Tragedy

 Getting back to Manchester and walking into my local I was confronted with a sad loss. Boddingtons bitter is no more. Now that doesn't mean that the bland nitro keg stuff that is available all over the place has gone and the canned beer, including the Boddingtons Pub Ale that I can buy in Volos, is still ubiquitous. It is the real Boddies that has gone.

When I first moved to Manchester in the mid 70s a good Boddingtons pub was the holy grail. The beer was cheap, straw coloured and very bitter with a honeyed after taste from the malt. It was a local brewery, based at Strangeways. And then came the corporate takeovers.

First, the brewery was acquired by Whitbread. They began the process of marketing the brand and changing the beer to make an imitation of the original available nationwide. They still kept making the old bitter, though diehard Boddies fans were convinced that it had changed into something more bland. Then, in turn, Whitbread were swallowed by Interbrew and their interest in a Manchester beer was limited. The Strangeways brewery was closed, but the cask conditioned draught bitter continued to be made at Hydes' Moss Side brewery. When Hydes decided to move, Boddingtons real ale died.

Boddingtons was founded in 1778 and this is the irony of the story. Beer has played a central role in British social history and whilst we lament the demise of a small independent brewery, Boddingtons were one of the predatory giants of the early industrial revolution. Before then most pubs brewed their own beer. Production was small scale, casks were racked above the bar; the hand pumped beer engine, worshipped by real ale freaks, that draws beer up from a cool cellar had yet to be invented. Larger industrialised breweries began to put an end to this and carved up the market, developing networks of tied houses where only their beer could be sold.

And by putting the home brew pub out of business, this revolution in beer production contributed to something else, the decline in women's status and economic independence. Brewing was a female job. Sheila Rowbotham has argued that this shift from home production was one of the critical factors that intensified gender inequality in industrial Britain.

And now, they in turn have succumbed to larger corporate interests. The major difference being that this also marks a decline in the quality of the product. But as to my splendid local, all is not bad news. Now they serve Thwaites.

Stoutism

Here's something designed to irritate me. A headline that reads "Doctors back denial of treatment for smokers and the obese". Just as I was marshalling all my indignation and arguments I read on. First I came to the statement that:

A majority of doctors support measures to deny treatment to smokers and the obese, according to a survey that has sparked a row over the NHS's growing use of "lifestyle rationing".

But then I came to the details of the survey. The majority was a narrow one (54%) and there was worse. This was not a representative sample.

Doctors.net.uk, a professional networking site, found that 593 (54%) of the 1,096 doctors who took part in the self-selecting survey answered yes when asked: "Should the NHS be allowed to refuse non-emergency treatments to patients unless they lose weight or stop smoking?"

So a self-selecting group of under 600 doctors, no doubt of the body fascist persuasion, are portrayed as the whole medical profession. This is precisely how the media use dubious surveys uncritically in order to write a sensational story. Mind you, the important argument is political not clinical. It is that universal services are precisely that, universal. And they are certainly not provided on the basis of a selective morality based on conformity to the latest fads.

Back again

Pelion showed itself at its finest as I left on Thursday. The air was clear and as the plane rose I could look down and see the the whole length of the peninsula. The village where my house is was momentarily visible, sitting by the sea where the land starts to twist round in on itself. Then the plane banked and flew north over the snow-capped Pindus mountains, leaving the warm air slowly behind as it began to approach a vast bank of cloud over northern Europe.

And so I came back to mountainous sarcasm as rain lashes down on this officially drought-stricken country and the unsurprising news that once again the economy has slipped into recession.

Before I left, an elderly neighbour spoke to me as I worked in the garden. She did a startlingly good impersonation of one of her local enemies before moving from the small world of the village to, inevitably, The Crisis. "Prices go up, up, up. How can I live? My pension is only €370 a month. In the summer I can grow food, but what will happens in winter?" That is about all the meaning I could salvage from her machine gun Greek.

