volos, the nearest team to here, who sparked much celebration in the spring by winning Europa League qualification in their first season in the top division, lost their place and were relegated to the fourth division, together with Kavala, due to the failure to break ties with owners implicated in match fixing. This caused a little local rioting and a court case. The first led to some tear gas being let loose by the police, the second to an injunction preventing their replacement. So the two teams promoted to take their places, Doxa and Levadiakos, have not had their licences approved. In the meantime, Iraklis avoided relegation last season but were then relegated because they submitted a forged document. Now they have won their appeal and so will stay up. That means that Asteras Tripolis, who were relegated, but then allowed to stay up because Iraklis were relegated in their place, have now been told that they have been relegated after all. Needless to say, Asteras Tripolis are also appealing, so nothing has been resolved. With all this in the air, the season actually started. Interesting.

Nearly gone ...

2011-09-01T14:21:00.000+01:00

Psychopathic dictators, distanced from reality, totally convinced of their own historical necessity and by the adoration that is bestowed on them, even if such obeisance is practised at the end of a gun, suddenly discovering the inconvenient fact that they are hated can only explain such loathing in terms of the failings and disloyalty of their ungrateful people. So, by unerring logic, they assume that in such a case the people must die. And, even if their regime has to go down to defeat, they want to take the people with them. So, despite the clear outcome of the revolution in Libya, the rhetoric about victory or death (at this stage it just means death) comes spewing out of the fleeing family, condemning more people to suffer unnecessarily. One can only hope for a swift end.

As the dust begins to settle where the revolution is secure and life resumes, with all the uncertainties of the post-revolutionary period, the stories spill out. Here is the reason one rebel took up arms:

Before February, he was indifferent to the Gaddafi clan, happy enough to bank a decent salary as an oil engineer. He had studied in London for a master's in business administration. He had never even seen a machine gun, still less handled one.

All that changed on 21 February, when Gaddafi loyalists began cutting down demonstrators in the streets of Tripoli with anti-aircraft weapons.

Yep, a bit of a game changer that one. It would be hard to remain indifferent at that point. Scared, yes. Indifferent, no. And that is the moment when a regime enters the beginning of its end, when people take action instead of succumbing to fear.

Without the UN's air support the struggle would have been crushed for a generation. The regime faced a choice when a wave of popular demonstrations threatened its collapse and rumours spread that Gaddafi was on his way to a Venezuelan retirement home. Instead of admitting that it had lost all support and legitimacy, it decided to kill the people. Libyans begged for help as they took up arms and, at the very last minute, it came. As a result, James Kirchick can write in a thoughtful piece in Foreign Policy:

The other remarkable thing about Libya is that it is the only Arab country where America is not just liked, but loved. (Speaking with Libyans, I never feel I have to lie and say I am Canadian, as I sometimes do in other Arab countries to avoid potentially dodgy situations.) That its people love America precisely because their country has been bombed by it is all the more noteworthy.

Yet still the commentators witter on. In the latest off the production line, Andy Beckett picks up pertinently on the tendency of the British press to behave like a small child on a long car journey; 'Are we there yet'? 'No dear and we are not stuck in a quagmire or a stalemate, it is just a long way.' However, he then follows an old trope about the absence of military experience of political leaders, making it too easy for them to go to war too quickly (if they had left it any later in Libya there would have been no revolution left to support!). Then the cynical side swipes appear, "Bellicose British journalists who opine about such conflicts from a safe distance"; "A defeated British bogeyman such as Gaddafi"; all accompanied by a lament for the decline of the influence of the peace movement.

What this complaint about war in general does is to ignore the specific causes and consequences both of action and inaction. And one is back to the old point that systematic, brutal violence by a state against its citizens left unmolested is not peace. Quick and risky action, which is expensive and can be complained about at leisure, is a gift of life and of a future to oppressed peoples seeking to throw off their oppressors. The majority of the Libyan people will be grateful that such inhibitions and reservations did not prevent United Nations support coming their way in the nick of time.

It isn't necessary to share the nationalist triumphalism of the Sun, or to see war as a glorified football match, to understand that military action can be overwhelmingly moral, despite its undoubted horrors. It is as important a sense as our moral revulsion against the barbarities of an unjust war, such as the one that Gaddafi chose to unleash on his people. Unless you are an absolute pacifist, you cannot escape judgement about the relative merits of specific wars, rather than reject war as an option in all circumstances. And in making a judgement, especially now conflicts have been stripped of their Cold War contexts, the support for popular liberation against the dictatorial instinct for mass murder might just be a good guide.

The Free Voice of Labour

2011-08-26T10:01:00.011+01:00

Time for something completely different. This delightful documentary, from 1980, about the American Yiddish Anarchist newspaper, Fraye Arbeter Shtime, is a brilliant piece of social and labour history. It lasts around an hour, but watching it will be time well spent.

