"Freedom!"

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

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

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!

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

Sunset

Dusk

And the August full moon

Mooning

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

Thanks Daniel

Hooligans

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

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

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

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

Everyday difficulties in Greece, described here by Angelique Chrisafis.

And it ain't over yet.

Kill or cure

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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!

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

Nausea

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

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

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"

The News of the Word scandal explained to Americans.

Hat tip to loads of people

Nationalism or internationalism

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

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

And another ...

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

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

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

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

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

International rescue

In a stimulating piece Iannis Carras writes about the environmental costs of the Greek bailout. He doesn't pull his punches about the self-interested funding pushed by the EU for inappropriate, destructive, large-scale and hugely expensive projects and their contribution to Greek indebtedness.

Much of the debate around the economic, political and societal crisis gripping Greece has overlooked the role of the European Union in fuelling the crisis. Quite apart from the distortionary effects on the competitiveness of peripheral states precipitated by the introduction of the Euro and the subsequent lack of adequate oversight, it was misplaced EU subsidies that resulted in a lack of competitiveness in many sectors of the Greek economy, and misplaced EU subsidies that allowed the dramatic growth of the Greek public sector following the election of Andreas Papandreou as Prime Minister in 1981.

He concludes:

The irony is that the Prime Minister, George Papandreou, whatever his other faults, has thus far stood out for his commitment to the environment... He is now being forced by the EU and the IMF to take responsibility for the worst man-made environmental destruction in the history of the Aegean.

How reassuring then that those self same officials are coming over to take control on behalf of those simple Greeks who just aren't up to running an economy. Reuters reports Eurogroup chairman Jean-Claude Juncker discussing how "the Greek crisis had been largely caused by itself" through paying too high wages (!) and saying,

"One cannot be allowed to insult the Greeks. But one has to help them. They have said they are ready to accept expertise from the euro zone"

Wow! Insulting? Patronising? Or both?  The failure of EU officials to acknowledge even the slightest responsibility for the crisis, all the while developing a new doctrine of bureaucratic infallibility, is profoundly depressing and gives little hope for the future. However, this is Greece we are dealing with and these people should remember that in these parts hubris is inevitably followed by nemesis.

Harigate

Everyone seems to be getting very excited by Johann Hari's alleged plagiarism. Here is my considered opinion.

Media training

Has Ed Miliband been coached like this?

After watching this strange interview I half expected him to come out with, "That would be an ecumenical matter".

Doomed.

Hat tip Anthony

UPDATE
The interviewer, Damon Green, has also expressed his despair

Aftermath

Coming out of a taverna on Wednesday night, the owners rushed out to talk to us. "Today has been a terrible day for Greece. This is no longer a democracy. We are worried for our friends in Athens. The only difference between now and the junta is that today we can talk and we are telling all the foreign people about what has happened." They were agitated and distressed by the shocking level of indiscriminate police violence against peaceful demonstrators (and even diners in nearby restuarants) that also drew protests from Amnesty International. Greece is not Syria, it isn't a dictatorship, they may have been melodramatic, but there are long memories here of the poverty and repression of the years of dictatorship and their anguish was real enough. They were not alone in their distress. What was more shocking was the claim by the responsible minister that the gas had been thrown by the protesters. Such a brazen lie shows a government utterly negligent in its duties towards its citizens. It took the police union leadership to show that civic society and democratic values are well and truly alive. He apologised for the violence and called for reform of the police service.

And it is reform that should now be dominating the headlines. Reform of the Greek state has long been seen as necessary and few will demur. Though what strikes me is that though there is much talk about the dangers of a disorderly default, I seem to be hearing little from the mouths of the elite about the dangers of disorderly austerity. No, the Greek people have to accept whatever is thrown at them, suddenly and abruptly. 'Shock therapy' is fine for ordinary people but not for the Eurozone banking system. Even if austerity is necessary (something I would dispute - though that is another argument) surely it can be managed in order to best protect the lives and businesses of the people, phased in with alternate investment and employment schemes to help growth, all the while tackling the real problems of lack of competitiveness and the inefficiency of the Greek state.

