Tomorrow

I have always thought that this is georgeous. It is a setting of a love poem by the German poet, John Henry Mackay (he was born in Scotland to a Scottish father).

Mackay is an intriguing figure. He was an individualist anarchist and his most successful book, The Anarchists: a picture of civilization at the close of the nineteenth century, is a marvellous first-hand description of the anarchist movement in the London of his day and is a dramatisation of the debate between the individualist and communist variants of anarchism. He wrote one more political book, The Freedomseeker, which met with little commercial success. As well as his poetry he also wrote defences of pederasty, his own sexual preference, under the pseudonym, Sagitta.

Jessye Norman sings this beautifully, with intensity and tenderness. Richard Strauss wrote the music to express his love for his wife. To whom, though, was the original poem addressed?

Time flies

This blog is now four years old. As I look at it I can see that the template is ancient, the readership is modest, my links are massively out of date and don't include some favourite sites, and as for the Roxio rankings - they are down from 200 to 2,000. I am trying to concentrate my efforts on more serious writing and am posting more infrequently as I find myself running out of conversations that I would like to have via this media.

So, I have a decision to make. Either there will shortly be a revamp or I will allow this distinctly weird habit to fade away. If you see a flash new template here in a bit, I will be continuing. If not, it's been fun.

England my England

In Greece strikes continue against the austerity measures, in France they are on the streets over pensions. In England, held in the chill embrace of a late autumn drizzle, people phone You and Yours to suggest ways the government can save money on postage.

Meanwhile, in the Hague they do things differently.

Hatchet jobs

Two wonderfully dismissive pieces on the dismal cuts about to hit predominantly the poor - yes the poor do come off worst.

Paul Krugman keeps up his Keynesian crusade here.

No widespread fad ever passes, however, without leaving some fashion victims in its wake. In this case, the victims are the people of Britain, who have the misfortune to be ruled by a government that took office at the height of the austerity fad and won’t admit that it was wrong.

And remember Clegg, Keynes was a Liberal.

The most amusing article though, and we do need a good malicious laugh at times like these, is by the cartoonist Martin Rowson in Tribune, recalling the first time he met George Osborne, "a bit of wimp, and with an unfortunately unlikable face".

His conclusion? He has,

...a mental image, of the type cartoonists experience, and it’s of an 11-year-old boy sitting in front of an Enigma machine and repeatedly hitting it with a hammer, just to see what might happen. There is, in other words, a stench of deranged naivety surrounding George Osborne, David Cameron and Nick Clegg ...

Thanks to Mike

Chop chop

...a gamble with almost no potential upside. Austerity is a gamble which Britain can ill afford.

Meanwhile in Greece

Unofficially consumers have cut spending, enterprises are running dry of cash, banks do not give loans (not even those financed by the EU), local investors hesitate to invest a single Euro, shops and smal businesses are closing down.

Never mind, you could always try this.



YouTube courtesy of long running strange email conversations

Weeping ...

... wailing and gnashing of teeth. Yes, this is about the Browne Report into higher education again. Here is the lament of Priyamvada Gopal who talks of "the greatest assault on the arts and humanities in the history of modern Britain."

All but the most affluent will be induced to turn away from courses in literature, history, modern languages and most social sciences ...

Calm down, calm down. Let's actually read the report. At the moment funding is based on student recruitment and completion. If a university gets £6,000 for a student, currently around £3,000 comes from fees and £3,000 from teaching grant. Under Browne, the full £6,000 will come from fees, paid up front by the government and repayable only when the student is earning more than £21,000 per year. The university gets the same and the student swaps a future tax liability for an increased income-contingent debt liability. Not all that great for students, but this isn't a radical change. It isn't anything like as radical as the initial introduction of fees and loans under New Labour. You will not have to be affluent to go to university, you will have to be if you are to repay the costs. And as the report states, "The financial risk on the loans is ... borne by Government, not by the student".

People have picked up on the fact that teaching grant will remain for some subjects, notably in sciences, medicine and modern languages, and see this as reflecting an attack on other areas. Actually, this is to correct for the possibility of market failure. These subjects carry higher costs, are less popular, yet are strategically important. The grant helps them survive in a world where they may be out-competed by the demand for the humanities. And Browne is banking on the fact that graduate employment rates are just as good, if not better, for the humanities as they are for vocational subjects.

A major difference will come from the lifting of the cap on fees, which may benefit high status institutions whose market position is such that they are capable of charging more due to the status they confer on their graduates, regardless of the subject studied. Though even here the report recommends a levy on higher fees such that,

As the fee amount rises, the marginal benefit to the institutions declines. This reflects the fact that the higher the amount of the loan, the higher the number of students who will rely on the Government to write off outstanding amounts.

Even so, this will reinforce a polarisation of income between wealthy elite universities and more equitable institutions.

This was written before the announcements of the funding review and I think that is something to be far more concerned about. Although my instinctive preference is for a system funded from direct taxation and for stable, predictable funding and I do not share many of the report's premises, it is relatively sane and certainly not an attack on the humanities. Browne consciously reinforces and expands already existing market competition in Higher Education, yet the report is not proposing an unregulated market, which may disappoint some of its libertarian supporters.

I have severe doubts that there will be any relaxing of the bureaucratic grip. In particular the need for information gathering and statistical evidence required to supposedly lead to informed market choice may well increase the box ticking whilst the proposed HE Council simply amalgamates all the existing bureaucracies under one roof and I am willing to bet that they will not release their hold on the beleaguered academic drowning in paper.

There are other problems too. Though I welcome the equality of funding entitlement given to part-time students, all is not rosy. Low income students on part-time courses currently get their fees paid in full by their local authority. It appears that this may no longer be the case and that, rather than getting free tuition, they will have to incur a debt. This is a big loss. In addition, the report recommends that "entitlement to Student Finance is in the future determined by a minimum entry standard, based on aptitude". This has nothing to do with "aptitude", it is all about prior achievement. And though 10% of places will be allocated to institutions to offer to those who do not meet the formal entry criteria, this is a centralising proposal and raises concerns for the future of open access recruitment.