"You have to be idealistic or you might as well take a gun and blow your brains out"

Thanks to the commenter here

Cognitive dissonance

2011-08-25T17:51:00.000+01:00

Simon Jenkins: Even though it worked and the result is welcome, it was still wrong.

Seumas Milne: Even though it was a success, it is a failure and a betrayal.

Robert Fisk: Doomed, I tell 'e doomed!

And still not gone yet ...

2011-08-23T16:07:00.000+01:00

As the events in Tripoli continue to unfold, this short article from Shadi Hamid provides a coherent argument about the importance of interventions and the lessons to be drawn from Libya.

It's odd, but not necessarily surprising, that critics of the Libya intervention were calling it any number of things: mistake, quagmire, dangerous, an Iraq repeat, and so on. It is odd because the ultimate outcome -- the rebels winning and Qaddafi falling -- never seemed much in doubt. It was a matter of when, not if. For both better and worse, Libya confirms the reality that the role of external actors (in this case, the United States and Europe) can still be decisive in the Arab struggle for freedom.

And he remakes a point that should be reiterated constantly:

When you have the ability to act, doing nothing is no longer a neutral position.

Going, going ...

2011-08-22T08:49:00.004+01:00

They are still wittering away whilst Gadaffi falls:

You hear no such appeals to humanity while Nato, in the name of the rebels (whoever they are), prepares to lay siege to Tripoli, a city of nearly 2 million people.

Libyan rebels are now advancing on the capital city of Tripoli with the aid of Nato strikes; this is sure to result in a real bloodbath, as opposed to the one that was conjured in Benghazi this past winter.

In the meantime, in Tripoli, Simon Jenkins' readers take to the streets.

And the Alex Crawford video mentioned in the previous post has now been uploaded to YouTube.

UPDATE
And still the miserable tendency of the liberal press grumble on - this from the Independent. Ignore them, read this instead: The Top Ten Myths About the Libya War. I particularly liked this:

The Libyan Revolution was a civil war. It was not, if by that is meant a fight between two big groups within the body politic. There was nothing like the vicious sectarian civilian-on-civilian fighting in Baghdad in 2006. The revolution began as peaceful public protests, and only when the urban crowds were subjected to artillery, tank, mortar and cluster bomb barrages did the revolutionaries begin arming themselves. When fighting began, it was volunteer combatants representing their city quarters taking on trained regular army troops and mercenaries. That is a revolution, not a civil war.

G'day hat tip.

"Freedom!"

2011-08-21T22:25:00.001+01:00

An astonishing video report

Alex Crawford, accompanying the rebels, said the opposition fighters had been greeted with scenes of jubilation as they made their way through the outskirts of the capital.

As they entered the city, their cars gridlocked the roads, she said, and hundreds of people came out onto the streets to greet them.

"These scenes are amazing - there are hundreds of people who have come out onto the streets to greet this convoy of rebel soldiers.

"You can hear them singing and dancing, it is an amazing scene.

"We are now just a very short distance from the centre, with more and more people are coming onto the streets."

Strange and stranger

2011-08-21T14:07:00.000+01:00

Anyone who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome knows that it is no joke and is massively physically debilitating. In the early days of its identification people also had to fight off the stigma of it being seen as a psychological, rather than physiological, disease. This is rarely the case today, but though I knew of the early debate, I knew nothing about the extraordinary actions of CFS militants until I read this article today.

One researcher told the Observer that a woman protester who had turned up at one of his lectures was found to be carrying a knife. Another scientist had to abandon a collaboration with American doctors after being told she risked being shot, while another was punched in the street. All said they had received death threats and vitriolic abuse.

The reason? They were investigating psychological factors as part of the syndrome. Remarkably, none of the researchers believe that the causes are purely psychological, they think that there are external factors such as a virus infection as well. Yet this has not stopped the intimidation.

Many of the extremists' claims are bizarre, said Professor Simon Wessely, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. "They say I am in league with pharmaceutical companies in order to suppress data that shows a link between viruses and the syndrome. But why on earth would drug companies do that? If they could link the condition to a virus they would be well on the way to developing lucrative treatments and vaccines. It is crazy."

So here we have conspiracy theory, deep mistrust of properly conducted scientific research, and ... well, who knows what else? It is the same sort of obsessive behaviour and half-digested pseudo-knowledge that fuels the 9/11 Truthers, the climate change deniers and many others who ignore established fact in favour of the fictions that feed their imaginations. Research into CFS though? That's a new one on me.

Past and present

2011-08-21T10:33:00.015+01:00

It was one of those remarks that pull you up short when you are teaching a class. A few years ago, I was coming up with the usual liberal stuff about deprivation, anti-social behaviour and the criminal justice system, when a student sat back in her chair with a look of disgust on her face and said, "It’s all right for you, you don’t have to live next door to the little bastards".