So what will happen? There comes a point when the most stubborn-minded ideologue, insulated from everyday life finds that reality has a nasty kick. My neighbour was only one manifestation of a pan-European sense of discontent. Across Europe anti-austerity movements are growing. The problem is that they are as much vehicles for populist, xenophobic and far-right sentiment as they are for democratic leftism. The conservative government of the Netherlands may have fallen, but it was Wilders' Freedom Party that brought it down

The possible election of Hollande in France may be the first crack, if only a small one, in the deadly certainty of the  European elite. If so, then it will be welcome as there has been little sign of any alternative political economy emerging elsewhere. Mark Weisbrot argues from the left that counter-cyclical economic policies are more than possible:

It is only the political will that is lacking. In the meantime, the opposition of ordinary Europeans throughout the eurozone will be all that stands between the European authorities and a worsening economic mess.

What should be concerning us all is that such opposition could end up imposing an even darker fantasy on reality than that of the austerity fetishists. After all, the opposition is not solely composed of elderly women in Greek villages, but of ambitious men and women anxious to promote a politics of hate.

1901

Something for a change. This is an extraordinary piece of trick cinema, an early comic scene from one hundred and eleven years ago. The youthful energy of the performer, the imaginative ingenuity and near faultless continuity are astonishing given its age.

But this is also dark comedy; it is like an anxiety dream where nothing that you are trying to do can ever be achieved, whatever you are looking for can't be found, you become trapped in endlessly replicating frustration. Very odd.

Ιστορία

I have sometimes alluded to modern Greek history when I have posted on the Euro crisis. This superb Radio 4 documentary by Maria Margaronis discusses the complexities and legacy of the recent past without romanticisation. Well worth an hour of anyone's time.

Thanks to Kev

Nostalgia

Economic crisis grips Europe; the rich party on as if nothing is happening; the policies of Brüning and Laval are all the rage; now the Daily Mail comes out in support of fascists.

Are you sure we aren't living in a Thirties theme park?

Easter parade

Goats moving to summer pastures - the event of the week.

Exciting times.

Spring

The sun is warm, the air cool. Bird song mingles with the sound of chainsaws on the breeze. And the quince trees are in bloom.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
    Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

Obedience and its discontents

Having spent nearly thirty years in what is often known as 'second-chance adult education', though sometimes I wondered about whether the nominal first chance ever really existed, Suzanne Moore's column rang a bell. She wrote,

I just hated school. Education policy is made by those who loved it, and this is a fundamental mistake. People who never regarded school as a moronic prison full of inane rules should not be in charge of them. This is why, instead of looking to the future, the current fashion in education is to look only backwards. 

Of course Moore was an adult returner herself. I wonder if she had a tutor who dished out the same big speech that I used to give to those often brilliant school failures that turned up to my classes. All of them had fragile self-confidence when it came to education; so I used to point out to them that failure was an intelligent response to schools, that they reward conformism rather than talent and that only the unimaginative do well. Maybe someone did, it may also have been a convenient excuse, or perhaps it is just screamingly obvious as you begin to succeed despite all those institutions having done their best to tell you that you were worthless, but she certainly thinks the same, writing here that,

Intelligence, the ability to connect and create ideas, the so-called thinking outside the box – these things are hardly likely when the box itself is idolised.

Though it was a good device for dealing with insecurities, it is a bit of a truism. All organisations require a degree of conformism to function. I know some great teachers who worked in tough areas and all would emphasise the importance of a functioning, structured institution to enabling kids to achieve. What then matters is less the matter of conformism, but the quality and nature of the institution to which people are asked to conform. Football fans will have had the perfect example this weekend. Scholes or Balotelli?

But this still leaves us with a problem, just where are those institutions that harness talent and foster creativity? And even more so, how are they to survive the bureaucratic stranglehold and funding regimes that constrict modern education as tightly as an Edwardian corset? Because now we are looking at the forward march of managerialism, the triumph of jargon-laden orthodoxy and self-perpetuating power structures. Everywhere there is a demand for subservience and the idea of management as a process of command and obedience is ubiquitous. Not only that, in a class society that is becoming more rigid, limited economic mobility is only realistically possible through a narrow conformism.