When the Liberal Democrats pledged their souls to the ending of tuition fees before selling them in exchange for a place in the sulphurous Cabinet room, they were trying to appeal to the interests of the fabled middle England, seeking to preserve their privileges. Browne doesn't seem to want to disturb them too much either. The parents will be fine, its the kids that will have to pay.

Yet, this report is an attack on something else, the civic tradition, community engagement and adult education - mainstream funded but doing something radically different, something I spent fourteen years of my life building. This type of work relies almost entirely on the teaching grant. There is a big demand, a large potential for growth, but even within the existing funding arrangements its fees need to be subsidised to make it accessible. Without any teaching grant and with minimal fee income within a climate of cuts, it is hard to see how any institution could afford to support it. Certainly, the students would never be able to pay pro-rata fees to wholly fund short courses.

What really is depressing is that the supposed role of a university education permeating the report is more than utilitarian, it views it solely as a vehicle for personal advancement. As a result, English at Cambridge will flourish; it is historic university adult education that has been sent to its grave.

Now is the time for your tears.

Browned off

The press has been saturated by comments on the Browne Report into the funding of Higher Education and, even though it may well affect my admittedly short-term and part-time employment prospects, I have little to add to what has been said elsewhere.

The premises of the report are based on one perfectly valid argument. Unlike comprehensive public services like the NHS, used by everybody at one time or another, or those like public libraries, which may be used by a minority but are open to unlimited use by anyone who wants to use them, Higher Education is exclusive and structured in such a way as to be used by a minority, a minority who may gain considerable personal benefit. The minority may be larger than it was and drawn from a wider social background, but there is also a difference between institutions. After all, some universities are far more elitist than others. In effect, there is a public subsidy for the Bullingdon Club. So to get this minority to pay directly for the education that reinforces their elite status is not unattractive.

Browne's critics have been trying to push a mainly utilitarian defence of the status quo saying that the nation as a whole benefits from having an 'educated workforce', that Higher Education creates the skills needed for an advanced economy, although occasionally you hear other arguments about the intrinsic value of a university education. It is mainly sophistry and many of these arguments make my nostrils twitch at the unmistakable whiff of bullshit.

It is an intrinsic elitism that has made universities' public funding vulnerable. Yet it is likely to be the elite ones that suffer the least, simply because they are so damn good at supporting the rich. Institutions with a much more diverse student population are feeling worried. This is an inevitable consequence of an unequal society and a market where the scarcity value of a degree has declined, giving a premium to a qualification from an unmistakably elite institution.

The debate around Browne has been depressingly narrow and, despite his welcome support for part-time study, is dominated by the idea of higher education as being solely for full-time nineteen-year-old students. This is not an accurate picture of the university sector as a whole, where mature and part-time students form a majority, but it is one that policy makers and journalists find difficult to shake off, whilst for some institutions it is broadly true.

When the sector began to talk about widening participation it only meant that there would be more students within the system drawn from 'excluded communities', not making the system itself more comprehensive. And in all of this there were some nasty little weasel words floating around these new recruits - 'ability to benefit'. That implied that there were some people not capable of benefiting, some too thick to go to university, an assumption that a university education was confined to an elite because only the elite were capable of it. From my experience working at the wilder edges of adult education, I would say that is complete self-serving nonsense. There is not, nor has there ever been, any mystery to learning, there are different aptitudes in different areas (I have ruled out a second career in sports science for myself), but learning is a universal human activity and what we call higher education isn't that special.

The challenge for universities was not to broaden the social base from which an elite was drawn, but to become genuinely open institutions. To do this meant offering things that were very different indeed; short courses, open access, distance learning, outreach etc., together with the cultural change needed to be accessible - in short to stop being so bloody pompous. It meant becoming a community asset, building links with trade unions as well as local businesses, working in the community with community organisations, becoming public institutions in the real sense of the term. And guess what, this is what University Lifelong Learning (in all its historic guises - Continuing Education, Adult Education, University Extension etc.) had, with variable degrees of success, been attempting to do all along and look what has happened to them.

This is the great missed opportunity. I can't help feeling that if Lifelong Learning had been placed at the centre of the university instead of at its margins, Browne's options would have been very different indeed. So the question now looms as to how we rebuild from here. Thus far policy makers have only sought ways of funding universities, the point is, as it always has been, to change them.

There is only one reality ...

...there is no immortality



Were you a pisshead God
You could save humanity
By slaying Charon
In your drunken rage

Eh?

There are always surprises. Little things crop up that make you wonder, this time about about the world inhabited by New Labour. Take this from Andrew Rawnsley's column today.

David Cameron sometimes entertains visitors to Number 10 in a first-floor room which looks over Horse Guards towards St James's Park. For many years, it went by the bland name of the White Room; recently, it was retitled the Thatcher Room. A portrait of the blue lady has been hung on a wall. But you'd be wrong to think it was Mr C who decided to establish this memorial to Mrs T. He stresses it was not he who turned the room into a mini-shrine to the Iron Lady; it was his predecessor. And this is true: Gordon Brown had the room renamed in honour of the Conservative prime minister who pulverised the trade unions, privatised the industries, sold off council houses, squeezed the state and routed the Labour party.

What does this Thatcher fixation have to tell us? Brown is of the generation, like myself, that remembers the era only too well. Extraordinary.

Then, thanks to a surprise birthday present, I have been reading Tony Blair's memoirs. All reviewers, whether sympathetic or not, have agreed that it is dreadfully, even embarrassingly, written. They are not kidding. Take this on the night of the 1997 election victory:

Hadn't we fought a great campaign? Hadn't we impaled our enemies on our bayonet, like ripe fruit? Hadn't our strategies, like something derived from destiny, scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts?