I think that this gives a clue as to why some of the most potent condemnation of the riots has come from people sharing the same background as the rioters, something that Christopher Hitchens noted as part of his reflections on the perennial violence of British society.

Rioting in Britain is not a novelty, the product of some new social disease. Riots have been a feature of British society for centuries. Frequently, they were the way people defended and extended their rights. Industrial relations were often carried out through riot. Workers were known to demolish employers' houses until their demands were met and machine breaking was not just a feature of the Luddite rebellion. Food riots were endemic as were rural riots against enclosure, turnpikes and, during the Swing riots of the 1830s, the introduction of the threshing machine. Workhouses were burnt down in protests against the Poor Laws. And politics was always a riotous affair. Whilst my leftist soul looks on these with sympathy, we have to remember that 'King and Country' mobs were as prominent as radical ones, as were anti-Irish disturbances and, going way back to 1190, a wave of anti-Semitic pogroms culminated in the appalling massacre of the Jewish population of York in Clifford's Tower. Our attitude towards riots should reflect precisely who was doing the rioting and for what reason.

It is difficult to pin down the latest wave of disturbances. The proximate cause of the rioting in Tottenham was very different to what took place in, for instance, Salford. The riots were limited to a few cities and towns, appear to have been short-lived and were carried out by relatively small numbers of people. Motivations for participation were different, ranging from excitement and opportunism to anger and alienation. But there was also something taking place that was unpleasant and disturbing. The result was that, rather than uniting communities in protest, they divided them, with large numbers of working class people expressing disgust.

Part of the hostility was down to a continuing generational conflict, part a moral revulsion at the destruction and, let's not forget them, the murders that accompanied the rioting and looting, although there is more to it than that. And this is where the views of my student comes in.

For anyone living on what are euphemistically known as 'problem estates', this wasn't a riot; it was a breakout group. Sporadic arson (accompanied by attacks on fire-fighters), joy riding, burglary and the sort of systematic bullying and intimidation that can even drive people to suicide are some of the everyday difficulties people face that can make their lives misery. It is a part of the backdrop to poverty. The same people who attacked property in town centres were, or were assumed to be, often the same ones who make the struggles of poverty so much worse. Hard experience had already bred antipathy.

In addition, there is evidence of some heavy violence in places with a history of gun crime and drug wars. And that is not all, if there has been an overt political agenda, in some places it seems to have been set by the far right. Riots are not arbitrary affairs; their targets are rarely random. Asian businesses have been consistently picked out wherever rioting took place, gay communities have been under attack too. (The gay village in Manchester was safe though. It was well aware of the threat and set up its own defence group to see off any potential attackers. Seriously, you would not want to mess with these guys.) In Salford, the police have fingered the far right as one of the main instigators of the attacks on the Precinct.

This rings true to me. I worked with many students emerging from troubled backgrounds who were directed towards adult education after problems with the police, drink and drugs, or gang related activity. This was a time when the social services and probation officers were under less pressure and more sympathetic to offenders. I met some fascinating and very able people, but the stories they told about what they were leaving behind made my flesh creep. And politically they had invariably come from the far right.

So, the working class sense of disgust is hardly surprising and I cannot shake off a sense of unease about these events. They strike me as troubling actions by troubled people. However, I have no sympathy at all with the indignation of the conservative right.

What a complete load of steaming ordure is flowing out of the orifice of the conservative press, even more from the office of the Prime Minister. All the old tropes, 'break down of community', 'decline of moral order', 'decay of civilisation', 'single parents' - no, 'single mothers', never forget that this argument is heavily gendered, decrying feckless women lacking the firm smack of the masculine discipline that features heavily in their fantasies. There have been endless streams of the stuff, lubricated by the laxative of moral indignation, all accompanied by the foetid stench of class hatred.

And this isn't new either; every generation has indulged in the same dreary guff. The Economist's Bagehot blog got there before me in using Geoffrey Pearson's marvellous book, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, a mainstay of my reading lists for years (and now shamefully out of print). It is a great post and worth reading in full.

There is nothing as unedifying as the spectacle of an establishment in full moral panic. In a chapter in his book, Customs in Common, E P Thompson wrote of the macabre theatre that was the Eighteenth Century riot, a masque of performance and ritual. Thompson was not just writing about the actions of rioters, he included in this notion of theatre the grim and bloody reaction of the courts. Little seems to have changed.

Today the punishments may not be as draconian, but the use of the law as an exercise in humiliation is still with us. And now the dust is settling, the first detailed reviews of convictions and the courts are showing an unsurprising pattern. Much harsher sentences are being handed out (with, thankfully, some successful appeals and acquittals beginning to follow) and, of course, they show that the majority of rioters were poor, unemployed and from 'deprived' areas.

