This time it's personal

I haven't really known what to make of the MPs' expenses scandal. Squalid, certainly, but significant? What has irritated me most is the whining of the privileged as they justify their actions - 'it is the system' and 'everything is in accordance with the rules' - as if rules and systems absolved the need for ethics and moral judgement. Then this happened.

MP David Chaytor has been suspended by the Parliamentary Labour Party amid allegations he claimed money for a mortgage he had already paid off.

He is the second Labour MP to be suspended and the latest from both main parties to face investigation amid continuing controversy over expenses.

The Daily Telegraph says the Bury North MP took nearly £13,000 for the flat in London after it was paid off in 2004.

I worked with David for several years in adult education in Manchester. We kept in touch and I visited him for a drink in the House of Commons just after he was elected. Though we haven't been in contact for a few years, I always liked David and considered him an able and principled man of the left.

His integrity was tested early. When, in 1997, the new Labour government decided to stick to the spending limits of the outgoing Tory administration it committed itself to policies that it had vehemently opposed only months earlier. The most egregious of these was a cut in benefit payable to single parents. The squirming sophistry as MPs tried to justify the unjustifiable was dispiriting to say the least. To his enduring credit, David was one of the few who rebelled and voted against the proposal. He remained a frequent rebel, holding to his principles when so many others caved in.

And now there is this, and I genuinely don't know what to think. Was it a "mistake" as he claimed? Does the defence of the living standards of the poor outweigh the abuse of expenses? Is it possible to be a good representative even whilst maximising your own personal benefit? However, perhaps Bakunin got it right:

Dependent on popular election, they are at first distinguished from the mass of the citizens only by the very qualities which recommended them to their choice and are naturally, the most devoted and useful of all. They do not yet assume to themselves any privilege, any particular right, except that of exercising, insofar as the people wish it, the special functions with which they have been charged ... Can this equality be long maintained? ...

Nothing is more dangerous for man's private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits ...

Is there not something in all that to make a man lose his head and his heart as well, and become mad with pride? It is thus that power and the habit of command become for even the most intelligent and virtuous men, a source of aberration, both intellectual and moral.

It's all in the genes

At least it is according to Chris Woodhead who "...says the children of middle-class professionals are likely to have 'better genes'". Thomas Hardy would never have bothered to write Jude the Obscure if he had access to this startling, scientific insight. Know your place indeed. And this should please Paulie and Shuggy

His answer is to teach all children the basics: to read and write, using phonics, and to be numerate. Then the solution is selection and grammar schools, and a voucher system whereby parents could buy their child's way to a better life.

Yep, vouchers solves all. This sums his position up:

Some children are born "not very bright" and education ministers will never be able to change that...

However, whilst ministers may not be able to change the "not very bright", they are able to appoint them as chief inspectors.

Conventional wisdom

Polly Toynbee writes sense about Thatcherism in her piece on the expenses scandal and Labour's record on equality.

This week marks 30 years since Thatcher walked into No 10, creating the myth that it marked an epochal change in attitudes. It didn't. It marked the day when Britain's dysfunctional electoral system allowed a small rightward shift to let in an unrepresentatively radical party. When unions over-reached themselves, 44% voted for her but 56% still voted against. British Social Attitudes showed year after year that people stayed wedded to the welfare state, the NHS, the BBC and social security. The majority always voted to the left of her, and her savage cuts made her the most unpopular PM to date, saved only by the left's exceptional disarray.

Thatcherism actually did mark a change in consensus. However, it was only the elite consensus that changed and it was one that smacked of opportunistic self-interest. Arguably, this was the central error of Labour's 'modernisers'. They mistook the views of the elite with the views of the populace as a whole.

However, my suspicion is that there is a bit more to it than that. New Labour despised the views of ordinary, left-leaning people, seeing them as ignorant and behind the times -'dinosaurs'. It was their own self-perception as being new, young and holding the secrets of modernity that was their undoing. And, as an enlightened elite themselves, they saw no reason why they, too, should not grab a piece of the burgeoning wealth at the top. Those of us locked into egalitarian ideas and shaking our heads in incomprehension were derided as 'the forces of conservatism'. Well, their nemesis is with us now and it gives me no pleasure, no pleasure at all.

Political scandal

Forget MPs' expenses. This is the real scandal.

Inequality at levels not seen under Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher or Major. Real cuts in the incomes for those at the bottom of the pile. No progress in reducing child or pensioner poverty. A record number of working-age adults without children living below the breadline. For the government, the release today of the annual Households Below Average Income data from the Department of Work and Pensions made desperately depressing reading.

Alienation? Are you surprised? Disillusion? What else would you expect? This is the true cost of Labour's slavish devotion to a conservative political economy, a cost borne by the poorest.

A really, really bad idea

Fire Hose Rodeo



Thanks to Trace

Misreading

Tanya Gold, in a piece about Jean Rhys, writes about Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre:

Jane Eyre is about a principled, virginal governess who falls in love with her employer Mr Rochester, but cannot marry him, because he has a wife, an insane and dangerous woman who lives in the attic, and appears only to start fires. It is a rescue fantasy - a book about how a plain woman can be saved by a powerful man.

In fact, this is the genre that Bronte subverts. It certainly is a rescue novel, only it is one about how a powerful man can be saved by a plain woman - but solely by losing his power and living with her as an equal. A far more interesting theme than Gold suggests.

Things we take for granted

And shouldn't

1. A shower - or bath if that is what you prefer. The bandage came off my leg today and I have just had a shower, feeling deliciously clean for the first time in a week. There is only so much you can do with a flannel.

2. The sheer niceness of most of the people who work in the health service, despite the occasional horror story.

3. The silly idea that you will see something that you want to blog about most days.

Once upon a swine

Shamelessly stolen from here

Recycling

I haven't heard it since my childhood. Today, outside my window, there was a cry of "rag bone - rag bone", the words running together, the 'o' elongated and exaggerated, sounding like another language from another time. At the bottom of the street was a horse and cart. So they still exist.

Health and efficiency

As I sit here with my left leg raised, swathed in bandages, after the last instalment of the minor surgery I required, I have just discovered that Paul Anderson has taken up the cudgels again.