Blair is making a nice point about the sheer fear he felt on taking power with absolutely no experience of government. But the language ... and the book continues in the same vein. All I can really say is that this glimpse of some of the thinking inside 'the project' leaves me bewildered at the strangeness of it all.

Prejudice

There is another nice piece published today about Gareth Thomas, the Welsh Rugby Union star who converted to Rugby League. Thomas is the only openly gay player of either code and has talked eloquently before about the experience of first attempting to deny his sexuality and then coming out at the height of his fame. He has since become a role model and inspiration for people trying to come to terms with their sexuality.

In the interview he deals with the prejudice and "unreconstructed attitudes" of his team mates - not about being gay you understand, nobody was in the slightest bit bothered about that - about Rugby Union. I mean he played Rugby Union. You have to admit that they have a point.

Sign it

And sign it now.

Save Adult Education

And, in a timely reminder of its importance, Harry Barnes writes of his own experience of adult education here.

Thanks due here, inexplicably I had missed it.

Pies, William Blake and Rugby League

So the Super League title belongs to the Pie Eaters, Wigan that is. The nickname derives from the General Strike of 1926 when Wigan's miners were forced back to work and were thus 'made to eat humble pie'. It was an insult, but one that has been embraced and transformed by the town, even to the extent of hosting the annual World Pie Eating Championship. They did much the same by taking George Orwell's distinctly unpleasant account of his visit to Wigan and creating a visitor attraction called Wigan Pier, complete with a large pub called the Orwell.

The transformation of William Blake's poem, Jerusalem, taken from his Preface to Milton, into a national - even nationalist - anthem is even more odd. The setting of the words to sumptuous music by C H H Parry turned this subversive, strange poem into a patriotic song, taken up as their anthem by, amongst others, the Women's Institute. It is played before every Grand Final, a rousing and emotional precursor, helping build the atmosphere before the entry of the teams. Yet, whatever the use, the words remain, even if stripped of context, and perhaps it makes Jerusalem the best known English poem. And I can't help feeling that Blake would not have demurred at the thought of his words blasting out in front of seventy-one thousand Northerners, celebrating the climax of the season of a sport rooted in the experience of the working classes and born as a fight-back against the class war being waged against them by the officials of the Rugby Football Union.

As for Saturday's final, St Helens proved no match for a resurgent Wigan. Missing their first choice half backs, they were completely outplayed as Wigan took their first title since 1992. The Wigan forwards dominated and their kicking game was devastating. If ever there was a victory due to a change of coaching, this was it. Last season Wigan were a good, if unspectacular, team; a new coach turned the same players into champions. The transformation was obvious from the first match of the season when super-fit players, considerably lighter than before, tore into the opposition. And then an Australian coach surprised and delighted by picking young local players instead of expensive overseas imports. Finally, it was a tactical switch that clinched it. The veteran Paul Deacon was moved to stand-off and the wonderfully talented Sam Tomkins moved to full-back, allowing him to attack from deep.

It was a great occasion, as always, whilst the youthful English talent on display and the high standards of play gave hope that one day we might begin to match the Aussies and end their comprehensive dominance. We can but dream.

Instead of a post

Fat man on a guitar sings the blues

Culture shock

From Pelion to Warrington is a journey that takes you from the idiosyncrasies of a Greek village to Rugby League territory, itself hardly an idiosyncrasy-free-zone. Waking up after the journey back, it was off on Sunday to the Co-operative Championship finals day for the lower divisions of the Rugby League, trying to switch my mind back to a different version of normality.

There were a few questions buzzing around. Would Oldham lose their fourth successive final and miss out on promotion yet again? They did, despite being supported by a group of African drummers and featuring the extravagantly named Wayne Kerr. Would the main match see evidence of the revival of two of our traditional heartlands clubs, Featherstone Rovers and Halifax, and show that there was life outside Super League, despite the abolition of automatic promotion and relegation? Here the news was mixed. The match was by no means a sell-out as it has been in the past, but there was a reasonable gathering of supporters from two clubs that had been through difficult times.

Then the drama began - a superb hundred metre try for underdogs Halifax from Warrincy, followed by a recovery from the excellent young Featherstone side and suddenly there was an announcement, the game was halted and the crowd behind one set of posts told to evacuate on to the pitch as a fire had broken out in a cupboard under the stand.


Friday saw the last match at St Helen's Knowsley Road ground, their home since 1890. On Sunday we saw why the old grounds had to go. A fire in many of our old stadia, including Swinton's much lamented and never replaced Station Road, could have been a catastrophe, another Bradford. Here everything was managed perfectly, there was no risk of it spreading and supporters were moved away from the area safely onto the pitch and then into another stand.

After a forty minute delay the drama continued. League leaders Featherstone built a comfortable 22-4 lead with 25 minutes to go and were cruising to victory. Then came the fightback, Halifax equalising at the death to make it 22-22. Now it was golden point extra time and Halifax snatched victory with a drop goal to win 23-22 and take the title.

It was a breathtaking, strange and very long day, but all was overshadowed by the tragic news of the death of Terry Newton. He was a fine player, though one capable of some pretty bad foul play, who had wrecked his career at the end by testing positive for a banned drug. A tragedy, but not one that should have cost him his life at the age of only 31. A very strange weekend for Rugby League.

With the Grand Final, a Wigan Saints derby, coming up on Saturday in front of around 70,000 fans at Old Trafford, it's a good time to reflect on the qualities and flaws of a sport that has reinvented itself, embracing a summer season, razzmatazz and a clutch of new stadia without ever losing its roots and its unique, down-to-earth qualities. It's a great game. Roll on Saturday.

A piece of history

This, according to its owner Iannis, is the first car ever owned in the village - and it is still in use.

But today I leave it all behind and set out back to the UK, though using more modern transport.

An unnatural disaster

First there is Ireland:

After posting an increase in growth in the first three months of the year, official data showed that the former "Celtic Tiger" sank into a double dip recession in the spring.