Even then, something would still be missing. Where is the EU dimension? Where are the reforms needed to monetary union to deal with the problems that have manifested themselves throughout this prolonged financial crisis? Then there is the democratic deficit implicit in technocratic elitism. Where is the discussion of this? Has the EU seen only external threat or the faults of its constituent nations rather than questioning whether its own structures have contributed to the crisis?

These are indeed the questions being raised by the people of the EU. And whilst the 'indignant ones' of Syntagma re-establish their presence, they now know that they are facing their own mirror image, an elite seething with indignation that anyone could possibly question their wisdom, prepared to defend the status quo - with tear gas if necessary.

Two opinions

Jose Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, the European commission and council presidents:

With today's approval by the Greek Parliament of the revised economic programme, the country has taken an important step forward along the necessary path of fiscal consolidation and growth-enhancing structural reform. But it has also taken a vital step back – from the very grave scenario of default. This was a vote of national responsibility.

Max Johnson of forex specialists, Currency Solutions (and just about everybody else):

And so another 10p looks set to be put into the meter of Greece's financial life support machine. With the Greek economy in intensive care, the Athens government finally has the mandate it needs to prescribe more bitter economic medicine. The Eurozone is now likely to approve a second bailout but there's every danger that the medicine will kill the patient.

Few Greeks look like they will take it lying down either. The popular anger convulsing the streets of Athens with strikes and protests will surely get worse.

There is every possibility that poorer Greeks, who will be hit hardest by the austerity measures, will simply refuse to pay their taxes. If that happens the prospects of a Greek default will go from highly likely to inevitable, plunging the country into the abyss and undermining any benefit the austerity measures may have had.

From here

UPDATE
Paul Mason on the violence in Athens:

What Greece is being forced to do is threatening the legitimacy of a democratically elected government and putting at risk the legitimacy of the political system in general. And the question for the EU and IMF is simple: is it worth it?

On the front line

OK - not quite at the front. I'll give you that.

Riots in Athens, hyperbole everywhere, a general strike today and, back in the UK, a big public sector strike on the future of pensions will take place tomorrow. And I am here, already drawing my pension and feeling incredibly lucky.

When I first came to Greece on holiday, I was sold the usual line. It was a faintly mocking one. There was the 'laid back lifestyle', 'slow pace of life', together with the gentle comedy of the ways of those curious Greeks. The favourite cliché peddled at the time was that 'everything worked on GMT - Greek Maybe Time'. It made visitors feel comfortable, patronisingly romantic and not a little superior. I got my first reality check when I strolled to the bus station only to find that the buses depart bang on time and that I had missed mine. I soon realised that, though the country will never be a model of Teutonic efficiency, what was happening was that people were working ferociously hard to make mass tourism work on a limited infrastructure. I gained a lot of respect for them.

Now those same people are staring at an economic crisis that seems scarcely credible. Facing massive state indebtedness, those who worked so hard are now looking at tax rises and at losing significant chunks of their income, if not their jobs. This would be bad enough if it wasn't for the the old stereotypes being trotted out again and again to explain it, basically seeing the crisis as the consequence of the moral failings of the natives. This is why it is nice to see the stereotype being challenged, such as in this refreshing post, even if some of the widely circulated figures are a bit dodgy and brushes with bureaucracy can give another impression.

Now, there is certainly some contributory negligence on the part of the Greeks and there are a couple of good pieces that highlight the history here and here. However, what we are seeing both here and in the UK is a clash between two models of political economy, with a resultant technical argument about how best to resolve problems (with the IMF and ECB's preferred model of austerity looking increasingly non-viable, both politically and economically - even the Economist is arguing for a managed restructure/partial default), and a wider debate about democracy, populism, and the broader purposes of the economy.

The thing that depresses me most is that policies are being presented as if there is no choice at all, as if, to use that lamentable phrase, there is no alternative. The clash of ideas is the very stuff of politics and the lapsing into some sort of post-ideological intellectual mush is one of the great failings of our times. It leads ordinary people to a sense of resignation and to the hubris of political leaders and technocrats alike, convinced that they are being bold when acting cautiously and wise when perpetuating errors. It is one of the oddities of the contemporary left is that foreign affairs have animated a debate (however grim), yet domestic economic policy has been allowed to lapse into consensus.