And so we are left with the unmistakable correlation of deprivation and disaffection - a disaffection that can produce violence, much of it self-destructive, just as it harbours outrage at that violence within the same community. This is even more so in a society that parades its inequalities, rewards its failures with grotesquely huge pay-offs and is suffused with the sort of suburban self-satisfaction that is nurtured by well-rewarded mediocrity. If you strip out opportunity and hope, then people will create their own alternatives with the materials that they have to hand and the results, as this astonishing piece about Argentinian football shows, are not always pretty.

Champions!

2011-08-14T17:05:00.000+01:00

After a nervous afternoon following texts from a friend at the ground and Internet news feeds, it is celebration time. Swinton beat South Wales 40-28, whilst Keighley lost at Workington, to become Championship Division One champions with two games left to play and win automatic promotion. A grand old club is on the way back.

Last night

2011-08-14T14:11:00.001+01:00

Sunset

Dusk

And the August full moon

Mooning

2011-08-13T20:31:00.010+01:00

It is the night of the August full moon. And we are promised a meteor shower too.
The radio will be playing songs about the moon all day, people will stay up late and maybe there will be music and dancing.

It is a sentimental time, so perhaps we should take a walk ...

Shush

2011-08-12T22:01:00.001+01:00

Thanks Daniel

Hooligans

2011-08-11T08:00:00.000+01:00

And in the meantime, groups of feral rating agencies are roaming the world economic system, burning credit ratings, wantonly removing 'A's, smashing share prices and throwing rocks at anyone trying to come to the rescue. France is the latest country to be engulfed.

Random thoughts

2011-08-10T22:06:00.000+01:00

It is holiday time in Greece so all is quiet on the rioting front, not so in my other home of Salford. I found what was happening there disturbing. National Greek rioting followed the shooting of a teenager in December 2008. It was aimed at the police. Riots and demonstrations have taken place against the austerity packages. They were aimed at the government. But Manchester and Salford? What was going on?

Obviously, riots like these are not the sign of a healthy society or of an economy that is functioning smoothly, but I am sorry I cannot see this as an uprising, a proto-revolutionary movement or even an outburst of inchoate rage at the Tories. What was on view in my other home was something that is very familiar to all who live there, seriously screwed up young people. Only this time there were more of them in one place. Not that many, a few hundred perhaps, but enough to be effective. Unlike in Greece, where much of the nation was broadly in sympathy with the protests, if not their methods, the people of Manchester and Salford seem horrified.

Here is Martin Bright:

I remember talking to Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company in the aftermath of the killing of Damilola Taylor and she said she was concerned that some children in her project had become “suicidally uncaring”. She meant that there was a group of young people who were so damaged that they had no empathy for others. Many of them were effectively homeless. Most disturbingly, they had developed their own parallel morality. This was over a decade ago.

You can read more from her here. From my former work in adult and community education I can recognise what she describes and think back to the really tough minded activists who work hard to overcome nihilistic, destructive alienation and the wonderful projects that can do so much to rescue people. I would also argue that the best work is not done by the state, its role is ambiguous as it is an enforcer as much as an enabler, it is done by the voluntary sector, doing difficult work with difficult people. It is just that the state is the only viable source of the necessary funding and this is being stripped away, leaving only the parallel world. This is no liberation.

I don't see a just society emerging from the ashes of a fully insured Miss Selfridge, but there was a thought that I couldn't let go as I watched the pictures and read the feeds of what seemed more like a systematic exercise in looting than a riot. Immature and damaged children, and yes they are children, were the ones who will appear on the CTV footage and later on in the courts. What of the fences who take the goods off them, the ones who make the money, the ones who hawk the stolen goods around? They aren't on the streets or the cameras. This was no heroic uprising, it was exploitation of the already exploited, of the vulnerable and immature. It was child abuse.

Simple pastimes

2011-08-04T11:30:00.000+01:00

They always used to say that every man should have a hobby. You know the sort of thing; collecting model trains, building replica ships out of matchsticks, splitting atoms.

Choices

2011-08-03T14:38:00.003+01:00

When you need a little light relief, turn to Simon Jenkins. In the midst of the most awful guff he always comes out with a gem. In this terrible piece on Libya he pulls out a general principle, an 'iron law' no less:

The iron law of plunging into someone else's civil war is choose the side most likely to win and make sure it does.

So that's what you should do. Franco? A dead cert. Lets get the RAF up there with those Luftwaffe chaps and bomb the crap out of Guernica. Pol Pot? A clear winner - if you need any help spotting those intellectuals to be exterminated, we're your boys.

I don't think so somehow. In any international conflict with global implications (aka "someone else's civil war") the basis of choice is not who is the likely winner, that would usually be the best armed and equipped, it is who you would want to see win. It is a moral and political choice. And in many cases, the side who we would like to see victorious is often the least well equipped. It may well consist of popular, democratic forces lined up against the tanks and troops of a fascistic dictatorship. And that is why intervention is necessary at times, to prevent them being crushed with all the consequences that may result.

