Ageing gracelessly

Norm thinks that "Retirement ought to be a choice rather than an obligation". OK, I will go with that, with the key word being "choice", especially seeing it is something that I have just chosen, from the age of 57, trading income for time. However, he then links to this article (by an economist to an investment bank) to argue that there is an economic case for being allowed to work on past retirement age.

Read carefully and I think that you will see that the subtext is not that you may be allowed to retire when you want, but that you will not be allowed to retire until much later. It's, 'back to work you idle septuagenarians, there are chimneys to be swept and it is your fault for not having enough children to send up them when you still could'. And these words chilled me.

The challenge is to think holistically about how we can raise the participation rate and productivity of people at work in general, and of women and persons aged over 55 in particular.

Just as I throw off the managerial chains and cry, 'free at last', I glimpse a malign argument that would draft me into the front line of garden tool sales at B&Q. It goes like this. People are living longer, the birthrate has fallen, pensions are becoming unaffordable (other than for failed investment bankers who need to be paid a fortune not to run banks), and people will have to accept that they will have to work a lot longer (especially those damn Europeans with their 'sclerotic' social model).

There are two false arguments lurking here. The first is that longevity is a problem rather than a huge triumph. Low life expectancy is the sign of political and economic catastrophe. A long life is the result of prosperity, so if we are more prosperous why can't we afford to offer a comfortable retirement? Why can people only live off present work rather than the results of their past labours?

Secondly, there is the idea that the only economically productive activity is paid employment. Just look at what people do in retirement (if they have the income). They participate, local government would fall apart without the retired, they join clubs and societies, run small businesses, write books, take part time jobs, do voluntary work here and overseas, make things, mend things, plant gardens and allotments, attend (and teach) adult education classes, whilst some even blog. Many wonder how they ever found the time to fit employment in. They are consumers and producers, not some horrible, wrinkly parasites.

However, that is not the fate of all. I am one of the lucky ones. For some, working beyond retirement age is not a matter of lifestyle choice, a desire to continue with a job they enjoy or a way to stave off boredom, it is a bitter necessity because they are poor. It is enforced and exploitative. Their retirement means that trips to the library are simply way of keeping warm rather than of fulfilling dreams. Life in a damp home, unable to pay the bills, and in increasingly poor health is the fate of millions.

What we are really talking about is the language of political priorities, not economic necessity, and of how we distribute wealth. It is back to that word 'choice' again. Do we choose to fund pensions, devote a larger proportion of national wealth to sustain older people in retirement, to maintain company pension schemes? Or do we bow to the gods of lower taxes and higher profits? The advocates of longer working lives are not posing this as a benefit for people who wish to continue working, but as an alternative to redistributive and egalitarian pensions policies.

The dream of technology and growing prosperity was that it would liberate (yes, liberate) us from employment and open up leisure time for creative work, lifelong learning and simple pleasures. Where has that vision gone? Isn't it time we should rethink working life as a whole. How about sabbaticals and paid educational leave? After all, sometimes retirement is wasted on the old. Instead we are fed apocalyptic gloom about a world populated by useless wrinklies, generating "financial stress for individuals and the state, rising pensioner poverty, social dislocations and the possibility of intergenerational conflict".

Rather than a lifetime locked into servile and alienated employment with little dream of freedom beyond, can't we just enjoy ourselves instead? That is the choice I would make.

Dusk

Life and death

Yesterday, another cloudy morning saw me clearing the rest of the bamboo that had spread in to the garden. A nearby builder, working on a house down the lane, asked for some of it to use for his tomatoes and cheered me with Greek sayings like, 'there is only one life and it is short' and 'we grow like flowers and then we wither', that sort of thing.

I sat down in the shade and then heard the squealing of what sounded like a distressed animal. As the noise came closer I went to investigate. At the back of the patio wall was a tiny puppy, clearly part of an abandoned litter. For once I was pleased that I didn't live here full time, I would have adopted it instantly and it would have grown up to be a vast, ferocious hound. Its appeal lay in its vulnerability. Fortunately a neighbour knew of an animal sanctuary and phoned them. It now has the chance of a life that would have been denied it.

All of which brings me obliquely to the end of the long lives of two survivors, First World War veterans Henry Allingham and Harry Patch.

In keeping with the new tradition of celebrity deaths, the Prime Minister had to eulogise:

"I know that the whole nation will unite today to honour the memory, and to take pride in the generation that fought the Great War. The noblest of all the generations has left us, but they will never be forgotten."

Not forgotten, but how will they be remembered? Will they be the "lions led by donkeys", a working class betrayed to mechanised mass slaughter? Will they be seen as the victims of imperialism or heroes of the nation?

In part, the battle is one of poetry. There is Laurence Binyon, whose lines,

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

adorn war memorials and are being trotted out regularly once more; stately, noble and kitsch.

Pitted against the non-combatant Binyon is the realism of Wilfred Owen, killed at the front shortly before the armistice, writing on "the pity of war".

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Harry Patch would have been with Owen, he saw the war as an obscenity, "legalised mass murder" to be remembered with horror and grief.

Owen was by far the greater poet, he overwhelms the stiff upper lip stoicism of Binyon's, "Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow", with bitter experience. Yet the legacy of his view of the War is mixed. It fed pacifism at all costs, including in the face of Fascism, and was part of the intellectual background to appeasement. Yet in the personalisation of the experience of war he, and many of his fellow war poets, made it clear that the life of each ordinary soldier mattered, they were not merely cannon fodder. From this sensibility comes the concept of war crimes and crimes against humanity, of Nurenburg and the Hague. And that is something most certainly not to be forgotten.

A cool reflection

The heatwave is over. It is a cloudy day and the temperature has dropped to a pleasant 28C. A good time to write the first of a couple of posts about recent deaths.

Leszek Kolakowski was a significant figure. There are good links worth reading here, but it was Norm's discussion that raised my interest, taking on the too eager simplifications of many commentators. Kolakowski is celebrated for arguing that Stalinism was not an aberration, but inherent in Marx's thought. Of course, he wasn't the first. The same critique was made contemporaneously with Marx, initially by Proudhon and then by Bakunin.