He couldn't resist after spotting an interview on YouTube with a Tory MEP, Dan Hannan, on Fox News. The main purpose of the interview was to trash the NHS with contradictory fictions. You can see it here. After my brilliant treatment it made me especially angry, my views haven't changed from this earlier post.

The other night a taxi driver was talking endlessly to me about how he wasn't a Tory but thought that Cameron would make a good Prime Minister. I then realised that the next election was all but lost. Watch this video and be scared, be very scared.

I leave the final words to Anderson and his understated comment.

What a stuck-up wanker. Lower than vermin. And what a cretin to do it now.

Seven songs for spring

How many fans and admirers is it possible for a fat man to have? I have been tagged three times to the best of my knowledge. George Szirtes, Poumista and Brigada Flores Magon have all asked me to join in this meme.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

Spring is associated with all sorts of corny music, "Paris in the Springtime", "If I Ruled the World", "Tulips from Amsterdam". It is a time of hope and romance. So what am I mainly listening to at the moment? Laments, that's what.

I have always had a soft spot for the lugubrious, but I think there is a bit more to it than that. If Spring is about new departures, that means leaving the old behind. When Persephone rises from the Underworld to rejoin Demeter, she brings life to the earth but leaves Hades and her realm in darkness. Spring is about parting too, about saying goodbyes.

Having just caught up with the world of music downloads I am exploring the music that I loved when I was young but never got around to buying. Most of it was contemporary folk; Dylan, Baez, Joni Mitchell and, of course, Leonard Cohen. My first song is one that is continuously buzzing around my head at the moment, Hey, That's no Way to Say Goodbye.

The mood is obviously infectious as the other night I listened to Mahler's Song of the Earth, with its sad and sensuous final movement evoking the fading of life into eternity, Der Abschied (The Farewell).

For me, Spring is also Easter in Greece and my friend likes to play the George Dalaras and Haris Alexiou CD, Mikra Asia, itself a remembrance of a lost world, as we turn the spit with the whole lamb roasting on it. I have been listening to it since I came back and here is a splendid live performance by Dalaras.

Returning home to a more frenzied life I calmed myself with the lyricism of Delius, a Yorkshire born composer of course. I chose to listen to On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring because of a memorable moment in a drive into the mountains in Greece when, by an old hollowed out tree, I heard the loudest and brashest cuckoo you could possibly imagine.

My trip into the past was not all bedsit misery. I heard Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant only once in the late 60's, but I never forgot it. The other day I downloaded it and listened to it again for the first time in forty years.

And when I need energising I turn to the driving jazz funk of Miles Davis's Right Off from A Tribute to Jack Johnson (and see this clip set to archive footage of Johnson himself). There is another memory here, it features John McLaughlin who I saw in a dazzling concert with his Mahavishnu Orchestra back in the early 1970's.

And my last one is a bit of a cheat as I haven't really been into it. Why do I feel the need for new starts, farewells and energising? This Bob Dylan song should give you a clue.

My seven tags? John boogies online every Friday. Scribbles is always up for a meme. Paulie is good for a tune or two. And what about those Critical Chatters in Crete? Come on Harry, give us a song or seven. Anyone who can throw up a post on interior design in 1970's Danish porn movies must have some interesting musical tastes, so how about it John and the Wife? And finally, I reckon we will get some good Jazz from Jim Denham.

Entrepreneurship

Another fine night with fine people. In one pub there was the best idea I've seen yet to get round the smoking ban for nicotine addicts. The owners had placed pots of complimentary snuff on the bar. Clever.

(Posted especially for Karen. She's been to the Nou Camp you know.)

A sense of proportion

"You dirty rotten swine you! You have deaded me again!"
The Goons

The Independent

Prepared for the apocalypse: Mexico's masked metropolis

The Express

Government health advisers warn a worst-case scenario flu pandemic could kill up to 750,000 people in Britain alone and lead to mass graves, inflatable mortuaries and 24-hour cremations.

spEak You’re bRanes

I do not believe that there is a pig flu. I distrust all government.

There is only one thing to do. Take to the streets and demand your rights!

Surrealism

Rugby League latest:

Whilst I was away, that august journal, The Salford Advertiser, reported that

Swinton Lions ascended like Jesus to the top of the Championship One table following two victories over the Easter period.

They played Oldham today and were cast out of heaven for the sins of knocking on, passing forward and missing tackles in a game where defence was seen as a tiresome imposition to be disregarded at will.

Oldham won 52-36. The match was played in the style of Dali.

Dancing to the Donkey of the Black Rock

The nickname of a singer and carpenter with a famously flat voice, here leading the traditional dancers in the square at Trikeri, a mountain top village at the end of the Pelion Peninsula.

Trickeri is celebrated for its mercantile energy, and sends its fishermen to dive for sponge all over the Levant. It possesses several schooners and tricanderis, which carry on, principally, the cabotage of these parts, but also venture as far as Alexandria and Constantinople. They did not recollect having sent vessels to Soujouk-Kaleh, and therefore it was needless to ask them about the Argo, or to tell them that their ancestors, thirty-five centuries before, had discovered Circassia, in a vessel, the timbers of which had descended from their mountains. In this narrow circuit of hills, enclosing the gulf, a great portion of which, too, is perfectly bare and completely barren, exists a population of 50,000 souls, amongst whom arts so varied flourish, and who, for centuries, have enjoyed freedom and abundance. Men have seemed to spring, in this favoured region, from the fructifying look of the rocks, still bearing the names of Deucalion and of Pyrrha. They have been protected, by their geographical position, from the savage tribes that, for so many centuries, oppressed their neighbours of the plain, and they have been shielded by the Church from the abuses of the Government. This district exhibits what the soil can produce, and what happiness man can attain to when relieved from the intrusion of laws.

David Urquhart - The Spirit of the East - 1838

Since then it's changed drastically in many ways, but perhaps not in all.


Photos by Aphroula

Respect

I went to a poetry reading last night. It wasn't like this.



More cultured, a bit like this.



With an added drop or two of this.

