Sex

There's some nasty diseases about:

There's a big salmonella outbreak in the US because people keep kissing chickens 

Well what would you expect with puritans like these.

That should have got a bit more traffic to this neglected corner of the internet.

Interlude

Mythical bollocks

This is the worst start to any article on the Greek referendum that I have had the misfortune to read. Nothing could be more cringe-making, surely.

 From the cradle of democracy, a lion has roared.

No, please no. Owen Jones, who else?

Such horrible hyperbole is typical of the sort of journalism we get from someone who knows little of modern Greece. Please, it's not the Greece of antiquity. It's a beautiful Balkan nation with a fascinating, but troubled, recent history; one that has democratised itself since emerging from a military dictatorship only forty years ago. (This is what Joseph Stiglitz called "its strong democratic tradition.") Yet the press regularly call on the classics to fill out their cliché quota, not always accurately.

So, it was good to see a classicist, Natalie Haynes, put them straight on a few things. My favourite line is this one.

As for the referendum result, I doubt the phrase “Greek Tragedy” has been used so much since Vicky Pryce was convicted of having once liked Chris Huhne more than any reasonable person could.

Cruel. But then so is much Greek mythology.

Politics

Referendums are usually about power, not democracy. They are a risky strategy, people do not always vote the way they are supposed to. Pinochet's downfall in Chile is a perfect example of a tactic that failed. But what has happened in Greece is, to my mind, not so much a demonstration of popular resistance to the economics of austerity, but a sign that Tsipras is a capable politician. The referendum has done what it was supposed to do. It consolidated his power.

First, troublesome individuals have been removed. Varoufakis resigned, as did Samaras, the leader of conservative ND.

Second, by convening a meeting of all party leaders, Tsipras has put together a national coalition behind a joint negotiating position and secured their backing. He has neutralised domestic opposition.

Third, he has opened up divisions between his opponents. There are signs that a Franco/German split is developing over Greece.

Now that Tsipras is secure, there are only two possible scenarios remaining. First, there is a deal. The joint statement is based on a vague list of aspirations.

The common goal is to seek a solution that will ensure:

• The adequate coverage of the financing needs of the Country
• Reliable reforms, based on the criterion of the just distribution of burdens and the promotion of development, with the least possible recessionary effects.
• Powerful, front-loaded, growth program, first and foremost for combating unemployment and for the encouragement of entrepreneurship.
• A commitment towards the beginning of substantive discussion on dealing with the problem of the sustainability of the Greek public debt.

If a deal is signed, it will include austerity measures. Tsipras has already shown that he has been willing to accept many of them in the previous round of discussions.

Though Tsipras has consolidated his power domestically, the Greek negotiating position is still weak. There may be a greater perceived risk of political rather than economic contagion, but will the creditors see appeasement or victory as the best way of discouraging it? And so, the second scenario is also possible, Greek exit from the Euro.

This time we should have a clearer idea much more quickly than before.

UPDATE:

They didn't choose appeasement. I am not surprised. 

Euro-zone leaders demand Alexis Tsipras offer them a deal harsher than the one Greek voters just rejected.

What now?

The turkeys did not vote for Christmas, but Christmas has not been abolished.

This very good piece from Nick Malkoutzis summarises the incoherence and uncertainties of the Greek referendum.

The mere fact that tens of thousands of people joined demonstrations for the No camp — under the banner of a Syriza-led government that has displayed nothing but amateurism since it took office in January, in a week when pensioners jostled under the sun to collect 120 euros from their retirement pay — is proof that hope is in short supply. We should consider whether we have reached the point where what is being attempted in Greece is at the outer edges of political and social sustainability.

A supplementary

I have just found another piece from last month, a profile of Mark Mazower. It is perceptive insight on the Greek crisis.

There are two telling quotes in there:

As a friend of Greece, does Mazower think that the country should return to the drachma if European policy does not change?
“I don’t know the answer to that. I think Greek public opinion is very sensible on this issue. It says that Greece must remain in the euro and that eurozone policy must change.”

And,

"...we academics have a tendency to think that once we have shown what is right and what is wrong, then everything else will fall into place. That’s why we become academics and not politicians."

Too true. My cue to leave the stage.

In Greece

I am back in Greece, but have been otherwise engaged. And now I seem to be in the epicentre of a major international crisis. You would hardly notice in this part of the country if it hadn't been for the queues at the ATMs as I drove back from Volos a week ago.

Even though I am here, I am an outsider to both the country and the language. As are most newspaper columnists - and many economists - and that hasn't stopped any of them from pontificating. I am swamped by commentary and by recommended articles. Many boil down to a morality play. Either the innocent Greeks are fighting back against their evil oppressors or the lazy, corrupt Greeks are robbing industrious Northern Europeans. Some columns have both happening at the same time. The majority are based on fleeting trips to Athens. Most cherry pick and by doing so miss out the details that make this crisis far from simple.

To repeat, I am an outsider. I am not even an economist. I am an historian though, and much of this has resonance with past crises. We have been here before and this colours my views. All I can really offer as a form of analysis are links and an overview of what I see are the main elements, all of which contribute to this particular crisis. Taking a deep breath, here we go.