Norm acknowledges what he sees as the weaknesses in Marx's position:

What precise weight of responsibility the original ideas, as put forward by Karl Marx himself, bear for the political disaster that was Stalinism may be a matter of debate; but only the most blinkered of Marxists will today deny that central deficiencies of classical Marxism played a role in the developments that led ultimately to the Gulag. Two central deficiencies in particular: the lack of an adequate theory of democratic political institutions; and the tendency to mock and diminish the importance of ethical argument (despite the fact that Marxism itself, and in Marx's hands, contained a moral vision and a commitment to principles of justice).

He also puts them into context, especially Marx's insistence of the continuing existence of the state.

Marx projected an end to the state, but that was the state in the meaning instrument of class rule. With no classes there could be no state in this sense; but there would be a 'public power', Marx held, and one subject to democratic control from below.

This was precisely the basis of the objections of the Anarchists. They felt that the state, even if it ceased to be an instrument of the rule of a particular class, would still be an instrument of rule by a new, and often capriciously cruel, elite, the state functionary. Thus they rejected the state per se. All rule, they argued, was in the interests solely of the rulers.

In his dispute with Bakunin, Marx ridiculed this position, yet I think that there is merit in it. However, the total rejection of the state does not mean the end of organisation for the achievement of collective ends. Anarcho-communists, like Kropotkin, thought this could be achieved without public power through revolutionary spontaneity and the instinct for mutual aid. His critical friend, Errico Malatesta, was more cautious seeing a need for preparation for freedom through the educative process of building working class solidarity. Individualists relied on models of robust autonomy within collaborative networks.

However, even outside the state, authority permeates many aspects of our lives and seems certain not to disappear. Autonomous organisations can be positively totalitarian, whilst many of us still spend the bulk of our lives in autocracies, more commonly known as the workplace, subject to the whims of the latest managerial fad. And if you want to see the effect of such little tyrannies, look at the management style at Royal Bank of Scotland. Thus the emphasis Norm puts on the need to think more deeply about democratic political institutions is one that applies to all human institutions and relations and is important for all left perspectives, whether statist or not.

To think about institutions that are subject to "democratic control from below", means more than self-congratulatory peans to western liberal democracies, for all their manifest advantages. It means a rejection of the cruelties, inequities and dysfunctions of everyday life, wherever they occur. It requires a consistent moral stance against exploitation and barbarity. It is about control and ownership, not just consumer choice. If we are setting out on a democratic journey, we have a long way yet to go.

But now, with the clouds still overhead, it is time for me to abandon idle speculation and cut back the bamboo that invades from the neighbours' windbreak.

Heat

The Greeks do heatwaves so much better than us. Shortly before dawn, the temperature at the bus station in Athens was 31 degrees C. It is cooler up here in Pelion, but it still reached 36 in the shade yesterday. Today there is a refreshing breeze. It is gorgeous.

At the airport, the authorities were searching for temperatures too. We had to pass heat-seeking cameras to see if we had the plague swine flu. No one did, though I would have been amused if they had picked out the hypochondriacs in front of me who wore face masks all through the flight on an overheated Olympic Airways plane, facing an acute dilemma when their airline meals arrived.

A sparrow has just swooped from the lemon tree to catch a small green grasshopper on the patio. I will join it. It is time for me to sit with a book in the shade under the vine. Bliss.

Greece ...

... is the word. I'm off there again tonight. Posting may be light, unless I want to taunt the sun-starved British. I'm a bit mean like that.

Parlour games

Has anyone ever played dirty word alphabet? It is great for a pub, or you can even play by text. You go through the alphabet thinking of sexual terms for each letter of the alphabet. But here is the catch; the words have to be suggestive not rude. So A is for ardent, not for arse. M is is for moist, you get the idea. It whiles away a few beers in a curry house, though I worry about Karen. Some of those words ...

"Unleashing Aspiration"

They would have to call it that, wouldn't they? Hyperbolic meritocratic language is quintessentially New Labour. Alan Milburn's report into social mobility touches on an area I actually know something about, widening access to universities. I have only read the press coverage rather than the report itself, and once I saw that it advocated vouchers for "children from poor backgrounds in areas of under-performing schools so they can go to more popular schools", without so much as a sideways glance at what this would do to the the children and schools left behind, I think I might give it a miss.

This argument is permeated by an old and lazy theme, that widening participation is a means of rescuing a few people from their class rather than a systematic attempt to address the social inequities embedded in our education systems.

Addressing social inequalities is a nice glib phrase, it trips off the tongue easily. Doing it is a little more troublesome. Even in a limited way, it demands an imaginative radicalism that seems in short supply at the moment. And that means making lifelong learning central. There are four broad issues that I think that policy makers need to consider.

1. Any attempt to select out "bright pupils" would instantly label the majority of those left out as incapable and unworthy - 'dim pupils'. It can be destructive.

2. That concentrating on schools and young people means ignoring the profound intergenerational effects of learning cultures. Not only do older people have a right to their own education, but they become powerful role models and advocates for learning throughout their families and communities.

3. There needs to be a recognition that people come to education at different ages and for different reasons. For example, some of the best work I have seen this year has come from prisoners who would never have dreamt of learning if it had not been for their incarceration.

4. And finally we come to that word 'aspiration'. Debate has been plagued by the lazy idea that people are deficient and need reforming by raising their aspiration. Credit where it is due, Milburn rejects this old turkey and is dead right when he says, "it is not that many young people do not have aspirations. It is that they are blocked".

There is plenty of aspiration out there, and not only in "young people", but it is coupled with a sense that higher education is 'not for the likes of us'. There is a reason for that. The cultures of some universities positively scream at people that it is not for the likes of them. It is universities that need to reform, to become more open, to involve themselves in the lives of everyone in their cities and regions. They have to meet the aspirations of people. They have to make dreams happen.