Words

Words can hurt, words can savage. Then there is the regret of words unsaid, recalled too late. Yet, when wrapped in intelligence, principle and warmth, words heal. When crafted with beauty, they delight, intrigue and bathe you in thought. Tonight I needed those words; words about fish as a form of sexual instruction, about ghostly conversations, about endless labour in a hotel bedroom. I was lucky, they came my way, I am grateful.

Here we go again

It's fattie bashing time once more. And again we are being fingered for global warming.

High rates of obesity in richer countries cause up to 1bn extra tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, compared with countries with leaner populations, according to a study that assesses the additional food and fuel requirements of the overweight.

Now I am quite happy with the argument that increasing consumption in the developed world contributes to global warming, but why is it assumed that us stout people are the only ones doing the consuming. We are the ones who tend to put the weight on, that's all. Skinny people who stuff themselves without piling on the flab are apparently immune from blame. And what about all those super fit exercise freaks who have to fuel themselves to maintain an abnormal exercise regime?

The point about focusing on obesity rather than patterns of consumption is that it places the blame for climate change on the sinful behaviour of fat people not on global inequities. Now take this gem:

They also factored in greater car use by the overweight. "The heavier our bodies become the harder it is to move about in them and the more dependent we become on cars," they wrote.

Sorry, it may surprise you that not only can I walk, I actually enjoy walking. It is more accurate to say that the older we get the less mobile we are and therefore are more dependent on motor transport. Have you seen any headlines saying that older people cause global warming? Soylent Green anyone?

No, instead we get the same smug message,

"Population fatness has an environmental impact," said Phil Edwards, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "We're all being told to stay fit and keep our weight down because it's good for our health. The important thing is that staying slim is good for your health and for the health of the planet."

The interrelationship between global inequality and global warming is important and complex, I refuse to accept that my waistline is to blame.

Should I stay or should I go?

Alice Mahon

I have spent most of my life working for and representing the Labour Party. I always took the view that I should stay and fight within, but New Labour have done such a good job of demolishing our democratic structure that I realised there was nothing I could say or do to change things from within.

Harry Barnes

Rebels should rebel and not give up ... It is much more fun to be expelled from an organisation on an issue of principle, than just to pack it in.

It is the existence of such a sharp dilemma, rather than the choice made, which is the problem.

Leading edge, vibrant, diverse, etc.

We’ve witnessed a groundswell of people and communities creating and organising learning opportunities for themselves. The challenge for all of us is to ensure we seize these new opportunities, and drive, rather than fall behind, the leading edge. To consider how Government can best support the vibrant and diverse opportunities out there for private and collective engagement.

John Denham - The Learning Revolution

A world-class source for international, cutting edge bullshit bingo aside, perhaps the question should be asked why people are organising their own 'learning opportunities'. Well, some of the reasons are that the Government has pulled the funding for the adult education classes that one and half million of them used to attend, strangled others with bureaucracy and introduced crazy rules that stop people studying one subject when they are qualified at the same level in another. That's why.

For more on this rhetorical tendency see Paulie here.

There are no goats

But at least the sun is shining in Hull. Not brilliant to be back, though I never stop being grateful for the huge privilege of being able to escape to somewhere so wonderful as Pelion. I am a lucky fat man.

Public transport

Απόψε κάνεις μπαμ!
Σε βλέπουν και φρενάρουνε
Και σταματούν τα τραμ

Tonight you go bam!
They see you and they brake
And they stop the tram

I am about to play hell with my carbon footprint. Bugger.

Thanks to Aphroula

Recovering the public realm

It was good of Will to think of me and he was dead right to draw my attention to these reflections of k-punk in the aftermath of the G20 protests.

New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism. For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members (at the college where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible disruption to the college). What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labour which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without. Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it's time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up the crisis - their crisis, our opportunity, as Harvey rightly characterises it - to begin to rid public services of business ontology. (When even businesses can't be run as businesses, why should public services?)

Action against managerialism eh? That sounds like a legitimate excuse not to carry out some of the mind-numbing tasks that form part of the modern educational bureaucracy. More seriously, this is about taking action that hits your enemies. Students are not enemies.

Of course being run on business lines is not always bad. Some businesses are well-run. However the managerialism that has infected the public sector is not based on the best business practice, instead it is an amalgamation of Taylorism, the conventional wisdom of management consultants and pseudo-marketisation. It is the product of bureaucracy, not commerce.

Two things strike me about managerialism. The first is that it affects the conditions under which public sector workers deliver services. It is an ideology of control, a system of domination that subordinates individuals' autonomy. It is anti-democratic. And so we become our own grudging oppressors, complicit in operating a system in which we have little faith so that we can protect something that we actually value.

Secondly, for us in adult education in particular, managerialism has been used as an instrument for the imposition of a specific model of lifelong learning. Today this increasingly means addressing the needs of employers, not employees note, and abandoning a broader, emancipatory notion of learning. And this is where the business model is so inappropriate. Public services' primary purpose is not to make a commercial profit. It is to deliver that service well and at reasonable cost, but above all it is to promote something of social value, a collective need, not just the needs of employers.

Those seeking utilitarian justifications for continuing liberal adult education like to point to the fact that the humanities, for instance, are capable of producing the 'soft skills' that employers need; analytical skills and creativity for instance. However, we have to recognise that they also produce those skills that employers most definitely don't want; articulate assertiveness, the ability to spot bullshit a mile off, a determination not to take crap. In other words, collective needs do not necessarily coincide with those of employers, they may conflict with them and strengthen the hands of their opponents. Don't think that those in power are naive enough not to know this too.

And this is where action gets interesting. Instead of moaning about pay (as I sit here in my second home in Greece I do not feel badly paid) or engaging in ill-informed gesture politics, there is space for action to attempt to re-establish the public realm, underpinned by an essentially egalitarian, humanist ethic that empowers people rather than renders them servile. A lovely thought, but will it happen? Don't bet on it.

My village

"But beautiful things are not luxuries, they are necessaries. Life would be unbearable without them".

Emma Goldman

The weather in Greece

Eat your heart out Suzanne Charlton, here is the TV weather forecast presented by Petroula Kostidou.