The sheer mediocrity of the managerial elites demands the same of us all. It certainly infects politics. Moore again:

Our political class is indeed the pinnacle of smug regurgitation. Many are the products of the very best education, and what do they desire? Only to replicate what they know, not to transform the world. As our access to information widens, our education system could open up. Instead, it narrows itself to certainties that anyone with half a brain would have questioned a long time ago. Go to school, get a good job, don't ask what it's for. Freedom does not come from thinking by rote. Whatever they tell you.

So now I look back on a teaching career slowly coming towards its end, a career record unblemished by a single promotion, and comfort myself that it is is only dull conformists who climb the ladder. That is my excuse. And I'm sticking to it.

Back to Greece

I flew in to Volos last Sunday before promptly falling victim to a stomach bug and I am only just regaining normality. And the scene in Volos city centre when I arrived was certainly normal. Warm spring sunshine, the Argonafton bustling, the restaurants full.

The crisis? People still enjoy themselves and, though austerity is casting its net widely, we are not all in it together. Funny how this is the one net where the bigger the fish, the easier it is to wriggle free.

A retired pharmacist brought economics back to the headlines in Athens by blowing his brains out near the national parliament building. And Jon Henley's reflections on the suicide highlight the impact of austerity on living standards.

Certainly, many Greeks are in desperate straits. In its fifth straight year of recession, Greece has seen its GDP shrink by a crushing 17%. Unemployment currently stands at 21%. Wages have fallen by a third since 2009 and are set to slide a further 15% in the next three years. Pensions, as Christoulas dramatically demonstrated, have been slashed.
The austerity measures imposed by the IMF and EU as a condition of Greece's successive bailouts have seen one in 11 people in greater Athens reduced to using soup kitchens daily, stocks of half the country's most prescribed medicines running out.
On my trip I met a secondary school teacher whose pay, which stood at €1,200 a month in 2010 and was cut to €850 last year, is set to fall to €600 from next month (his rent and bills remain €400), and a child psychologist who has not been paid at all since December; she and her two small sons have had to move in with her mother.

Whilst policy makers seem to ignore the architecture of monetary union, others are certainly raising the question of the future of the Euro. This year's Wolfson Prize for economics is being awarded on the basis of the best plan to break up the Eurozone. In a profile by Zoe Williams, the BBC economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, put the significance of the Euro crisis succinctly:

It's more than a disaster, I think it's a tragedy. It was quite an ambitious project, which had pros and cons, but it was basically mis-sold to everybody. So the Germans were sold it as a way of spreading a German approach to economics, and German stability, across the eurozone; but they were told that it would come without any obligations on them, there would be no bailouts. At the same time, the others were told this was a quick ticket to German stability, and they would get low interest rates and low inflation, and they weren't told: there's one catch – you have to be as competitive as Germany for ever. And if you do have any problems, all the usual tools you'd use to get out of them won't be available to you. For many of these countries, the implication is years more austerity, which has a big sign on it saying, 'Brought to you by the euro.'

I suppose the clearest message against economic orthodoxy, even more poignant given Christoulas' suicide, came from South Korea. I have often argued that individual human liberty cannot be extended to its fullest in anything other than conditions of the maximum possible security.  Ha-Joon Chang makes the same point, but implicitly asks what the point of an economy is in the first place. If it is to make people happy, then we are on the wrong road.

The sad tale of my country should serve as a salutary warning to Britain and other European countries that are embarking on major cuts to welfare. They believe that such cuts will reduce budget deficits and make their economies more productive by making people compete more vigorously. However, the Korean story shows that insecurity actually makes people less, not more, productive, and also desperately unhappy. Surely, that is not what they want.

***

And finally ...

The bit that took me most by surprise was reading that Stephanie Flanders is the daughter of Michael Flanders, one half of the comic song partnership, Flanders and Swann. You will have to be of a certain age to remember them, but they were part of the background music of my childhood. So to continue with the Greek theme, what better to finish on than with their version of To Kokoraki.