Simply opening the cracks into the elite so a few more of the hoi polloi can squeeze through achieves wonders for some individuals, but what of the others? A genuine commitment to lifelong learning, the engagement of universities with all their communities, the creation of open institutions that are easy to access in many different ways, creates possibilities for the many. And, as regular readers of this blog will now be tired of reading, it is this civic mission that is being strangled by stupid and destructive policies.

Dire

Swinton 18 Blackpool 33

Unutterably dire

History lessons

Thanks to Kellie of Airforce Amazons for drawing my attention to this post from Ghosts of Alexander on the "wretched" standard of history in media reporting on Afghanistan. I am not well read on the history of the region, but I can spot a cliché when I see one and they are being regularly trotted out, as he notes here:

First, there’s the Euro-centric perspective that always bring up defeats of European forces. This includes the Soviet-Afghan war, the Anglo-Afghan Wars and, for the historically challenged, Alexander the Great (there is a little history in between these events worth reading). And then there is the perspective that claims Afghanistan is, and has throughout history, been “backwards.” And then there are people from all other parts of the political spectrum who have read a couple of books (probably “popular” histories) and then decided they should expound on Afghan history to bolster their arguments. To emphasize, one is missing massive chunks of history if confined to the narrow perspectives above.

These stereotypes, many bordering on racism, form the bedrock of much of what passes as commentary. I don't intend to turn myself into an expert on Afghan history, but surely it isn't asking too much for those who get paid to turn out opinion pieces on issues on which lives depend to engage in a little basic scholarship? Then again ...

Graduation

Just back from the Ruritarian invented tradition of graduation in the City Hall; a procession straight out of Lord of the Rings, with everyone telling me that I either look like Henry the Eighth or a Beefeater in my garish robes, followed by wine and food with students and colleagues. It was my last one, a poignant moment. Our degrees were presented together with the Business School's. Large numbers of proud families of overseas students were taking films and pictures and I realised that I would now figure in the photograph collection and home movies of several African families.

As I processed off the stage to solemn organ music I spotted that one of the tribulations of being a man of a certain shape was happening. My trousers were slowly slipping down. How to hold them up in fancy dress is a big problem. Nothing for it, but to thrust the robes to one side and yank the buggers up. Now that's one for the family album.

What a mess

Even set against the low benchmark of Guardian commentary, this piece of hand-wringing by Peter Preston on Afghanistan is breath-taking. The argument goes like this:

There is no reason for being in Afghanistan.
Winning the war will not affect Al-Qaida.
Afghanistan is full of difficult foreigners "who haven't made it past 1400" (years that is, not two o'clock in the afternoon).
The Taliban cannot be defeated by military means.
Pakistan will defeat the Taliban by military means (mind you they invented them in the first place to get at India).
The solution is containment.

Yep, containment. Let the Taliban take over and then ...

They can rule, to be sure: but only until the foe that has destroyed countless regimes before them – Afghanistan itself, intractable, restless, chaotic, ungovernable – destroys them, too. If Taliban land is cordoned off, isolated, consigned to its own devices, then it won't survive for long.

Presumably it will take until around 1450 - or ten to three - whatever.

And what about the people? The Afghan people who appear nowhere in the list? These "chaotic", "ungovernable" people with their universities, schools and gleaming new adult education projects? They won't survive long either. As I understand it, the general idea is to throw them to a bunch of ultra-violent, tyrannical theocrats and sit back and wait for everything to turn out nice in a fifteenth century sort of way. Is this really the face of modern liberal opinion?

I didn't say that ...

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

Christina Odone provides a curious defence of patriarchal religion in her review of Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom's new book, Does God Hate Women?.

But in explaining how God is dragged into this systemic abuse, the authors are guilty of the flawed logic they abhor in macho regimes. An attractive woman in a miniskirt who walks down the street is not responsible for the men who, distorting her attitude, read it as an invitation to rape; so God, in his many guises, cannot be held responsible for the men who distort his message into an invitation to abuse others.

Benson and Stangroom are atheists, as am I, and so they are talking about the development of religion as a misogynistic ideology, not the views of a non-existent God. However, the defective communication skills of an omnipotent God is an odd argument for a theist to deploy. It must be really frustrating, all that effort at revelation and still the buggers get it wrong.

Minimalism

This week I have been blogging in the spirit of John Cage.



Hope you enjoyed not reading anything.

Rebellion and renewal

Terry Glavin has some posts up on the significance of the Iranian revolt. He sees two great hopes emerging from the protests. The first is that they have begun to break the bizarre and destructive alliance between leftists and a far right theocratic Islamism that had somehow managed to get itself accepted as a form of liberation theology. More importantly, from the perspective of Terry's particular commitment to Afghanistan, the street demonstrations have undermined the baleful influence of Iran in Afghanistan itself. Though the die-hards will still plug away with their apologias and elisions, illusions about Iran are dying.

Does this mean that we can relax, that the left has regained its senses? Not yet, by any means. Whilst anti-fascism went head-to-head with a crude anti-imperialism, a quieter betrayal of principle was taking place; the abandonment of the poor.

I have just started reading an interesting book of reportage on the white working class in the USA by Joe Bageant. In his introduction, he asks, "If the left is not about class equity, what is it about?" Not a question for John Denham. Fresh from his triumph in wrecking university adult education, he couldn't have put it more starkly. The Guardian reported,

A senior cabinet minister will warn tomorrow that "the egalitarian ideal" that has dominated left liberal thinking since the 1960s is redundant, saying Labour's traditional emphasis solely on the poor leaves the vast bulk of the population alienated and left out.

So the ideal of equality has dominated the left since the 1960's, has it? Denham might have been more convincing if he had talked about the 1360's. Here is one version of John Ball's sermon from 1381.

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman. From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

Equality is a long standing dream, central to any who would claim to be left-wing, not a self-indulgent sixties fashion.

Denham's sentiment is redolent with a cynical view of the electorate and locked into a model of voting behaviour as being based solely on a narrow calculation of self-interest, rather than one informed by an ethical world view. And certainly Labour are acting on just these assumptions. Take a look at the new welfare reforms. As well as producing some dubious practices, they are full of gems like this,

Three hundred thousand of the poorest households in Britain are expected to lose up to £60 a month from their housing benefit under government plans to curb the welfare budget. The cut, which would hit Labour's core voters a month before the next general election, could spark a revolt reminiscent of the 10p tax rate debacle.