1. Ideology.

Austerity/economic orthodoxy is the dominant ideology at the moment. It has a long pedigree, including amongst its antecedents; the gold standard, the economics of Hoover and Brüning, the May Report and the fall of the 1931 Labour Government. It isn't a happy history. It ended up with the Second World War. The Keynesian opposition to orthodoxy, piloted by Roosevelt through the New Deal, became dominant after the war. Keynes' approach to government budgets was that they should be balanced over a business cycle, rather than over a calendar year. Government should always act counter cyclically, investing during a downturn and retrenching in times of growth. In dealing with debt, Keynes prioritised increasing income (growth) over reducing spending. A Keynesian approach would see it as madness to cut spending and suck demand out of an economy at a time of recession. It would risk turning it into a slump, causing immense hardship and reducing government income, thereby cancelling out any gains made through savings. Orthodoxy always kept some adherents, most notably in the IMF, but regained its dominance through a renewed challenge to Keynes from a resurgent classic liberalism, adapted into a doctrine of neoliberalism (a specific term now used loosely by the left as a 'boo word') and entrenched by the Thatcher and Regan governments.

Amartya Sen published an excellent essay defending Keynes, explaining the neglect of his insights and placing his approach in a historical context here.

Syriza promised a Keynesian approach to the Greek debt crisis and an end to austerity. The problem was that it was impossible to deliver when the institutions were ideologically convinced of the correctness of the opposite. Syriza failed to change the world. It was if they had gone to the Vatican and came out surprised that the Pope was still a Catholic. Vacillating between accusation and compromise, they weren't good diplomats. They had three cards to play, but all were trumped - see Duncan Weldon here. They were right about the economics of austerity, but had no way of delivering an alternative. So what happens next?

2. Illusions.

There is a narrative doing the rounds that the emergence of other indebted countries like Spain, Ireland and Portugal from recession is a sign that austerity worked (conveniently forgetting the fiscal expansion of quantitative easing). I fail to see the return of growth two or three years after you would have normally expected it, in countries with degraded capacities, after the mass emigration of some of its most talented young people, and with increased inequality and poverty, as a conspicuous success. Rather, it is a tribute to the resilience of those societies. But even if austerity can work, was it worth the cost and the destruction of ordinary people's lives?

There is also the sense on the left that Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain are the vanguard of a new mass movement of radical social change, rather than an expression of populist and traditional resentment against the elites by people who have had enough and just want to return to normal. Historically, this has been a resentment that has been exploited in times of crisis as much by the right as by the left. And the Greek government is a coalition between Syriza and ANEL, a far right bunch of ultra nationalist conspiracy theorists (which is why the government's minister of defence believes in chemtrails!). There has always been a question mark about whether Syriza is a leftist or nationalist project and at the moment, rather like the referendum on Scottish independence, the rhetoric on the 'no' side is assuming an unpleasant nationalist tone. Is Tsipras really Greece's Alex Salmond?

The final illusion is that referendums are somehow a pure form of direct democracy, rather than an expedient political tool for a party facing difficulties. Syriza has admitted as much. So we have the curious spectacle of a referendum on whether or not to accept terms that are no longer on offer for a bailout that has expired. The choice thrown down is to accept austerity or to negotiate a bit less austerity. The EU is insisting it is about Euro membership, Syriza say it isn't, but then, if it was, Greeks would vote overwhelmingly to stay in the Euro. The left-wing historian, Mark Mazower, who, unlike many commenters, has written on modern Greek history, knows Greece well and speaks Greek, denounces Sunday's referendum here. Catherine Fieschi places it in the context of a populist challenge to representative democracy where "we seem to be leaving the agora and headed toward a new coliseum."

3. German strength.

This is part of the problem, paradoxically. The whole point of the EU was to cement Franco/German relations and constrain German power. This is a constraint that Germany wanted eagerly. It is haunted by its history. Germany does not want to dominate Europe. That is why it insists on rules, rather than the exercise of power. Ironically, German obduracy leads to accusations of the very thing it is trying to avoid.

German savings, wage restraint and surpluses, the product of its ordoliberalism, may be a virtue in a state with its own currency, but are a weakness in a currency union without corrective mechanisms. They produced the flood of credit that financed their exports to deficit nations at the periphery. Low interest rates, again a product of German economic strength, produced credit booms elsewhere. The crisis was made in Germany, even if it was implemented by the debtor nations, especially in the case of Greek sovereign debt.

4. Greek weakness

I have read many fantasies about how well the Greeks would do if they defaulted and left the Euro. And it may yet happen. But they all discount how badly Greece would be placed. It would be locked out of currency markets and would have a soft, depreciating currency from which they could not benefit. Exports may become cheaper, but they don't have many. Imports would become far more expensive and most energy is imported. The poor will suffer most. There would have to be a major restructure of the economy for Greece to benefit - and boy do they need one - but it will not be an easy answer. It may well have been better if they hadn't joined. They still would have had a crisis, though not this one. But they did and leaving is another matter altogether, although, as Frances Coppola writes, the process may have started already.

Anyone who has had any dealings with the Greek state knows that it is, well, different. Just how different is made clear here by one of the most trenchant opponents of austerity, David Blanchflower.

"The reality is that Greece has a highly uncompetitive economy and no credible tax collection system. The problems mostly are in the product, capital and housing markets that remain unaddressed. According to the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings, Greece ranks 61st, just behind Tunisia. Greece is 155th in the ability to enforce contracts, just ahead of Laos and Botswana. There has been no reform to speak of. Greece is characterised by endemic tax evasion, a poor tax collection infrastructure, parochial patronage policies, corruption and huge delays in the administrative courts dealing with tax disputes. Greece also has deep structural problems, mostly in product markets with oligopolies in almost every industry, closed professions, administrative and bureaucratic impediments to entrepreneurship alongside barriers to trade and exporting, none of which have been addressed. This baby certainly isn’t over. The worry is if the inevitable Greek default spreads."

The Greek state is slowly improving, especially now it is beginning to develop online access, but still needs major reforms. The bureaucracy is labyrinthine and obstructive. The Greek people would welcome change. But why haven't they had it? In the article I linked to earlier, Armartya Sen makes an important point.

