Mills and Boon

1. The Spirit of '69

I don't know when the word 'relationship' began to be used. It seems such a technical, dispassionate term. Maybe it was part of the political revision of language that was meant to remove emotion. Seeing as the predominant associated sentiment was hate, there was a point to it. But for love? Other words are redolent with breathless tension – 'affairs', 'flings' and 'liaisons'. There is the naughty wink implied by the not so innocent 'hanky-panky' and 'carrying on'. In contrast, we have the coyness of 'courting'. Then there is the depth of feeling seeping through 'desire', 'passion' and 'romance'. And if there was one word I wouldn't use about supporting a football team, it is 'relationship'.

Yes, this post is about football.

I was inspired to write this by a lovely series of posts from George Szirtes about the role of Manchester United in his life (starting here). In an act of spectacular unoriginality, shameless copying or hero worship (you can decide George), I have decided to do the same about my experience.

If Barbara Cartland had not been obsessed by winsome, virtuous women meeting square-jawed, though tender hearted, alpha males, she could have turned out potboilers about true love instead; the passion of the football fan. George would fit in well with both. Lean, intelligent, with a fearsome work ethic, he is also, of course, a poet and so would make a marvellous romantic hero. His great virtue is constancy. I, on the other hand, am certainly not lean, love my sleep and am a master of prevarication. And when it comes to football, I have wavered. Mine is a more complicated story.

It goes back to 1964. I grew up in the suburbs of South London and the father of a school friend took me to my first football match, Crystal Palace against Charlton Athletic. Palace won 3-1. I still have the programme. We sat in the old stand and at the end of the game we clambered over a low partition to reach the exit quickly. Tubby and hesitant, I lingered at the top only to be given a helping hand by an impatient fan who pushed me off. Nobody was concerned with my sense of indignity. I was ten days past my twelfth birthday.

Most children's football education comes from their families; they inherit their teams. My father had been a top class amateur footballer but had died when I was four. I had no knowledge of his allegiance other than the fact that he had played for Clapton when they won the FA Amateur Cup in 1924 and 1925.

I was interested, uneducated in the game and had a free choice. It was another friend, then a Manchester United fan, who went with me to a handful of matches. We saw Palace again against Coventry City in 1967 when they were on the verge of promotion under Jimmy Hill and went to a match at Tottenham. Then, in 1968, he was given tickets for Fulham against Manchester United and asked me along. It was a different experience; a packed ground was overrun with United supporters as they won 4-0 on the way to the European Cup. George Best scored twice, one a fierce shot at the near post. I remember waiting in long queues at the underground station whilst a police horse lazily nibbled my friend's new, trendy hairstyle. That didn't do it either, but a lingering affection for two clubs was eating away at me.

It was in the tail end of the 1967-68 season that I became a fully-fledged fan. And I chose Palace. It was a non-descript season for them and, in some perverse way, that attracted me more than the allure of the soon to be European champions. Palace finished eleventh in the second division. I also continued to watch United whenever they were in London, but I gave my heart to Crystal Palace. Both my two friends came to the matches with me and in time the United fan was converted to become a zealous Palace supporter.

Romantic attachment is indefinable. There were two rivals for my heart. Manchester United, exciting, glamorous offering the promise of eternal bliss (though none of us knew then that we would have to wait twenty-five years for consummation) and Palace, offering moments of hope and then never failing to disappoint, a floosy in a scruffy ground with open terracing and grass banking. Selhurst Park or Old Trafford? It was no contest. I chose Selhurst. And then the miracle happened.

1968-69 season started with three wins, but after a few setbacks it became clear that we were promotion contenders. The first division beckoned and Leeds United were sensationally defeated in the League Cup. Promotion was sealed in a tremendous final home game. 2-0 down at halftime to Fulham, Palace fought back to win 3-2 and finish second in the table behind Brian Clough's Derby County. We three friends were part of the crowd that invaded the pitch as the team appeared in the directors' box, stripped off their shirts and threw them to the crowd. Then they threw their socks and had to be restrained from removing their shorts.

We made our way back elated. Even at sixteen I was acutely aware of mortality, so I screwed up my eyes and hoped that I would not die before I saw Palace play in the first division.

When the fixture list came out, the first game was at home to Manchester United. There was something odd about the way the two clubs were to be entangled in more than my life.

2. Boom and Bust

The 2-2 draw with United in Palace's first game in the top division remained the highlight of a season that was one long struggle against relegation. In the final fixture of the season, an agonising 1-0 victory over Manchester City gave Palace a chance of staying up depending on the results of relegation rivals Sheffield Wednesday's final two games, played the following weeks. Sheffield needed three points to send us down in their place. The first was, inevitably, at Manchester United. And, to my horror, United failed to keep Palace up as Wednesday forced a 2-2 draw at Old Trafford. It was down to the last match against Manchester City, a win would have been enough. The news came through on the radio. City had won 2-1 and Palace were saved.

This triumph only opened the way to more suffering. Two more seasons of struggle and dramatic escapes culminated in the appointment of Malcolm Allison as manager. He took Palace down two divisions. They were relegated to division three in the same season United went down to division two.

But then the revival began. The start of it was the cup run of 1976. Palace went all the way to the semi-final as a third division club before the fans' hearts were broken as the team froze and lost to second division Southampton. But stunning away wins at Leeds, Sunderland and Chelsea are etched in my memory, just as I am etched on YouTube. Shortly after Palace's second goal I am there in the crowd, celebrating. There is a screen grab below.

Allison had another influence. He admired Milan and when he was at Manchester City used their red and black stripes as City's away kit. He did a similar thing at Palace. Out went the traditional claret and blue and in came red and dark blue stripes, together with a new crest and nickname of eagles. It is a change I have never wholly reconciled myself with.

We three friends all still went to matches together when we could, but we were young, wanted more from life, and everything was changing. One had moved away to live in the countryside and in September of 1976 I moved to Manchester.

3. Manchester

Manchester saw a change in my attendance patterns. I went to most United home games and Palace away games in the north. I was still a Palace fan but saw more of United. And the centrality of football in my life was fading. I had taken redundancy, studied at evening classes and entered the University of Salford. I was on my way to becoming an adult education lecturer and academic. Saturday afternoons were now reserved for essay writing with the football commentary on the radio. The year I left work, Palace had been promoted to division two. At the end of my first year at university they had won the second division championship under Terry Venables. Their young side had such a bright future they were dubbed 'the team of the eighties'. The year I graduated they finished bottom of the first division and had been relegated again.

Something else was happening too. My old life was slipping away. The three friends who had shared school, football and youth had drifted apart. We lost contact and though United were beginning to win more of my affection, I had started to fall out of love with football.

The eighties were heartless years and the football matched. Ruthlessly pragmatic, the pace had quickened and skill declined as two sides packed midfield and played high offside traps denying the space and time given to the longhaired artists of the sixties and seventies. But it was events off the pitch that got to me.

We should not romanticise the stadia of my youth. The crowd violence was real and ever-present. But the hard work, investment, social engagement and rebuilding that was necessary to confront the problem was entirely absent. Instead, club chairman competed with each other in savagery. One talked of birching hooligans on the pitch, another of turning flamethrowers on them. It was if the boardrooms of our football clubs were inhabited by the Taliban. These were the only businesses I knew of that wished to inflict brutal violence on their customers. It was only rhetoric, but what they were allowed to do was contemptuous of the ordinary fan, punished them for their loyalty and, it can be argued, was an act of class hatred.

Whilst those who could afford it sat in the stands with good views and relatively civilised conditions, the rest were physically caged on the terraces behind spiked steel fences. The grounds were crumbling, toilets were disgusting and I got tired of being crushed at inadequate entrances and exits and having my view obscured by fencing. The violence struck first. When I saw corpses being carried out of Heysel, I thought, "It's not worth it. I don't want to go any more". And all the time I was certain that there would be more deaths. I was convinced that one day those bloody fences would kill a lot of decent working class people. They did. Ninety-six of them.

In the meantime I had discovered a fresh love. I was taken to rugby league and fell for it both on and off the pitch. Here was a sport with a deep working-class ethic, demanding extraordinary levels of skill and courage, which was wonderfully entertaining. Off the pitch, there was no fencing, no segregation and, despite a large proportion of the crowd being pissed, no violence – just witty and abusive banter. Living within easy travelling distance of greats like Wigan or St Helens, who did I choose? Swinton. Another floosy. Another abusive affair. Over the years Swinton has provided a constant source of disappointment sprinkled with the odd moment of hope, just to keep you hooked. It was a new Crystal Palace. This time, there was no alternative temptation winking at me in the corner. I have stayed true and blue.

4. Eric

In the meantime, Palace had revived with a new young manager, Steve Coppell, who had played on the wing for Manchester United. And they reached the FA Cup Final; their opponents were, of course, Manchester United. The semi-final against Liverpool was televised live, but was on the same day as Swinton were playing at Huddersfield. I stood in front of the TV, ready to jump in the car the moment the match ended, expecting a heavy defeat. Instead it went to extra time and Palace won 4-3. We sped to Huddersfield and got there seconds before the kick off. I was wearing a Palace scarf to go with my Swinton one.