And what about paying for the credit crunch? Oh yes, public sector workers will have to bear the brunt (and do read Will Hutton's strong dissent from the prevailing conventional wisdom here). Of course the election of two BNP MEPs has scared them into throwing a bit of potentially illegal raw meat to appease far right voters, but the bulk of the working class is left out in the cold.

The fight to establish social liberties is only one part of the historic role of the left, the other is the struggle for economic security and equality. That is why Terry is right to emphasise the role of the international solidarity of labour unions in confronting oppressive regimes. Others, though, have lapsed either into a Panglossian complacency about western societies, or a crude and self-serving electoral cynicism. If we are lucky, the left may be about to regain part of its soul, but there is still a world to win.

Chronicles of wasted time

Via the drink-soaked ones comes news of the valiant attempt to translate the Bible into LOLCat speak.

Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem

Yikes!

My favourite is still the Polari Bible, translated by The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (Manchester House).

1. In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.

3. And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.

4. And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria medzered the sparkle from the munge.

And they have done the lot - Old and New Testaments - good grief.

Blinked and missed it

The heatwave has ended. Emma Goldman once wrote

One is certain to be disappointed in American reporters, yet never in the London weather ...

If the damp makes one miserable, it produces good complexions, rich foliage, and the strength of the British Empire. Delicate skins, the luscious green lawns and meadows, are due to the weather, and the need to escape from his own climate has made the Englishman foremost among globe-trotters and colonizers.

That's the latest panic over. It's back to swine flu now. Can't wait to get to Greece.

Phew, what a scorcher

The sun has come out. The temperature was 28 degrees Centigrade in Hull today. It even crept over 30 down South. It is wonderful and pleasantly warm. But there is nothing like the weather to panic the British. An official heatwave is likely to be announced. I didn't know there was such a thing. Apparently it triggers a government heatwave plan with lots of useful advice:

It says homeowners can stay cool by painting their houses white and planting shrubs for shade ... Other tips include identifying the coolest room in the house.

It is forecast to rain on Thursday.

Books

Norm has linked to this collection of photographs of gorgeous libraries, oozing with grandeur. I am going to add a more humble one from the corner of Greece where my house is.

The village of Milies in Pelion has a library with a long history linking it to the Greek Enlightenment (Διαφωτισμός), the movement that provided the intellectual foundations of the revolution against Ottoman rule. It even holds 15th Century editions of Aristotle and Aristophanes.

You can explore their web site, but I posted this as an example of the importance of smaller collections, often acting as instruments of popular education, as well as the large, prestigious buildings emanating power.

Two that I have used regularly developed out of private collections that sprung from a determination to record movements for social change. The Working Class Movement Library in Salford is a spectacular collection of material from the late 18th Century onwards. The best source for the history of anarchism in 19th Century Britain is the Max Nettlau papers held amongst other amazing archives at The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

Neither are in spectacular buildings, an old fire station and a converted warehouse, yet they are two of the most exciting places I have visited. The full glory of the library lies in its contents, and sometimes, as with these examples, their own history.

A sense of proportion

Germaine Greer on a dead pop singer. First Dionysos, then Orpheus and, finally, "the royal ballets of Europe":

Nijinsky may have been the greatest Spectre de la Rose, Nureyev the greatest Corsair, but these two candles pale in the light of Jackson's blazing star. The surprise is not that we have lost him, but that we ever had him at all.

Please tell me that column was a figment of my imagination ... please, please...

New beginnings ...

...and a few farewells. I will soon cease to be a fat bloke in Hull - no I'm not on a diet, I am taking early retirement. Regular readers will have an inkling about some of the reasons why. So I will be a fat bloke in Manchester, and, as much as possible, in Greece from the beginning of October. Scary, but fun.



(All offers of part-time work will be gratefully received).

Today

Troika night

Wine and curry are the perfect combination for stirring the entrepreneurial spirit. Deciding that L Ron Hubbard got it right - "If you want to get rich, you start a religion" - last night the three of us invented one based on magnesium. Oh well, back to the day job. Less wine next time, methinks.

Specially for Karen, she's been to Australia three times you know.

Clarity and confusion

Norm has dealt with the content of Peter Beaumont’s article in Sunday’s Observer perfectly adequately. Instead of going over the same ground, I want to comment on the structure of Beaumont's argument, as it is a classic example of a technique used in making a dubious argument. The trick that he is playing is simple. He is asserting that the truth lies between two extremes. It sounds eminently reasonable and studiously moderate. It portrays the opposition as being simplistically polarised; allowing wordy, meandering equivocations to appear to be an intelligent expression of complexity. The problem is that this may not be where the truth lies. Let’s see how he sets about it.

Firstly, under the banner headline, “The urge to split the world into two warring camps is childish”, he splits the debate on foreign policy into two warring camps; the anti-imperialist “remnants of the old left”, opposed to interventions, and a coalition of liberals and neo-conservatives who promote them. It is an over-simplification that makes it conveniently easier to claim a reasonable sounding middle ground.

The reality is somewhat different. Anti-imperialists are joined by traditional conservatives, opposed to the intervention in the internal affairs of other countries in principle, sympathisers with Jihadi Islamism, the BNP, Greens and a multitude of deranged conspiracy theorists. The interventionist camp actually includes many other old leftists (mind you some used to call themselves the New Left. Have the new become old after all those years? Perhaps they should be the middle-aged left). For these, the support for democracy, human rights, equality, etc., are indivisible. Thus they tend to favour some interventions, though certainly not all.

And it is this indivisibility that is the key. I despair at the number of times I have heard it said that ‘the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle’. If you are opposed to stoning women to death for adultery, there is no middle position. A more nuanced stoning does not exist.

Beaumont proceeds to describe the position of the interventionist camp thus,

The unifying conviction that has glued this group together has been an almost religious belief in the transformative power that western democratic habits possess when transplanted into societies and cultures that have experienced largely restricted freedoms

Another rhetorical trick; it is far easier to attack a fictitious position than a real one, so best to invent one.