Larry Elliott comments:

The reason for this is simple: the budget cuts have impaired the economy's ability to grow. The Irish government wants to slash the country's budget deficit from 12% to less than 3% by 2014, which would be eye-wateringly tough even if the economy were growing robustly. But when the economy is shrinking, it means the government is in effect running to stand still, hence the calls for even greater austerity to mollify the markets. That would, of course, simply weaken growth prospects still further.

Ireland, in other words, is perilously close to locking itself into permanent depression and deflation, from which the only way out may be a default that would further damage consumer and business confidence.

Then there is Greece. And Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, has said, "Greece has a role model and that role model is Ireland." Ah.

Much of the reporting of the Greek crisis consists of sending someone, blissfully unencumbered with knowledge, somewhere nice for a week or so to write about the crazy goings-on of those pesky foreigners. So it was great to read this thoughtful analysis of the Greek economy from Aristos Doxiadis, written with insight and respect. Doxiadis identifies the main features of the economy to be its reliance on small scale family enterprises and self-employment, a persistent rentocracy and opportunistic behaviour. This, he argues, is a consequence of the history of the modern Greek state and its very different model of development.

In the West, feudalism, monarchy and the Catholic Church interacted to create the absolutist state which was mandated to rule and guide society. The bourgeoisie inherited this state and reinforced its role of societal guidance. In parallel, during the industrial revolution large business hierarchies were developed, which assigned stable positions to workers and clerks. Such things did not happen in Greece: we overthrew the Ottoman state rather than developing it, and we resisted economic hierarchies.

In other words, advanced western economies were founded not only on free markets and individual incentives. They were founded on hierarchies (vertical rules) and on strategies of cooperation (horizontal rules). Successful and hegemonic capitalism is free markets embedded in a society of rules and responsibility. Otherwise, it is either a jungle, or a community of corner shops. We Greeks have subscribed neither to vertical nor to horizontal rules. We are neither obedient nor cooperative. If we have avoided the jungle, it is because we have kept the corner shops.

Instead of despairing at Greek foibles, Doxiadis makes pertinent observations about the strengths of some Greek behaviour to go with his critique of the features of the economy that are dysfunctional and in urgent need of reform.

Within this context, we have developed some admirable economic institutions, which western-educated technocrats find peculiar.

I would urge anyone interested to read the article in full, it would be well worth your time.

I harbour huge doubts about the wisdom of economic orthodoxy in any circumstances, however the imposition of an orthodoxy, conceived in the context of very different societies, on somewhere as unorthodox as Greece strikes me as destructive folly. Instead, Doxiadis argues for the recognition and support for an economy based on small-scale activities, an alternative model of development, rather than the use of the sledgehammer of austerity, accompanied by wishful thinking about the emergence of a competitive and orthodox economy from the wreckage.

A new model of development for Greece should not imitate the ones that have been most successful globally. We start from different initial conditions, and will follow a different route. Let us accept our peculiarity.

UPDATE

But then again ...

Whole EUR 19.000.000 (no typo! nineteen million euros!) was spent in rubbers by eco-friendly Greek ministers in a period of five years.

Heaven knows ...

... we're miserable now.

The UK and Ireland have been named as the worst places to live in Europe for quality of life, according to research published today.

And I am going back there on Saturday. Oh well.

"Last year compared with our European neighbours we were miserable but rich, this year we're miserable and poor."

And the weather is crap. Then we do like to moan about everything, perhaps it makes us happy after all. Perhaps.

Hot stuff

I love spicy food - but this encounter with the infinity chilli from Grantham, probably the world's hottest, does not sound nice.

The fire hits my throat and then goes into my ears. My ears! They ache terribly. My legs wobble. Punch-drunk, I slump on a garden chair.

And then, the obvious question:

But what happens next? "Let's be honest here. It's got to come out again," he says. "But it's not going to be as bad as when it went in."

Last night

Another wonderful sunset

Have a break

What a shock.

"Whether people are in a job or not, they almost all report being happiest during leisure time. The employed, however, are least happy when at work or commuting."

A new study is reported as finding that, on the whole, work is pretty crap and that not having any is not too bad on a day-to-day basis. I have to say that after three months enjoying a Greek summer I am not waking up in the morning tortured by the lack of a few hours of mind-numbing bureaucracy.

However, the piece goes on,

In line with previous research, the study found unemployed people are less satisfied with their life in general.

Well, the hours may be great, but the pay is lousy and then there are all the words in the sociological lexicon - status, alienation, identity etc. Some work can be fun too, because I do miss teaching - but not marking. All of this does suggest though that leisure time, however you want to spend it, should play as important part as employment at the heart of any emancipatory ideology. In the meantime, I shall put my feet up on the patio with a good book.

Bonfires

Book burning is back in fashion. This piece sums up the whole pointless affair, describing superbly how the actions of self-righteous nonentities were inflated by a stupid and lazy media to global significance.

In the meantime, just as Shuggy argued:

More than a dozen people were killed and scores injured in confrontations in Kashmir today following a report on an Iranian TV channel of the desecration of the Qur'an in New York on the anniversary of 9/11.

Deeply depressing.

To continue on the theme, but change the subject, I wanted to understand the references in George Szirtes' The Burning of the Books so I have just read Elias Canneti's Auto da Fé. The poem is a set of reflections on the novel and what an impressive and strange novel it is, though I have not come to terms with it in my own mind yet. At times disturbing and at others darkly funny, it is based on constant thought and communication leading to total incomprehension, collective and individual, breeding misogyny, murder and madness. And, centrally, it is about books, libraries, "those burning places of the intellect"*, their lives, their destruction.

It could not be more relevant to the folly of bigots.

It is Autumn and all we should be burning are the fallen leaves. The first poem in George's collection is Chet Baker, so this seems appropriate.