The final marked a turning point for me. A dramatic and dazzlingly entertaining draw at Wembley was followed by a replay in those days before things were settled by penalties. This time Palace decided to try and win by kicking the opposition off the pitch. It was a horrible, negative performance and they went down to a deserved 1-0 defeat. Later, with allegations of racism in the boardroom, it was hard to sustain affection. And then came Eric.

Romantic novels are not complete without a strong, dark, temperamental and, preferably, foreign hero who sweeps the heroine off her feet. United signed Cantona. There he was, Heathcliff and Rochester rolled into one. I saw his first game at Old Trafford. I was expecting fancy footwork. Instead, he played deeper and ran the game. The skill was there but so was the strength. He was utterly dominant. I had a new boyhood hero in my forties.

Cantona was the catalyst that opened up an unbelievable chapter in the history of United and I became a Cantona fan, probably more so than a United fan. His weakness lay in his fierce temper, a product of his pride and intelligence. He did not suffer fools gladly, once calling his national team manager a "shitbag". As a result, his greatest moment of fame was to attack an abusive spectator, leaping into the crowd with a kung-fu kick, at, where else, Crystal Palace.

Though never quite the same when he retired, I continued to follow United, seeing some wonderful football and enjoying the success of the season of the treble. The joy was palpable, but restrained by something inside. Was it just because I was older, or was it the nagging guilt of infidelity? And once again I was losing my love of football.

The game itself was better, but the economics of it caused me moral unease. It was not just the obscene amounts of money, nor even the greed of the Premier League; it was what was happening to fans. In the eighties the issue of football violence had been dealt with by punishment, now the tactic was more profitable, exclusion by price - gentrification. I and many others began to be priced out, even though I was in a comfortable middle class profession. Corporate guests got the best seats as stadia were redeveloped. And as football gentrified, it became fashionable. Politicians adopted unconvincing allegiances to appear as ordinary guys. Ownership changed. Plutocrats came in. I didn't like it and the contrast with Rugby League was striking. I stopped going and became an armchair fan. In the meantime, Palace went into administration and nearly ceased to exist. So did Swinton.

5. Reunited

Crystal Palace were receding from my life. I still looked out for scores, though even forgot to do that at times. I watched United on TV and followed Swinton home and away, going to exotic places such as Dewsbury and Barrow. Even that became more truncated as I got my house in Greece and Rugby League became a summer sport. Then, something else happened. I got an email out of the blue from an old friend who I hadn't been in contact with for more than thirty years. It could never have happened without the Internet. This set in train a series of conversations about "whatever happened to …". A bit of Googling and we found out. Those three schoolboys who stood on the Holmesdale Road End, who ran on to the pitch in 1969 and who suffered the agonies of the 1976 cup run, were back in touch.

We were radically different people from the ones who drifted apart. I was an academic on the verge of publishing my first book, another was an entertainer and disc jockey who lived in Spain, the third was a playwright living on an organic farm. We decided to meet and where else could we go but to a Palace match.

Reunions are difficult, something that Milan Kundera depicted in his post-communist novel, Ignorance, where he built his narrative on a reunion between one person who escaped and his old comrades who remained trapped in Stalinist Czechoslovakia. For a time the past holds, but there is a void, those years without conversations, those life experiences about which they were mutually ignorant. It could only end in disappointment and distance. This is also the case with an old football team. Some players were unknown, even the supporters' chants were different; everyone was talking of matches you hadn't seen. There was an ache of regret at the missing years. But the bond was there, Palace won, the joy was deep and the shared weekend was alcoholically magic.

Yet friendships cannot solely rest on a shared past. They have to have a present and build a future. And that future will, inevitably, be centred around football. An era has come to an end at United with the retirement of Ferguson. A new one is beginning at Palace with sanity returning to the boardroom and a dramatic promotion to the Premiership by winning the play-off final at Wembley. It hurt not being there. My first love had stirred. The texts from the friend who went flowed. Emails buzzed over to Spain.

The star of the play-offs was Wilfried Zaha. Twenty-years-old, extravagantly talented, but very raw, he showed something else in those games, strength and courage. He has the makings of a very great player indeed. But he too is off. To Manchester United. In interviews he showed himself to be articulate and determined to leave a legacy at the club that had nurtured him for ten years. Even if he goes on to be a United great, you get the feeling that he will never lose his affection for his first team. I can identify with that. Crystal Palace are back in my life, but I also might just become a Zaha fan.

The power of first love is part of the armoury of cliché that the romantic novelist carries into battle. The best subvert the genre; others embellish it with purple prose. But there is an alternative literary device, a cyclical view of life. Though our physical lives are unavoidably linear, our destinies are linked to our pasts. Circles are closing; old ties are proving stronger than I thought. And you know what? It feels good.

In praise of disobedience

Schindler's Ark gave a marvellous example of how in a criminal world it takes a criminal to accomplish great acts of morality. Similarly, when faced with an act of political stupidity, it is the bureaucrat that knows how to fix it. The 'bedroom tax', a reduction in housing benefit to be paid to people deemed to be over-occupying houses because they have a 'spare' bedroom, even if they use it, has proved to be expensive and, at times, cruel. So how do you deal with it? It is relatively simple, if time consuming. Find a way to call that room something else - a study, a box room, a 'non-specific' room. (The non-specific room is a masterpiece of bureaucratic jargon being used to thwart bureaucracy.) Leeds City Council point out why they are doing it:

Councillor Peter Gruen, the Labour member responsible for neighbourhoods, planning and support services, said it would cost the council more to evict tenants and rehouse them than it would to simply accept that many could not pay for the underoccupation charge.
He said: "The idea of taxing poor people for bedroom tax is perverse. The charges we incur in legal fees chasing up the increasing rent arrears from the last two months is farcical. It costs the courts far more money to evict people."

There is a more general point to be made here. People do not always obey orders. Often they find ways round them. Disobedience to authority is just as human a characteristic as obedience. For that we should be grateful. It can save lives.

Progress

The Internet is to blame. We have forgotten how to socialise with real people. Our concentration spans are being destroyed. It used to be the cinema. Or the telly. Or anything new. But whatever it is, we're doomed.

A few years ago Kirkpatrick Sale wrote, presumably on a computer, that: "computers are steering the world toward social inequity and disintegration." John Michell has added, "To institutionalize the dark ages by giving authority to the metric system would be an act of folly inconceivable in any other age but our own." Yes, you read that right. The metric system. Apparently imperial measures are "sacred measures" that unify the "macrocosmic body of the universe and the human microcosm." A few more kilometres down the long road to hell.

Modern medicine is killing us. We need 'natural' remedies. Big pharma is enslaving and poisoning us. The obesity epidemic means that we're all going to die! (This is, of course, technically true, the big question is when).

Our populations are ageing, we are all living longer (er, what was that about big pharma and obesity again?), we have a pensions crisis, there are too many people in the world! Ah, Thomas Malthus, you have never been forgotten.

Life is suffused with arbitrary tragedies, but in general we are living longer and healthier lives. Yet, some misanthropists see this as unmitigated bad news. Industrialisation has brought real environmental dangers, but also the means to understand their mechanisms and to take action to mitigate them. (Though it has also produced lobbyists determined to stop us; life is never simple). And yes, population growth does have profound environmental consequences. So, how do we limit the pressures of population? Well, if this report is anything to go by, by living longer, more prosperous lives. And watching telly. And not only because it restricts the amount of time available for sex.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the transition to a low fertility regime, deemed necessary by almost all environmentalists, requires substantial modernization, particularly in the socio-cultural realm. Television depresses fertility because many of its offerings provide a model of middle class families successfully grappling with the transition from tradition to modernity, helped by the fact that they have few children to support. 

It appears that modernity offers the solution to the problems of modernity. We may not be doomed after all – unless the lobbyists win that is.

Hat tip - Paulie

Master Chef

So Delia thinks we are losing the art of home cooking. Well here is something to cheer her up.

Thanks to Roy, with fond memories

Mr Tory

Back in the UK, feeling cold and decidedly grumpy; an ideal time to pick an argument, which I did over Michael Gove's 'Mr Men' attack on his critics. Some people have praised it, but I am unimpressed.

The speech starts in a curious way for someone so attached to the concept of rigour, a misquotation in the wrong context. Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, which is what I presume he is alluding to, does not contain the line, "Truth is beauty and beauty is truth". It ends with the following:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

Gove thinks that we need to know a bit more than that; quite rightly so.

This misquote is one of a bewildering set of sub-headings (all taken from a conservative literary canon; Wordsworth, Kipling, Tennyson amongst others) sprinkled throughout the text often with little relevance to what follows. It is as if a dictionary of quotations had been mined to lend the speech literary pretentions. Stylistic quirkiness apart, Gove promises to "abjure ... Ciceronian rhetorical tricks", and then fills his speech with them.