But the real (and strong) case for institutional reform has to be distinguished from an imagined case for indiscriminate austerity, which does not do anything to change a ­system while hugely inflicting pain. Through the bundling of the two together as a kind of chemical compound, it became very difficult to advocate reform without simultaneously cutting public expenditure all around. And this did not serve the cause of reform at all...

The compounding of the two – not least in the demands made on Greece – has made it much harder to pursue institutional reforms. And the shrinking of the Greek economy under the influence mainly of austerity has created the most unfavourable circumstances possible for bold institutional reforms.

He is right, but the opposite is true too. Determined opponents of austerity also linked the two and opposed reform as well as the cuts.

The responsibility for the Greek sovereign debt lies with the Greek state. Arguably, the starting point for resolving it should have been reform linked to investment and debt relief. Instead, Greece got cuts - internal devaluation - with little change. Combine this with fear of the consequences of a banking failure post-Lehman and you have the recipe for socialising the losses of private investors' bad investments by compensating them with the wages, pensions and savings of ordinary people.

 5. The Euro.

Throughout the current phase of the crisis, there has been little talk about reforming the structural failings of the Euro. Monetary union without fiscal union has meant that there is no mechanism for transfers between surplus and deficit areas. Differences in competitiveness can no longer be managed through currency exchange rates or interest rates, so the only alternative is through internal devaluation, a competitive lowering of living standards - a race to the bottom as the cliché has it. The Euro was supposed to bring convergence, instead it resulted in polarisation. This report from Stephen Fiddler is an excellent summary.

This is not new either. It is a more comprehensive version of the 19th century experiment, the Latin Monetary Union. It was a failure that was finally killed off in 1927.

There is more, much more, but an explanation that omits any of these elements will be incomplete. Macro economic policy may be wrong, but a change of direction would do little without micro economic change. The flaws in monetary union need rectifying. Looked at today, the whole situation is a pretty potent cocktail and a complete mess. The problems are getting worse too. Under Syriza, the economy has tanked. It is also a story of incompetence, intransigence, and a narrowness of vision. There is much uncertainty. Martin Wolf explains the dilemmas well. 

Looking back at the links in this post, most are from trenchant opponents of austerity. Yet many also support a yes vote. It wasn't a deliberate choice on my part, but it does illustrate how this referendum has divided allies. They share a similar analysis, but differ on the consequences. I have Greek friends who will vote both yes and no, but there is no one I know who isn't voting on the basis of a choice between bad and worse. So I am going to finish with links to two posts. The first is from Yiannis Mouzakis, a very regretful yes voter. The second is from a very angry, Irate Greek (Theodora Oikonomides) who will vote no.

The crisis is rooted in a profound ideological clash between orthodoxy and a revived Keynesianism. It has been taking place in a setting of flawed and failing institutions. It has been handled ineptly and, at times, stupidly. When the history of the crisis comes to be written, not many will come out with any credit, but then we still don't know how that book will end. 

Fear and loathing in academia

I have been reading piece after piece about the stifling of opinion in American and, to a lesser extent, British universities through crippling political correctness, enforced by student activists setting themselves up as the thought police. One tutor has recently gone so far as to write a viral article claiming to be "terrified" of his students. This is so outside my experience, even after more than thirty years teaching, that I assumed that something must be seriously wrong with higher education in the United States. However, I couldn't help feeling uncomfortable about it and that sense of unease raised questions.

The main one was how typical was this? Is this general practice or are we facing another moral panic? I have seen a few bits of unpleasant idiocy over the years, but the overwhelming experience I have had of students is that they are nice, generally polite, and occasionally cut and paste stuff from the internet.

There are some real problems. This example of posh radical feminists getting skewered by a right wing magazine for their intolerance seems a bit overwrought, but the way in which radical groups have promoted misogyny, homophobia, and recruited people from British universities to become, for instance, executioners for ISIS is of far greater importance. The Kipnis case should also raise alarm bells. Then we have all this "infantilizing" stuff about safe spaces, trigger warning and micro aggressions, which has generated a huge press.

But it was still good to read this:  

I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all

Amanda Taub injects some sanity and tells everyone to calm down.

I covered sensitive topics in my courses, including rape, capital punishment, female genital mutilation, and disputed accounts of mass atrocities. Our classroom debates were contentious, and forced students to examine their own biases. I kept an "on-call" list that pressured students to participate actively in those discussions. I did not use trigger warnings.
I never had any complaints.
I bring up my own experiences as a reminder that if the plural of anecdote isn't data, the singular of it sure as hell isn't, either. The fact that I enjoyed my time teaching doesn't tell you anything about the state of education in America — and neither does the fact that the pseudonymous author of this Vox article is a liberal professor who is terrified of his liberal students.
And yet the response to his article, which as of this writing has now been shared more than 190,000 times on Facebook, shows it has struck a nerve. This is something people are genuinely concerned about — enough that the thoughts of an unidentified man from the Midwest feel like a revelation, as if some secret truth everyone suspected has finally been exposed.
In other words, it's truthy: it offers a conclusion that feels as if it should be true, even though it isn't accompanied by much in the way of actual evidence. In this case, that truthy conclusion is that the rise of identity politics is doing real harm — that this new kind of discourse, whether you call it "identity politics" or "call-out culture" or "political correctness," is not just annoying or upsetting to the people it targets, but a danger to academic freedom and therefore an actual substantive problem to be addressed.

Instead she nails the big problem - management.

The Kipnis case was triggered by the complaints of just two students. Why were they taken seriously? It's management that has been too terrified to deal with jihadi recruitment on campus and too venal to listen to senior academics warning it not to take the Gaddafi cash. It's management that has revelled in the power to stifle dissent (and raise their own salaries) bestowed on them by the new managerialism. But it's easier to blame students.