The amoral, 'realist' perspective that Jenkins comes out with is actually unreal, detached from a real world where we face the constant necessity of making ethical judgements, taking risks, fulfilling our responsibilities and standing up for our principles.

Hard times

2011-08-03T12:13:00.001+01:00

Everyday difficulties in Greece, described here by Angelique Chrisafis.

And it ain't over yet.

Kill or cure

2011-08-02T17:44:00.000+01:00

The OECD are confident. But, as Aditya Chakrabortty reports from Greece, others are not so sure:

One senior investment banker is more blunt: "People are scared that the government doesn't know what the fuck it's doing."

Reading this, together with his other report on a complex loan deal of dubious legality, you have to say that they might have a point.

Greece certainly needs reform, though the real point is which reforms it needs and which it could do without, and it also needs investment. At the moment we are seeing the start of a reform process, linked to austerity packages drawn from the manuals of orthodoxy, being cheered on by international institutions and bright-eyed American trained technocrats. In the meantime sceptical Greek people are conducting a quiet run on the banks and withdrawing cash. We will see who is right.

Phew, what a scorcher

2011-08-02T17:17:00.000+01:00

I saw this report yesterday about the excessive heat in Britain (28C - a pleasantly warm late evening here).

Parts of Britain have enjoyed sunshine and scorching heat as temperatures were higher than in Sydney and Rio.

It forgot to mention that in Sydney and Rio it is winter.

Success story

2011-07-30T17:08:00.002+01:00

"Thank god for crime; it saved me from a life of boxing". One of my favourite quips though I can't remember the source. It turns round a standard story of a life rescued by sporting excellence. That redemption is precisely what happened to Cec Thompson, the Rugby League international who died recently.

Thompson overcame a difficult upbringing, illiteracy and racism to become only the second black player to play international Rugby League for Great Britain in 1951. (In comparison, it took until 1978 for Viv Anderson to become the first black player to represent England at football, but then Rugby League has a better record in dealing with discrimination than some sports, perhaps because it too was the target of bigotry from the Rugby Union for around a century.)

This would have been a stirring enough story if it had not been for a second redemption, this time it was because of adult education. This from Andy Wilson's obituary:

He had launched a window-cleaning business in and around Workington, and also felt sufficiently confident with reading and writing – developed on coach trips to away games with Hunslet, when he would learn new words from the Reader's Digest – to make a tentative move into journalism. He joined music and operatic societies, and an art club, passed his English O-level after taking night classes in Workington while coaching Barrow, then enrolled at Huddersfield Technical College in 1962.He was then encouraged to apply for a place at Leeds University, and started a course in economics in 1965, at the age of 39.

He ended up as a teacher.

This is another reminder of the power of adult education and its continuing need, even though successive governments seem keen to abandon it. And for those who think that adult learning should be purely vocational, please note his starting point; music, opera and art. I haven't read it, but I see that his autobiography, Born on the Wrong Side, is still in print. I might just order it now.

Sporting drama

2011-07-26T21:08:00.001+01:00

On a dramatic day, the issue of promotion and relegation between Rugby League’s top division, Super League, and its second tier, the Championship, has been decided with only around five games and the play-offs left to go.

The team currently lying third in the Championship will be promoted, though we knew that months ago. The teams lying first and second won’t be eligible for promotion for another three years.

The big shock is that the team lying bottom of Super League will be relegated. The favourites to go down were the team immediately above them. This is because the bottom side were promoted originally for three years so that Super League could have a team in South Wales. They play in North Wales. They did play a season in South Wales, but finished bottom, got small crowds, ran into financial difficulties and had six of their Australian players (yes they were supposed to be old South Wales) deported as they were here illegally. So, the next season they moved to North Wales, did well, got small crowds, ran into financial difficulties and went into administration. This year they have been at the bottom, have small crowds, but the Rugby League wants a team in Wales so they were favourites to stay up.

However, yesterday, they decided to relegate themselves, withdrew their application and declared that they couldn’t run a financially viable Super League club. They didn’t tell the players. Or the fans. Never mind, it means the team above them stay up.

This also means that the club who are currently seventh in the Championship are furious. They think that the next to bottom team in Super League should have been relegated anyway and they should be promoted in their place as they have a nicer ground.

No matches were played today.

I have an idea. Why don’t they relegate the team that finishes bottom of Super League and promote the side that wins the Championship? A bit complicated I know, but it might just catch on.

Brevity on Breivik

2011-07-26T18:18:00.000+01:00

I suppose that it was inevitable if that if a mass murderer posts an interminable manifesto on the internet before carrying out his crime it will be mined, equally interminably, by bloggers and columnists to prove that what they have been saying all along was right and that if we had heeded them all would have been fine. They should pause and consider that a melange of commonplace and contradictory ideas prove very little and that those who are attracted to them usually, interminably once more, fill the comments boxes on web sites with tedious scrawl, not Norwegian islands with dead children.