Let's start with one bit that I agree with him over, English Language. I have been dispirited by the standard of written English in many undergraduate essays recently. It has been even more worrying in that in trying to work with some students on improving their writing they lack even the most basic knowledge of grammar. Explaining what a verb is should not be part of my job. The worst thing from my point of view is that it takes so long to mark the bloody things. Nothing is more likely to make me come over all Goveish.

Given the interrelationship between language, class and power, this is a critical issue. As too is his defence of liberal learning, high standards and quality vocational training. Who could disagree? And this is the point. Jamie Whyte puts it beautifully:

A simple test for substance in political statements is whether anyone sane would disagree. If a politician declares it his aim to make the people of Britain healthy, wealthy and wise he tells you nothing useful... In a healthy democracy ... political discussion would focus on the difficult and controversial issues where reasonable people disagree. 

This rhetorical device is used throughout the speech. You are so busy applauding the sentiment, you forget that the debate is not about whether English Language teaching should be improved, it is about whether, for example, a "screening check at age six" is the right way to go about it. He dodges the debate on specific policies by begging the question, assuming that his are the only answers to the issues he raises. Rhetoric on uncontentious ends suppresses debate on contentious means.

The speech is supposed to be an answer to his critics, so how does he deal with them? Does he answer their criticisms? Of course not. He deploys three more tricks. The first is to ignore substantive issues and instead attack an imputed motive. Talking of a letter signed by 100 academics in the Guardian he says:

The assumption lying behind the letter was that the level of aspiration embodied in the current curriculum, its associated teaching methods and our national examinations was already high enough.

The letter says nothing of the sort. And then he continues:

And I have a different starting premise from those 100 academics who are so heavily invested in the regime of low expectations and narrow horizons which they have created. 

Having shown what thoroughly bad people they are, he does not need to inconvenience himself with the fact that, rightly or wrongly, they are concerned that his policies could damage aspiration, lower achievements and narrow horizons. He is not dealing with what his critics are actually saying, but the motives that he has invented for them.

Now for the second trick, the centrepiece of the speech and the bit the media have picked up on, Mr Men and the teaching of history. What he is doing is choosing an extreme example and launch an attack using it as if it was the norm. This is a typical straw man argument. Now, to my inexpert eyes, the Mr Men lesson looks, well, pretty grim. But where does it come from? Is it widely employed in schools? Actually, it is from here; a commercial, private web site, run by someone teaching in the independent sector in France. There is no evidence of its use in English schools. It looks as if Gove's researchers have trawled the web to find something they could ridicule. The whole of schools' history teaching is tainted through guilt by association, despite there being no evidence of any such association existing. But as a tactic it has worked magnificently. Gove's proposals have been ignored as press coverage focuses on the irrelevant and unrepresentative Mr Men and the Nazis.

Finally, out comes a tired, old stalwart; misrepresentation and scorn. This made me recall something from my adult education days in North Yorkshire. Anyone working in community outreach knows that the most difficult thing for a prospective student is taking that first step over the door. The local Training and Education Council tried to deal with this by sponsoring a bite-sized courses week. Free ten to twenty minute sessions on simple skills or interesting facts (we ran local history sessions) were held in locations all over the region. The aim was to tempt people in for the first time then give them the information and guidance about doing something more serious. It was a moderate success, but a PR disaster. One of the sessions showed a quick and easy way to get a duvet into its cover. The local press had a field day with headlines about colleges running courses on duvet stuffing, dumbing down, wasting public money on rubbish instead of proper education, all the usual guff. The result was that they killed the idea, it never happened again.

Gove's speech does the same thing, picking on some ideas suggested for use, predominantly, in primary school history teaching. Here he conflates two things; methods that are used to engage students at the beginning of their learning with what they do by the time they have reached the end. I can assure you that my history seminars are entirely free of cartoon characters, but did any of my students start getting a love of the subject from learning in this way? I certainly didn't get mine from Richard J Evans; it came from reading Ladybird Books in the late 1950s. If you want to engage people, you have to do it with material that is appropriate to their age, prior knowledge, etc. This isn't having low aspirations, it is about finding ways to get people to enjoy learning and laying the foundations for more serious study and adult methods at a later stage. Again, he uses this to shift his attention away from his critics who argue that the methods he favours are those that turned generations of young kids off history for life.

There is much more in there too. It is a speech that uses all the tricks in the politician's toolbox. You should not be surprised. Michael Gove is a politician and an ambitious one at that. Nor should you be surprised by his ideologically driven history syllabus. Sure it is nationalist, but then so is Gove, saying that he would vote to leave the EU. Nor should you be astonished that his pedagogy is conservative, he is a Tory. What else would it be? And it certainly should not be a shock that the cumulative effect of his measures is to centralise power over education policy in Whitehall, after all he is only following the road first laid out by Kenneth Baker in a previous Conservative administration.

The fight is on for the future of education. Gove is there in the blue corner, confident and pugnacious, ducking and weaving. This doesn't worry me. My anxiety comes when I look over to the red corner. There, fear haunts his opponent's eyes and there is no strategy to defend against such a clever right hand lead. In poor condition, the best the left's champion can hope for is to deflect the blows. Delivering the knockout punch is a distant dream.

UPDATE
The Historical Association gets under his guard and lands a couple of shots here and here.
Thanks to Anne

On the way

Details here as well as fame in Canada. 

Avast

This has to be the story of the week.

Members of a North Devon WI were left embarrassed after a number of them had dressed up as pirates for a talk by a former sea captain who has been held hostage by Somali pirates for several weeks...  

"There he was delivering this harrowing story about how he was held hostage and feared for his life, and we were all sitting there dressed as Captain Hook".

Pots and cats

It ain't necessarily so

I hate the term the New Atheists. I am fed up with the way it is used to sneer at a group of modern authors who are simply the latest in a long-standing intellectual tradition that rejects religion and religious thought. What distinguishes them is that they are good writers and have a large, receptive audience. They have not had to deal with the hostility and persecution dished out to Richard Carlile or G W Foote; instead they are read by many, well-rewarded and face ineffectual opponents using some of the sloppiest arguments I have seen.

Rambling articles describe atheism as another form of religious faith (presumably in the same way that all anti-Fascists are Nazis, anti-Communists worship Stalin, and anti-atheists … you get my drift) or think that without the moral code and sense of right and wrong that religion brings we will sink into a pit of cruel depravity. Max Dunbar demolishes one of the worst examples here.

But what strikes me is that the defence of religion being mounted rarely contains a defence of the existence of god. Instead, all the discussion is really about the sociology of religion. And this is the crux of the argument. The religious believe in the existence of one or more supernatural or spiritual beings, whilst us atheists find the whole notion preposterous. Rather than take on the empirical evidence or discuss theology, it is more convenient for a predominantly secular audience to shift the debate away from the literal truth of religion to the function it performs. Yet, really the argument is simple. And, as far as I am concerned, there is no god.

Ignorance is not bliss

The measles outbreak in South Wales continues, with one death possibly attributed to the disease. It is the inevitable outcome of the dip in vaccination caused by the MMR scare. Much has been made of the role of the right-wing press, most notably the Daily Mail, in feeding the anxiety engendered by the claims of Andrew Wakefield that led him to be struck off the medical register. (The whole saga is explained simply in a graphic here). Yet, I was also taken by surprise recently when anti-vaccination sentiments were raised in another, more radical, setting. This shows that suspicion of science goes well beyond the hypochondriacs of the Mail.

Part of the reason why MMR gained such prominence is that a good controversy sells papers and part is that the default position of the populist press is distrust of what they see as the 'vested interests' of aloof experts on the make. They are driven by anti-intellectualism, see themselves as champions of 'common sense', popular wisdom, or, as it is also known, ignorance. This is where the radical left, especially in its counter-cultural moments, also steps in with its healthy scepticism of the powerful. This can be highly rational and understandable, though it sometimes leads to overreactions with unintended consequences. Yet, it can become a blanket judgement and when it comes to alternative health, this very scepticism of 'big pharma', again held with good reason, leaves people wide open to exploitation by the multi-millionaire retailers of quack remedies who pose as their champions. At one extreme scepticism becomes cynicism, and at the other, gullibility.

So who are we to trust? How can we be sure that we are being told the truth? The answer is actually quite simple. It lies in method. For scientists this is straightforward, there is a scientific method of research and evaluation that is integral to good science. One of its great champions in the blogosphere is David Colquhoun, the subject of an excellent profile here. But for those of us who work in the humanities and social sciences, it does not seem so straightforward. Yet we too have methods of inquiry, rules of logic, a critique of rhetorical tricks and the tools to think clearly about causality and correlation. Subject the claims of quacks and conspiracists to proper empirical examination and logical analysis, and they crumble before your eyes. This is one of the main reasons why their propagators try and draw adherents into what effectively becomes a cult, part of a circle of "truth tellers', resistent to reality.

Critical thinking, just like scientific method, does not happen spontaneously. It has to be learnt. This is why I have always argued, not always successfully, for the teaching of study skills as a discrete, accredited unit as part of any course. Much of what passes for skills development is about how to write an essay to a set formula, whereas what I have advocated is that it should be, amongst other things, about clear thinking; giving the students the basis they need to spot self-serving bullshit a mile off. And Colquhoun's best throwaway remark in the Observer profile gives us a pretty good indication of why it is desperately needed.