So yes, there is a classic moral panic going on, which is not to say that there are no egregious examples of illiberal idiocy taking place. But we need to remember that behind the "safe spaces" and demands for "trigger warnings" there are real issues. It is just that this isn't the way they should be dealt with. And I have come across students who have had difficulties with topics and comments that have been handled badly. The whole point is that these have to be managed professionally and individually, not by some crazy warning label applied to classic literature. That is what good teachers do. The first thing that I used to tell new tutors in adult education is that they had no idea what was out there in the classroom, that they needed to be aware and sensitive, and if they encountered students with problems to refer them back to us straight away so that we could get the right help in place. Tutors need supporting, not undermining.

So what about the students? Well, they are mainly young and middle class. Mostly, they are serious, depressingly earnest, and without much in the way of life experience. Youth is not a zealot-free-zone. I am not surprised they jump on ideological bandwagons. But as long as an institution is prepared to set and enforce standards for free discourse and mutual respect, the zealots would be little more than extremely irritating. Ah, but now, say the critics, they are treated as customers (presumably instead of as serfs) and that is why it is all going wrong.

There is nothing wrong with treating students as customers, after all they are paying a lot of money for a service and should expect to get something in return. The problems set in once another managerial orthodoxy comes into play - "the customer is always right." The obvious rejoinder is that that they are, except when they are wrong. Customers can also be unpleasant, bullying, offensive and violent. There are times we need to protect staff from them. The idea that the customer is always right, is wrong. To treat students as customers does not mean indulging their worst behaviour and prejudice. It doesn't mean supporting them when they are manifestly in the wrong. It means teaching them well and treating them fairly. The big problems arise when managers ignore this basic principle, shy away from defending social equality and intellectual freedom, and conform to the latest whims of conventional wisdom.

This whole assault on political correctness smacks of educational conservatism. It is couched in the language of the moaning about students that used to infuriate me. And look at its targets; equality and inclusion. Unconstrained censoriousness about bugger all, supported by managerial persecution of marginalised part-time staff, does not mean that we should not be trying to address inequality or finding a more polite and inclusive way of talking and thinking. It simply means that we should be doing it better.

Confusion reigns

We live in unusual times. Whilst the Guardian publishes apologias for Sepp Blatter, the place to go for hard-hitting criticism of the Tory government is, er, the Daily Telegraph.

Well, Theresa May's Psychoactive Substances Bill is a classic of incompetence. Matthew Scott comments:

... the Government seems to have decided that banning 500 substances is not enough. It must ban almost everything that gives pleasure.
And what a ban. Of all the many idiotic, ill thought out and pointless laws ever passed, this would be the one of the silliest. And its draftsmanship would make the asinine Dangerous Dogs Act look like the magisterial 1925 Law of Property Act.
The production, supply, offer to supply, import and export of any “psychoactive substances” will carry potential 7 year gaol sentences.

I suppose they have a point. The terrible scourge of nutmeg needs sweeping from our streets and off our custard tarts. Then we have to outlaw curries (not to mention rye bread). I mean, think of all those chilli addicted zombies, exploited by the cruel curry pushers to be found lurking on street corners, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting at the moment they are most vulnerable - that mysterious time known as "after the pub."

The sheer madness is that the Bill would ban everything unless an exception is made. This breaches the usual legal principle that a person may do anything that is not specifically prohibited by law. Instead people may not consume anything with psychoactive properties unless specifically permitted by law. And so the drafters of this legislation have to dream up exemptions to the blanket ban (coffee, alcohol and tobacco, for example), but they are guaranteed to miss something because the list of substances that "affects the person's mental functioning or emotional state" is virtually endless.

And the age of romance is well and truly murdered:

What stronger emotional response is there than that produced by the beautiful scent of roses delivered to the woman you love? Sorry, that very emotional response is enough to engage Section 3, and if you happen to hand them to her outside a school, or worse still arrange for someone under the age of 18 to deliver them, the Court is obliged by Section 6 to treat those facts as “aggravating features” for the purpose of sentencing. And don't think you could avoid the law by giving her perfume instead of flowers: the esters and oils in perfume are designed to seduce, which is of course an emotional response.

The legislation is lunacy and runs against basic Conservative principles. (As does the even stranger decision to force housing associations to sell their own private property against their will at a discount. At least with privatisation the state actually owned what it was flogging.)

Scott concludes,

The Bill is a textbook example of bad legislation, It is unnecessary, incomprehensible, largely unenforceable, and, by encouraging professional criminals into a new area of business it is likely to prove entirely counterproductive.  

It seems that the hubris of a massive victory achieved with all of 37% of the votes has sent the Tories crazy. No, hang on. Utterly bonkers.

Sporting lives

It's time for some good news.

Rebirth - born again in Blackpool.

That's what it felt like as Swinton contested the first iPro Sports Cup Final for League 1 Rugby League clubs.

We lost, but there was a great turnout of Swinton fans with banners and balloons. We kicked up one hell of a racket. And it felt really good. The sun shone and the sky was dressed in Swinton colours. You could sense that at last this great old club is reviving. It is run soundly now, with a new company and fan representation on the board. There is an active supporters' trust. It's a club we can all get behind. After more than two decades of homelessness, everyone knows that we need a ground back in Swinton. If that happens the future is bright - bright blue.

Flowering - fans demanding the impossible and getting it.