Hat tip Andy

A day in the mountains

Yesterday.

Collectivism reborn?

It has been hard to rise from the slumber induced by the Greek spring and a surfeit of 'Wine Poems'. Eric Hobsbawm has just about woken me up with a patchy piece on the economic crisis that, at first, posits a false dichotomy between unrestricted global capitalism, “a sort of international bourgeois anarchism”, and “centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type”, or Stalinism as he doesn't call it. A whole range of social democratic and democratic socialist alternatives disappear in the chasm between his two irreconcilable models.

However, he seems to be grasping for just such alternatives, though, curiously, he shows little faith in them,

You may say that's all over now. We're free to return to the mixed economy. The old toolbox of Labour is available again - everything up to nationalisation - so let's just go and use the tools once again, which Labour should never have put away. But that suggests we know what to do with them. We don't.

This pessimism seeps through the article, but he makes one pertinent, if commonplace, point deftly calling for “a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people”.

And that raises the importance of collective action, not as an alternative to individual liberties, but as an essential component of them.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the "capabilities" of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

There's that pessimism again, however his assertion of a collective interest in public provision chimes perfectly with those of us who still cling to a public service ethos. There is nothing new here. It could almost be a restatement of the 'Middle Way' of the 1930's. It is just nice to see advocacy of "public non-profit initiative" and "collective social improvement" at a time when one of its instruments, adult education, appears to be in its death throes with the remnants being corralled into the low-cost wishful thinking of informal learning.

Matters of no consequence

The Internet has been down much of the time. Apparently there was a fault with the server at Thessaloniki.

Yesterday, cold wet weather gave way to warmer air. The skies cleared and we have bright days and cool nights.

The winter's rain has left the garden a jungle and I have been involved in serious bramble removal.



Some vignettes:

I do not know whether KLM's airline meals are the worst, the most adventurous or an ironic reflection on the impossibility of mile high food. The main meal on my flight over consisted of a nettle cheese and salad sandwich with jam.

Chrysanthi, a neighbour, sitting in long grass under a tree in the next field, enjoying the warm sun, holding a young goat gently on her knee, whilst others calmly grazed all round her.

Under ten Euros for a five litre box of red wine called "Wine Poems".

And the nightingales have arrived.

April

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!

Bugger Browning, I'm off to Greece.

Light posting ahoy!

Another fat man on a keyboard

The composer Handel, cruelly caricatured by his soon to be ex-friend Joseph Goupy after a massive eating session. There is now a new theory behind Handel's obesity and gargantuan appetite, he may have suffered from binge-eating disorder. This theory also suggests his ill health and death were caused by lead poisoning due to drinking vast quantities of wine.

Today he would be a suitable target for Channel 4 or even held up as an example of a dangerous threat to the civilised world.

Instead we are left with the music; beauty emanating from the obese.

Adult education blues

Here is another lament for the demise of University Adult Education. Pol Pot analogy aside, it sums up the position pretty well, though some institutions are holding on and supporting lifelong learning. One of the better pieces of analysis of the situation that I have read lately is this academic paper by Chris Duke. He deals with both the demise of adult education, but also the failings that made it vulnerable. Duke puts forward a critique of the sterility of the Great Tradition*, which I wholeheartedly share. Yet he is also a partisan for adult learning, particularly for engagement.

Engagement today needs a compelling narrative that legitimises community and regional engagement work as integral to mission and policy, effectively embedded in the practice of the whole university as ‘what we do here’.

There is one, Patrick Geddes' University Militant. It was articulated just after the First World War; it is a narrative that has been forgotten.

Duke takes a lovely sideswipe at bureacucracy,

Any attempt to document, quantify and regulate the work of partnership and engagement in pursuit of social, civic and cultural as well as economic development is doomed. If pursued ruthlessly it will destroy the very work.

And I can't fault his judgement, nor his pessimism, here:

What is needed to promote university engagement and balanced regional social and economic development in the spirit of the early extension and tutorial classes today?

To borrow from the title of a book cited in this paper, something of the spirit might conceivably be rekindled, in a world desperately needing applied humanistic intelligence for the sake of sustained and balanced development of the eco-system and the social systems which we inhabit. But the form will have to be different. An effective solution will require clear and competent institutional leadership. This means courage and staying power, along with effective and confident delegation to and empowerment of strongly motivated academic organisational units... The extramural tradition should have been a natural breeding ground for the latter. Whether the new managerialism that prevails in many universities will produce this mix remains to be seen. Whether the competitive but changing environment of RAE and league tables will allow it is also a moot point.

"Desperately needed"? Yes, it certainly is. Valued by those with power? I doubt it.

*Discussed by Richard Hoggart, who once taught in the Adult Education Department in Hull, here.

Porngate

Is this all we have to worry about?

Home Secretary Jaqui Smith is not impressed with her husband, Richard Timney.

A close friend of Smith's said Timney would be "sleeping on the sofa for a while. To say she's angry with her husband is an understatement".

He'll need those films then.

Swinton in the Spring

The sun shone brightly today though the air still chilled. Rather than freeze in the stand we took our places on the terraces opposite to be in the sun. Watching from lower down gives a different impression of the game. It seems faster, more immediate, more personal - especially if the touch judge is as good at giving back the abuse hurled at him by disgruntled spectators.

The visitors were Keighley who had impressed by beating Oldham the previous week. Swinton cut them apart. Playing glorious running rugby they swept to a 20-0 lead in only fifteen minutes. Too good to be true? This is Swinton; of course it was.

Keighley started to recover, improved dramatically and kept pressing. With ten minutes to go they had levelled the scores at 28-28. A dramatic comeback was on. But it was to be Swinton who snatched the winning try after picking up a dropped ball and then securing the lead with a penalty in front of the posts to scrape home 36-28.

Great entertainment. It confirmed my sense that, at the moment, it is the Championship that is delivering the most entertaining football, rather than Super League. The quality may not be as high, but it is fun to watch. For Swinton, with a nice blend of youth and experience, there is optimism. Could this be a promotion year at long last? Next season it might just be Toulouse in the Spring.