That consensus has contributed to a political stasis, a failure to deal with the real conflicts that affect everyday lives. Aditya Chakrabortty gives a perfect example of how this works, arguing for the importance of effective, confrontational trade unionism to the health of capitalism.

What's so odd about the current debate on inequality is that everyone deplores it and yet very few will come out and support the mechanisms to tackle it. Perhaps a CEO catching a thought-provoking discussion on Radio 4 will decide to shower his or her staff with payrises. And perhaps one day a plebiscite of turkeys will vote for Christmas.

With the debate on public services being dominated by models of consumer choice, we are forgetting that the bigger choices facing us are about the type of societies we live in, of how we distribute wealth, and on this the political class seem curiously silent, even as crisis engulfs a small, beautiful European country with a rather wonderful climate and hard-working people who deserve better.

Sense

As an antidote to some of the appalling stereotyping of Greeks, which generally omits their long working hours and low pay, and to some of the populist rhetoric being dished out, here is a clear-sighted short piece from Amartya Sen in which he actually praises the Greek government -

It is to the huge credit of the Greek government – George Papandreou, the prime minister, in particular – that it is doing what it can despite political resistance ...

Though he also points out that what they are being told to do is the wrong thing.

... but the pained willingness of Athens to comply does not eliminate the European need to examine the wisdom of the requirements – and the timing – being imposed on Greece.

 In typically elegant style he writes,

The high morals of "sacrifice" do, of course, have an intoxicating effect. This is the philosophy of the "right" corset: "If madam is at all comfortable in it, then madam certainly needs a smaller size." However, if the demands of financial appropriateness are linked too mechanically to immediate cuts, the result could be the killing of the goose that lays the golden egg of economic growth.

As I think back to the debate over European Monetary Union in the 1990s, I had little idea where I stood. This was partly because the anti-Euro campaign featured prominently some unpleasant and obsessive Tory right-wingers, who mixed up their opposition to the Euro with their general hatred of the European Union as a whole, whilst their Euro-scepticism was being disavowed by a newly enthused Labour Party. Yet those who who opposed the Euro were a mixed bunch indeed. It was a broad coalition that included social-democrats and libertarians as well as the Conservative nationalist right.  

Each emphasised different aspects of the argument, which consisted of a range of concerns; the inflexibility of the Euro, the loss of sovereignty and democratic accountability, the built in deflationary biases and the perception that a common currency would not promote convergence, but lead to divergence, between stronger and weaker economies. 

This certainly seems prescient today, though we sometimes forget that the conventional wisdom and liberal opinion was pretty much in favour of the UK joining and it was Gordon Brown who fought to keep Britain out when Labour were elected to power.

The result was that the UK was able to respond to the recession with a 25% devaluation and interest rates of 0.5%, strategies denied to the Greeks. (This also begs the question of why the Coalition government have been so determined to keep up with the new trend for cuts).

With hindsight, it appears that the sceptics got it right and, for those who adopted the Euro, political arguments won out over the economic ones. As Sen points out, that has, paradoxically, allowed political democracy to be undermined by the very economic flaws that were conveniently brushed aside. And it is this threat, and the systemic economic failures that have created it, that needs to be addressed, rather than indulging in stupid ethnic stereotyping of conveniently brown-skinned Mediterranean types and the rain-sodden Irish.

Inside the IMF

Key negotiations on the debt crisis have now been filmed.

There is none so blind ...

... as he who will not see.

This is a fair summary:

The European Central Bank will not countenance the idea of default. That just leaves deflation, and lots of it, as a way of putting the Greek economy back on track and ensuring the single currency remains intact.

This is a crackpot idea for two reasons. First, it runs counter to the basic principles of democracy; the Greek people are clearly not in the mood to bear the spending cuts, the reductions in wages and the sweeping privatisation being demanded of them by the European Union and the IMF as the price of a fresh bailout.

Second, deflation has already made Greece's debt problem worse and more deflation will make it worse still.

Larry Elliott arguing for the need of Greece to leave the Euro. The democracy point is well made here:

After Lehman, there was initial shock and uncertainty – but the collapse of stock, commodity and currency markets did not happen for a few weeks. That was when elected politicians were forced to choose between the demands of voters and markets, and went with the voters.