... the lack of scientific education among politicians is scary. Can you imagine a minister of education referring to "Newton's laws of thermodynamics", or giving taxpayers' money to schools that believe in karma and gnomes? Michael Gove has done both.

Hard sums and easy morals

One of my favourite quips about modern economic theory is that its reliance on mathematical models is bad economics, but even worse maths. That certainly has been brought home by the spreadsheet mistake in the influential work of Reinhart and Rogoff. So it was nice to see this piece by David Graeber arguing that:

After all, as I and many others have long argued, austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality. We are talking about a politics of crime and punishment, sin and atonement. True, it's never been particularly clear exactly what the original sin was: some combination, perhaps, of tax avoidance, laziness, benefit fraud and the election of irresponsible leaders. But in a larger sense, the message was that we were guilty of having dreamed of social security, humane working conditions, pensions, social and economic democracy.

And this is the paradox. We rather like a good dose of vindictive morality. Nothing gives a believer more pleasure than the thought of the wicked burning in Hell for all eternity. Yet the stern face of just retribution is not always wise, especially when delivered in the name of flawed institutions.

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. 

Forgive us our debts rather than impoverish a continent. But that is no part of the great Austeritian faith of tough choices and harsh medicine. Even without indulging in the sentimental belief that economics is about ensuring the welfare of all, there is a utilitarian argument against the economics of austerity; it makes everything worse. Larry Elliott expands on a neat metaphor here:

The economist George Akerlof came up with a metaphor for the state of the global economy at an IMF conference on rethinking macro economics. "The cat is still stuck up the tree and we don't know how to get it down", he said. Keynes would suggest building a bigger ladder. Hayek would wait for the cat to jump down of its own accord. The European approach involves chopping the tree down.

Flowers

Wild

and tame

Spring in Greece is special.

Love and marriage

Marriage destroys love through property.

Henry Seymour, individualist anarchist, 1888.

In the 19th century, the people who I write about were much taken with the idea of 'free love'. Those of us who came of age in the sixties and seventies are more likely to associate the phrase with the licentiousness of the 'permissive society', whose membership forms seemed so elusive at the time. In fact, the term referred to something else entirely. This was the idea that the law had no place in regulating human sexual behaviour, that 19th century marriage was an institution that dehumanised women by making them the property of men, and that marriage was not a free choice due to the social and legal coercion directed against those who chose to not to get married. Ending legal marriage was therefore seen as a process of emancipation.

As a happily unmarried person, I have some sympathy with them. I have seen perfectly content partners turned into warring spouses due to the expectations and pressures that marriage can bring to bear. However, there are many other blissful and lasting marriages amongst my friends and acquaintances and who would deny them the right to celebrate and formalise their relationship through marriage? Well, quite a few if they were gay.

Whereas, many of the causes that those 19th century radical battled for have been won and the decision to enter into a legal relationship is mainly a free choice, the law still puts on its sternest face, not to force people to get married, but to deny them the right to do so if they choose. The arguments pitted against freedom of choice and equality before the law range from outright bigotry, through doctrinal rigidity, to elaborate sophistries; none impress. So, though marriage is not for me, I am delighted that New Zealand has at last made it available to everyone who might want it, just as the right not to get married remains.

Legislative assemblies can be forbiddingly formal places, but here human happiness intruded as a decision was celebrated to at last accept full legal equality for gay people. And what a touching scene it was.

Tough choices

Sometimes it is a question of priorities.

Sue Marsh writes on the withdrawal of the Youth Premium that treats severely disabled young people who will never work as if they have full national insurance contributions. It costs £11 million a year. She writes:

In Westminster terms it would barely pay for the DWP's paperclips. It is a drop in the ocean of a welfare budget spanning 10s of billions. It only applied to a few thousand of the most disabled children in society (children just like Ivan Cameron, had he lived into adulthood.) But Lord Freud, failed investment banker and Minister for Welfare Reform, insisted that we could "no longer afford it" We could no longer afford to allow such profoundly disabled children lives of dignity and independence. No more security. No relief for worried families that they would be safe once they were gone. A cross-party consensus of decades, stripped away by ministers who didn't even know what they were doing.
This week, William Hague assures us we can afford £10 million for a ceremonial funeral for Margaret Thatcher.

Oh well. There now follows a party political funeral.

England, my England

First, Parliament is recalled at vast expense and ten million quid is quickly found from an austerity budget to pay for a funeral for a Prime Minister who left office over twenty years ago and who has become an icon of both the left and right for wholly contrasting reasons.

Second, Ding Dong the Witch is Dead is in the top ten.

Those acquainted with British social history should not be surprised.

The British state has always had a taste for pompous, and expensive, self-congratulation. The people have a long tradition of confronting it with raucous irreverence. In the eighteenth century the solemnity of the gentry was often met with a popular form of ridicule, rough music. Rough music was a cacophony of noise made by an exotically dressed mob to humiliate the target and puncture self-importance. Today it is the same. Except that a man with antlers on his head bashing a tin kettle has been replaced by Judy Garland. I suppose that's progress.

Letting go

It takes a huge amount of mental honesty to admit that you have succumbed and that the idealism has slipped away; understanding that "failure that begins with indifference". This article on disengagement from prison education is a lovely piece, though the author, Alan Smith, was incredibly lucky to be able to give up the way he did.

His final class, slowly winding down, gave him a series of "golden, other-worldly mornings". They were reading Chaucer. They loved it. As Smith puts it:

When we don't know about history and art and society we are adrift. Most of you reading this will never have had that experience, but many of the men I taught were ignorant of just about everything, and as grown men felt this keenly. Education was a relief, a route to self-respect.

And this is why it may be another time to give up:

For the most part, classes in the arts, social sciences and languages have been closed. There won't be much of my liberal nonsense in the future. The government has decided training for work is the way to go and for the most part education, beyond basic numeracy and literacy, has been abandoned. I can't see it myself.

I can't see it either. And I don't like the idea that a liberal education should become the expensive preserve of a pampered elite in a way it has never been before.

Beauty and bestiality

The most moving piece in the papers this week is Ed Vulliamy's superb account of the music composed and performed in the Terezín transit camp, the last stop en route to the gas chambers. There, music was allowed to flourish for a short time before a generation of Czech musicians and composers were exterminated.

The article is accompanied by this video account by a survivor, Zdenka Fantlova:



There is also an interactive guide available online.

Of the stories Vulliamy recounts, one of the most shocking is the way that the music was used for propaganda to fool the Red Cross about the nature of the camp, more shocking still is that the Red Cross were taken in. Please preserve us from the gullibility of the well-meaning. A propaganda film was also made in 1944 which included a performance of Hans Krása's children's opera, Brundibár, written before the war, but reconstructed in the camp. A clip of the performance is on YouTube. I find it unbearable to watch. Immediately after filming, the children were sent to Auschwitz to be murdered. Few survived.

Here is a modern performance, it is as exquisite as it is touching:



The main reason for posting this, apart from the quality of the article, is that it is at times like these that we should remember that fascism should be offered no respectability, no excuses, no understanding; it only ends in death.

Shock horror!

Big fall in mature students comes as shock to universities

They're surprised?  Run that by me again ... I suppose that they never guessed that closing adult education departments might actually reduce numbers. I mean, who would have thought it?

Spring

Hello Britain

Recipes

One of the first things you learn in adult education is not to patronise your students. You may be popularising but you are not dumbing down. Watching a documentary on Pompeii the other night it struck me that one of Nick Cohen's favourite moans about the quality of BBC TV drama could easily be applied to their historical documentaries.

There seems to be a standard formula. First, take a ten minute script and turn it into a one hour programme. Then take a presenter and send them somewhere pretty and warm to be filmed. Add a thirty second clip of actors in costume running around screaming, then repeat it several times. Include a computer generated recreation of an event or building and repeat that several times. Actually, repeat everything several times on the assumption that the attention and retention spans of the audience are roughly equivalent to those of goldfish. Finally, do a facial reconstruction of an ancient dead human and mouth platitudes like, 'wow, this is a real living person.'  (No it isn't. It's a waxwork. And anyway most of the audience will have died of boredom by then and will have started channel-hopping for repeats of Father Ted).

The documentary had one thing to say, which was that the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum were killed by a heat blast and not smothered by ash. Interesting, but that was it. A bit of explanation why helped us along for a few more minutes. But even that explanation was simplified (and repeated several times) on the grounds that the audience will be a bit too stupid to understand much else.  And they are all like that; deeply, deeply patronising.

Remember this:


That's what documentaries used to be like.  And you tell that to young people today ...

Doom and gloom

Cyprus, the Leveson debacle, retrospective legislation. I give up.

I suppose as the old slogan doesn't quite go, "Fuck news-related material, let's dance!"

Disobedience

Early in the crisis, a wise ex-colleague wrote to say that "Savers will pay for the mess. They are the only ones that have any money left."

That comment was relayed by Buttonwood in the Economist yesterday.