*George Szirtes - Postscriptum

Thoughts at lunch time

I was shopping in Volos on Monday and stopped off for lunch. The waiter heard English being spoken and started asking questions about what work was like in England and whether he could get a job. Qualified in computer programming and network design, there he was working as a waiter and saying that he had wasted the best years of his life. It was just one small indicator of life in deflationary Greece. In the meantime, Greek TV shows adverts for expensive English university accredited degrees in business studies - another costly route to a dream that will probably end in delivering coffees to ageing English tourists.

All the while, sitting at your table looking out over the Argonafton, hawkers from Africa and Asia keep trying to sell you grim religious pictures, cheap plastic toys or knock-off DVDs. God knows what they have risked to get to the promised land of the European Union. Roma children are begging in the street and ask for the unfinished pizza slices.

There it all was, amidst the comfort and prosperity of European life, a hierarchy of hope, disillusion and discontent, as seen from a pavement café in a Greek port.

In the meantime the English press have been obsessing over the Blair memoirs. All agree as to the excruciating written style:

"On that night of the 12th May, 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power to cope with what lay ahead. I was exhilarated, afraid and determined in roughly equal quantities."

Then there was Iraq, with a consensus, bordering on neurotic hatred, that the desire to bring down the regime of a brutal, mass murdering dictator and replace it with a democracy was somehow an act of unparalleled malevolence.

There was little in the coverage on Blair's social policy, other than to describe it as 'centrist' and essential to winning power. There was even less on the whole Third Way farrago, an intellectual mish-mash if ever I saw one. Few doubts were expressed about the nature of public service 'reform'. And there was nothing on the strange death of adult education, my particular obsession.

When I look at the New Labour years, what strikes me as vital is political economy. Blair was not an unsuccessful Prime Minister, but he was an unsuccessful Labour Prime Minister. Deeply attracted to fashionable nonsense (the weightless economy anyone?), the Blairite government fully accepted and accelerated the Thatcherite settlement, only moderating it through supply-side driven investment in public services. There was an easy association with wealth, privilege and a celebration of inequality, though only on 'merit' of course. And it did this at the very moment when Labour had the power and popular approval to challenge, revise and lead the country away from the prevailing neo-liberal consensus.

And all this leads to the scenes at the port. For us Europeans this isn't desperation or starvation, it isn't the hunger, disease, shortened and blighted lives of the slums of the developing world, nor is it the brutal racism directed presently against the Roma across our continent. It is a feeling of unease that things could and should be better, a nagging worry about the future, a sense of injustice at the immunity of the rich from the sacrifices now being imposed through economic austerity programmes. Lost potential, lost lives, curtailed dreams seem to be an ever present reality. Stories that highlight individual tragedies are sprinkled amongst general unease.

And when Labour bought into the political economy of Thatcherism they made themselves complicit in all this. This is the legacy awaiting the new leadership, only now they have to challenge a coalition government that Blair seems only too comfortable with. We will have to wait and see, but, like Paulie, I am not hopeful.

The truth

Dramatic video footage of the Cameron/Clegg negotiations has emerged:

A tale of two newspapers

In the Israel/Palestine conflict there appears to be a choice between victory for one side or the other or a settlement. The only problem is that victory is neither possible nor desirable. Israel cannot and will not be obliterated and the Palestinians will not and cannot have their right to self-determination denied. So the real choice is between a continued, corrosive blood-letting or a deal that will transcend the conflict and create a new reality, giving the opportunity for peace.

So where are you most likely to find an argument for continued struggle? The Guardian of course where this article, in a piece of psychic punditry, announces in advance the failure of the coming peace talks, or, if by any chance an agreement does emerge, that it must of necessity prove to be a disaster.

The Jerusalem Post, meanwhile, provides another platform for the practical optimism of Gershon Baskin of ICIPRI who argues that, "Failure to reach an agreement would be a crime against both peoples".

In the meantime, the current enemies of just such an agreement, in the same way as their earlier counterparts did, have announced their opposition.

September

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain'd

With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

'The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

'The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

William Blake - To Autumn - 1783

I have never been here in September before and I will see most of the month out until I return to the UK. Already there is a sense of Autumn, the mornings and evenings are cooler and though still warm, the heat has a softer quality to it. Despite my ignorance and lack of stewardship, thin branches are bending under the weight of fruit. The village is noticeably quieter, many summer visitors have gone and it is absolutely gorgeous. As the loudspeaker on the hawker's van calls out, 'κρεμμύδια και πατάτες έχω', I have an overwhelming sense of my own good fortune and privilege. What could be better than to be here, now, on a September day?

Versatility

I like these internet toys. Apparently:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Wow. I am proud of that, a fine writer. So how about something else, a bit of academic writing:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Never read anything by him so I wouldn't know. So let's try another piece:

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Shit! Quick, delete it this instant. The shame, the shame. Slap another passage in to take the taste away.

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Who? Well what about trying something else.

I write like
H. G. Wells

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

There, that is more respectable, even if some of his politics were a bit dodgy.

Consistently male I suppose, but then I did a bit of cheating and found that Emily Bronte writes like James Fenimore Cooper, George Eliot writes like Charles Dickens as does Thomas Hardy, Thackeray and, I suspect, most 19th Century English novelists. Let's go earlier. Mary Shelly writes like Mary Shelly, but Laurence Sterne writes like Robert Louis Stevenson. Daniel Defoe has the style of Jane Austen. A little more populist perhaps, Agatha Christie writes like Arthur Conan Doyle. Oh well, so it goes ...

Thanks to Shuggy for helping me waste an odd half hour.

Your health!

Abstinence is a killer. Time magazine reports on some new research:

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socio-economic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

So eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow the teetotallers die.

Relatively embarassing

After evolution and climate change, there is another global conspiracy for the right to challenge, the Theory of Relativity. Yep, theoretical physics is a liberal atheistic plot. Here is the clincher:

"Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of 'curvature of space' to promote a broad legal right to abortion".

If you can bear it, you can read all about it here.

Are you sure it isn't April 1st?

Thanks to DJG

Time out

As I have said before, it's a nice place.