And there is a large measure of agreement from a Greek economic liberal:

Greece was bailed out to save European banks, not Greece itself, and that the bailout was only a temporary liquidity measure, when our problem is solvency. I explained back then that a massive recession was on its way and that there's no reason to expect anyone to lend to post-memorandum Greece who would not lend to pre-memorandum Greece, as the country will be more indebted and less capable of growth; hence the importance of reform. Finally, I pointed out in that interview that default has been historically proven to be a workable solution to a solvency problem and is an option for Greece. I still believe this, although people have to realise that timing the default is crucial and getting people to demand one right now is not going to help.

Even the IMF is starting to panic.

The International Monetary Fund warned European leaders that their hesitant response to Greece's debt crisis risked triggering the world's second global financial meltdown in three years.

So what is coming out of the EU?

Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister who chairs the meetings of the 17 eurozone finance ministers, said he felt for the Greeks: "This is something that affects me greatly. You look at the reaction of the people on the streets. You see they are rebelling. I understand that and I'm touched by that."

But he also said that there was no option but to keep to the existing plan: "There is no other choice than fiscal consolidation in Greece and in other fiscally weakened countries."

When will they wake up?

Liking Greece

 Anarchists certainly do.

Greece is another country that anarchists have a soft-spot for. But instead of loving Greece for the food and the island scenery like most normal North American and European tourists do, they like Greece for it’s anarchist activity...

There’s also another aspect of Greece that’s very exciting to anarchists, the all important riot-porn. If anarchists catch wind of new austerity measures enacted by the government, they all eagerly await when Libcom.org will get a new gallery of exciting imagery of tear gas, broken windows, destroyed businesses, and things on fire. After they get this out of their system, they can all flock to message boards to talk in disgust about the capitalist folly that brought those austerity measures into place.

Hat tip to an antipodean

Dog days

As I watch a warm afternoon breeze rustle the leaves of the walnut trees and the cat dozes on the wall in the shade of the vine, it is hard to feel as if I am in the centre of a crisis. Yet the turmoil in the urban centres of Greece continues as the government reconfigures itself. In a country where even the dogs riot, there is a sense that the consensus has broken down.  This is hardly surprising when the sole answer to the failure of an austerity package is another austerity package.

In the absence of any recognition that this is partly a systemic crisis, threatening the entire European economy and requiring systemic reforms, it seems that the only possible response to Greece's sovereign debt lies in a choice between growth and default. The first is precluded by a policy of artificially imposed austerity, the second is of uncertain consequence though beginning to look increasingly likely. In a thoughtful piece, the historian Mark Mazower concludes,

Thus, whatever the cost-benefit analysis says about default, the pressing issue for Greece and for the EU as a whole is political. People will not accept further cuts if they think this is simply to bail out Europe’s overpaid bankers, and they will not support a government they believe is devoid of any positive strategy for recovery. If that support vanishes, as it is on the verge of doing, the country may head for bankruptcy anyway. That might well be the worse option not only for Greece but for Europe too. The onus is now on Europe’s leaders to rise above the short-termism and the wishful thinking that characterises their responses so far – the latest EU-IMF agreement is more evidence of this – and to frame further assistance as part of a plausible plan for growth. Given their track record, we should not hold our breath.

 I think that the last word should be left to Loukanikos.

Top class

For a British Rugby League fan, watching the Australian Sate of Origin Series between New South Wales and Queensland is exhilarating and bloody depressing. Why? The standards reached are incredible and then it dawns on you that we will never win a series against them, probably not in my lifetime.

From the jaws of victory

Incredible

... Britain and its Nato allies no longer believe bombing alone will end the conflict in Libya, well-placed government officials have told the Guardian.

Instead, they are pinning their hopes on the defection of Muammar Gaddafi's closest aides, or the Libyan leader's agreement to flee the country.

"No one is envisaging a military victory," said one senior official who echoed Tuesday's warnings by Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, head of the navy, that the bombing cannot continue much beyond the summer.

What could be more self defeating, more likely to ensure that their desired end is not achieved? Could they have sent a clearer message to Gadaffi that holding on and waiting will give him the victory and the revenge he desires, condemning the Libyan people to yet more misery?