Today is ...

... National Cleavage Day. In the true spirit of equal opportunities, I think that us blokes should be allowed to join in too.

Lest we forget

"Bradford Spring"? A sick joke.

Two nice places

The sun shone on Hull as I was there for a couple of days this week, seeing old friends and missing many more whom I would have loved to have seen.

Not all was well. As the Hull Daily Mail reports, a major adult education programme, the one I used to run, is facing closure. One of our students commented,

"I passionately believe the university and the chances it can offer should be for everybody, not just for the few."

She is right and all the staff thought likewise. I shared quite a few drinks last night with some very able, committed and downright frustrated people.

Even with this poignant loss, Hull is still a lovely place. And it is beginning to flaunt itself a bit.  When I first went there it marked its heritage with the fish pavement - a set of plaques in the pavement with engravings of fish on them to lead people on a guided walk around the sites of the old fishing industry. Now there are iconic buildings such as The Deep, innovative ones like ARC, the Museums Quarter and recently the promotion of Philip Larkin, with a fine statue at the station and slate plates with some verses of his poetry set in the station concourse. This last is rather ironic; if Hull now celebrates Larkin, Larkin did anything but celebrate Hull.

The great virtue of the beautification of the city is that it has not been accompanied by gentrification. The place remains resolutely down-to-earth and a joy to visit.

And tomorrow I am on my way to Greece again, where the problems facing Hull are nothing as to the economic crisis there. Yet, in contrast to the apocalyptic reportage with their projection of Mad Max scenarios around the streets of Athens, Jon Henley continues to tell of the consequent growth of social solidarity in the face of adversity, rather than the social breakdown being predicted by the dystopian pessimists.

There is, among many Greeks, still intense anger at what they are living through, as well as almost complete disillusionment with politicians, not to say politics. But in Choupis's words, many are "moving beyond anger": instead of lashing out, coming together.
In Volos, a waiter in the taverna by the ferry terminal, told me that "in the years of cheap money and easy credit, we just lost sight of what matters, you know? It's sad that it's taken a crisis to do it, but we're rediscovering our values."

Watch his video report here.

All of which suggests that Thomas Hobbes is not always the best guide to human behaviour, even if the outcome of the crisis is far from clear. And nice places remain nice places, despite the worst efforts of unimpressive governing elites to try and ruin them.

Three on Greece

First up is a longish piece in the London Review of Books. It has carries the stamp of LRB fashionable pesimism, although there is, of course, much to be pessimistic about. John Marakis looks at the political causes of the Greek crisis, laments the loss of sovereignty and charts the impact of austerity being imposed by the 'troika' of lenders. With elections looming he concludes:

A coalition of the same parties in parliament rubber-stamps the measures the troika demands while proposing to compete for a ‘fresh mandate’ in elections planned for April. Recent opinion polls show that more than 60 per cent of the electorate wish a plague on both their houses. The choice could hardly be less appealing: vote for the same crew, or don’t vote at all – an incitement to violence if ever there was one.

Then here comes the optimists, this in a review in the Financial Times of a new documentary by two young Greek film makers, Krisis. They are absolutely clear about the social impact of the crisis, but then they see some hope.

“There is not a single conversation I had with a person who didn’t see the bright side,” said Katsaounis. “Greece has been through a lot of shit. Compared to the second world war, the civil war, the dictatorship, this is a bump in the road.” 

Finally, the realists.  Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu write about the impact of the partial Greek default on the financial system and reckon that it has been minimal. They conclude that the all-pervading apocalyptic prognosis of total financial collapse which would be the result of any policy that didn't impoverish the Greek people to avoid default was not analysis, but special pleading by those who stood to lose as a consequence of their bad investments. And this capture of the policy making elites by the financial ones is deemed to be one of the reasons why the EU leaders have "mismanaged their way into a deep crisis".  They conclude,

The Greek default has turned out to be the proverbial dog that didn’t bark. The lesson for Europe – and for the US – is clear: it is time to stop listening to what banks say, and start focusing on what they do. We must re-evaluate the distorted political economy of the financial sector, before the excessive power of the few imposes even larger costs on everyone else.