(Thanks to Peter Green for the photo)

Rationality

My newspaper has made for strange reading this morning. Marina Hyde takes on one of the easiest targets, celebrity self-importance with its attraction to charlatan mystics and messianic political missions ("Hi, I'm Richard Gere, ... and I'm speaking for the entire world ..."). The cumulative impact of this catalogue of narcissistic lunacy is deeply tedious.

Then, David Owen, of all people, talks of political leaders' "hubris syndrome", which he sees as an illness manifesting itself through,

• A narcissistic propensity to see one's world primarily as an arena in which to exercise power and seek glory
• A disproportionate concern with image and presentation
• A messianic manner
• Excessive confidence in own judgment and contempt for advice
• Exaggerated self-belief, bordering on omnipotence
• A belief that one is accountable solely to history or god
• Loss of contact with reality; often associated with progressive isolation
• Restlessness, recklessness and impulsiveness

To be fair, Owen admits to a tendency to it himself before listing his main British Prime Ministerial candidates - Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. The theory is in a paper co-written with Jonathan Davidson of Duke University, North Carolina, who gets little of the glory.

Of course this is saying nothing new. It was a phenomenon known to the Ancients and here is Bakunin writing in 1867:

Is there not something in all that to make a man lose his head and his heart as well, and become mad with pride? It is thus that power and the habit of command become for even the most intelligent and virtuous men, a source of aberration, both intellectual and moral.

Finally, as if to prove the point in the most chilling way possible, up pops the grisly personification of the cloning of Rupert Murdoch with Benito Mussolini, Silvio Berlusconi, with a new unified right wing party, called, with deadly irony, "Freedom People".

So where does this leave us Enlightenment types with our dreams of a rational world? How do we hold to our ideals when faced by such an awesome display of dubious mental health? Do we despair? It is so tempting, but there is much else besides, a popular instinct for justice and morality*, a relapse into reason all the more powerful for its low visibility. There is an egalitarian antidote. Another world is possible; at the moment, I just worry about whether it is probable.

*Via TG

Inequality and authoritarianism

If you are a strange sort of person, like myself, who spends a fair amount of time reading 19th Century Anarchist texts, you will recognise a recurring theme that sees human progress as a product of liberty and social regression as being the consequence of authority. It is an assertion that cannot be proved, rather it is an article of faith.

However, there now seems to be some hard, empirical evidence in its favour, gathering by John Crace's review of a study of the epidemiology of inequality by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Though the authors concentrate on economic inequality, I was interested in this extract of the review on hierarchy.

When monkeys are kept in a hierarchical environment, those at the bottom self-medicate with more cocaine; a caste gap opens in the performance of Hindu children when they have to announce their caste before exams; the stress hormone, cortisol, rises most when people face the evaluation of others; and so on. The result is always the same: fear of falling foul of the wealth gap gets under everyone's skin by making them anxious about their status.

It seems to me this is more than simply a critique of material inequalities, but also of interrelated power structures. I was thinking about this when Will sent me a reference to this paper by Hugo Radice. Sadly, his scholarly comparison of the management of British universities with Stalinism is hidden behind a subscription screen and my institution does not subscribe to the journal, so I haven't read the original. Times Higher Education has a sketch report here and there is a thoughtful post on the article by Mark Harrison here.

Historical analogies are rarely helpful and Harrison, though broadly sympathetic, points out the real differences, especially this one:

The big difference was this: I had no barbed wire. With a few coils around the campus, I could have blocked off the exits. I'd have had to give guns and spotlights to the security staff. If I could have stopped my professors from leaving, I would have been able to do things to them that would lower their welfare, and they would have had to accept it. They would have grumbled, and then conspired against me, and I would have needed a political police within the department to listen, detect, and report it to me. I'd soon put a stop to that. Forced labour would be next. But I had no barbed wire. If they didn't like the pay or conditions on offer, and could do better elsewhere, my colleagues would leave. Other universities that could use their talents more productively would make them a better offer, and I would have to match it or lose them. Without barbed wire, I could not accumulate personal power by treating others badly; I could get my way only through reliance on positive motivations.

Of course some institutions do treat people badly, though not quite on the scale of Stalin. However, as a study of managerialism and bureaucratisation, the paper reflects on the lack of democratic structures inherent in a managerialist approach to running, in this case, universities. A similar piece could be written on many other public and private sector organisations. All operate their own scaled down "Pyramid of Tyranny".

And what Wilkinson and Pickett's study points to is that the inequality inherent in hierarchy is unhealthy and unsuccessful. You can listen to the authors interviewed about it here. They emphasise that inequality results in a decline of trust, reciprocity and community life, or as Kropotkin would have it, mutual aid. I would take this analysis further and suggest that if we are to have a successful and healthy public sector, we not only need to question the distribution of wealth, but also deal with the distribution of power and how it is exercised, especially in our day-to-day working environments.

New Labour placed great store in a form of Fabian managerialism, enthusiastically setting themselves targets as much as they imposed them on others. The discontents registered by Radice point to the dysfunctions of such an approach. Rather than transparency and efficiency, they certainly led to well-documented failures attributed to target chasing, but perhaps there was something more intangible happening as well, the erosion of the sense of common purpose and ethics on which the public sector depends. Those 19th Century Anarchists may just have been on to something.

Eh?

There are times when my critical faculties hit a brick wall of incomprehension. I suppose this is pure Guardian - from Joseph Fritzl to Iraq via Hitler, Fred West, Pol Pot and Attila the Hun, combined with a sense that it is somehow all our fault. I really need help understanding this conclusion:

America's picture of itself as inviolable was shredded on 9/11, and for a moment the world's most powerful nation was flayed. Just as its solution to the agony of vulnerability was to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, so the solution to the presence of monsters in our midst is to rid ourselves both of them and any identity with them. They become the receptacle for everything that is bad, and in casting it away we can believe that we are good enough and once again in charge.

What on earth does this mean? The subheading to the piece says that "We cast evildoers such as Fritzl as bogeymen to spare ourselves any moral self-examination". I thought that it was because imprisoning and serially raping your daughter in a specially constructed cellar over a 24 year period might just be described as both abnormal and utterly wicked. How foolishly simplistic of me, I am obviously in need of therapy to uncover my moral complicity.