Of course the view of the majority of Libyans themselves is less equivocal. These come from a report in the same paper from the capital Tripoli, not the areas under the control of the revolutionaries.

"Most people want him out and more people can talk about this now than before because he is under pressure. But you still have to be careful. If you are caught, God knows what will happen to you." 

"Nato good, good," is a common refrain to be heard from people talking to foreign reporters.

"Look there - plainclothes police," said a taxi driver, driving through an area called Fashloum. "And there, and there. The only people who like Gaddafi are the police and people working with him."

Clarity

The jungle is cleared and a garden has emerged. However, the rumble over the Greek economic crisis continues. At village level, the bits that I manage to understand or are translated for me, range from delightful people picking gardenia flowers as gifts whilst expounding the most bonkers of conspiracy theories, the general idea that Merkel is the new Hitler (and the glee at the fact that the Germans poisoned themselves with their own bean sprouts, rather than with something grown by one of those recalcitrant Mediterranean types, is palpable), some pretty crude racism, whilst on the news protesters chant about the politicians being thieves. All have one thing in common, the sense that the cause of the crisis is a moral, rather than a systemic failure.

One of Adam Smith's most notable insights was his much misread notion that the strength of a modern, industrial society does not rest on the virtue of its citizens. Instead, small petty desires and self-interest drive economies and sustain civilisation. The target of Smith's writing was the same one that seems to animate popular debate today and thus leads us away from the major questions about the failures in the Eurozone. And, even if moral failure was a key factor, any system that has to rely entirely on the prevalence of human virtue has a major design fault anyway.

So, with the next tranche of bewilderingly terrifying austerity measures about to hit Greece, it was good to read these two posts from a new blog offering clarity about the systemic failings of both the single currency and the overarching economic model that informs it. This gets it spot on.

Without investment, or/and a dramatic structural change in the economy, to correct any trade imbalances everyone ends up working more for less. The promise is that this is for the short run. The reality is that, while the trade imbalance between the richer and poorer Euro members remain, it is for the very very long term. Under the austerity measures, the poorer states have even less resources to invest in structural changes to make their economies competitive. The ECB/IMF package is massive transfer of resources from the poor.

Instead the blog directs us to schemes such as this, Yanis Varoufakis and Stuart Holland's "modest proposal", and argues consistently that we are facing a EU-wide economic crisis that is not the result of the wayward behaviour of a few swarthy (or Irish) small nations, but an ongoing and inevitable consequence of the failure of the institutional architecture of monetary union. 

And so we face a choice between continuing pan-European austerity or a reform that will recycle trade imbalances to allow for investment and development in Europe's poorer nations. I know what my choice would be.

Hat tip - the ever useful KTG

It's a jungle out there

At least that is what the garden looks like. A month away and the combination of rain and sun has led to an explosion of greenery. Time to find a man with a strimmer - Niko!

The rest is more or less unchanging, a new greengrocers has opened and Stavroula comes to my gate to complain about life, speaking in Greek that I can't follow, to ask the usual questions and to warn me about the dubious behaviour and bad character of another of my neighbours before waving a cheerful goodbye. And of course, the moment I opened the patio doors the cat arrived expressing his deep affection and demanding food in return for the benefit of his company when he is not visiting other houses.

We are on the cusp between spring and summer, some of the wild flowers remain and a group of the last of the wild poppies are wearily hanging on amongst the grass and weeds. The most dramatic colour is provided by the pomegranate. The bright red flowers are starting to turn into fruit and it looks like there will be a bumper crop this year, though the bush is still small. Not that I will get to eat them as I will have returned to England for work by the time they are ready.

At least by arriving early this summer I got to taste the cherries. The crop is finished by this time of year but various neighbours had not been as ruthless in stripping the trees as previously and there were a few left.

It is warm, but not hot. The cicadas haven't started making their usual row and have left the cool nights to the nightingales and squabbling dogs. There is a strong gusting breeze and butterflies are flitting through the garden. It is good to be here.