Aditya Chakrabortty also quotes the words of a friend:

A friend of mine has a mid-level job at the European Commission. Over the past few years, through Greece and Ireland and Portugal and Spain, he has kept up a resolutely chipper air. This weekend, as details of the Cyprus deal came out, he sent me this email: "Is this what the European financial system has come down to? A direct appropriation of savings because it cannot cure its systemic problems. It is not just the banks that are bankrupt. It is the whole bloody model that has run its course and we are in denial."

It was a bad idea too far. They hit savings, not income. They were punishing virtue with theft. The Cypriot Parliament looked out and saw their own angry citizens, then they scanned the horizon and saw Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland. And what else could they say, but 'no'.

Who knows what will happen next. The fear of contagion for the EU, especially after the Italian elections, is not economic. Instead, they must worry about how disobedience might become a habit now that a precedent has been set.

This is a long running saga, going way back into the 19th Century to the ideas of the people that I write about. There were contrasting views amongst reformers and radicals. On the one hand there was an eclectic bunch of mutualists, cooperators, radical liberals and democratic socialists. On the other sat the Fabianism of the Webbs with their belief in the benign rule of a technocratic elite. The Fabians had social science and rationality on their side. They were meritocratic elitists, managerialists one and all. The others believed in self-determination, liberty, devolution and democracy. In the struggle between coherence and the disparate messiness of the libertarian left, coherence won out. Later, the EU enshrined technocracy at its heart. It has one major flaw. What if the technocrats are idiots?

The democrats bit back today, not through the election of anti-political clowns, but through a simple act of denial. The consequences are uncertain, but we have just had a reminder that democracy is present only when people have the power to refuse.

The crisis returns

It is bad economics and bad politics. There was always a better option.

But let's be provocative. What can one say in favour of the Cypriot raid on bank deposits?

First, it is progressive. The rich pay the most. The very poor pay nothing, as they are usually too poor to save.

Second, what is the worse crime? Taking 7-10% of people's bank deposits or 50% of the incomes of the already poor?

Of course it isn't as simple as that. As a wealth tax it is inefficient. The wealthy will have much of their money in assets not cash and will be more than able to absorb the cost. It is more likely to hit older people. Small savers will often have scrimped and sacrificed to build up some reserves for later in life from already highly taxed incomes. They may have sold assets to fund their retirement or to support their children and grandchildren. To be denied the gratification that they had deferred is a harsh irony. Their inclusion, along with the wealthy, is unjust and quite possibly illegal. Deposits up to €100,000 are supposed to be guaranteed. As for the shares of equivalent value given in compensation, I don't think that many financial advisors would suggest selling at the moment.

But it isn't just that. Why else is there real anger? Certainly, there is the shock of hitting the one area of wealth that was seen to be immune. And we don't like retrospective taxation. It comes far too close to theft for anyone's liking. But then there is also a sense that thrift is virtuous. Taxing virtue is not moral, especially as it is done to recapitalise the banks broken by the immoral gamblers of the financial world. The feckless are to be repaid by the thrifty.

What this seems to show is that moral discourses are inescapable in economics. The attempt to render it a technical subject alone runs the risk of abject moral (and technical) failure. It is good to see that the 19th Century term, political economy, has made a comeback. It implicitly includes the human impact of policy in its calculations. The failure of the well-heeled technocrat is seeing poverty, unemployment, desperation and all the ills of austerity as technical indicators and not as real lives.

Of course, there have also been many trying to turn the crisis into a morality drama of the indolent south against the industrious north. This sophistry has been pervasive. But just as there are various competing policy options there are different moralities that should be at play too. There are alternatives. How about a sense that economics should be based on a sense of the implicit and equal worth of all people? Making the well being of all, rather than the protection of institutions, the first priority would have led to different policies. And they may well have proved more successful.

UPDATE:
Made in Germany.

And the risk of a run on the banks.

Truth and lies

In my last post I wrote about how John Stuart Mill saw truth emerging from the conflict of ideas. What he had in mind was doctrine and belief. I think he would be astounded to discover the battles that are now waged against empirically verified reality, something that he no doubt assumed would be accepted by all. If we are not to live in a fantasy world, the duty to contest in these cases is not a way of exploring truth, but of defending it against distortion and deliberate campaigns of disinformation.

Mill was a true Victorian liberal. He envisaged civilised debate between rational people and a respectful, thoughtful exchange of ideas. And in this spirit we should welcome this new film (and web site) on climate change denial.



Greedy Lying Bastards gets it about right.

In one sense that is a little unfair as many deniers are horribly sincere. But who dreamt up the misinformation that they believe and endlessly repeat? Someone had to distort and manipulate data and it had to be deliberate. When every single claim made has been subjected to rigorous scientific analysis and all, yes all, have been found to be utterly wrong, the expensively maintained communications machines that produce and endlessly repeat this guff must know it to be false.

Phil Plait gets it right writing about the "blatantly untrue, ... ridiculous and obviously false statement" that there has been no warming for the past sixteen years:

The difficulties in debunking blatant antireality are legion. You can make up any old nonsense and state it in a few seconds, but it takes much longer to show why it’s wrong and how things really are.

When financial interests team up with wishful thinking, we are in trouble. It is about time to drop polite respectability and call a lie precisely what it is.

In praise of free speech

I have been meaning to put up a review of Nick Cohen's polemic on free speech, You Can't Read This Book, for some time. With a brief hiatus at a hectic time, this is the moment for me to post some comments on the book. A regular reader of Cohen's journalism will be familiar with many of the examples he gives and the case studies with which he illustrates his main themes. These include religious extremism and the manufacture of offence, Britain's egregious libel laws, the suppression of free speech in the workplace and its contribution to the financial crash, as well as the ludicrous case of the prosecution of Paul Chambers for a joke tweet. Gathered together as part of a coherent whole, they tell a damning story. The book has garnered a big batch of complimentary reviews and quite rightly so. If you want an overview of the contents, go to those (or better still, actually read it), instead I want to highlight some broad points that particularly struck me.

There are four main strengths. First, the book is readable. If I were still teaching the modules on political thought that I used to deliver as part of our part-time degree programmes at Hull, it would be a set text. There is a premium to be placed on accessibility for getting people thinking about abstract political ideas and Cohen delivers. Secondly, he has no illusions that there is a technological fix for free speech. The Internet is just as potent a weapon for surveillance as it is for free expression. Cohen argues for the supremacy of politics over technology. Third, he includes the workplace as well as the public sphere, using the memorable phrase, "Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship." The damaging impact of managerialism is a worthy target of his scorn. But the final strength is down to his decision to avoid a conservative trap, political correctness.

There is a real reason why political correctness is not a free speech issue. Partly, this is because it is a form of institutional custom rather than criminal law, but the main point is that it falls into the category that Cohen takes from Mill, the one that sees him still argue for the prohibition of hate speech, that of preventing harm to others.

Political correctness, as it was termed by its enemies, is rooted in the recognition that language is an instrument of exclusion. The cries of 'it's political correctness gone mad' are expressions of resentment at the opening up of privileges to people drawn from outside establishment circles. Anne Norton put it beautifully in her demolition of Allan Bloom's prolonged whine, The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom wishes to recover a world in which very ugly men – men who stutter and drip gravy on their shirts – become objects of desire. 

Though abused by zealots and, at times, made ridiculous by fools, political correctness is simply a form of etiquette that allows people to feel comfortable and to thrive in institutions that previously did everything in their power to exclude them, not least through sneering and demeaning language.

The most important point that Cohen makes, one that shouts out from the pages of his book, is that censorship is one of the most potent weapons that can be used by the powerful to secure their power. It is the foundation stone of tyranny. The first targets of the oppressor are the press, education and culture (read George Szirtes on Hungary for graphic examples of the far right in action). Not least of the evils that flow from censorship is that legal restrictions on free speech instantly create 'thought crimes,' making political opposition a criminal act. As a result, the fight for freedom of speech is central to the struggles of the oppressed. Anyone familiar with British labour history would be aware of the resistance to the Stamp Acts (aimed at preventing the working classes from reading the radical press by placing a tax [stamp] on newspapers to make them unaffordable), of the struggles of Richard Carlile against the laws of blasphemy and seditious libel, and of the free speech battles between socialists and the police over mass meetings in Trafalgar Square. Free speech was a central demand of the working class movement.

Yet there is a paradox in all this. Freedom of speech means allowing the expression of noxious views, of paranoid conspiracy thinking and of a whole range of lunacy. It is distorted by the inequitable ownership of the media and the power of wealthy interests. Yet, this is not an argument against the general principle of the right to free speech. Instead, we need to think more about another of Mill's utilitarian justifications.

Cohen uses Mill in making his argument, but concentrates on the harm principle. What interests me, and I have blogged on this before, is Mill's dialectical epistemology, the idea that truth can only emerge through free debate and that very same clash of ideas can prevent active belief from ossifying into dogma. So, he didn't just advocate the right to free speech, with its associated duty to ensure that it is respected, he argued for the necessity of challenge, a duty to contest. Though we may not criminalise the views of others, however obnoxious, we do not have to promote them, to stand by idly whilst they are expressed, nor wash our hands of our duty to actively oppose them. Tolerance does not mean passivity. And Cohen is certainly not passive. Instead he ends the book with a call for,

… a political commitment to expand the rights we possess to meet changing circumstances, and a determination to extend them to billions of people from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe who do not enjoy our good fortune.