Scandalous

From the Daily Mail (photo caption)

Struggling: More than 100,000 seven-year-olds is unable to write properly

I blame the teachers.

Thanks to Julie

Mooning

It is the August full moon tonight, a special occasion here. I am just back from the front with ringing ears where there was the big(ish) full moon party with a very loud and rather incongruous Greek heavy rock band. The last number ended abruptly when the electricity blew and we all trooped off into a quiet, beautiful and, of course, moonlight night.

The radio plays songs about the moon all day. Here are two, in a different vein to the music I have just been blasted with, one melancholy:



The words in translation (and another version) here

And one lively:



Words and translation here

Cultural news

Clearly essential reading for all opera buffs and, for once, the Amazon customer reviews explore this fascinating topic even more deeply. Read them carefully.



Hat tip? I bet you can guess who.

Heritage

This is already on the UNESCO world heritage list

Now it could be joined by this

The Mediterranean diet, with its mix of fresh fruit and vegetables, grilled fish and olive oil faces a final vote in November for ranking on Unesco's list of "intangible" cultural heritage, launched in 2003 to complement the collection of monuments and natural wonders, and covers oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals and festivals.

I wonder if they are going to include the fags and the tsipouro.

Tim Hayward gets "this act of insane redefinition" spot on.

Life and debt

Via Will and John comes this talk to the RSA by, and this interview with, David Harvey. Both seem particularly pertinent as I sit here in a country that is experiencing a severe economic downturn before returning to one that appears to be locking itself into a masochistic political economy, perhaps showing that, after all, corporal punishment in public schools did do them some harm.

What I liked about this talk is that Harvey is keen to break away from the idea being peddled, not least by some Greeks themselves, that the current financial crisis here is the result of cultural failings. Though the Greek state is hardly a model of efficiency and effectiveness, Harvey looks beyond this to systemic economic factors and, in doing so, challenges many of the other conventional explanations of the crisis.

His main argument is that this is not a series of crises, but a single one that keeps cropping up in different countries across the globe. It is located in the central contradiction of neo-liberal economics. The search for high profits to drive growth derives, at least partially, from the reduction of labour costs, mainly through eroding the power of labour in the market place, thereby adversely affecting the level of demand. So, with earnings stagnant, growth and consumption was maintained through the injection of credit and the invention of ever more complex new financial products to sustain that credit. Thus, when the bubble burst, the crisis appeared to be a problem of indebtedness, easily susceptible to moral arguments about spendthrifts, rather than one rooted in declining real wages - a classic crisis of under-consumption.

Harvey is a Marxist, though certainly not a dogmatic one, but the theory of under-consumption is not solely a Marxist theory. For example, here is the mutualist anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, writing in 1846 about the displacement of labour through mechanisation.

What a system is that which leads a business man to think with delight that society will soon be able to dispense with men! Machinery has delivered capital from the oppression of labor! That is exactly as if the cabinet should undertake to deliver the treasury from the oppression of the taxpayers. Fool! Though the workmen cost you something, they are your customers: what will you do with your products, when, driven away by you, they shall consume them no longer? Thus machinery, after crushing the workmen, is not slow in dealing employers a counter blow; for, if production excludes consumption, it is soon obliged to stop itself...

Proudhon was reiterating the views that were also to be found in early liberalism, especially amongst radicals. You can find concerns about under-consumption in Adam Smith, though one of the most persistent and obsessive liberal economists to warn of the dangers was Charles Sismondi (1773-1842).

And this is what interests me, early liberal economics certainly contained some orthodox thinkers such as Jean-Baptiste Say, but much writing is hedged with caution and caveats, whilst radical liberals were overtly critical of orthodoxy and made what they saw as the right of the workers to the full value of their labour central to their thinking. This spawned a whole range of political ideas, not just socialism, but radical liberalism, individualism, co-operation, mutualism and anarchism as well. With the revival of neo-liberalism in the latter part of the Twentieth Century, that critical liberal tradition was ignored and a new, utterly-self confident, version of corporate driven, turbo-capitalism emerged, claiming, somewhat dubiously, to be the true heir of classical liberalism.

If Harvey is right, and certainly the main empirical planks of the argument are all there, then the resolution of a crisis brought about by inadequate purchasing power in the economy through a policy designed to lower that purchasing power further seems hardly wise. From here in Greece, the signs are not good and even the bond markets seem to be opposed to human sacrifice. All of which highlights the increasing interest in the benefits of equality as well as the maintenance of living standards for the many, rather than the massive enrichment of the few.

Eleni

She's one hundred years old now. Eleni was my neighbour until old age forced her to go and live with one of her sons in Volos. She is back in the village at the moment, staying with another of her sons, so I dropped by to see her.

There were hugs and kisses, she is always pleased to see me. I think she appreciated us as neighbours and liked us around the place. Her hearing and vision isn't great, but though frail her sense of humour is buoyant and she rocked with laughter at my wild gestures that tried to convey some sort of meaning that my Greek language could never manage to do.

There is no flash on my mobile phone so the picture isn't great but that didn't stop her son trying to get me to take a photograph of the barbecue being built on their patio. They were trying to sell me one and thought I could show the photograph around. Sadly, it was too dark so the builder rushed to his car, stood in front of the barbecue, took a picture, showed it to me and then put his camera away. I think he missed the point.

At the moment I am reading about another Eleni, the mother of the author Nicholas Gage. She was tortured and executed for the crime of protecting her children during the final stage of the Greek Civil War. It is a brilliant, complex and harrowing book. And then I think that the Eleni I know was in her thirties when the Nazi occupation began, with its mass starvation and appalling hardships, closely followed by the brutalities of the Civil War. I wonder what she has seen during her long life, I will never know.

Still, she survived, gave birth to four sons and lives on. As does Greece, now a democratic nation, though facing new troubles. May Greek democracy too survive this unnecessary economic onslaught and leave the horrors of the Twentieth Century buried in the history books, never to be re-enacted.