All three are worth reading in full.

Choosing to learn

What annoys me about the new system for funding higher education in England is not so much the proposals themselves, regressive though they are, it is the hysterical misconceptions of some of the opposition. The latest is in the line is this piece, which says that:

"Student choice is a myth, and a dangerous one at that."

His tortuous argument concludes with this decidedly strange statement:

... the emphasis on student choice is actually immoral. It loads upon immature participants (note the assumption of immaturity - all students are not young and not all young students are immature) all the responsibility and risks of making the wrong choice, a choice that is hard to unravel once made. Surely it is the academic community that should take the responsibility for ensuring that whatever and wherever a student wishes to study (er, isn't this a choice?), they will receive a worthwhile higher education.

What world is he living in? The best people to tell you if a course is crap or not are the students. They are quite capable of judgement. Should it really be this mythical 'academic community' that directs the poor innocents and tells them that what they think is piss poor is actually the best that can possibly be dreamt up by these fine minds? And hasn't he noticed that universities have always been in a market, which might explain why they spend so much on big marketing departments? Every time an applicant fills in a UCAS form, they are making a choice. Every course with options invites students to make a choice. Student choice is, and has always been, integral to higher education.

Of course total customer sovereignty would be crazy - after all, customers are frequently wrong - but so is an authoritarian diktat. The best education has always been a mutualist exchange. Yet he hits the nail on the head when he writes about the risk of making a wrong choice, before moving on to continue bludgeoning his thumb.

Because this is where the real damage is being done, second chance learning. You cannot prevent people making a choice that is wrong for them at the time, or one that may turn out to have been wrong later in life. But by removing teaching grant and putting the full burden of funding on fees alone, the cost threshold for returning to do something different has been raised for those who find themselves ineligible for government loan funding, whilst institutions have no incentive to offer anything other than the orthodox.

The result is that second chance learning has collapsed other than through employer sponsorship, as have broader university missions like the engagement of local communities through adult education and subsidised short courses. Any free market allows for experimentation and learning through mistakes - 'those cornflakes were disgusting', 'that builder is a cowboy', 'I am never using that garage again' - choosing the wrong subject at the wrong time is common. The ability to rectify that mistake is now much more costly and, for many, prohibitively so.

The new funding system is a mess. At the heart of its incoherence is a narrow concept of what a university is for. Locked into an orthodox view of the student as a school leaver taking a full-time degree, the possibilities of a more imaginative and flexible vision of universities as centres of lifelong learning has been lost. And, amongst the self-serving wringing of academic hands, that argument is seldom heard.

Anarchy

But where Anarchist practice really triumphs is in the course of everyday life among common people who would not be able to endure their dreadful struggle for existence if they did not engage in spontaneous mutual aid, putting aside differences and conflicts of interest. When one of them falls ill, other poor people take in his children, feeding them, sharing the meagre sustenance of the week, seeking to make ends meet by doubling their hours of work. A sort of communism is instituted among neighbors through lending, in which there is a constant coming and going of household implements and provisions. Poverty unites the unfortunate in a fraternal league. Together they are hungry; together they are satisfied …

A miniscule society that is anarchistic and truly humane is thus created, even though everything in the larger world seems to be in league to prevent its being born – laws, regulations, bad examples, and public immorality.

Elisée Reclus (1894)

Papadopoulos, who spent 17 years abroad with MSF and returned to her native Greece three years ago, sees hope among the rubble. "What keeps me going is an increasingly strong sense of solidarity among the Greek people," she said. "Donations to MSF, for example, have of course gone down with the crisis, but donors keep giving, they remain active."

She sees a refreshing new phenomenon of self-organisation and social action. "In the past year of this crisis I have seen really encouraging, really exciting things happening – people are seeing the power of organising themselves. We have to support them."