A life cut short

One personal tragedy amongst so many others.

Loss

Whilst I lament the loss of pubs, let's not forget how much of a social institution the evening class is. Doing an adult education course is about more than learning, it is a way of meeting people and making friends. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard it described as 'a lifeline'. Another part of our civic society is in decline.

Now, after the reductions elsewhere, universities are reporting cutbacks to their adult education provision; for example here, here and here.

This week I was talking to a student who is now doing a degree after taking a number of courses, including some of our Trade Union modules. He said he wouldn't have gone to university if he hadn't decided one day, on a whim, to take an evening course in holiday Spanish. The irony - and the ignorance.



UPDATE
Add public libraries to the list

The road to surfdom

Terry Glavin on surfing for peace in Gaza - and skateboarding in Kabul. Fun instead of fundamentalism; good stuff.

Synergize intuitive functionalities

And complete other vital tasks in the workplace. Impress your managers, write important reports and win promotion with this wonderful web tool. Grow out-of-the-box eyeballs. Indeed.

Ta Will

Hate speech

Could you name any other group of people that could be the acceptable target of language like this in the mainstream press?

You have to hit people where it hurts most, which in the case of fat people is in their wallets, because literally hitting them (fun though it is) doesn't hurt them at all, what with their being so fat.

What we have to do is tax fat people directly. I admit that this is a form of head tax (or rather, in this case, an arse tax) of the kind that has led to all sorts of social unrest in the past, but don't worry: fat people are far too lazy to riot.

It is an old game, but try replacing 'fat people' with the words like 'Jews', 'blacks' or 'gays' and then you can see how vile and hateful this language is. I have nothing but contempt for this type of ignorant playground prejudice masquerading as journalism.

Via the Trots

In praise of pubs

Tristram Hunt brings an historical perspective to bear on the latest suggestion to end binge drinking, a minimum price for booze as suggested by the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson. This is not the first time he has raised the idea of higher alcohol prices and it was he who first mooted the smoking ban and has talked up the issue of obesity. His is the most prominent voice of moral puritanism to speak in the name of public health.

What Hunt does is to point out that proscribing popular pleasures has historically been a bitterly resented failure. And so he turns to Hogarth and his famous engravings of Gin Lane and Beer Street. Beer and the alehouse was the way that people were saved from the ravages of gin. The solution lies in pubs. He writes:

For some 500 years now, alehouses have played a pivotal role within British public life. But now pubs are closing at the rate of 40 a week and we are haplessly bearing witness to an extraordinary process of cultural self-immolation...

So what we really want from the Chief Medical Officer is not a one-size-fits-all tax on alcohol (which the Government is already suggesting it will not support) but specific policies to encourage more people to drink more beer in more pubs. That is called working with the grain, or yeast, of history.

Now that is a health policy I could live with. And it is worth looking at that Hogarth image again. People quaffing ale, the pawn shop closed, everyone prosperous, happy, healthy and, Liam Donaldson please note, fat.

UPDATE
The Zythophile is not impressed by Donaldson either - via

Revenge is sweet

Interesting news; Merseyside and North Yorkshire local authority pension funds are to sue RBS and the now infamous pensioner Fred Goodwin. The Times reports:

Cherie Blair has been hired by two local authority funds to seek compensation for the “massive losses” incurred when RBS was bailed out and the share price collapsed.

They claim that on multiple occasions RBS and Sir Fred, its former chief executive, “falsely reassured” investors that the bank was in good health when it was “effectively insolvent” because of bad loans.

A dispatch from the front

The news from the world of adult education is unremittingly bleak. Amongst the tales of cutbacks and closures, a request to sign a petition to protest about the ending of Manchester University's adult education courses for the public has reached me, whilst Baroque in Hackney has posted eloquently on the loss of City University's poetry workshops.

In the meantime, Times Higher Education has an account of the CALL lobby of Parliament. It doesn't make particularly good reading, not least because the MP who had put down an early day motion supporting the campaign has disassociated himself from the THE report. The booing and apparent discomfort of the minister, John Denham gave me some malicious pleasure, especially after his throwaway derogatory remark about "holiday Spanish". However, this was embarrassing:

Mr Denham attempted to answer whether the Government could truly claim its spending priority was education, or whether the Iraq War and the multibillion-pound bailout of the UK banking sector took precedence.

I am sorry, this is a crass piece of linkage. Even the most ardent supporter of adult education couldn't argue for giving priority to poetry classes over rebuilding Iraq and dealing with the global economic meltdown. Anyway, this crushingly disappointing policy is less about total funding than its distribution, emanating from a particular educational philosophy, the concentration on a narrow vocational agenda.

Peter Kingston makes the case far better in his Guardian report of the lobby, highlighting David Blunkett's powerful advocacy of adult learning and summing up government policy perfectly.

Labour's proposition is that courses - daytime or evening - that are more about addressing people's curiosity or desire for self-fulfilment than making them employable should get less assistance from the exchequer.

Of course this representation of adult education provision as being divided between deserving and undeserving learners is a crude pastiche of reality where no such neat division exists. The perfect example of the power of intellectual curiosity as an engine for social mobility is to be found in Geoff Bratley-Kendall's life story, brought to my attention by the former Labour MP and adult educator, Harry Barnes. Geoff's journey from the pit to FE teaching is worth reading about in full and this struck me as absolutely right.

He learnt that education does not have to happen at a particular time in one's life. He had seen the regular tapping of unknown talents. He saw the strength of educational provision which started out on a voluntary basis, where those studying did not have to be present if they weren't interested.

He also traced the decline of adult education to 1992, but the crisis has much longer roots back to the early years of the Thatcher administration. I started working in it in 1982 and since then there has scarcely been a year when I have not been dealing with cuts and insecurity. My old College of Adult Education in Manchester closed in 1990 and since then the gloom has been only occasionally illuminated by hopes that proved to be groundless. The situation now, though, is the worst I have known.