What I did on my holidays

I suppose that after the hard grind of relaxing in Greece for a couple of months, the wedding in the Czech Republic was just the tonic I needed. And what a wedding!

Most tourist will be familiar with Prague, but Olomouc is less well-known, incomparably quieter and has a beautiful centre, ringed with hideous Stalinist architecture. Everywhere there are reminders of a troubled history. The Second World War memorials carry the unfamiliar dates of 1938-45. For Czechs, the war began with the dismemberment of their country and the start of the German occupation after the Munich agreement. Then there are the remainders of the Communist past; the murals at the railway station and, above all, the clock.

The town hall has hosted an astronomical clock since the fifteenth century. It has been remodelled frequently, the last time was in the 1950's. As the defeated German army left in 1945, someone, in an act of spiteful vandalism, fired a shell at the clock leaving it wrecked. And so it was rebuilt, this time in the style of Socialist Realism, a unique piece of Stalinist kitsch. Here it is as it was before the war and today.













Every day at twelve it gives its full performance in front of a small knot of observers. There is a YouTube video of it in action here.

Elsewhere, the city is studded with extraordinary Baroque churches, as political as the clock. They were built to mark the defeat of the Reformation in the Thirty Years War and flaunt the resulting Catholic ascendancy. One monument, the Holy Trinity Column, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, stands across the square, glaring at the clock.

Walking around a city you often get the sense of its past from the neglected and the run down, rather than from the celebrated tourist highlights.

A street scene or, in this case, a simple doorway gives a sense of faded elegance that contrasts with the crumbling concrete of badly built apartment blocks from the Communist era. It made me wonder about Stalinism as an aesthetic failure as well as a political catastrophe. Catholicism in Europe was associated with reaction, illiberalism, authority and control yet still produced some magnificent art. But perhaps the sheer ugliness was just the product of the times, when public architecture became particularly joyless the world over.

Then there was the wedding itself in a spectacular church on a hill overlooking the Moravian plain. If the outside wasn't imposing enough, the interior was wildly over the top, like Liberace on speed.

As a hardened cynic, even I was blown away by such a magical scene for a wedding. I could forget my antipathy to the iconography and wallow in pure sentimentality in a church full of seriously hungover people, at least the ones from England. That certainly is a bunch who know how to party. Late nights on the town for a couple of days before the event had left their mark, but they were only training sessions. It was time for the reception.

It started impressively enough with a waiter slicing the top off a bottle of champagne with a sword and the custom of smashing a plate on the doorstep of the restaurant that the groom has to sweep up with a dustpan and brush. It then turned out to be a fifteen hour extravaganza of food, booze and dancing to an ageing Rock 'n Roll band, playing the standards sung in Czech, either side of a disco featuring naff 70's and 80's pop music. The place was bouncing when this one came on. And then there was all that gorgeous Czech beer.

I had never been to the Czech Republic before. The one thing that struck me most was how orderly the country is. Even if there is no traffic, nobody crosses the road unless the pedestrian crossing lights allow. Small groups of people stood patiently by the side of empty roads waiting for the clicking sound made by the crossings to speed up, meaning that the lights had changed to stop the non-existent cars. The museums only allowed you to pass through them in one direction and stern attendants were everywhere to ensure that you did as you were told. In restuarants and bars plates and glasses were cleared away the second you had finished. Sunday night was near silent and the city centre was deserted apart from a few tourists. Yet the clubs stayed open late and served up huge quantities of alcohol and the bars and restuarants certainly didn't bother with healthy eating options and portion control.

It had been an unforgettable weekend; noisy, rowdy and incredibly drunken, spent with people who I like immensely in a remarkably beautiful place. Yet on my return to Greece, as I sat on the bus taking me down the peninsula, just behind the driver who was talking on his mobile phone and smoking a fag out of the window as he manoeuvred round hairpin bends, I enjoyed the culture change; friendly, informal, occasionally fractious, anything but organised though it still works and somehow more comfortable, like sitting in your favourite chair. I had been away and I was coming home.

Away

I am setting off this morning for the Czech Republic to attend a wedding. I shall be here for a few days, with the urge to do some sightseeing no doubt conflicting with the odd hangover. So all you will get here is ...

Sizzling in summer

One of the great pleasures of summer in Greece is being able to use the barbecue regularly, especially if friends come round to share a meal, talking and drinking until late in the warm night air. All types of meat, marinated in lemon juice and olive oil together with fresh herbs picked from the garden, taste wonderful cooked over charcoal, as does fish, bought the same day from the sellers at the front. Aubergines and peppers are beautiful too, grilled and sprinkled with salt, vinegar and oil.

But what is this? A study has found that this is really shocking behaviour.

Beer, ice-cream, crisps, Indian takeaways, chips and anything in batter: normally, it's a particular food type that gets blamed for helping the British to pile on the pounds. But now a whole style of cooking and eating has come under fire for encouraging obesity in the UK.

Research shows that Britons consume more than the recommended daily intake of calories in a single barbecue meal, with men often eating more than 3,500 calories and women more than 2,500.

Oh no! Douse those coals immediately or at least follow the report's advice. Replace those sausages with a "tofu kebab or mixed green salad with harissa dressing" or at the very least "exercise portion control".

So who carried out this research, which University or research establishment was involved? Er ... the study was "conducted by Boots and the Tony Ferguson Weightloss Programme" who just happen to have a new range of expensive diet products to sell to the guilt-ridden.

There was one consolation at the end of the piece,

However, the Boots research indicates that any advice on sensible alfresco eating habits is likely to be ignored: it found that although a third of those questioned (2,000 adults) were aware they eat more food than usual, 41% chose to forget how many calories they were consuming and ate as much as they wanted.

Bravo for the 41%! Anyway, I always exercise portion control at my barbecues, the portions are vast.

An advocate of peace

It is hard to add anything to this statement.