No, what the coalition he depicts as interventionist argue is that when the people of a country resist tyranny, we should support them, when they call for equal rights for women, we should stand in solidarity with them, when they call for an end to regimes built on arbitrary murder and torture, we should do what we can to aid them. This isn’t an ‘almost religious belief’ in the power of democracy. It is a moral and political choice to stand with the oppressed against oppressors and support the democratic aspirations of others. Where then is the balanced middle ground?

None of this belittles the immense difficulties of transformation and change and the real dilemmas about how best to support and assist, but it certainly does not suggest that a commitment to a better world needs diluting with relativist mush.

The funeral

It was a Manchester June day, not cold, but a brisk breeze drove dark clouds across a grey sky. When patches of blue appeared, they lacked any confidence in their ability to be blue, preferring a shy, pale bashfulness. There is a tight schedule, one group spills out, tearful, blinking at the light, whilst another hearse queues patiently.

As we wait, the previous service ends, black clad families emerge from the chapel, the young men with shaven heads, one sporting a neo-nazi arm band, the menace subdued by the democracy of death. And then it is our turn. Old familiar faces, friends who you are pleased to see after many years, an Irish priest delivers an inappropriate service for an atheist. Finally, the curtains close and grief is inescapable. Now to the pub, memories, laughter and stories. So many stories. So much laughter.

And of all the memories of Denis, laughter predominates. I am hugely grateful to have known and worked with him. A multitude of infuriating faults and dubious personal hygiene were overwhelmed by anarchic humour, profound kindness and an abundant array of catch phrases. He was a marvellous, entertaining tutor, but I have to wonder whether he would have survived had he been starting a career in education today, with its mechanistic, prosaic instrumentalism and grinding bureaucracy. Denis was not typical, yet he worked in a system where he was possible. That is the big difference. A world without spontaneity, idiosyncrasy and creativity is an impoverished one. Just as his friends have lost Denis, so education is in danger of losing its soul.

Coherence

The THE reports growing unease about the wonderful merger of education with business through the creation of Peter Mandelson's new fiefdom, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

It certainly has produced some odd-looking ministerial portfolios. This one has some logic to it, though with chilling undertones: "Lord Drayson keeps his post as Science Minister but adds responsibility for research and procurement in the Ministry of Defence." Kevin Brennan will combine Further Education, skills and apprenticeships with consumer affairs. But the most surprising is Lord Young, who adds to his previous job as Minister for Students, responsibility for the Post Office and Royal Mail.

Who said men can't multi-task?

(Thanks to Ian)

A passion for learning

David Blunkett, who promoted the Green Paper on Lifelong Learning, The Learning Age in 1998, and who himself was a beneficiary of adult education, has joined the fray with a cautious, though explicit, criticism of government policy.

Education can transform lives. It fosters dignity, confidence and capability - and investing in it makes sense for individuals and for the health (economic and physical) of the nation.

He even thinks it is more likely to help you stop smoking.

Then there is this interesting line, "But the bigger challenge facing the new department is to trust people to make their own decisions about what they need to learn".

At any level? Because the government has effectively barred people from studying for an equivalent or lower qualification than one they hold already, a crazy policy that has wreaked havoc with university lifelong learning departments. Is Blunkett coming out against it?

I would like to think so, but one little fact nags away at me. When the proposal was debated in the Commons, he voted with the government. Ah... Party loyalty trumps principle and sense every time.

Give them back

It looks stunning and opens on Saturday. It is the new Acropolis Museum in Athens.

Those of us who know and love Greece will recognise this from Stephen Moss' preview.

"Forgive me, it is crazy," says Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, president of the Organisation for the Construction ... "We told the construction company about this a year ago," he says, as we pass a group of workmen who are adjusting cables, "and they leave it until the week before the opening."

It will be ready.

What will be missing though are the sections of the Parthenon sculptures sitting in the British Museum. They will be replaced by plaster casts of the originals. Removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th Century in controversial circumstances and acquired by the museum in 1816, surely it is now time that they were returned.

UPDATE

See here as well

Friendship

Thanks to this blog, news has just reached me of the death of my old friend and colleague Denis Keating. We had lost touch, but a mutual friend searched and found me on the internet. Denis was the person who christened me "Plump" and we shared an office together at the old College of Adult Education until it closed. He was a brilliant, supportive and totally bizarre friend. And as one of the people who was a central part of a formative and happy period of my life, he has never been forgotten; a big character, with deep reserves of kindness and decency, and even deeper ones of bullshit.

So where do you start with Denis? There are too many stories. To give you a flavour of the man, this is something I wrote a few years back for the newsletter of the Galatea Trust, an organisation that promotes therapeutic environments.

The College could not have been a better building in which to work. It was modern, well equipped and purpose built for adult education. However, within this smart, comfortable environment there remained a small corner of squalor. Denis's office. When Denis and I finally shared a room it was a partnership made in hell. I have never been the tidiest of people and Denis was certainly not the most domesticated. He never used a handkerchief. Instead he blew his nose on a large shabby towel which lay in a crumpled heap on a corner of his desk. I never saw it changed in the eight years I worked there. When the place closed we found one of his past meals under a pile of handouts, dried, shrivelled and welded to the plate. This was in keeping with the mould encrusted coffee cups balanced precariously on the radiator and the all pervading smell of his pipe. The cleaners had long since abandoned any hope of anything but the most perfunctory vacuuming. Not only that but we covered the walls with photographs with satirical captions and then Denis indulged his passion for American Studies by plastering the wall with memorabilia. Unfortunately this consisted mainly of chocolate bar wrappers and other forms of packaging. Thus we sat in splendour. Tatty, dirty and with a collection of American litter bluetacked onto the surroundings. The office did not fit the definition of a therapeutic environment. The students loved it. It was always full.