FC United of Manchester, a non-league club created and owned by its fans, born out of despair, formally opens its new stadium with a friendly - against Benfica! David Conn, the best writer on football, has written a lovely piece on the club. It concludes beautifully:

At the trial game one supporter, Michelle Noonan, called over to Brown. “I can’t stop crying,” she said. Asked why, she was quiet for a while. Then she replied: “Because I can’t believe that out of so much anger and hatred we have made something so good.”

Reunion - first love and football.

I have lived for many years in Manchester where I discovered Rugby League and Swinton. I also watched football and went to see Manchester United, mainly sporadically, though I did have a season ticket for a few years before giving it up with a sense of growing disgust. The economics of it offended me, but it was the way supporters were both exploited and patronised, treated as cash cows to be berated if they tried to complain, that meant that the relationship could not be a happy one. The crass commercialism and "global brand exploitation" had turned something romantic into something ugly. The Glazers' takeover and financial dealings would have seen me off completely, but I had gone before then. I could have been tempted by FC United, but it wasn't in my heart.

As I have blogged before, I grew up in South London and I fell in love with Crystal Palace early in life. I knew I had to go back. I was returning home - to Palace - to first love. The experience was intense.

It felt more ethical too as Palace were in the Championship, but just as I started going they won the play-offs against the odds and were promoted to a place amongst the plutocrats. Remarkably, they have stayed there and this season finished tenth. Yesterday, they honoured one of their longest serving players, the Argentinian goalkeeper, Julian Speroni with a testimonial. Speroni donated all the receipts to charity. Dominic Fifield wrote a smashing profile of the man and summed up the Palace experience totally:

Speroni often ends up pinching himself when he contemplates the journey he has made from Saavedra, Buenos Aires to the Premier League via Dundee. Or, putting the geography to one side, to mid-table in the most watched league in world football via one relegation, a painful administration and 11 different managers – permanent, interim or caretaker – at Palace alone.

But things have changed since that administration five years ago, and whilst the way FC United is run may be the ideal model, Palace is the next best thing. There is a supporters' trust, though it's not part of the ownership structure. But the consortium that took the club out of administration is led by a lifelong fan. He talks emotionally about his first match here, a game I was at too and remember well. He runs the club, but does not take a salary. It appears that the temptation of an American takeover has been resisted. The club is debt free, profitable, sustainable and determined to stay that way. The rapport with the fans, including the lunatics in the Holmesdale End, is excellent and watching Palace is a boisterous, noisy experience. It feels great to be back, even if distance restricts the times I can go to see them.

Nemesis.

Always save the best news until last.

Two criminal probes into corruption at football's governing body Fifa are under way, after seven senior officials were arrested in Zurich on US charges...

 Prince Ali Bin al-Hussein of Jordan - Mr Blatter's rival for the Fifa presidency - described the arrests as "a sad day for football".

It isn't a sad day, it's a great day. It's a great day for the slave labourers dying on Qatari building sites, it's a great day for the countries deprived of World Cup profits and left with expensive white elephants of rotting stadia, it's a great day for the ordinary fan whose pockets are picked by corrupt plutocrats exploiting their love of the game. It's late - too late - it may achieve little, but it has happened. Let's celebrate.

And while we raise our glasses, let's glance over our shoulders at other examples of the what the world can be - at Swinton, FC United and Crystal Palace - at all those fan run and owned clubs - at the German football model - all the while remembering that sport matters, it is part of our culture and history, and that another world is possible.

Queer ducks

I can now formally announce that the world has gone mad. Or at least a section of it. Or an intersection. An abstract from a conference run by Left Forum.

Animal rights are often seen as subordinate to or even the opposite of human rights. But what if we flipped the picture, seeing the world from the point of view of queer ducks and LGBTQ people alike oppressed by hierarchical binaries? Our all-queer panel of animal liberation activists will cover not only intersections among speciesism and homo/transphobia but also the exciting possibilities opened up by a fully ecological activist praxis. Presentations: "Born Wrong” by Christopher-Sebastian McJetters -- An examination of how violence against animals perpetuates anti-gay bullying, erasing nonhuman identities also erases queer identities, and hyper-masculinity in American gay culture cultivates speciesism. "Decolonizing the Dominant Diet” by Brandie Skorker -- A challenge to socially constructed dietary desires that are rooted in oppressive histories while leading to environmental catastrophes. "Human Rights as Animal Rights” by Pattrice Jones -- A “queering” of the notion of animal rights to encompass human rights and thereby enliven struggles for social and environmental justice through the restoration of social and material ecologies. 

Quack!

Thanks to MJ, our wobbly Francophone friend

Unforgettable

"You have to remember that most people lead very humdrum lives." That was a comment Peter Mandelson threw out to justify New Labour's continuation of the Conservative government's Millennium Dome project in a contrived 1999 TV documentary. He went on to say that people deserved the opportunity to have one extraordinary experience in life, which the Dome would provide. It was a perfect example of elite condescension.

At the time, I swore at the TV. Now I would tell Mandelson to go and see New Perspectives' production of my old friend Tim Elgood's latest play, Unforgettable. It welcomes us into ordinariness. The stage is set with respectably fashionable furniture from the early sixties, and we enter into the action through the aftermath of a subdued, suburban funeral with a finger buffet of indifferent vol-au-vents and sherry served from a cut glass decanter. We meet a brother and sister, Jed and Rosie, both in their sixties, both moderate failures, unexceptional in many ways. They are the only characters. And slowly they draw you into their world, a world that is both banal and beautiful.

The play hinges on Jed and Rosie's decision to care for their mother who has Alzheimer's, but it isn't really about dementia. And though the main theme explores the complexity of their relationship, this isn't the whole story either. The play is a tragicomedy. So is life. No life can have a happy ending and all must end. As the play repeats often, life is too short. Negotiating it is difficult. Yet we laugh and enjoy ourselves for as long as we can. We must.