And in writing this, he is standing in a long tradition of radicals who sought to challenge injustice and exploitation, as well as oppose the power of the oligarchs who would silence them.

In praise of the internet

Imagine the scene. It is the late 1950s. A small plump boy in grey shorts and too tight school blazer is standing alone, lost, in the playground of a new school. All around him the energetic games of the popular and included swirl noisily. Then, from out of the crowd, a tall boy steps forward. "Would you like to play?" It is from these moments of intrinsic kindness that friendships begin and lives are shaped.

Another boisterous boy is part of the crowd and we three band together, unknowing that friendship had in this case begun even earlier. Our mothers recognised each other at a school sports day and we learnt from them that we had been playmates as toddlers.

And as we grew through the anxieties and earnestness of adolescence and young adulthood, we still played. Sometimes we kicked a football around in the local park, at others the pleasures were more grown-up; drink, parties, girlfriends. But then we drifted, as most do. Adult life and ambitious dreams pulled us in different directions.  Slowly and inexorably, friendship became an island of memories slipping gently over the horizon.

I am tired of reading jeremiads about how the internet is fracturing human relations, leading to isolation and obsession, destroying our concentration spans, and so on - interminably. As a communications tool it is the best humanity has come up with yet. It places a research library on every desk. OK, it is also full of barking mad conspiracy theories, malign politics, masturbatory aids and cats - I'll give you that. Yet there is something special about it too.

A chance conversation elsewhere led to a number of searches and suddenly a whole network of friends has been re-established. It could not have happened without the internet. And then, some thirty or more years after we had last parted, the tall boy stepped forward from cyberspace and said, "would you like to play?". The gang of three, one now living in a different country, are meeting up this weekend. Three sixty-year old children, without the grey shorts but with the same noisy boisterousness, will be wallowing in beer, football and cringe-making nostalgia.

So, just for once, let's celebrate the internet and the way it can bring people together; perfect strangers and old friends. It is a richer world with it. And come on, you would have found another way of prevaricating if it wasn't there, wouldn't you?

In praise of muddle

The latest article from Paul Berman on what he sees as the third phase of the Arab Spring is worth reading, if only to reinforce the point that the main opponents of Islamist politics are Muslims.

So it is not true that, in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood speaks for society as a whole. Nor does Islamist ideology, with its invocations of superstition and its exaltations of obedience, express the Egyptian “street.” Nor does the Brotherhood possess the canny ability to bend history to its will... Nor is it true that, in Tunisia, the reputedly more moderate version of the Brotherhood, Rachid Ghannouchi’s Ennahda party, has offered a sounder alternative ... A great many Tunisians have evidently had their fill... Nor is it true that radical Islamists, given the chance to rule on their own, can succeed in spreading their beliefs to the rest of society. On the contrary. Not in Mali, anyway.

Revolutions are usually confused, messy and pluralistic. The resulting power vacuum gives organised groups the opportunity to simplify the situation. The Islamic far right was well placed and tactically astute enough to mount a power grab. Now, if Berman is right, it faces another messy, pluralistic challenge.

This has confused sections or Western left/liberal opinion. In the wake of the end of the Cold War their greatest fear was of the 'tyranny' of American hegemony. Their polar opposites were the neo-conservatives who celebrated and sought to promote just such a hegemonic outcome as "the end of history." Both created a range of fantasy politics stretching from the "Clash of Civilisations," through a romanticised anti-imperialism, to the conspiracy theories of the "New World Order." And Islamists profited. Neatly sidestepping their theocratic authoritarianism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism and barking mad world view, whilst engaging in ever more elaborate apologias, some of the left sought the comfort of a tidy bi-polar world by embracing radical Islam. And even today, Islamists can be assured of a good press in the house journals of the liberal/left. The world they have created is one where America (always bad) is confronted by anti-imperialists (always good). It is easy. You know which side you are on and every political conflict can be neatly placed in one drawer or the other.

There is one problem. Tidiness is not the human condition. When a large section of people, the very ones who have been neatly filed under the heading 'Muslim (good),' start saying 'we don't want these bastards to rule us,' this world view breaks down.

Instead, there are a range of political positions that welcome ambiguity and messiness. For instance, it is possible to be hugely critical of aspects of United States society and politics without seeing it as the ultimate evil. You don't have to be an advocate of American hegemony to argue that liberal democracy is far better than either fascism or the latest fad of murderously psychopathic theocracy. Nor do you have to be an imperialist neo-con to think that humanitarian intervention by the West is preferable to standing aside and watching systematic murder take place. Rather than a neat world, we should be looking for a moral one. Not in the sense of the 'morality' of social conformism and sexual repression. The morality I would advocate is that of human rights, of emancipation, of liberty. Torture is wrong, mass murder is wrong, vile punishments for non-crimes conjured from the fantasies of sex-obsessed theologies are wrong - the list goes on and on. Our guide is not a vision of an ordered world, but of conscience, an instinctive sense of what is right. Peter Kropotkin put it well, "A man who possessed no trace of such instincts would be a monster."

And there are monsters in this world. They need confronting and opposing. This leads us to make choices, to side with lesser evils, to kill to save other lives. We cannot escape difficult judgements through the application of neatness.

Aside from the unshakeable principle of moral clarity, maybe we should embrace pluralism, enjoy the muddled and infuriating complexity of human life, whilst dealing with the myriad of unpredictable problems that it throws up as people shape their own lives. After all, this is what we mean by liberty.

The fat of the land

Any fat person will tell you the same thing. It is perfectly possible to be fat and healthy. It is just as possible to be thin and ill. Morbid obesity is dangerous. There are some health problems associated with being overweight, just as there are with any number of physical and genetic dispositions. However, these are not automatic. Some people put on weight, others don't. The number of times I wanted to lurk with a sawn off shotgun outside a bone-thin, binge-eating colleague's office and demand that he hands over his metabolism are innumerable. Yes, psychological problems do produce eating disorders of all types. Dieting only works temporarily and however brutal one is with one's self, it seems to be impossible to shrink beyond a certain weight and it is ever harder to maintain it. And as you get older ... well, the phrase middle-aged spread wasn't conjured out of thin air. All the while, even a passing acquaintance with history would make you aware that this is nothing new. All this we know. We repeat it often. We are rarely believed.

What many thin people, politicians and journalists will tell you instead is that it is 'all your fault fatty'. So too will the vested interests in the vast diet industry. They make you feel bad, so that they (at a price) will make you feel good again. My advice is to cut out the middle man and just feel good anyway.

One of my interests is the 19th Century secular Freethought movement. It wasn't strictly atheist, though most activists were, it aimed to remove religious and superstitious forms of thinking, rather than belief. Obesity is a classic example. Fat is sin. Those who started out thin and became fat have fallen. Those of us who have always been amongst the stout carry the burden of original sin. Salvation is at hand though, but only if you embrace virtue and self-sacrifice. Saints and prophets preach at you to mend your gluttonous ways and follow the true path of abstinence. Those who shed the pounds ascend to glory, those whose flab hangs heavy are the damned. All I can say is, bollocks to that and pass the pies.

Tuesday's Guardian, prompted by the publication of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges report on obesity, was full of people seeking to lead us from our wicked ways. A sinner who has truly repented bore witness to the misery and degradation in which we wallow and tried to lead us to the promised land. Then, in the middle of the swamp of lunacy usually known as the comments section, there was a still, small voice of sanity. Charlotte Cooper wrote of the report's recommended actions:

These interventions are ineffective – or worse – because they treat "the obese" as an abstract, pathological population instead of a group of actual people who are part of the social fabric. They consider weight loss to be the ultimate remedy for every health and social problem associated with fatness, even though it is almost impossible to maintain in the long-term for most people, including those who have undergone surgical interventions. What is sad about this is that people tend to blame themselves when weight loss fails. 

Although they are well-meaning, AoMRC's proposals are not about health promotion, but contribute to a narrative of blame, punishment, prejudice, stigma and anti-fat scapegoating that is horribly familiar.

Amen.

Cooper goes on to suggest some deeply radical suggestions, like encouraging fat people to keep fit and healthy by being nice to them and offering them things to do that are pleasurable (sadly, the pub isn't on her list). Who would have thought of that? Bit of a soft option for the blighters, eh?

I followed her profile and discovered that Cooper blogs here. It is rather fun to read, even if it is slightly odd to find the male, heterosexual me included in aspects of queer feminist theory. So one Dr Fat now takes the opportunity to say to another, keep spreading the good word. Cheers.

Two

It is the second anniversary of the Libyan uprising. Here are two reports that are worth reading. Both record the anxieties, failings and uncertainties of the country emerging from the Gadaffi years. Both call for patience and hope that it will be given. Yet the theme is the same from the stories they tell. First, Chris Stevens writes:

Cab driver Ishmail Shebani has two flags on his taxi, the Libyan tricolour fluttering alongside the blue and yellow of the Amazigh, a Berber people in the western mountains who endured persecution under Gaddafi. The revolution, he says, means he can give Amazigh names to his children, something banned under Gaddafi. 