Denis is one of the finest adult educators with whom I have worked. But it was not just this that brought in the people, nor was it a craving for passive smoking. They liked the office. Why on earth should this be so? At first the answer seemed simple. We justified our appalling habits by claiming they were a device whereby we removed the barriers of pomposity and showed that education could indeed be for all. As one student memorably wrote in my leaving card from my subsequent job: "Thank you for showing us that a bad example can still make a living". It may have been squalid but it was fun.

Of course there is more to it than that, something much more subversive, the office wasn't boring (though we did have a cardboard boreometer on the wall - don't ask) and boredom is a tool of oppression. What is odd is that I am really quite fastidious. The office was funny and Denis made laugh - every day - so I went along with it.

I can't resist another story. Denis had the most noxious, poisonous farts of any man on earth. They seemed to roll down his trouser legs, seep out and hang heavy, close to the ground, like a carpet of mustard gas. They were foul. He could always see me coming into work from the office window, so, on occasions, he would wait until I started climbing the stairs then he would let rip, walk out and shut the door. I would open up to be greeted with an appalling stench. But he had more imagination than to leave it at that. He would walk down to the coffee bar, find the most attractive young female student he could see and say to her, "Peter would like a word in the office". As I stood there cursing the unique strain of bacteria that could produce something so gut-wrenchingly awful, the student would walk in, slowly turn green and try not to mention the obvious.

"Those were the days when we used to work nights", that was one of his catchphrases. But they were the days, the ones before bureaucracy, normality and suffocating respectability set in to tame the anarchic and the creative forces that make education fun. An old and, in many ways, better world is dying. And underneath the boisterousness, there was a seriousness, a commitment to adult education and, as a former mature student himself, a contempt for the demeaning pomposity that wrote off working class people. At heart, he was an idealist with an instinctive socialism bred from experience. It is just that it was expressed in rather odd ways.

As an adult educator Denis touched many lives (in more ways than one!), as a colleague he certainly affected mine. I hate the fact that I hadn't seen him for years and I loved the man. Tonight I feel bereft.

Theft

"We kill nothing, we live on the land, we never rob nature. Yet governments always want more. We are warning the world that our people will die."

John Vidal writes here about the economic and environmental war being waged against indigenous peoples, a war scarcely visible in the catalogue of contemporary global conflicts. He quotes Victor Menotti, director of the California-based International Forum on Globalisation, as saying,

"This is a paradigm war taking place from the arctic to tropical forests. Wherever you find indigenous peoples you will find resource conflicts. It is a battle between the industrial and indigenous world views."

This description is tinged with the ecological romanticism of the Green activist, though the plight of indigenous people is only too real. In fact, there is nothing unique about their position. It is the same as that of the many others who have faced dispossession throughout history, whether Native Americans or Scottish Highlanders. Their problem is that they happen to own what others, far more powerful than them, want and intend to acquire, regardless of the devastation caused.

The way in which indigenous people view the natural resources under threat is indeed different to the governments and corporations desperately seeking to exploit new resources. However, the difference in perceptions is down to more than a different way of seeing the world, rather it is a product of the utility of the environment to their survival. It is about the ownership and control of their own resources. In this sense we are not witnessing a "paradigm war". This is a war for the collective and cultural survival of those deemed expendable.

And it is for a model of progress that does not include genocide.

It's Friday night

So let's ..

Is there life on Mars?

Well, being a publicity seeking hussy, I am there - Paul Burgin's Mars Hill that is.

Doomed I tell ye

I know that the results are distorted by abstentionism and by the peripheral nature of European elections in the public consciousness, but whichever way you look at it, it's a disaster. There will be reams of guff all over the place, so I will just add a gentle reminder about my own special interest. Giving one million four hundred thousand voters a very good reason not to vote Labour by ending their adult education classes won't go down as a master stroke of tactical genius.

Sweet and sour

After Sugar comes this.

The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills has been merged with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

Together they will form a new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, whose key role will be to build Britain’s capabilities to compete in the global economy. The new department will be headed by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson.

So that's what they think universities are for is it? To be the servants of business. And, what is more, to be administered by a government department that has neither the word 'university' nor 'education' in its title, headed by an unelected politician whose presence hardly reflects a renewal of ethical standards in a disgraced Parliament.

And where have all the dreamers gone? Where are those who love learning, who value it for what it is, regardless of its economic purpose? Where are the believers in education as a force for nurturing imagination and artistic expression, from The Pitmen Painters to El Sistema (now also being piloted in Scotland)? And where are those, deeply rooted in the labour movement, who saw education as not only a tool of individual enlightenment, but also as a force for collective liberation? Not in today's Labour government, that's for sure.

A Labour government. Really? From where I sit now, it seems that any resemblance to a Labour government, living or dead, is purely coincidental. I am revising my opinions, Norm could be right. It might be time.

Sugaring the pill

"Enterprise tsar"?

If there was a market in mass-produced portable nuclear weapons, we'd market them, too

Words fail me.

UPDATE
Well informed readers will have spotted the deliberate mistake. The C5 was the classic failure of Clive Sinclair, not Alan Sugar. Oh well... It's a pretty picture, it can stay there.

Gaining ground

In this post, I referred to a great article by Ian Ground in Adults Learning about the demise of University Lifelong Learning. It is now available on line. You can read it here, and you should.

On the eve of the polls

We live in strange times. A brooding discontent has morphed into disillusion and melodrama all because of fiddled expenses. The result is that political debate has moved from the realm of the banal into that of the surreal.

Norm might be mystified, but I am downright confused. Even he had me scratching my head at one point. He took Shuggy to task for not favouring an early general election, yet the proposal would bring out the Sergeant Wilson in me, asking, "D'you think that's wise sir?". Norm wants a Labour government and hopes for a better one, as, despite everything, do I. I respect his principles and the coherence of his argument, but the tactics? Suicide has never been high on my list of reliable methods of retaining power.

I am totally bewildered by Polly "this is the best government Britain has ever had" Toynbee - calling for both Alan Johnson (my local MP with whom I have had the odd interesting exchange on adult education) as leader and a vote for the Liberal Democrats.