Tim's gift as a writer is his ability to show that the prosaic is profound and there is an emotional intensity to the play, brought out by the fine acting and intelligent direction. He writes with affection, but without sentimentality. He never preaches. And the story that reveals itself as the evening progresses is one that we recognise as, in essence, our own.

Obviously given the subject matter, the play explores the nature of memory, especially through the use of evocative music, but what I found most compelling was the way that Unforgettable was a meditation on kindness. Even if it is masked by an acid, and wickedly funny, tongue, kindness is the unifying principle that held Jed and Rosie together, as it does us all. And this is what made me think of Mandelson. The reduction of the passions of life, death, birth, love and human kindness to a "humdrum" existence that can be elevated by a day out in a giant, corporate-sponsored plastic tent, is demeaning. This play is a complete rebuttal.

I enjoyed the jokes, found the humour cathartic, but was deep in thought by the end. It is a sympathetic and sensitive portrayal of ordinary lives facing difficult and common dilemmas that engages its audience on several levels. Those lives are important, those experiences intense. And as I left the theatre and strolled to the pub, still gripped by the emotional power of the play, I couldn't help thinking that the experience of seeing Unforgettable was so, well, memorable.

On and on

I'm back in the UK and it is cold. Being in more immediate touch with the British media, I am becoming acutely aware of the fact that nobody does a post-mortem like the Labour Party.

It combines the calm control of Lance-Corporal Jones,


the optimism of Private Frazer,


with more common-or-garden political practices.



Amongst the cries of "we were too left wing," "we were too right wing" or, even more bewilderingly, "we were too left wing for England and too right wing for Scotland," together with the Blairite calls for the return of the king from over the water or one of his anointed, there are some small voices of sanity.

First of all, Jon Trickett did something that few do, he looked at the figures. Most rely on impressions based, at best, on seats, but more often on pre-existing prejudices. And he comes up with something interesting.

In a minor tidal wave of what looks like pre planned statements, a group of commentators have argued that what lost the election was a failure to tap into the hopes of “aspirational” voters.
However, there is not a shred of evidence for their argument. The explanations for our defeat are deeper than this simplistic assessment.
The truth is that Labour recovered amongst middle class voters but has suffered a cataclysmic decline among working class voters.

That, together with the politics of nationalism, certainly did for Labour in Scotland, but also badly affected them in marginal constituencies elsewhere, particularly in the Midlands.

He also punctures the myth of the electoral triumphalism of New Labour by pointing out something anybody could see if they looked at the figures: "In 2005 ... Labour had lost 4 million voters since the election in 1997."

This isn't reassuring. As John Harris points out in the next outbreak of sanity, this is a common feature of social democratic parties across Europe. And in this country he comes to similar conclusions to Trickett:

...Labour’s vote share had been sliding since 2001. Even the supposedly wizard-like Tony Blair managed only 35.2% of the popular vote (a mere 22% of the whole electorate) in 2005 – and one only need visit any number of supposed Labour “heartlands” to understand what that decline now actually means. In those places, it’s instantly obvious that this is not just a crisis for centre-left politicians, but the left-behind people and places many of them are meant to speak for. Go to the South Wales valleys, or the post-industrial north-east: in the midst of a lot of generalised hopelessness, there is no real enthusiasm for Labour, limp support reducible to ancestor-worship (“I vote for them because my grandad did”), and among most people under 30, no idea of the values the party claims to stand for.

Economically left behind and politically ignored, these communities have turned to demagogic anti-immigration movements, hence UKIP's inroads into the Labour vote. Coffee mugs are no answer.

John Cruddas, who has an axe to grind, having written the manifesto and headed a policy review that was completely ignored, wants the party to try and recover those forgotten voters (and non-voters). As he explained in an interview with Toby Helm, the strategy Labour adopted was uninspiring.

Radical, far-reaching work produced by his policy review was ready to be taken up, he now says, but was left to gather dust by those around Miliband, who opted instead for their minimalist, safety-first offer, and a few “free money bribes” such as the energy price freeze, which failed to add up to a convincing, overarching national story.

He is also an advocate of rebuilding Labour as a social movement through community development and activism. It is damned hard work, as anyone who has worked in a community setting will tell you, but it isn't enough on its own. You have to make a difference too. You have to deliver on your work to be trusted. It is the right thing to do, but it won't bring instant results.

The elephant in the room is what caused these communities to get left behind in the first place, political economy. Nobody seems to be talking about it. Having conceded the basics since 1997, it is hard to build a convincing alternative narrative that can be sold. Part of the problem is that we are locked into the discussion of political ideas on the idea of a right/left spectrum. It is as if ideas can be quantified. Our language is imbued with terms like "the centre ground," implying the ability to split the difference between opposites. In reality, we have distinct theories of how an economy works, not a sliding scale of leftness and rightness. Labour needs to recover an alternative that they can show will work for the excluded and included alike - for all the people they speak for. That is not an easy task at all and it is not going to happen if the Party continues to think in clichés.

Awkward facts

There will be acres of commentary on the election in the next few days. A lot of it will be saying the same things and reading personal prejudices into the headline results. The narrative will be a surprise Tory triumph and a dismal Labour defeat. Old enmities will be dusted down, favourite policies will be advanced and everyone will have a theory about the reason why it happened. They will all focus on Parliamentary seats won and lost, very few will bother to look at the voting figures. If they did they would see a much more complicated picture.