 Jon Henley, this from the latest in a series of illuminating reports on the social impact of the crisis in Greece.

Here is just one example of why Greece is still a great place and why you should go there and spend your money, despite all the negativity in the press. But it is also a reminder that, whilst the financial markets are settling into the warm glow of complacency with the conclusion of the latest deal, the crisis is far from over and that none of the major economic contradictions have been addressed. Even though EU leaders think that they have successfully quarantined Greece (a policy that is the antithesis of solidarity), Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland are waiting in the shadows and even the Netherlands can't meet the terms of the extraordinarily restrictive fiscal rules that they so assiduously helped to impose. There is no resolution, events are merely pausing for breath.

Cat blogging

If in doubt, fall back on cats.

Visit the web site here.  There is an interview here as well.

Full fat blogging

Here is a post from Norm that I thought I couldn't fault, until ... the link.

Hummus is indeed divine, but Waitrose 'reduced fat houmous' (sic)?  For a man of a certain shape with a profile to maintain, an inbuilt distrust of the words 'reduced fat' is to be expected. But when that fat is provided solely by olive oil and crushed sesame seeds, even the virtuous must side with the stout.

If you want really addictive, totally scrumptious hummus, make your own. It is incredibly easy and all the quantities can be varied according to taste. This is how I do it.

Use dried chick peas, rinse and soak overnight. Half a packet will make a huge bowl of the glorious stuff, enough for a family of addicts. Drain and rinse the chick peas and then you can either simmer them for a couple of hours in salted water, or do what I do and use a pressure cooker so that they only take twenty minutes to be nice and soft, but not mushy. I suppose you can cut corners with tinned chick peas, but they aren't as nice and I would sulk.

This is the important bit. Don't throw away the cooking liquid. You are going to use some for blending.

Use a blender (you can be authentic if you like and spend god knows how long beating them up in a pestle and mortar, but only if you are mad, precious or a columnist for a posh paper).

First, put two or three large peeled cloves of garlic in the blender (vary to taste but NEVER omit), add the juice of a lemon (again this can be half a lemon for a milder flavour or even two if you like that sharp lemony tang), pour in a good quantity of quality olive oil. Blend until the garlic has disintegrated. Spoon in some tahini - again vary according to taste - a dessert spoon or a tablespoon full, though don't overdo it. A good tip is to stir the tahini first so that any of the oil that has separated out is mixed back in with the sesame pulp. I then give it another whizz in the blender.

Now for the crucial bit. Add some of the chick peas with a little of the cooking water and blend with the oil, garlic and lemon, preferably on a low setting (I like mine coarse not smooth). This is the trick. If it is too sloppy add more chick peas to thicken it, if it is too solid add more cooking water. Continue until you have blended the lot, then you can throw the rest of the cooking water away. Beware, you can thin down hummus easily, but you can't thicken it up again if you have run out of chick peas. It doesn't take a lot of water to turn it into a thin, liquid mess. That is why you do it in stages.

Spoon it into a bowl and give it a good stir with a fork so that everything is evenly mixed, cover and set aside for a bit for the flavours to merge.

To serve, pour over more olive oil so that there is a layer of it on the surface, sprinkle on a little paprika and decorate with lemon wedges. Get yourself some pitta bread, plain flat bread or a nice, fresh baked white loaf and dig in (OK spoon some on your plate if you insist on being refined).

Continue until sated, in this case it means when you have had too much, lie back, close your eyes and think of Nigella Lawson. Bliss.

Sheffield spring

Not just a beautiful day, but another step on the revival of Sheffield Eagles, now playing out of both the Don Valley Stadium and Bramall Lane. Sadly, the latest step was taken at the expense of Swinton. This promotion lark is not going to be easy.

A tribute

I meant to post this a few weeks ago but forgot, though I don't know how. So in a slow blogging week, I thought I would put up this heart-rending tribute. Here is Star Turn on 45 Pints performing as the inimitable Whitley Houston.