As a career choice, this wouldn't have been the best if it hadn't been for the people I have met and taught along the way, with their humbling and inspiring life stories. They were always the ones who kept me going and I would not have missed the wonderful privilege of working with them for anything. But now, at a time like this, the sense of disappointment is palpable. And for the new generation thinking of taking that nerve-wracking first step back into education later in life the opportunities of genuine lifelong learning are slowly being removed.

And as the government stubbornly refuses to listen, the patient's condition is becoming critical. I fear that we are on the brink of completely losing something special, something that should be a source of pride and something that is a mark of a civilised society. These are bleak times indeed.

Technosense

Thanks to Will for directing me to this rather nice piece in praise of the Internet, drawn from an interview with Stephen Fry for BBC Radio 4, which will be broadcast this Thursday. You will be able to download a podcast here.

There is nothing exceptional in it, just some general sense directed against the doom mongers and hysterics who feel that the Internet marks the end of civilisation as we know it. I really liked this analogy:

But the internet is a city and, like any great city, it has monumental libraries and theatres and museums and places in which you can learn and pick up information and there are facilities for you that are astounding - specialised museums, not just general ones.

But there are also slums and there are red light districts and there are really sleazy areas where you wouldn't want your children wandering alone...

And I think people must understand that about the internet - it is a new city, it's a virtual city and there will be parts of it of course that they dislike, but you don't pull down London because it's got a red light district.

And as someone who has gone on record here about my preference for email, I also appreciated this:

It's a literary form in the most basic sense that you're writing and it's rather wonderful. The phone will be seen, I think, as a terrible aberration.

Last night I was with a part-time student giving some guidance on an essay he was writing. We searched the library catalogue, printed off a reading list, found a couple of good articles and then emailed an essay structure to his computer at home without leaving my office. I thought, "isn't the Internet wonderful", and for a part-time student with a family and busy working life it is a godsend. It is like all technologies, it is popular and growing for one reason and one reason alone. It is damn useful.

Women's lib

Fish in a barrel I know, but the Catholic Church's attempt to embrace gender equality is hardly impressive even by their standards.

As International Women’s Day is celebrated, the Vatican had a novel message for the women of the world: give thanks for the washing machine. This humble domestic appliance had done more for the women’s liberation movement than the contraceptive pill or working outside the home, said the the official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano.

Yes, it was divinely ordained that women have to wash all men's undies in perpetuity. Careers, independence, freedom from violence, social and economic equality? Nah, washing machines.

The article is entitled, “The washing machine and the emancipation of women: put in the powder, close the lid and relax - then shag the postman, open a can of Special Brew and smoke a few fags”. I made the last bit up.

It is a piece of lousy research anyway; they forgot to mention the vacuum cleaner.

Thoughts on Orwell

Terry Glavin has linked to an interesting, though rather oblique, review of Orwell's essays by Julian Barnes in the New York Review of Books. Barnes focuses his review around a critique of Orwell's status as a 'national treasure'. It couldn't be a more appropriate time to do this when his last novel, 1984, has just been identified as the book that most people lie about having read in order to impress their friends.

Barnes names three necessary qualities for 'treasuredom' and it is the second that raises the most questions;

An element of malleability and interpretability. The malleability allows the writer to be given a more appealing, if not entirely untruthful, image; the interpretability means that we can find in him or her more or less whatever we require.

Can his writing really be described as malleable? One of the things that surprises me is the number of unlikely people who claim Orwell as an intellectual hero. He has, of course, become an icon of Eustonians because of his anti-totalitarianism, though some of them might be uncomfortable with the fact that the reason he went to fight in Spain was not to uphold the right to free speech but to "kill fascists". The most curious admirers though are libertarian conservatives.

I think that Orwell's appeal to them rests on two features drawn from his later novels. Just as anti-Americans borrow his description in 1984 of Britain as Airstrip One, libertarians see the novel as a working out of Hayek's view of the evolution of totalitarianism from war-time planning. Neither interpretation would have appealed to Orwell who was a firm supporter of the post-war Labour Government and certainly knew whose side he was on in the Cold War. However, it is probably his anti-Communism that appeals most to the right. I am not sure that they should be quite so admiring.

I have always thought that Animal Farm was his finest novel. It is a bitter satire on Stalinism certainly, but what is less frequently noted is that the book is also implicitly anti-capitalist. The only time the animals are happy is during the immediate period of the liberation when they have seized the farm from Mr Jones. The one threat that could bring the animals back into line is "you don't want Jones back". The novel is pro-revolution and its pathos and bitterness comes from its betrayal. The ultimate is the end of the book when the animals cannot distinguish the pigs from the humans. They had become the same - not worse - the same.

Even Orwell's evocation of a patriotic Englishness is not a wholly sympathetic one. If there is one thing that permeates his writing it is a sense of disgust. And here Englishness is a failing that disgusts as much as it is a quality that charms. It blinds us to crisis, hides us from truth and smothers us with complacency.

And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen--all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Orwell is a savage writer; angry, discontented and bitter. His plainness of style is not a folksy anti-intellectualism, it is a method of critical thinking. He is not a comfortable English nationalist, nor is he a liberal anti-Communist. To understand him properly is to take him at his word, and not about whether or not he shot an elephant.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

"As I understand it", this is the key. His understanding was underpinned by a tetchy discontent and a discomfort with orthodoxy. He is disconcerting and that is why he is still worth reading and why he should never be romanticised. He was a serious and, at times, uncomfortable writer, not a prophet, even less a guru.

Economics exam

Question 1.

In December 2005 I took out a loan of £4,000 to buy a car. Base rates were 4.5% and the APR for the loan was 6.93%. If I was to take out a £4,000 loan today from the same bank now that base rates have dropped to 0.5% I would pay an APR of 17.9%.

Explain without resorting to foul language and incitement to violence (very hard I know).

Stink bomb - sex bomb

Here is the headline of the day:

How the smell of rotten eggs makes men randy
Scientists take eight transsexuals and a whiff of hydrogen sulphide to begin making an alternative to Viagra

Whatever turns you on I suppose. Can't say it does much for me.

This sporting life

Sundays are not serious days. Once they had been wrested from the moral disapproval of the religious they became days of pleasure, or at least days for watching Swinton.