The culprit is the electoral system, but not in the way UKIP seized upon it, comparing their 12.7% and one seat with the SNP's 4.7% and 56 seats. It is a false comparison. UKIP is a national party, whereas the SNP is a regional party, only standing in Scotland where they did exceptionally well. Any proportional system, other than a strict party list, factors in geographic representation and local constituencies. Under the single transferable vote, with multi-member constituencies, the result may have looked similar, though UKIP could have picked up a few more seats where they came second if they were garnering second and third preferences. Given the nature of UKIP, they may not have got that many, but that is only speculation. The Green Party might have done a lot better. The problems with the system lie elsewhere.

First, the Conservatives won a secure majority of 12 with only 36.9% of the vote, a weak performance. They gained 24 seats, but they only increased their share of the vote from 2010 by 0.8%. Labour did badly, there is no doubt about that, they lost 26 seats, yet look at the voting figures. Labour increased its share of the vote by 1.5% - more than the Tories managed. They had improved from the last election! And this is despite the miscalculations that exacerbated their Scottish disaster. However, they hadn't improved enough or in the right places. Despite this, the recriminations have started and Miliband has resigned as leader.

Labour really needs this introspection. Its platform and presentation was unimpressive. It has to develop a coherent social policy and a revamped, social democratic, political economy. 30.4% is poor for a party aspiring to be a party of government. But it still was an improvement on last time and sometimes recovery from a very low base takes time - like from 1997 to 2010 for instance. And the Tories didn't do much better. There is no need come over all apocalyptic just yet.

Secondly, the really big change was the collapse of the Liberal Democrats. They were the only major party to lose support. Their vote declined by 15.2% and they lost 49 seats. Now that was spectacular. They had been growing over the years on the basis of tactical voting, another by-product of the voting system. They became the vehicle for anti-Tory voting to lock the Conservatives out of constituencies that might have been naturally theirs. But then they went into coalition with them and the anti-Tory rationale disappeared overnight - as did their support. Doesn't look like such a smart move today, does it? With this big a collapse, the overall result depends on where these votes go and one of the things it appears to have done is to open up natural Tory constituencies as Conservative gains.

The other factor was turnout. 66.1% isn't good. Compare it to the Scottish independence referendum for example. This was an election without widespread enthusiasm. It is why it smelt of 1992 to me and I went to bed last night before the exit poll (Greece is two hours ahead of the UK) fully expecting a Conservative win, though not an overall majority. Labour hadn't done enough, was unconvincing and, without enthusiasm driving change, we tend to end up with stasis. However well the campaign went, they rarely make any difference at all. The die was cast much earlier.

And finally, I want to give two cheers to the polls. Yes they were wrong, but all polls are published with the caveat of a 3% margin of error either way. If they were overstating Labour by 3% and understating the Conservatives by 3%, they weren't that far out. The real fault with the polls was not their accuracy, but our willingness to believe in them as absolutely correct measures rather than being an approximation.

So we have a new single party government thanks to the distortions of our electoral system. Although the Tories were unambiguous winners as the largest minority, they did relatively poorly. We have an opposition locked into a process of re-evaluation and internal struggle. It sounds like a free pass. But have you seen some of those Tory backbench obsessives? The majority isn't that big and it won't be an easy ride. The opportunity is there but only if the Labour Party can develop a coherent programme and generate the energy and enthusiasm for change. And they have to do it in the right places to win seats in an arbitrary electoral system. Otherwise we are in for a long haul.

One big happy family

That's what the two codes of rugby are supposed to be now after that little family row that only lasted a hundred years of persecution or so. Except old habits die hard, it seems.

Rugby league players in the United Arab Emirates have been told the league president Sol Mokdad has been arrested as part of a rugby union campaign to have the 13-man game shut down.

 Come back Vichy ...

Silver linings

As any reader would imagine, I am not a happy bunny today, even if I was unsurprised by the result. But every cloud and all that ...

Two great results from the general election:

1. Farage lost. And he resigned as UKIP leader just as he said he would, though he did say that he may well stand as a candidate in the autumn leadership election (I am not sure that is what is normally meant by a resignation, but there we go). More importantly, it marked the defeat of the latest attempt to build a Powellite party in Britain.

2. Galloway lost. And he delivered a suitably bizarre losing speech whilst still wearing that strange hat (a white, Scottish Catholic blaming his defeat by an Asian woman on racism is novel). This too marked the defeat of something bigger, an attempt to create a populist and communalist political movement in alliance with ultra-conservatives and Islamists. The great joy is that he was comprehensively defeated by a Muslim feminist with a history of fighting discrimination.

It is nice to know that however many dark corners there are, Britain isn't that nasty.

Last tango with Charlie

I was going to leave the American spat about the PEN award to Charlie Hebdo alone, but then I came across this article. It didn't rehearse the old arguments, but said something new. Vladislav Davidzon, a Russian-American living in Paris, picks up on the American intellectual context of the PEN boycott with insight and verve. His target is the parochialism of American bourgeois prissiness. And there are some great lines in his piece:

 …as an American writer living in Paris, one has the acute feeling of being a witness to the moral and intellectual self-immolation of the American intelligentsia. 

 “Their account of Charlie Hebdo is like a Google-translated version of Rabelais,” the American writer Lauren Elkin lamented. 

Stale prudishness was mistaken for solidarity with the oppressed. 

 And even amongst the defence there was,

 ...the older strain of American prurience lurking in the rhetoric of the magazine’s American defenders … a ritual of bourgeois ideological self-abnegation, lacking all esprit and vitality. 

There is a lot more in the piece to chuckle at, but he nails it. Charlie Hebdo's literary critics were utterly humourless, morally censorious, and, well, depressingly conventional. It's bloody puritanism again. Some selected cartoons (all any of them saw) offended their sensibilities, even if they had been correctly interpreted. The cartoons weren't "punching down," they were punching them.