Mohamed Abu Muailek is a 25-year-old Palestinian, believes that Palestinians should seek co-existence with Israel. Mohamed is in jail and facing potential execution by Hamas. Once a militant, he is now a strong advocate of peaceful coexistence. He used to fire rockets from Gaza into Israel. Then, partly because of an internet friendship with an IT colleague, Mohamed changed his mind. Deciding that violence was wrong, Mohamed became a dissident, and argued the case for peace and co-existence with Israel. Hamas have jailed him and he is facing a likely death penalty.

The campaign website is here and a report of the experience of the film-maker, Paul Martin here.

Anyone prone to romanticise Hamas, please take careful note.

Thanks to Helena

Lost in translation

Waking early this morning, I did some web surfing and ended up on a Greek blog post listing some of the best moments of summer. Because my Greek is very, very rudimentary, I was lazy and used Google Translator. Here are some examples of what it came up with:

"The crowing of a misguided from the hot cock in a ill-afternoon hours"

"The repeated echo of a distant and allegedly festival is induced by the moods of the wind"

"Crack due to the unplanned rush of impatience forks when the waiter leaves the table dish with tzatziki"

And my favourite:

"Can meet again in passionate love of your vacation last year and I recommend your child"

Some advice - use a dictionary.

Shocking

You learn something new every day if you read the papers.

If we look at the industrialised world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing.

Well I never.

Politics and anti-politics

From over the pond - the Aegean that is - a reader based in Turkey drew my attention to this catchy paragraph from Peter Oborne's book, The Triumph of the Political Class.

"The only Cabinet minister in Blair's 1997 administration known to have had any experience of work in the commercial sector was John Prescott, a ship's steward in the '50s. He was later joined by Alan Milburn, who used to run a Marxist bookshop called Days of Hope, better known by the spoonerism Haze of Dope"

There is a lot to unpack in such a short passage. It is part of a common-place argument that politicians are distanced from 'real life' and have no understanding of the 'real world', being locked in a parallel universe of their own making. The argument isn't without merit, but in one sense it is a truism. We all live lives proscribed by the boundaries of class, gender, region, ethnicity, occupation etc. and do not have an intimate understanding of the lives of others, though we can try and learn and the failure to do so is a major contributor to bad management and poor policy making.

Yet there are other difficulties with the specifics of Oborne's comment. Anyone coming into government will of necessity have been an MP for some time and so politics will have been their full-time job for quite a while. Then what does he mean by "the commercial sector"? Private industry? And if so, why is this experience more valid than the public sector or the professions? And, of course, there is a neat, snobbish dig at Prescott in there too. But even taking it on its own terms, there is one major problem with this statement. It isn't true.

The claim that no-one apart from Prescott in the 1997 Cabinet had any experience outside politics seemed so unlikely that I did a bit of checking on the internet. It took less than an hour and this is what I found.

Margaret Beckett was a metallurgist for AEI, soon to become part of GEC. David Clark worked in forestry and was a lab technician in a textile mill, then became a mature student and university teacher. Nick Brown worked for Procter and Gamble. Frank Dobson worked in industry, but for the then nationalised Electricity Generating Board. Gavin Strang was an agricultural scientist.

Several cabinet members had experience of local government, the most notable being David Blunkett who had run Sheffield City Council, possibly a better preparation for a ministerial post than being a management consultant.

There is another side to the "commercial sector" as well. Unsurprisingly, the 1997 Cabinet contained four former full-time union officials, including Prescott. Day-to-day working in industrial relations is certainly an education in the only too real life experienced by many of the electorate!

The biggest single group was lawyers with seven in cabinet, does their work not count as "commercial"? There were two former adult education tutor-organisers as well and three University lecturers. Clare Short had been a civil servant and, given the new government's interest in the Third Sector as part of their Big Society fad, they might be interested to know that Chris Smith had worked for a housing charity.

There was no-one from senior business management or from the financial services sector, but are they any more representative of 'real life'? Anyway, given the overwhelmingly Tory ethos of business management, it would be odd to expect to find anyone building a career as a Labour politician from it. And though the ministers were all middle class professionals, quite a few had come from working class families and were the beneficiaries of the post war expansion of educational opportunities. Rather than being narrow apparatchiks, they had rather a wide range of experience and impressive academic qualifications.

It is always fun to point out where sloppy research undermines an argument, but I think that more important things are at stake. The book is riding a current wave of anti-politics, which I consider highly dangerous. It takes various forms; 'they are only in it for themselves', 'they are all the same', and other associated generalisations. Of course, if you ask people to expand on this and be specific they usually can't. This is because of a slippage between scepticism and cynicism.

Politics, as a means of managing our public and collective interests, is a necessity. It never goes away. I am deeply depressed about the awful level of current political debate, the dominance of an elite consensus on political economy and on the quality of political leadership. However, this is very different from a rejection of politics in itself.

Anti-politics is cynical not analytical. It is a blanket condemnation of politics and an expression of contempt for politicians, whatever they do or stand for. In itself, it posits no alternatives and has no analysis. There is the strange Tea Party anti-political movement in the United States, but perhaps the most egregious recent example is the Greek Sect of Revolutionaries whose first proclamation announced, "We don't do politics, we do guerilla warfare". Nobody knows what they stand for. I doubt if they do. Often this is an impulse that can be exploited by the populist autocrat who declares himself to be 'above politics' (the ultimate oxymoron for a politician), sometimes it can lead to the demand for a 'top businessman' to come and sort things out. Demagoguery replaces the building of movements, alliances and the representation of interests.

My deep disappointment with New Labour knows no bounds, and as for the new lot ... It would be a huge relief to see politicians shunning conventional wisdom and media stereotypes in favour of good research and pursuing principles instead of exercising their own cynicism through media-driven populist measures to be nasty to whoever is the latest folk devil. However, we do need to be able to explain why we think like that, rather than simply hug the comfort blanket of anti-political sentiment. Intelligent politics is the answer to anti-politics, it can be just as critical, but with reason and, most importantly, it offers us alternatives.

Thanks to John