Nobody puts it better than George,

Breivik is one of those semi-intelligent people who are actually more stupid than any genuinely stupid person. Vastly overestimating semi-intelligence is not only stupid but worse. It is blind, arrogant, and always malevolent in effect. There is deadly danger in being obsessed by one's own importance or the importance of one's ideas: the two are almost the same thing.

Pathological ideas are dangerous, infecting the minds of pathological people they can be murderous, embedded in pathological regimes they can be genocidal. We are kept as safe as we can be by the humility of democracy with its agonised uncertainties. Of that, and that alone, we should be overwhelmingly certain.

The first tomato

2011-07-24T09:50:00.000+01:00

It may not be big, but it was pretty tasty and was the first one from the first tomato plants in our first vegetable patch. Cue the song:

A matter of life and death

2011-07-23T11:56:00.000+01:00

It has been a beautiful summer's night. The front was busy with people enjoying simple pleasures and with others working flat out to earn their livings. Yet there has been a cloud of death shrouding today. The horror of events in Norway show that fascism, in whatever manifestation it takes, is still with us, infecting diseased minds. A singer died too, a talent lost, destroyed by the insanity of a celebrity lifestyle offered to the wealthy, often mistaken for hedonism. In the real life outside the bubble, the pain of the parents must be incomprehensible. And how many other talented and delightful people died of their addiction in the gutter, unheralded and unmourned? How many migrants suffocated or drowned in the desperate search for a better life? How many have the Syrian police incarcerated and tortured today? Death is all around us.

So let's celebrate life. That is all around us too. It is in the solidarity being offered the people of Norway, a deeply moral emotional spasm. It is in the support for the oppressed in some, if not all the parts of the world that we would like to see it.

Here in Greece, the nation is breathing a nervous, unconfident sigh of relief after a deal had been reached on its debt, recognising the problem as pan-European and not the result of the sins of the improvident. I would have been tempted by scepticism if it had not been for this deeply sane post by Aristos Doxiadis. At its heart is a recognition of the primacy and value of the practice of politics:

“Aha”, I hear the other side saying, “but these are extraordinary times, that call for extraordinary leadership. By that standard, they have done a miserable job.” Well, it depends how much faith one has in benevolent dictators: is the power to commit great resources without negotiations a good thing? How confident can we be that a grand strategic plan decided in early 2010 would have worked well? For every proposal that was mooted, there were counter-arguments of substance, not just of process. Take for example, the idea of a big Marshall plan for Greece: what kind of governance would ensure that the funds would be well used to support sustainable growth, rather than being squandered to rent-seekers? Ditto for a massive recapitalization of all European banks – how would the terms of that distribute costs fairly and ensure competent management from then on (not, presumably by getting corrupt or clueless civil servants to be CEOs).

Further, extraordinary leadership is compatible with democracy only if the majority of the people are affected by extraordinary circumstances; and will therefore consent to extraordinary solutions. This is not the case in the Eurozone.

Indeed. And if there are failures, then, as he puts it, in a functioning polity "there can always be a new round". Here he resists the siren song of demagogy in favour of the political process, something that seems to be forgotten in the USA. The EU have recognised the need to rescue the insolvent, unlike in America where a profoundly unserious opposition seems to be on the point of propelling the solvent into default. And for what? The very limited liberalism and dark skin of its properly elected president?

Europe has resisted such lunacy and embraced politics, however uncertain its achievements, just as today we mourn the slaughtered victims of anti-politics.

And this raises the problem of our political language, the way we discuss life and death issues, many far more serious than the Eurozone. Take the Middle East for example. Here is the most marvellous expression of optimism by Gershon Baskin in the Jerusalem Post.

So one thing that gives me hope is the deep belief that this conflict is resolvable; every single issue, to the minutest detail, has solutions based on research, dialogue, precedents and “home-grown” Israeli-Palestinian ingenuity.

What is lacking, and is absolutely essential, is any semblance of trust.

Israelis and Palestinians have definitely earned their mutual distrust.

The most crucial aspects of each of the five Israeli-Palestinian agreements have been breached systemically by both sides. There is no clear “good guy” and “bad guy” when it comes to implementation of signed agreements. And no artificial “confidence- building measures” can replace such earned lack of trust.

Once again, the conclusions of the optimist can only be an expression of a faith in life.

I am not so naïve as to believe I have no mortal enemies, but I don’t allow myself to be constrained by fear, or allow fear to sour into blind hatred.

I believe in the power of people to be good. I believe in the power of compassion, which is much stronger than hatred. And I will always be true to myself and to the belief that making peace is first and foremost a decision – one that we have apparently yet to make.

After the experience of seething, deranged hatred in Norway, the glorification of murder, the pitiless slaughter of ordinary people, here we have again a celebration of life against death.