So this Sunday marked my first visit to the splendidly set and poorly signposted new Doncaster ground for a lunchtime kick off in the Northern Rail Cup. Arriving late after getting lost and walking a fair distance to the stadium, the turnstiles would not let us in as they could not take cash. I had to dash round to the ticket office on the other side of the ground to buy tickets and then return to the entrance - all for a crowd of less than 700. We missed the first try and it was actually scored by Swinton as they rushed into an early lead before going down to another encouraging defeat to a higher division team. It was a smashing match with some sparkling rugby and some less than sparkling errors that cost Swinton dear.

Then it was back to watch a recording of the Carling Cup final only to find the recording had finished just before the end of extra time. This left me avoiding contact with the outside world so that I did not know the result of the penalties before the highlights were shown late at night. (Any of you old enough to remember that classic Likely Lads episode?)

At least the World Club Championship between the British and Australian Rugby League champions recorded properly. Previous games have been marred as contests because the Australians have not tried. This time it was spoilt because they did. The gulf between Australia and Britain was manifest and the game was over just after half-time, only late consolation Leeds tries gave the score an aura of respectability.

A good day none the less and one when the first signs of spring were in the air. No, Sundays are not meant for sombre self-denial.

Lobby fodder

The Campaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning held their lobby of Parliament on Wednesday to protest about the collapse of much adult education provision. I was not there, but those that did go felt that it went well. Around 400-500 people turned up, not a vast gathering, but enough to register the discontent felt at the loss of adult education around the country.

Again MPs were sympathetic, though NIACE report that, "Whilst CALL supporters displayed their passion and commitment for adult learning, DIUS Secretary of State - John Denham - gave a robust defence of government policy". And that sums it up. It keeps the issue on the agenda, but changes nothing. The government will not listen.

And this raises a problem with Paulie's determined defence of representative democracy against populism. If, when confronted by people who are well informed and in touch with reality in a way that those in power are not, elected representatives simply dismiss genuine concerns with platitudes, then we are witnessing a failure of representation in much the same way that giving in to a regressive populist media campaign would be.

I don't offer a solution, merely to raise the issue of a democratic dilemma that has left me bitter and frustrated about the ignorant destruction of something as valuable as adult education, despite blanket condemnation from those who know best.

Consequences

Two reports from Greece at the weekend highlight the continuing unrest at the political situation. One speaks of the rise of a 1970's style terrorism that sounds chillingly nihilistic.

...the Sect of Revolutionaries, believed by experts to be a branch of Revolutionary Struggle - a group that made its debut with a rocket attack on the US embassy in 2007, and also thought to be behind the attack on Citibank - has stood out for its cold cynicism and marked lack of ideology. "We don't do politics, we do guerrilla warfare," it declared.

There was also a long and thoughtful piece on the disturbances by Helena Smith and Ed Vulliamy, based predominantly on interviews with some of the protagonists. It is worth reading in full. Two contrasting interpretations caught my eye. First, here is a leftist veteran of the events of 1973 that brought down the Colnels' junta.

One leading member of the polytechnic occupation was Dimitris Hadzisokratis, who now leads a left-wing parliamentary group wary of the current insurgency... He meets us in his office in parliament, to contrast then with now. "What happened last December was an explosion, not a revolt," says Hadzisokratis, "which means something else. The situations are entirely different, we were rebelling against a dictatorship, they are rebelling against a democracy. We had a set of demands and goals. Yes, there were ultra-leftists and anarchists involved, but they were doing something else, and that's all I see in this explosion. Who are they fighting, exactly? It is amorphous, it has no aim and, as such, it will reach an impasse and will be judged as pointless."

However, Constantinos Tsoukalas sees something else, the serious degeneration of hope and disillusion with mainstream politics.

He sees "the uprising as a symptom of the end of political hope and the beginning of something else. One of the nefarious consequences of the end of the Cold War and the emptiness of the global market that was supposed to put an end to ideology but, in crisis, has instead created this moment of great ideological tension".

And now the British Police fear that the same could happen in this country. I am sceptical, as is Olly, but the most perceptive expression of doubt comes from a young Greek Anarchist who knows England well.

"We are at one extreme edge of Europe, but not really part of Europe, and you are at the opposite edge, but also not part of Europe. Here, an uprising, there... nothing. Though the violence is the same in your country, in fact it's much worse. But you commit it against each other; knife crime, drunken fights and gangs. Here, we challenge the state and the banks, not each other".

Besides, if disturbances did break out here this summer, it would be guaranteed to rain.

Rights and Liberties

I was looking through the Convention on Modern Liberty's web site. It highlights a range of issues, surveillance, data protection, free speech, legal rights, etc., all important certainly, though I wonder if they constitute quite the profound threat portrayed. There is one thing missing however, probably the biggest attack on rights in recent times. A Bill going through Parliament at the moment will take away many of the economic rights of the poor.

Further, the imposition of a regime of conditionality on our benefits systems allows a systematic invasion of privacy by the state under threat of sanction. So egregious are the changes that they have actually led to Madeleine Bunting writing an excellent article. So where are the civil libertarians? I can't see them.

Sniff, sniff

I have a cold.

The sandwich of knowledge

The bottom tier contains eight strips of bacon, six sausages and four burger paddies; followed by a second tier of black pudding; topped by a third tier comprised of two diced chicken breasts and six fried eggs.

Mmmm ... This is taken from the ultimate in food porn, This is why you're fat.

The site is one of the gems from the Premier Portal of Pointlessness. Paulie dug this one up and I can't thank him enough. No moments of dreary tedium for me now when I can use it to find such stimulating reading as Cows Go Moo. Every link is a complete waste of your life - marvellous.

And this cheery tune is just what you need to give you a lift.

Another Sunday

And another defeat, but a different mood leaving the ground. After a promising spell Swinton gave Leigh a 26-4 half-time lead through some extravagant errors and I feared the worst. The second half was another matter with a great Swinton comeback against the higher division team, eventually losing by 26 points to 34. Not a bad way to while away a cold February afternoon. Not bad at all.