It is the suburbanisation of politics and it is everywhere. A middle class sense of propriety and constraint, linked to a paralysing fear of life, means we debate in semi-detached shackles. Argument is infused with anxiety about saying the wrong thing, thereby stepping outside the bounds of convention. What has happened is that the convention has replaced the cause and it is the cause that matters.

If you want to understand the demagogic appeal of Nigel Farage, it is because he deliberately breaks these rules, but does so in order to destroy the cause. In this way he appears subversive, but he is the ultimate suburban. He wishes to license the expression of the petty hatreds and prejudices that liberals are trying to outlaw. He is the other side of the same dismal coin.

It's time to realise that liberation is fun, equality can be fought for with humour and that free and happy societies are not the products of the denial of pleasure. Liberty is the product of a love of life, not a moral disapproval of the bits we enjoy. And irreverence has long been the weapon of the oppressed. This is why Davidzon provides the best defence of Charlie Hebdo that I have read. He writes:

Charlie Hebdo is, let it be said, utterly joyous and carnal fun for anyone with an anarchic sense of mirth. It is vital and scabrous and it skewers all religious and political pieties with equal glee. Descended from the glorious genealogical tradition of Honoré Daumier and the bande dessinée, the planar blocky design is all thickened line and sensuousness. The covers are strikingly designed in a creamy pastel palette. It is true that the cartoons do range all along the spectrum in quality, but many of them are uproarious, witty, and shrewd. They characterize the convention of sublime take-no-prisoners political savagery and sexual bawdiness that has always run through French political tradition, and which simply does not exist in American politics. Many of Charlie’s targets richly deserve the mocking opprobrium. The entire project is permeated with sex and libidinous fidelity to the bodily appetites. It is earthy rather than “vulgar.” 

Equality and the law

One of the basic principles of liberal democracy is equality before the law. At a bare minimum it insists that the law applies equally to all citizens. Though true in theory, the practice is different if people do not have access to advice and representation to find their way through the complexities, to understand their rights, and to have someone to articulate their case on their behalf in ways that the inexpert might find difficult. If the barrier to obtaining representation is money, then this fundamental democratic principle is undermined, confining justice to the wealthy. This is the whole rationale behind legal aid and local authority funded law centres. And this is also why the cuts to the system is a national scandal that has gone virtually unnoticed.

The Conservative Party's approach to public services is a curious one. The standard complaint of "marketisation" is raised at every turn as if the struggle is between free-market ideologues and those who feel that there are areas that should be immune from market competition. But in legal aid, as in other areas, this is not what the Tories are doing. They are actually reducing competition in favour of issuing a smaller number of state-approved contracts, limiting the choice of clients. And by doing so, they are bureaucratising what was a relatively simple system, restricting its availability and increasing its cost to the user.

Legal aid is not a sexy political area and lawyers are not an appealing political cause, unless you realise that nobody goes into criminal law for the money - where pay is poor and commitment high - or if your luck runs out and you find that you join the minority of people who need legal help. It has been absent from the election campaign until recently when an open letter to the Guardian tried to raise the issue. It is worth quoting from it at length.

In 2010, annual expenditure for the civil and criminal justice system stood at approximately £2bn per annum, which equates to the cost of running the NHS for a fortnight. Spending was falling and was not spiralling out of control. Now, after two years of an unprecedented programme of cuts, the level of spending is down to approximately £1.5bn per annum. The effect of the cuts is reflected in eye-watering statistics. From 2012-13 to 2013-14, debt cases fell from 81,792 to 2,423 and in clinical negligence from 2,859 to 114. In employment law, legally aided cases fell from 16,154 to six in the same period. The huge increase in employment tribunal fees has meant that people without deep pockets have little to no protection against unscrupulous employers. We know that cuts disproportionately affect women and, sure enough, the government’s own figures show an 80% drop in the number of women taking employment cases to tribunal. Funding in family law cases dropped by 60%, causing a predicted rise in unrepresented defendants, a trend now also starting to be seen in the criminal courts.

What the figures do not convey is the sheer human misery of being unable to get legal advice. GPs report a large increase in the number of patients who would have been assisted by advice on benefits, employment, debts and housing. Cuts to legal aid are literally making people sick.

To its credit, Labour has responded, but my how cautiously. It is promising to make it easier to get legal aid for victims of domestic abuse. On the radical upheaval of the system, it is silent. And here we see another problem. Labour only feels it can act where the recipient is uncontentiously deserving. It is a further sign of the erosion of the basic principle of universality towards the provision of services based on the idea of moral worth.

If conventional moral sanctimony is the determinant of support, it is hardly surprising that criminal law defendants are an easy target. But this is the whole point of universality. Access to a service is there irrespective of moral judgement. It is based on a different concept of justice. And in doing so it stands the best chance of reaching everyone who needs it. Once discretion enters into the equation, services go to those best able to negotiate the system. And what that usually means is that the people who need them most miss out.

Other voices

Angry

And sad

The obvious

This, from Robert McLiam Wilson, is really excellent. You need to know who he is.

I’m the Irish guy who writes for Charlie Hebdo. I’m conscious that this sounds like the beginning of a joke. Frankly, it’s beginning to feel a little like that too. 

 And he continues,

Much of this anti-Charlie prissiness comes from how the magazine has been typified in the Anglo press. ie, idiotically for the most part. An infinity of pundits have made blithe diagnoses of general knavishness while not speaking any French at all.

This bears repeating. No. French. At. All. The point about language is absolutely crucial. Indeed, it may well be the only real point. It is so preposterous that it makes my head spin. How can you make any sensible judgement about Charlie if you cannot read it?

Quite.

And people should read the whole of this article too. It's in English.