Yet what of international solidarity? One thing that strikes me is how the left in the West has embraced the language of the far right in both Israel and Palestine. Both pro-Palestinians and defenders of Israel have seized on this lack of trust with rhetorical gusto. For one side the language is full of a far too ready eagerness, especially given the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe, to paint the Jew as the ultimate villain, complete with absurd analogies, conspiracy theory and the romanticisation of the Palestinian far right as a noble resistance. Sadly, Israel's defenders also use language dripping with negation, seeing Palestinians solely as the ultimate anti-Semites, unable to recognise the bitter experience of occupation, exile and dispossession, desperate to de-legitimise any protest, to deny that there is any partner for peace. Each take up the banner of irridentalist nationalism, which will only bring death in its wake, and feel most righteous in doing so.

But peace demands something else - a deal, politics, life. And the place to find it is in the left, the Palestinian and Israeli left. They are not that far apart, though they certainly have their disagreements. They do not share these discourses, they abhor them. Both are seeking the same thing, the building of the trust necessary to do a deal that will allow the national-self determination of both peoples. Yet our leftists seem ignorant of their efforts and scornful of the prospects, preferring the certainties of partisanship.

And to me, this is what being on the left is about. It is about a respect for life. This doesn't mean quiescence, nor the absence of struggle. What it does mean is clear sightedness, to recognise that the defence of people about to be slaughtered by a vile regime is not imperialism, to see that trying to accommodate murderous despots as an 'exit strategy' is an act of cowardice rather than of courage and, at the same time, to realise that the struggle to reach an agreement that transcends conflict is not necessarily a sell-out.

Intoxicatedby the beauty of the Greek star-lit night and by not a little of the cheap draught wine, it is easy to feel the privilege of life. Yet that is what an emancipatory politics is about, life over death. Even though we will all succumb one day, the time that we are granted should be a heaven on earth and not a living hell.

It's back!

2011-07-20T13:10:00.001+01:00

Courtesy of Ian Bone, get your revived on-line copy of the News of the World here.

Nausea

2011-07-20T12:52:00.000+01:00

Just as the Murdoch press gets so delightfully skewered by the Guardian's superb investigative journalism, we forget it has its own middle-class sewer - yes, the comments pages where the readership can get their rocks off on, ever so understandable, mass murder. The latest piece masturbates to the memory of Mao with a breathtaking piece of 'yes buttery'.

It is tempting to denounce Mao as a monster, and to dismiss the Maoists of today as no less criminally deluded than Peru's Shining Path guerillas, or the Khmer Rouge. Certainly, the scale of the violence Mao inflicted on China dwarfs all other crimes and disasters committed during the course of nation-building in the last two centuries. But political and economic modernisers elsewhere also exacted a terrible human cost from their allegedly backward peoples.

This is even more irritating as the theme he hangs this on, the crisis of rural communities, is incredibly important. But there are much better guides to it, as there are to Mao.

Summit latest

2011-07-20T10:31:00.000+01:00

The secrecy surrounding the latest EU talks has been breached with this exclusive footage of the meeting:

It is too hot to do anything other than shamelessly plagiarise Steve

Straining credulity

2011-07-13T16:07:00.000+01:00

The BBC reports that in Austria a pastafarian member of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has won the right to wear a sieve on his head in the photo on his driving licence for religious reasons.

Pastafarians are all atheists.

"Schadenfreudegasm"

2011-07-12T12:08:00.000+01:00

The News of the Word scandal explained to Americans.

Hat tip to loads of people

Nationalism or internationalism

2011-07-12T10:24:00.001+01:00

I liked this discussion in the Financial Times for two reasons. Firstly, it points out that the current financial crisis is not solely a Greek one, nor is it wholly of Greek making. Secondly, it stresses the need for action and reform at European level, rather than loading austerity packages onto the Greek people in the vain hope that the failed policies of the past will prove to be the successful ones of the present. It argues for internationalism to prevail over narrower national interests within the EU.

This point was made a while ago by Mark Mazower, who also placed the crisis in its historical setting.

The members of today's political class in Europe are Margaret Thatcher's heirs, not George Marshall's. They find it hard to understand that the markets need to be saved from themselves if Europe is to survive in anything resembling its present form. They forget that Germany itself was allowed to cancel its prewar debts in 1953, one of the preconditions for its subsequent boom, and that when others, such as Poland in 1991, were allowed to write down their debts in their turn, they too prospered.

Right now what is needed is long-term political vision and a new willingness to argue for the benefits of continent-wide redistribution.

Anyone familiar with Mazower's general history of Europe, Dark Continent, will be aware of his contention that fascism was not an aberration in Europe. Authoritarian nationalism is always there to challenge democratic internationalism and the internationalist pulse is weakening. Mazower concludes:

The clock is ticking: in September the next package of aid for Greece will have to be announced. It will be a decisive moment and the outcome will be critical for Greece, and for the union too.