As for getting rid of Brown, it would seem obvious that someone who manifestly cannot do the job should be removed. However, this is the paradox of any organisation. We invest leaders, managers, etc. with vast decision making powers, regardless of whether they prove themselves to be complete idiots or not. Then, however reluctantly, we obediently go along with decisions that we think are totally wrong, purely because they have been made by someone inept for whom we have no respect, but who holds an office that we would like to remove them from. Then try getting rid of them and you find it is nigh on impossible. I fail to see the rationality in this.

And, obviously, the question of replacements arises. Who would be elected? Who will be the new leader? What sort of democratic renewal would an election bring? Ah... The eager and ambitious bunch waiting in the wings don't look that impressive to me. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. We are talking of political laxatives here, that is all.

The discussion around reforming institutions and practice in the wake of the collapse of our complacency about British democracy is important. Yet it is ultimately vacuous as something is missing - political economy. And it is missing at the time of an economic crisis that is of far greater significance than the cost of moat cleaning. Democratic renewal is not about choices of parties but of ideas. Institutions and practice are a vehicle for their advancement. We have had thirty years of elite consensus around neo-liberal assumptions. The mainstream challenge should come from social democracy, its agent should be the Labour Party. Come back ideology, all is forgiven.

UPDATE

Norm replies here. The main difference between us seems to boil down to the fact that I prefer the probability of defeat later over the certainty of it now.

Paranoia

Nick Cohen has an article in Standpoint about paranoid political thinking. He fingers all the usual suspects, 9/11 conspiracy theorists and the like. He missed out one group though - Rochdale Hornets supporters. All referees and, at times, the rules of the game appear to a proportion of them as a vast conspiracy to deprive the Hornets of their rightful penalties, tries, goals and, obviously, victories in every game they play. As one particularly vociferous woman complained that if the rules were as she had just rewritten them, rather than as they actually are, a goal line drop out would have been a tap on the 20 metre line, I felt my brain start to slowly disintegrate. Rochdale were winning at the time too.

However, despite Swinton's best efforts to lose a scrappy, close encounter, a late fightback and a Holroyd drop goal secured a 23-22 win for the Lions. Holroyd was then sent off for abusing the Freemason, sorry referee, after he gave a last minute penalty to Rochdale and the Hornets fan next to me exploded with anger insisting that it should have been moved ten metres forward so that they could have kicked it and won the game. He didn't and they didn't. Thank god that one's over for another year.

Mutual aid

Well I never, Kropotkin may have got it right according to this research.

Scientists studying animal behaviour believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans.

And here is Kropotkin writing in in his last, unfinished book, Ethics: Origin and Development.

Our primitive ancestors lived with the animals, in the midst of them. And as soon as they began to bring some order into their observations of nature, and to transmit them to posterity, the animals and their life supplied them with the chief materials for their unwritten encyclopaedia of knowledge, as well as for their wisdom, which they expressed in proverbs or sayings...

And if we, with all our book learning, and our ignorance of nature, feel unable to understand how animals scattered over a wide territory manage to gather in thousands at a given spot to cross a river ... or to begin their march north, south, or west, our ancestors, who considered the animals wiser than themselves, were not in the least astonished by such concerted actions... For them, all the animals were in continual communication ... thus constituting one vast community, which had its own rules of propriety and good neighbourly relations. Even to-day deep traces of that conception of nature survive in the folklore of all nations.

Kropotkin was a natural scientist as well as an Anarchist, viewing the development of human ethics as part of a process of social evolution in interaction with the natural environment. In other words, he felt that we learnt the instinct for mutual aid from animals.

Via Norm

Morality or inequality?

David Marquand has written about the current political and economic crisis. He locates it in the failure of neo-liberalism as a model of political economy and is perceptive when he links both the banking crisis and the expenses scandal to a crisis in the legitimacy of the state.

For the crisis of the economy is also a crisis of the state. Democratic Europe's miraculous recovery from the traumas of total war, genocide and defeat was underpinned by a tacit social contract between states and peoples. The state guaranteed full employment, rising living standards and social protection. In return, the peoples gave the states their loyalty. The contract was embedded most firmly in the social democracies of northern Europe and the social market economies of Germany and her neighbours. But there were local variations in France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Now the state has been forced to renege on its part of the bargain. Full employment is no more, ­living ­standards are falling, and social ­protection is under threat. The rising tide of bitterness and anger that swept through ­London's G20 protests, and which has now broken over the heads of MPs – worthy as well as unworthy – is the result. But that is only its local, ­British manifestation. All over Europe, the people feel that the state has betrayed them. They don't know why or how, and they haven't yet found an effective way to vent their anger. But they do sense that they have been let down. And they are right.

However, he then takes one step further into the notion of a moral economy. I am more familiar with the concept as elaborated by the historian E P Thompson, who saw it as a popular view of a just moral economic order, enforced by ordinary people through custom and riot. Marquand draws on this but adds to it something that is much closer to the morality of 19th Century Christian socialism.

According to it, the unhindered, ­rationally calculated ­pursuit of ­individual self interest in free, competitive markets was not just economically efficient, but also morally right.

This provided a convenient self-justification to the rich that their vast earnings were theirs as of right. However, Marquand sees this as morally corrupting of the less well off as well.

House owners who gambled on ever-­rising house prices and took out mortgages they could not afford; credit card holders who borrowed more than they could realistically expect to pay back because realism that conflicted with immediate gratification had come to seem quaint and old-fashioned; and voters who thought they were morally entitled to ever-rising living standards without effort on their part, were all playing at the gaming tables of the ­neoliberals' casino capitalism.

It is an old trope, you can find it in Tolstoy for instance, but something still jarred with me when I read it. Then I heard an interview about some new research on BBC radio this morning. The TUC's ToUChstone blog has published a new pamphlet, Life in the Middle (pdf). It is an interesting pamphlet that argues that the political emphasis on winning the votes of 'Middle Britain' has been distorted by the use of mean, rather than median, income as the identifier of who is in the middle of the income range. As a result,

...the term ‘Middle England’ – more commonly ‘Middle Britain’ now – has changed its meaning over the years in the minds of politicians and journalists to mean a group that sits not in the middle but in the upper half of the income distribution. Middle Britain has become shorthand for the conservative, well-to do citizen. Subtly and gradually, it is this different Middle Britain that has come to dominate cultural and political debate.