"I'll tell you why it's better now," he said. "I get Gaddafi guys in my cab complaining that they lost the revolution, and they don't mind being open about it. But if Gaddafi had won, the rebels would be too scared to complain out loud."

Then, Martin Rose tells us a tale of three desks to illustrate the post-revolutionary work of the British Council and observes:

The real energy of Libya today, though, is in the extraordinary feeling of elation and moral vigour that many of its people have about them. Another colleague said to me, “It’s not just that we’ve overthrown a dictatorship – we’ve wiped it out as though it had never been. No one talks about Gaddafi – and it’s a great pity so many of the books about the revolution seem really to be about him more than the tuwar who overthrew him, and what has happened since.”

In praise of enthusiasm

Finding the remains of Richard III in a car park has spawned the usual litany of jokes, resulted in journalists rapidly revisiting their school history and has produced the odd bit of sneering too. What struck me about this extraordinary discovery is that it marked the triumph of the obsessive amateur.

These obsessives come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes armed with an impregnable self-confidence in their own lack of expertise and a masterly command of massively detailed bollocks, they launch into the murky waters of conspiracy theory or climate change denial. But there are others who become formidable independent researchers and they can produce more interesting work than the stuff that gets churned out by the academic treadmill. History is a particularly fruitful area.

Working in adult education I learned to ignore the advice that was always being offered - 'there are loads of local history societies here, you should put on a local history course.' No you shouldn't. They will bomb. The members of these societies will enrol in droves and then all drop out within a week or two when they realise that they know far more than the tutor. And their approach is different too. They are less interested in the type of broader analysis that grabs an academic historian, instead they want to know about people and places. Local characters, landmark buildings, the lives of people working in local trades and industries, stately homes and workhouses, reminiscences of childhoods lived long ago are what inspire them to beaver away in archives, sometimes with remarkable results.

The 'King Richard was Innocent' brigade straddles both camps. The conspiracy they are trying to unravel is a Tudor one, but their research is formidable. And without them Richard's body would never have been found, even if it did disprove their theory that the King's spinal deformity was another example of Tudor mud slinging. However, they could not have done it without the work of professional archaeologists. This was a symbiosis of professional expertise and the research of enthusiasts.

My own research is mainly in the nineteenth century - the era of the enthusiastic amateur. Their writings are fun to read. And it makes me think that the absorption of research by the academy is not wholly beneficial. Above all, academic language can be a form of exclusivity; a private, inaccessible code - and incredibly dull. So the sheer enjoyment of watching academics working with a decidedly dotty amateur to produce spectacular results reinforces my general prejudices about the importance of popular education and the fact that we should value what those outside the system can offer.

Resurrection

If there is one book that I will never cease to recommend it is the wonderful study of working class self-education by Jonathan Rose with the somewhat awkward title of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. You will find in it the history of popular enthusiasm for literature and learning and the organisations it spawned. In time, these organisations formed the basis for our system of adult education, both inside and outside universities. Their incorporation into the state education system provided security of funding, nationwide access and public investment, until it began to be taken away again.

The thing is that when institutions closed and buildings were sold off, it was not just the public funding that was lost, but the legacy of centuries of private, voluntary contribution was also disposed of. It was an act of theft from previous generations. But the demand for adult education remains. People are still passionate about learning and so we are seeing a new system emerging in embryo. It is like being back in the late nineteenth century. The latest is the free university movement, where more enlightened institutions have allied with voluntary effort to begin to reproduce a new version of the old university extension movement.

This is greatly to be welcomed, but I hope I can be forgiven a churlish thought; wouldn't it have been better not to have done away with the original system in the first place?

Keeping fit

I liked this idea from a splendid new book by James C Scott:

One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality.  Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay 'in shape' so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is 'anarchist calisthenics'. Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it is only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you'll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you'll be ready.

And you don't even have to wear Lycra.

Collapse of this stout party

Here we go again. The nobly sympathetic Zoe Williams reports on a conference on obesity. She observed that inevitably:

The conventional narrative – that obesity is a combination of personal failure and societal booby-trapping, where we're nudged towards unhealthy eating and inactivity, and don't put up much of a fight – remains the starting point.

And so we plunge in to the pathological diagnoses of the inadequacies of the obese - "abuse, trauma, neglect" put in an appearance, as does depression and stigma. Other activities are suggested instead of eating: - "Five minutes of vigorous masturbation ... takes up 300 calories. It can replace a light meal." One expert ponders a deep paradox:

"The government spent millions on that obesity campaign, then wondered why it didn't work. But I don't think there is an information deficit," adds Buckroyd. Obese people know very well the mathematical discrepancies of their calorie usage. "But so many people are puzzled by their own behaviour."

And yet none of these dedicated puritans seem to have noticed something that is pretty obvious, especially judging by the profusion of cookery shows on TV. Eating and drinking are pleasurable. They are sensual, relaxing and sociable. The preparation of good food is creative and, at times, ruthlessly competitive. We have a love affair with food because it is incredibly loveable. Food is at the centre of our culture of hospitality, snacks and drinks are offered wherever we go. It makes us feel good, both to give and receive. We like it. Food is more than fuel for survival, it is the social glue that holds us together. Food is nice. Overdoing it carries the extra spice of sin, a very fine dish indeed.

Williams ends with a comforting statistic:

... obesity costs £5.1bn to the NHS. Malnutrition costs £7.3bn. 

And that is in a developed country. Feeding the world rather than encouraging people to knock a few pounds off or lose the odd sagging belly is what a genuine politics of food and health should be talking about.

Of course none of this actually deals with a question that recurs throughout history. Why when indulging in this cornucopia of pleasure do some put on weight whilst others don't? So perhaps us fatties need to be a bit cheeky and muscle in on a gay anthem, insisting that perhaps the reason for our rotundity is simply that we were born this way.

Fiction

What would George Orwell have made of 2013? Who knows, he's dead. Move on now ... oh no, we don't get away with it that easily. There's still a couple of thousand words to get through yet. Gawd.

More questions are raised. Lots of them. And then we play a new game.

Indeed, there's a better game to play with Orwell than "What would he be writing about were he alive?". It's called "What did he get right?". To be sure, Orwell said that what he wrote in his dystopian novels were warnings rather than predictions, but let's forget about that for a moment. 

In other words, let's ignore about what he actually wrote and make something up. So, if Nineteen Eighty-Four was a prediction, even if it wasn't, what did it get right? The answer's simple. Nothing. No? Of course not, you have a column to fill. And so we get a few examples of egregious practices and then more make believe.

We don't have public executions, you might retort. Yes, but given how much we like spectacle of others suffering, that might only be a matter of time – hangings downloadable to your funky new Google glasses.

"Might be only a matter of time," eh? Anything, just anything so that we can conclude:

Perhaps 2013 isn't so different from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I don't know about you, but I reckon I can tell them apart. A single (or even multiple) illiberality does not a totalitarianism make.

The problem with this type of writing is that it uses the work of a long dead author as a cypher for its own prejudices, in this case those of a rampant Guardianista, stamping them with the moral authority of the blessed Orwell.

So what about Orwell's novel itself? I have written before about it not being my favourite. But I think that we have to place it in its historical context. The fears it reflected were far more real then. Nazism had been defeated at horrendous cost, but Stalinism was triumphant. Of the two vastly destructive dystopias that had wreaked havoc, one, together with its apologists, remained, carrying with it the status of victor and ally. Orwell feared its attractions as a model to a ruling class.

If you want a companion piece to Nineteen Eighty-Four, I would suggest a book that would not instantly spring to mind.  Hayek's The Road to Serfdom may come from a different perspective, his classic liberalism was utterly different from Orwell's democratic socialism, but the impulse behind the two was the same. Hayek feared that central planning in a social democratic state would be in danger of replicating the very fascism that it had been employed to defeat:

...many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realisation would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.

Similarly, Orwell thought that the national security state and an increasingly threatened elite were perfectly capable of adopting Stalinism for their own purposes. Neither saw this as inevitable. Both wrote as a warning, sounding the alarm as to the possibility, calling for watchful and determined opposition to any moves in that direction. And they were both wrong.

It was much more understandable at the time they wrote, but their pessimism was unfounded. They had underestimated both the stability of liberal democracy and its openness to reform. We took a different road and live in far more liberal societies today than we did in the nineteen forties. That is not to be complacent about the injustices and inequities of our times, far from it. We should just remain grateful that these earlier literary warnings remain only as a device to allow privileged Guardian columnists to have what they desire most; membership of the oppressed without all the inconveniences of the real thing.

Artificial union

Michael Aylwin writes with excitement about those "masters of innovation", Saracens Rugby Union Club, installing a new artificial pitch. He continues,

What makes it all so intriguing is that no one has ever seen a proper game of rugby played on such a surface.