UPDATE
Heading for the inevitable?

A rose by any other name

2011-07-12T07:49:00.000+01:00

Harigate is getting much more interesting indeed, in a grimly voyeuristic sort of way.

And another ...

2011-07-10T21:29:00.001+01:00

Once again there is news of an impending sad loss. Another University lifelong learning (adult education in plain English) department is scheduled to go. This one is close to my heart too. How careless we have been with the legacy of more than a century of activism to create a more open and inclusive higher education system. In the past few years it has been thrown away, sometimes with a note of regret, but mainly with puzzlement that something so seemingly peripheral to the life of a university actually exists and how such an adornment adds little to the productivity of the diploma factories of modern higher education.

Yet to me these are gems that should be treasured and not deposited in waste bins for disposal. They are places where the dream of equality, the joy of learning, and the escape from the deadening hand of narrow instrumentalism flourished. Many are now no more. It is a loss that some can't comprehend, let alone bother to mourn, a modern tragedy scarcely understood by managements but felt deeply by tutors, students and the communities that loved them. We will miss them when they are gone.

By default

2011-07-10T21:01:00.000+01:00

Like Greece, Buenos Aires had swallowed the textbook analysis – backed by the IMF and the consensus of academic economists and domestic politicians – which said its problem was not an overvalued currency and unsustainable debts, but too much public spending.

As the economists Roberto Frenkel and Martin Rapetti put it in a study of the Argentine crisis for the CEPR, the theory was that "fiscal discipline would entail stronger confidence, and consequently the risk premium would fall and bring interest rates down. Therefore, domestic expenditure would recover and push the economy out of the recession. Lower interest rates and an increased GDP would, in turn, re-establish a balanced budget, and thus close a virtuous circle."

It didn't work. In fact, drastic public spending cuts made the downturn worse, while the dollar peg prevented the devaluation that eventually helped Argentina to get back its competitiveness.

Similarly, Athens – locked into the euro – is unable to devalue, or control its own interest rates, and the solution being pressed on Greece by its eurozone neighbours involves privatisation, liberalisation and drastic public spending cuts.

Heather Stewart draws out the comparisons between Argentina and Greece and argues for the default option.

Consumer affairs

2011-07-06T17:11:00.000+01:00

Some heartening news for bargain hunters. Reported research shows a tendency to understate the amount of alcohol on the label of a bottle of wine. That is unless you make the mistake of buying low strength wines, then you will be diddled (and not piddled).
"We observe systematic patterns in the errors: a tendency to overstate the alcohol content for wine that has relatively low actual alcohol content and a tendency to understate the alcohol content for wine that has relatively high alcohol content."
I don't have that problem with the batch of wine I bought yesterday, Château Yeorganopolou 2011. It's a cheeky little number, delicate with a hint of peach and a tendency to make one misjudge distances, whose delicate bouquet is prone to inducing big speeches. There is no problem with labelling, there isn't any. There is a bottle though - a glass one too, with a cork - posh you see. Well you would expect that for €3. Very drinkable. Cheers.

Ee bah Greece

2011-07-05T12:10:00.000+01:00

I went into Volos yesterday and the streets are lined with posters advertising a performance of Hamlet at the Municipal Theatre. Hamlet is rendered in Greek as Άμλετ, which transliterates as Amlet.

Suddenly I realised that by 'eck they speak Yorkshire round these parts! It would go down a treat in 'Uddersfield, 'Alifax and 'Ull. Perfect for your 'olidays.

Things ain't what they used to be

2011-07-04T16:10:00.000+01:00

It's only another one of those laments about how the Internet might be useful, but is cheapening human experience. This time it is about the fantastically useful digitisation of historical source material. I am eternally grateful for the web sites maintained by institutions and enthusiastic individuals which make obscure 19th century pamphlets and newspapers available on my screen. However, for Tristram Hunt, this smacks of inauthenticity.

But it is only with MS in hand that the real meaning of the text becomes apparent: its rhythms and cadences, the relationship of image to word, the passion of the argument or cold logic of the case... There is nothing more thrilling than untying the frayed string, opening the envelope and leafing through a first edition in the expectation of unexpected discoveries. None of that is possible on an iPad.

He is right about that thrill. I remember a sense of disappointment turning up at a library to discover that the original copies of the Herald of Anarchy that I had been reading only a few weeks previously had been replaced with a microfilm due to the fragility of the paper. But, funnily enough, none of the words had changed and they seemed to mean exactly the same as they did before.

Lucy Inglis nails it,

Original documents are a pleasure, a privilege and treasure. They are also a fecking nuisance when you've traipsed all the way to Countytown and the very thing you wanted, had called up about and were told would be there is now being withheld because it is too fragile.

Absolutely, and when you are trying to write something in rural Greece, being able to call up these wonderful sources at a click of a mouse is an even bigger pleasure, privilege and treasure.

Thanks