The other delight is to taste real food. Today's simple lunch of tomato and cucumber with feta cheese and fresh baked bread was a gourmet delight. And that was one of the topics of conversation I had on the flight over. You know the years are advancing when a young woman anxiously asks you if you need help putting your rucksack in the overhead locker. Your self image as a young buck dissolves as you realise that you are well into the transformation from sex object to pity object. And when I finally sat down, slightly crestfallen, she, a Greek living in England, confessed that what she was really looking forward to on her return to her homeland was eating a tomato that actually tasted of something.

Yet that was not all we talked about. Our conversation ranged through art and architecture, radical education as well as history and political philosophy as she turned out to be a young and talented freelance animator and designer. She is just starting out, though I think you need to watch out for her name (or names - she seems to have rather a lot of them), she has the ability to go far.

So, summer beckons and as I type this I look through my open window under the klimataria, shaded by the vine, I get that familiar, startled feeling of not quite believing my luck in ending up here, in my own house on an early summer's day.

Far from the madding crowd

And crowds there are in Greece, gathered in city centres - with around three hundred thousand outside the Greek Parliament in Syntagma Square last night - to protest at the latest round of austerity programmes which are certainly depressing the economy but making no impact on the level of debt (See too Paul Krugman on the Helenization of a Europe-wide crisis).

Will I be parading my radical credentials at the forefront of a major protest movement? Of course not. I will be in Greece, but hidden away in rural Pelion indulging in escapism. And as I fly tonight, it seems that I will not be alone.

For sale

Human lives in exchange for a convenient escape.

First there is a little rehabilitation to help the sales pitch:

Britain and the United States are pressing for United Nations sanctions against 18 former senior Taliban figures to be lifted later this month in the strongest indication yet that the western powers are looking for a negotiated peace with the Taliban.

After all,  

Qalamuddin, the former head of the religious police, said however the Taliban had "changed". 

Like this?

Taliban gunmen have killed the headteacher of a girls' school near the Afghan capital after he ignored warnings to stop teaching girls, government officials have said.

 As for the Afghan people? Well some have a more down-to-earth view:

The Taliban are not our brothers, they are our killers.

Cassandras

As more news seeps out about the crumbling of Gaddafi's army, it seems a good time to look back on some of the recent commentary on Libya from the usual suspects - a study in the pathology of pessimism, a peculiar trait of the Guardianista.

First up, here's Richard Norton-Taylor:

In Libya, there is no end in sight to a campaign which is not succeeding in its UN-sanctioned aim to protect civilians.

 Hang on a second. "Not succeeding"?  Have I missed something here? Did Gaddafi's tanks and mercenaries actually carry out their slaughter in Benghazi and then move on throughout the East or did the UN action end up preventing it? And even if the conflict is dragging on with its horrible human cost, doesn't stopping Gaddafi's advance and saving the East from his clutches, at the very least, amount to a success? Isn't it a little early to pronounce the whole affair a failure? The revolutionaries certainly do not agree.

And in the second example even Simon Jenkins admits as much. But being Simon Jenkins he is also always good for a bit of light relief.

Britain has done what it said it was going to do – it stopped Gaddafi visiting his wrath on Benghazi. It should then have left, returning only if he did. 

Did I read this right? The moment Gaddafi was forced back from Benghazi he should have been left to crush the revolution everywhere else, securing his power, reinforcing and re-equipping his army all the while? Is Jenkins really suggesting that British forces should have been withdrawn to let him get on with it as long as he didn't touch this one city? Extraordinary.

Finally, we have the star turn, Jonathan Steele.

The best way to protect Libya's desperate civilians is for Nato to reverse its mistaken policy of taking sides.

Leaving aside the obvious point that not taking sides is not an act of neutrality but is de facto support for the the side with the best military hardware - in this case Gaddafi - has his moral compass gone completely awry?  Should we not choose sides between, on the one hand, a popular democratic revolution and, on the other, a kleptocratic, murderous, family tyranny whose leaders have been indicted for crimes against humanity? Are they moral equivalents to be treated as equals? It is absolutely clear that this is precisely the time to take sides. We should support the struggle for democratic change against the systematic violence of fascistic autocrats. Studious and oh so reasonable sounding neutralism is, in reality, the betrayal of the hopes of people risking everything for the sake of freedom.

The least we can give to the revolutionaries is our solidarity, the best is our help when it is requested, the worst is our disdain for their incredible courage in demanding to have what we so casually take for granted.