Leaving aside the question as to whether Union can be called "proper rugby", I would like to point out that Widnes Rugby League Club sucessfully installed an artificial pitch a year ago and has played a full season on it. 

Once again, Union plays catch up and the press fail to notice the real innovators. Then it is League. And in Widnes. In the North. They couldn't really be expected to know about it, could they?

Rent boys

What strikes me as interesting about today's penchant for austerity, particularly in the Eurozone, is the way it has united a range of classic liberal economists with Keynesians in opposition to it. Both agree from different premises that the policy is a dismal failure and there is a measure of consensus between them about the need to maintain demand in times of recession. Whilst recognising that sovereign debt is a real problem, they are clear that it cannot be reduced without a healthy, productive real economy. Thus, they focus their critique on the extraction of rent from the real economy and the damage it causes. Here are a couple of examples.

Aditya Chakrabortty, from the social democratic left, revives the work of Michał Kalecki and in doing so stresses the importance maintaining expenditure and investment in a recession. An equitable distribution of wealth is of particular importance for maintaining demand and a healthy economy, providing the resources for the erosion of sovereign debt levels. This is something that, as Will Hutton reports, even the IMF has woken up to. Austerity certainly redistributes wealth, only it does so inequitably, filling the pockets of the rent seekers. Earnings and benefits are squeezed, depressing consumption and damaging the wider economy. He concludes, "… austerity is just code for the transfer of wealth and power into ever fewer hands."

In a longer piece, rooted in economic history, Michael Hudson argues that the interests of a rent seeking class are embedded in an ideological hegemony, often justified by false historical analogies, that is shaping the political economy of European nations to the detriment of the wider economy. I won't repeat his full argument, the piece is worth reading in its entirety, but the following illustrates what I mean by the extent of the opposition consensus.

A political and ideological coup d’état is replacing democracy with financial oligarchy, transferring government power to banks and bondholders. The new policy is not for governments to tax the wealthy but to borrow from them – at interest, which is to be paid by taxing labor, consumers and industry all the more. To proceed down this path would reverse Europe’s Enlightenment and the past three centuries of economics. It is called classical economics – and even “free market economics” – but it is a travesty to impose this policy in the name of the patron saints of classical political economy. The Physiocrats, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Roscher, Friedrich List and Progressive Era reformers urged just the opposite path of what now is being taken, and indeed which the world seemed to be following until World War I and for a few decades after World War II.

So far, there is little sign of this counter argument having the slightest impact on our austeritian rulers. In the meantime there are consequences. Aristos Doxiadis and Manos Matsaganis have written a stimulating pamphlet on National Populism and Xenophobia in Greece, where they look at the interaction of the notion of Greek exceptionalism with the crisis to produce a nationalist populism that blames the crisis on a variety of external forces (including the bogeymen dreamt up in the wilder fantasies of conspiracy mongers) whilst absolving themselves from any responsibility. Of course, much of the responsibility for the crisis does lie outside Greece, as emphasised in the other pieces, but another dimension is the product of Greek governance, institutions and attitudes. The rise of populism is not happening only in Greece. UKIP is a comparatively mild example in this country, but is cut from the same cloth. A much more virulent version is to be found in Hungary and it is possible to argue that both German popular discourse and, more alarmingly, EU institutions seem to be more comfortable with a morality drama about the puritan north against the hedonistic south as an alternative to examining the real consequences of monetary union.

This nationalist populism could be a genuine threat to the European Union, one that it seems unwilling to recognise as it insulates itself from reality with the self-reinforcing dogma of austerity economics. What is certain is that the social stability offered by EU membership looks less secure as the undercurrent of violence, discussed here by Maria Margaronis, begins to seep from the margins. Doxiadis and Matsagianis stress the need for,

A growing economy providing good jobs, and a welfare state geared to the needs of the weakest. The most effective therapy of the underdog mentality is hope and economic security. Hope will not be created by Greeks alone: Greece’s European partners must help

It seems no nearer. But just as they call for reform, they also "…call on those who feed the paranoia and the illusions to consider the consequences." In short, their pamphlet calls for mental honesty and self-criticism at a time of increasingly deluded certainties. We can only hope that such sanity prevails.

Film news

The alternative version

A new season

Rugby League kicked off for me with the friendly this afternoon between Salford and Swinton. Salford now run out to Brian and Michael's saccharine song about L S Lowry. Lowry, of course, lived in Swinton. On Station Road. A few hundred yards from Swinton's old ground.

Salford are in dire financial straits. Swinton donated a large part of their share of the gate receipts to Salford for their survival fund. In return, Salford have nicked our artist.

The match ended in a win for Salford, 52-12. Oh well.

Miserables reflections

With all the hype surrounding the new film of the musical version of Les Miserables (I have seen neither) I thought it was about time to read the book over the holiday period.  It was a fine choice to make.  Les Miserables is a vast, compelling novel, contrived in places, relying on the strings of coincidence common to the 19th Century epic novel, which keep the main protagonists linked together throughout many years. It uses gripping, dramatic narrative and then gives the reader time to breathe by interjecting long sections of reflection on everything from the Battle of Waterloo to the use of slang, before the action begins again. Much of what follows will not make sense unless you are familiar with the work, but I wanted to pick out something that struck me about the book. I saw Hugo writing not simply as a radical liberal proponent of social justice, nor as a poetic celebrant of the progress initiated by the French Revolution, but as an ironist. Let me explain.

After I finished the book I thought of the main female character, Cosette, and couldn't help but think, "what a bubble-headed wuss." Sweet and loving - yes. But a feminist icon? No way. In one sense it was part of the success of her rescue from the exploitation and abuse of her early years, spent farmed out to the 'care' of the dreadful Thénardiers, that she had the prospect of an ordinary, cosy bourgeois existence married to Marius. Being simply nice and happy is a real achievement after that start in life, a testament to the love and protection given her by Jean Valjean. The only thing is that she is not the only woman who loved Marius. He had a choice that he never considered, Éponine.

Éponine was one of the Thénardier daughters. She had become a tough street kid (Hugo's best writing is about these abandoned children, they are the most vivid and real of his characters), cunning, ruthless and hard.  But that was tempered by a touch of selflessness and immense courage. She gives her life on the revolutionary barricade to save Marius, taking a bullet aimed at him, even if it was her subterfuge that led him into danger.

Éponine didn't stand a chance. Marius was already infatuated with Cosette and he was only a paper rebel. He would always return to bourgeois respectability and reconcile with his royalist family. This is what Cosette represented, an ideal bourgeois wife. Feminine, virginal, conventional and thoroughly girly. And so Hugo has Marius embracing respectability by marrying unknowingly the illegitimate daughter of a dead prostitute. And that is irony.


You find it too in the genuinely evil Mr Thénardier. The irony here is that he is pretty useless at villainy. His incompetence means that he keeps rescuing people for the worst reason and with the worst motives. He intends to betray them, but ends up saving them. The same applies to the police inspector Javert, often seen as another villain. Instead, he is an incorruptible servant of justice. His problem is that he is unthinking and sees no distinction between law, retribution and justice. The moment he sees that the application of law can be an act of injustice, his life falls apart.


If there is one theme that animates the novel it is the crime of the abuse and abandonment of children, made worse by a world that once it has condemned never forgives. Thus, Cosette is still a triumphant character, she has been redeemed and her redeemer is an ex-convict, devoted to virtue, who can never escape his past. The novel is not an exercise in moral relativism; good and evil exist. But it does argue against social convention and that you can find both in the least likely places. For example, the ironist Hugo shows that Thénardier's evil intent can result in unintended good, whilst Javert's virtue can lead to the horrors visited on a galley slave for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread when starving and penniless.


There are many other threads and devices running through this multi-layered book. Irony is only one of the tools that Hugo used to affirm the human value of the lowest without romanticising their vices, expose the callousness of class and to forcefully show that good can only thrive in a good society. Les Miserables is one of those overtly political novels that is subversive in the widest, and best, sense of the word.

Taxing issues

First, someone should give the "troika" of lenders to Greece a lesson in the price elasticity of demand. Hefty tax rises on heating oil have meant a 75-80% drop in sales, shivering Greeks and a nasty wood smoke smog over Athens. A rise in taxation has resulted in an estimated 400 million Euro fall in tax revenue. Genius.

The UK is playing with another brilliant idea, saving money by punishing fatties. Stay fat and you could lose benefits. Mind you, with the level of benefits these days food is a bit of a luxury. The suggestion is that:

Obese and other unhealthy people (please note the association; fat and healthy? Impossible!) could be monitored to check whether they are taking exercise and have their benefits cut if they fail to do so under proposals published on Thursday by a Conservative-run council and a local government thinktank. 

Westminster council and the Local Government Information Unit say new technologies such as smart cards could be used to track claimants' use of leisure centres, allowing local authorities to dock housing and council benefit payments from those who refuse to carry out exercise prescribed by their GP.

Bring back the treadmill for the poor, I say. And after that, introduce a girth tax or a corpulence charge. Us fatties are such a burden (and rather a heavy one at that).

Oh lord, please preserve us from the wisdom of our rulers.