Now, what the pamphlet argues is that their research shows that if you restore the meaning of Middle Britain to those literally at the median point of national earnings you will see that they have seen a real decline in their incomes. This wealth gap has been bridged by credit. So, according to the research, the growth in consumer credit is not about instant gratification, nor is it about a "moral entitlement to ever-rising living standards", it is about maintaining living standards in the face of falling real income, despite a vast increase in national wealth. Credit is a function of inequality and it is this that lies at the heart of the banking failures of today.

I am not a good enough economist to be able to judge the merits of the research, but I do still have my own concept of a moral economy and it is an egalitarian one. The pamphlet is another affirmation of my belief that New Labour's abandonment of an egalitarian political economy was a social, political and economic mistake of the first order and one for which they may be about to pay a heavy price at the polls.

In the meantime, if you want to know where you stand in the earnings league, try this neat widget from the TUC.

Outplayed

The best team won.

Bad habits

Hot news from Greece:

Seventeen British men arrested for wearing nuns' habits and accused of offensive behaviour been freed by a court on the Greek island of Crete.


The men, who were also wearing women's lingerie, spent a night in police cells in Crete wearing their outfits.

If only the authorities had known cross-dressing is an old British disorderly tradition.


Mind you, they should have said they were weather forecasters.





Ta Will

Bank holiday fun

It has been a good weekend for an unathletic sports fan. OK, Swinton Rugby League Club lost again to Oldham and continue dropping down the table. Oldham were the better side. There a rather a lot of better sides these days. Oh well.

I was delighted to see Hull City stay in the Premiership (sorry Will) despite being totally outclassed by United reserves. It means so much to the city. When I first moved to Hull, all the kids wore Leeds, Liverpool and United shirts, now all you see are the black and amber stripes of the Tigers. Even the lamp posts on the main road at the bottom of my street have black and amber banners on them saying, 'Hull, home to heroes and champions'. (I originally mistyped 'home to herpes and champions' - an easy mistake to make.)

And, on a great day for nostalgics, Burnley have been promoted after thirty three years out of the top division. It marks the return of a small town with a fine footballing tradition. My first football watching memory is of Spurs playing Burnley in the 1962 Cup Final. Best of all, there is something deeply satisfying about seeing a team sponsored by a pie manufacturer reach the top.

Jackanory

The best article I have read this week comes from the May edition of Adults Learning. Ian Ground is brilliantly angry about the near total demise of university adult education. He argues that the legacy of the present administration will be,

...the deliberate destruction of a great civic tradition, the systematic exclusion of the public from our universities and the end of lifelong learning as an object of public policy.

He thinks that there is something else lurking underneath:

The closures of public programmes at Reading and other universities are historic for this reason then: they are the sign of an intended seismic shift in the nature of the relation between the state and the universities about who will decide what can be learned. In this, lifelong learning departments are just the coalface canaries.

Let them learn skills.

The article is not available on line so instead of directing you to it I shall tell you a story.

When I worked in Manchester, I used to go with the students from my evening classes for long drinking sessions at a small pub in what was then an un-gentrified Hulme. In those days I had stamina. We used to gather in a room to one side of the bar and for a few weeks a group of workers from a nearby building site used the place. They bristled with hostility, leaning on the bar, making loud comments about "bloody students", that sort of thing.

One evening, one of them followed me into the gents. There was an uneasy atmosphere as he stood next to me at the urinal. Then he turned and said, "You're the person I need to talk to about education aren't you"?

"Yes", I replied.

"How do I do it? 'Cause there's got to be more than this".

So I told him where he needed to go for advice, gave him phone numbers and offered to meet him. He then went back to his mates at the bar and continued swearing about students.

It was a glimpse of the reality that lies behind lower rates of working class participation in learning. It is not caused by 'low aspirations' that need 'raising'. That patronising explanation individualises something that is systemic: exclusion and oppression, culturally reinforced, that smothers the desire for a satisfying intellectual life with a tragic contempt and a sense that it is impossible - 'not for the likes of us'. How convenient this is for the middle class educational worlds where a sub-conscious sign saying, 'no riff-raff', can be discretely fixed to those ivy-clad walls.

Here is the end of the story. I never saw him again. He didn't come to the college, phone anyone, nor did he meet me. His world won. However, I like to think that one day, perhaps many years later, he may have seen an advert and walked into a college or centre somewhere, found what he wanted and dared to live his dream.

And this is why lifelong learning is so important, why it should be an integral part of universities. It is the ever open door, ready for the moment when a chance encounter or a need for something more overwhelms the forces ranged against it. The tragedy is that today the doors are closing, they are being chained up, secured with formidable padlocks. The doors may have been small, but they were there. Where are the political forces that will pry them open once more?

Threat or promise

Marcel Berlins takes the opportunity to have one of his periodic digs at the internet. Because of the ease of copying and pasting he asserts that,

The easy access provided by the internet is a direct threat to individual and original thinking, writing and scholarship.

Note that it is the internet that is to blame, not the copiers, nor an educational system that prioritises instrumentalism and conformism, the internet. It is the same old reductionist argument. A whole technology can be damned by just one of its many possible uses, purely on the basis of what happens to be your latest irritation.

I wouldn't be without the internet. I have a realm of scholarship at my fingertips (as well as much rubbish, but that can be diverting in its own way too) and sometimes, like tonight, it can be magic.

I have been gripped by reading Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life. Goldman's prose is pacy and vivid, her narrative drives you through the intensity of an extraordinary life. Her voice is distinctive. Her voice? As I started on Volume Two I suddenly thought, 'What did she sound like?'. So I went to the computer and within a few minutes I was listening to one of the few clips of her speaking that exists.



And now I am going back to the book with that distinctive intonation echoing in my brain and the powerful prose seems alive as never before. And, what is more, I can share my delight with whoever in the world happens to pass by this site. "A threat to scholarship"? Ridiculous.

Recent light posting

Apologies. I am trying to think of something ...

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.